Heller M, Woodin W.H. (eds.) Infinity. New research frontiers (CUP, 2011)(ISBN 1107003873)(O)(327s)_MAml_

the “christian infinite” 265disclosing what is contained in his Logos, while still remaining hidden in the infinityand transcendence of his manifestation. To understand the intimacy of God’s immediatepresence as God to his creatures in the abundant givenness of this disclosure is also –if only implicitly – to understand the true difference of Being from beings.15. One consequence of all of this for the first generations of Nicene theologianswas that a new conceptual language had to be found, one that could do justice notonly to the Trinitarian mystery, nor even only to the relation between this mysteryand finite creation, but to our knowledge of the God thus revealed. For, in a sense,the God described by the dogmas of Nicaea and Constantinople was at once moreradically immanent within and more radically transcendent of creation than the God ofthe old subordinationist metaphysics had ever been. He was immediately active in allthings, but he occupied no station within the hierarchy of the real. As Augustine says,he is manifest in all things and hidden in all things, and none can know him as he is(Enarrationes in Psalmos LXXIV.9). He was not the Most High God of Arius, immuneto all contact with the finite, for the Logos in whom he revealed himself as creator andredeemer was his own, interior Logos, his own perfect image, his own self-knowledgeand disclosure; nor certainly was his anything like the paradoxical transcendence of theOne of Plotinus, “revealed” only as a kind of infinite contrariety. In fact, the God whois at once the Being of all things and beyond all beings, and who is at once revealed ina Logos who is his coequal likeness and at the same time hidden in the infinity of histranscendence, is immeasurably more incomprehensible than the One, which is simplythe Wholly Other, and which is consequently susceptible of a fairly secure kind ofdialectical comprehension (albeit, admittedly, a comprehension consisting entirely innegations).16. The Christian God, by contrast, requires one to resort to the far more severe, farmore uncontrollable, and far more mysterious language of analogy – to indulge in aslight terminological anachronism – in the sense enunciated in Roman Catholic traditionby the Fourth Lateran Council: a likeness always embraced within and exceeded by agreater unlikeness. In the terms of Gregory of Nyssa, however much of God is revealedto the soul, God still remains infinitely greater, with a perfect transcendence towardwhich the soul must remain forever “outstretched.” Or, as Maximus says, Christianlanguage about God is a happy blending of affirmation and negation, each conditioningthe other, telling us what God is not while also telling us what he is, but in either caseshowing us that God is what he is while never allowing us to imagine we comprehendwhat it is we have said (Ambigua, PG 91:1288C).17. That said, in a very significant way, the fully developed Trinitarianism of thefourth century allowed theologians to make real sense of some of those extravagantscriptural claims that, within the confines of a subordinationist theology, could beread only as pious hyperbole: “we shall see face to face,” for instance, and “I shallknow fully, even as I am fully known” (I Cor. 13:12); or “we shall see him as heis” (I John 3:2); or “who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9); or “theSon...istheexact likeness of his substance” (Heb. 1:3); or even “blessed are the pureof heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8) – makavrioi oiJ kaqaroiV th/‘ kardiva/,o{ti aujtoiV toVn qeoVn o[yontai (note the definite article). In considering the Godof Nicene theology, we discover that the knowledge of the Father granted in Christis not an external apprehension of an unknown cause, not the remote epiphenomenon