Worship and the paradox of divinity
A central truth, both in Christian theology and in Platonic thought, is that created beings are not perfect or self-sufficient. Discussing prayer, for example, Iamblichus defends the practice based on the idea “that we are inferior to the gods in power and in purity and all other respects.”1 We exist only, according to this tradition, because we participate in the One, or rather in the image of the One.2 Similarly, though without the polytheism which marks Iamblichean (and Proclean) thought, St. Paul notes that we exist only because our existence has been gifted to us: “For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).3 And in Acts 17:28, taking to the assembly on the Areopagus, he states, citing the Cretan philosopher Epimenides: “For in him [God] we live and move and have our being.” We cannot live, move, or even exist except in God.4
So according to Christian theology and Platonic thought, and consequently the Christian Platonic tradition, we are not perfect in ourselves but only through participation and imparting, through a divine gift, as Pseudo-Dionysius says: “For there is nothing that is self-perfect, or absolutely without need of perfecting, except the really Self-perfect and pre-eminently Perfect (Gk. tò óntōs autotelès kaì protèleion).”5
But note the paradox here. God or the One, which is that exception, is both self-perfect and beyond perfection. The reason for this is twofold. First, as human beings, as intellectual animals, who communicate through language and concepts, we need to use language about God to have communion with Him. Central to this, traditionally, and not just in Christian thought, is the language of goodness and being. We might say that God is absolute goodness, that He is simply the Good, or that He is perfect Being. Secondly, however, we also acknowledge that such names, like the Good or He Who Is (Lt. Qui Est), the latter of which Aquinas insists on, based on Exodus 3:14, in the Latin translation,6 are improper names. They do not fully explain God but they may be of help. These terms, however, do not, and cannot, capture God, because God is utterly beyond being and beyond intelligibility. Aquinas, therefore, insists on saying that God is esse, which is the infinite verb (‘to be’), not the noun ‘being’ (Lt. ens). God is not (a) being but simply the act of existence in itself, ‘simply to be’ (Lt. esse tantum).7 We cannot actually conceptualise God. So although we can in one sense say that God, as the Good, is “the really Self-perfect” (Gk. tò óntōs autotelès), He is more accurately described as the “pre-eminently Perfect” (Gk. protèleion), the One who transcends perfection altogether. This paradox highlights both that we need to use language to describe God but it also points out that this language cannot capture Him.
But the paradox remains important, because our language about God concerning Goodness and Being points us to God as creator, and it helps us appreciate His creation, not as an object of worship, which would be idolatry, but as a reminder that while we cannot comprehend God, His creation is an icon of Him, something along which we can look to God, who is the One from whom all being emanates and the One in whom all being participates. Since we cannot experience God directly, we need mediation. We do not need to escape into some ‘spiritual realm’ to have communion with God. No, creation itself is a divine gift through which we are united with God. As Paul Tyson notes, citing C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, “the world of immediate experience is not “seen through” and then discarded, but rather that world as we experience it is the necessary medium through which we hear the music of heaven.”8 Created reality is, in other words, in all its physicality, sacramental and mediatory. Created reality is not perfect but it points to the One who is, “the really Self-perfect and pre-eminently Perfect.”9
So while God is utterly beyond being, He is still near to us, as we, and all of creation, emanate from Him. That does not mean that we understand God, or grasp him, but that our spirit is fixed in awe and wonder because of all God has done. And by contemplating this paradox, and by looking to the creation as an icon of the creator, we understand that everything is a divine gift, and that this most eminently concerns our goodness and our very being. And, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge notes, this should create in us a sense of awe and wonder, and a practice of worship:
Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of existence, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast thou ever said to thyself thoughtfully, It is!, heedless at that moment, whether it were a man before you or a flower, or a grain of sand? Without reference, in short to this or that particular mode or form of existence? If thou hast indeed attained to this, then thou wilt have felt the presence of a mystery which must have fixed thy spirit in awe and wonder.10
Notes:
Iamblichus, De mysteriis, Greek and English, intro. and trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), I, 15 (p.59).
For a discussion of this, see my latest article on the One of the soul: Kjetil Kringlebotten, “Christian theurgy and divine indwelling” (Studia Theologica: Nordic Journal of Theology, 31 March, 2023).
If not otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations follow The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Edition, Catholic Edition, Anglicized (Nashville, TN: Catholic Bible Press, 1995).
Though St. Paul acknowledges that there are beings which may be called ‘gods’ (1 Corinthians 8:1-6), these are spirits which, while emanating from God, as He is the source of all that is, are nonetheless not to be considered creators. In practice, they are basically what the Jewish and Christian tradition calls Angels, where some are good and some are evil. Pseudo-Dionysius, following St. Paul, acknowledges this, stating that his treatise, The Divine Names, “does not affirm that the Good is one thing, and the Being another; and that Life is other than Wisdom; nor that the causes are many, and that some deities produce one thing and others another, as superior and inferior; but that the whole good progressions and the Names of God, celebrated by us, are of one God.” See Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names (De Divinis Nominibus), V, 2 (816CD), cf. Kjetil Kringlebotten, “Christian theurgy and divine indwelling” (Studia Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology, 31 March, 2023), 8-9. For critical editions of the Greek text of the Areopagite, see Corpus Dionysiacum I, ed. Beate Regina Suchla (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990) and Corpus Dionysiacum II, 2nd ed., eds. Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). There are two complete translations in English, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, in collaboration with Paul Rorem (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987) and The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, 2 vols., trans. John Parker (London: James Parker and Co., 1897, 1899). If not otherwise noted, I use Parker’s translation, though if I find it necessary, I will alter the translation. See Kjetil Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation: On Theurgic Participation in God (PhD dissertation, Durham University, 2021), 4, n2.
Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy (De coelesti hierarchia), X, 3 (273C), Gk. ’Esti gár oudèn autotelès ē aprosdeès kathólou teleiótētos ei mḕ tò óntōs autotelès kaì protèleion.
See Urban Hannon, “Aquinas & the Areopagite; or, On the Primacy of the Good: Against the Existentialists” (Divinitas 8, 2023): 35-68.
I try to explain this further in this post.
Paul Tyson, Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for our Times (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2015), 25. Also see Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation, 176-188.
Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy, X, 3 (273C).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 3.11, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, vol. 4.1 (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 514, quoted in Eric D. Perl, “Into the Dark: How (Not) to Ask “Why Is There Anything at All?”,” in Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom, ed., Jeffrey Dirk Wilson (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 190 (cf. 179-206).