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

266 notes on the concept of the infiniteof something infinitely greater than the medium of its revelation, and not merely aglimpse into the “antechamber of the essence”; rather, it is a mysterious knowledgeof the Father himself within the very limitlessness of his unknowability. Then again,the God who is the infinite source of all cannot be an object of knowledge containedwithin the whole; furthermore, if the Logos is equal to the Father, how can he trulyreveal the Father to finite minds? And if – as became clear following the resolution ofthe Eunomian controversy – the Spirit, too, is not the economically limited medium ofGod’s self-disclosure, but is also coequal with the Father and the Son, and is indeedthe very Spirit by which God’s life is made complete as knowledge and love, powerand life, how can he reveal to us the Father in the Son?18. These questions are made all the more acute, obviously, by the quite pronouncedapophatic strictures that all post-Nicene theologians were anxious to impose on theirlanguage. As Augustine repeatedly affirms, every kind of vision of God in himself isimpossible for finite creatures (see, e.g., De Trinitate II.16.27; In Ioannis Evangeliumtractatus CXXIV.3.17; Contra Maximinum Arianorum Episcopum II.12.2), none canever know him as he is (Enarrationes in Psalmos LXXIV.9), nothing the mind canpossibly comprehend is God (Sermon 52.6; Sermon 117.5), God is incomprehensibleto anyone except himself (Epistle 232.6), we are impotent even to conceive of God(Sermon 117.5), and so when speaking of God we are really able to do so properlyonly through negation (Enarrationes in Psalmos LXXX.12). And yet he also wants tosay that, even in failing to comprehend God in himself, we are led by the Spirit trulyto see and know and touch God.19. Similarly, Gregory of Nyssa denies that any creature is capable of any qewrivaof the divine essence, and yet he wants also to say that, in stretching out in desiretoward God, the soul somehow sees God and attains to a qewriva tw’n ajqewrhvtwn, avision of the invisible (De Vita Moysis II). Gregory even speaks of David as going outof himself really to see the divine reality that no creature can see, and remaining everthereafter unable to say how he has done this (De Vita Moysis II). Maximus, who raisesthe “Greek” delight in extravagant declarations of apophatic ignorance to its mosttheatrical pitch, nonetheless makes it clear that his is an apophaticism of intimacy,born not from the poverty of the soul’s knowledge of God, but from the overwhelmingand superconceptual immediacy of that knowledge. The mind rises to God, he says,by negating its knowledge of what lies below, in order to receive true knowledge ofGod as a gift, and to come ultimately – beyond all finite negations – to rest in theinconceivable and ineffable reality of God (Ambigua, PG 91:1240C–1241A). Whenthe mind has thus passed beyond cognition, reflection, cogitation, and imagination anddiscovers that God is not an object of human comprehension, it is able to know himdirectly, through union, and so rushes into that embrace in which God shares himself asa gift with the creature (Ambigua, PG 91:1220BC), and in which no separation betweenthe mind and its first cause in God can be introduced (Ambigua, PG 91:1260D).20. It was in terms such as these that the metaphysical reserve of older Greekthought regarding the “rationality” of the infinite was ultimately overcome. At first,even Christian thought was reluctant to depart very far from antique philosophy on thematter of the unintelligibility of the infinite. Origen actually denied that God could becalled “infinite,” arguing that an infinite divine essence would simply be an essencewithout definition and would, in consequence, be incomprehensible even to itself (De