Creating new metaphors for God

In a previous column, I opened up the traditional Catholic teaching on the essential unknowability of God. If this comes as a surprise, perhaps an unsettling one, to some readers, I suggest that this is the result of faulty theological education imparted by inadequate leaders and teachers.

Perplexed Catholics have been deprived of St. Thomas Aquinas's teaching in his Summa Theologiae: "That God is known, but what God is, remains unknown."

Etienne Gilson, the great student of medieval theology, stated the issue bluntly: "What Thomas actually says is that the essence of whatness of God is something we do not know at all. He does not say that we do not know it much, or not well, or that we. know it only a little: he says we simply do not know what it is at all." In this, "Thomas follows the great theological tradition of the Greek Fathers of the church, who taught that while Gott's essence is eternally unknown to us, we do have knowledge of God's creative energies. As Orthodox theologian John Meyendorff describes the paradox: "The same God reveals himself (sic) and remains transcendent to his own revelation." Hence we properly speak of the "distinction between the essence and the energy in the bosom of the one unique God."

Already in the fourth century, Athanasius boldly wrote of the divine energy: "God became man so that we might be made God." And "not only man's body, but the whole of the material creation will eventually be transfigured"

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new Earth; for the first heaven and the first Earth had passed away." (Revelation XXI, 1)

St. Paul put it this way in Romans, Chapter 8: "The universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and enter upon the freedom and splendour of the children of God. Up to the present, we know the whole created universe groans in all its parts, as if in the pangs childbirth. Not only so, but even we, to whom the Spirit is given as first fruits of the harvest to come, are groaning inwardly while we wait for God to make us his sons and daughters and set our whole body free from mortality."

Hear Archbishop Joseph Raya transmit the tradition: "At the incarnation, the Son assumed human flesh. He became human, a microcosm. He used matter as a vehicle for his divinity. He inserted himself not just into humanity, but into the very universe, which supports humanity and of which humanity is a part. He united the 'stuff' of the universe to his divine Person, and thereby purified it, redeemed it, elevated it to share in God's life. By his ascension he sustains it with his living presence. For the resurrected and glorified body of Christ does not live 'up there' somewhere, but it now lives here, immanently everywhere in this universe, working in it to bring it eventually to its final fulfilment." This unity of all reality echoes the dictum "That you are!" (Tat tram ai!) as the Hindu Upanishad put it well over two thousand fears ago.

Today, we are in the spellbinding process of discovering new worlds of energy that embody the Creator: of life, from the deep oceanic hot springs that surprisingly teem with life to the "frozen wastes," and of the arctic, which harbour life forms never suspected before, from the revelations of microbiology to the untold bounty of the macrocosm. We are communing with "the diaphany of the divine at the heart of a glowing universe, the divine radiating from the depths of matter a-flame," its Pierre Teilhard de Chardin envisioned it. When we love God, it is through the world, and when we love the worM it is as a function of God, the animator of all things. This "endless mutual reaction" of divine energy produced for Teilhard a "sudden blaze of such intense brilliance that all the depths of the world were lit tip for me" in that "the cosmos itself ... the entire realm of matter is slowly, but irresistibly affected by this great consecration."

Hence, the challenging wisdom of the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "Our highest happiness as thinking beings is to have probed what is knowable and quietly revere what is unknowable." and of the scientist Albert Einstein who advocated "the holy curiosity of inquiry." New divine energies demand new metaphors for God. We are free to create them. It is our vocation.

Ft. James Roberts writes from Vancouver.

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