Knowledge of God

(Antelope Canyon - found here)

“For ‘he who loves,’ St. John says, ‘is born of God, and knows God.’ ‘He who loves,’ Augustine comments, ‘sees love, and he who sees love sees God’ . . . and this love, adds William of Saint Thierry, is the eye which enables us to see God. But at the same time, that knowledge is precarious and always obscure, for it depends upon a life which is both precarious and full of ‘vicissitudes,’ and never possessed as one possesses a natural good; and because it can never catch the pure light which is shed by that life, in the prism of the concept. . .

‘Do you think what God is? Do you think what God is like? Whatever you imagine, he is not that; whatever you can grasp in thought, he is not that. But to give you some taste of him, God is charity, and Charity is that by which we love.’ [St. Augustine]

‘This we know [about God]. Do we therefore suppose that we have understood? It is not argument which makes us understand these things, but sanctity; if indeed what is incomprehensible can be in any way understood…’ [St. Bernard]”

~Henri de Lubac

“Those who understand God more, understand more distinctly the infinitude which remains to be understood; whereas those who see less of Him do not realize so clearly what remains to be seen.”

~St. John of the Cross

“A certain ignorance of God accompanies our knowledge of God in faith. This statement appears initially to be a self-contradiction. But it merely acknowledges that what we know of God from Christian revelation does not arrive at the fullness of his divine truth. The true nature of God remains always beyond our grasp. The contemplative life involves a daily engagement with this constraint upon our knowledge of God. The closer proximity to God given in prayer accentuates the experience of God’s transcendent mystery. It is the person of prayer who knows God more intensely as one who is unknown. The paradox is central to all contemplative life.”

~Donald Haggerty