There are some subtleties, though--or perhaps I'm obtuse or inexperienced.
Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can, I say my [daily prayers], I fast a little, I pray and meditate. I live in peace as far as I can. I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up, stretched his arms towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you want, you can be all flame.”
Moses was warned that he could not see God and live, and pagan stories recognize this too. The finite, and even the infinite, cannot experience God as He is in Himself. The experience won't fit in our minds, our hearts, our nature. God gave Moses an experience of Himself that would fit in his mind, and He gave us a living image of Himself in Jesus.
How far can we go in union with God?
And since the mystery of our faith is directed toward a God of utter transcendence, the direct experience of His energies leaves the theologian with an awestruck recognition that God’s essence lies yet beyond those energies, and that the theologian is forever unable to experience it. Thus he is left not only negating correlations between his experience and nature, but also negating correlations between his experience and God’s essence.
We're assured that heaven is not imaginable. Even so, it would seem that the experience of God, however infinite, will be consonant with our nature, and so be limited by our nature. Other created things may experience aspects of God that we won't. That wouldn't make our experience wrong or incomplete, of course. It wouldn't even make it finite.
But. Would my experience be limited not just by the shape of our common human nature, but also by how I have failed to conform my life to Christ here?
UPDATE: Dante seems to have thought so
2 comments:
We are made as flesh and blood ourselves, not pure spirit, and so all experiences of anything must enter through our senses, and even our thoughts are collections of chemical reactions and electrons changing places in our brains. We can only imagine transcendence, not actually transcend.
So be it. We are called out of ourselves but cannot get out. That also is the plan, then, or at least the current plan for us. The original plan may have been different, though I confess I can't see how that could be. It is a disguised version of the Argument From Desire, I think.
In Eastern Orthodoxy, the key is theosis:
... the process of a worshiper becoming free of hamartía ("missing the mark"), being united with God, beginning in this life and later consummated in bodily resurrection. For Orthodox Christians, Théōsis (see 2 Pet. 1:4) is salvation. Théōsis assumes that humans from the beginning are made to share in the Life or Nature of the all-Holy Trinity. Therefore, an infant or an adult worshiper is saved from the state of unholiness (hamartía — which is not to be confused with hamártēma “sin”) for participation in the Life (zōé, not simply bíos) of the Trinity — which is everlasting.
We were made to walk with God daily, as Adam and Eve did, so the experience of God was intended to be a daily part of being human. Christianity gives us that ability again.
AVI, I think we are fully human and fully spirit, after Christ being fully human and fully God. So, for me, the idea that all experiences must enter through the body is very strange. Historically, I suspect that is a late 19th century idea, but in any case, surely a spiritual being can have spiritual experiences. E.g., divine revelation must be a valid epistemology for a Christian. The end result has a physical aspect, e.g., revelation results in thoughts in the mind, but the original knowing need not come through the flesh at all. That it results in bodily experiences is only to be expected since we are both spirit and body. This is the same way that we do with our bodies (e.g., sin, baptism) affects our spirits.
We are not called out of ourselves; we are called to be our complete selves, and our complete selves are body and spirit in one person walking with God.
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