It would seem that...
Does the Council mean that we may know of God by our reason? Or actually know Him - as a Person (or more accurately as 3 Persons)?
How do we know persons generally - our friends, our loved ones? By reason, as well as by the senses?
Is it possible to know God by actually experiencing Him personally - His very presence - in a way that is closer to the way in which we know our friends than to the way in which we know facts? (I know we shall do so in Heaven, but even here and now?)
"No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."
This seems to say, as I have argued before, that reason is not the vehicle that takes us to knowledge of God, but rather revelation through grace. We cannot, by *choosing* to exercise our reason in a quest for knowledge of God, reach that goal. Rather we are *chosen* to have that knowledge revealed to us. Once we have been thus awakened to the Truth, I suppose we can look around at the world and see beauty, etc. as clear signs of God's providence. But we can't start with the world as fact and build a knowledge of the Transcendent out of its bits and pieces.
Marion:
There you have it. The Catholic Church says yes, Rob says no. Who are you going to believe?
Proof-texting is a bit dicey, since of course there are plenty of Biblical texts that refer to knowing God from creation.
As for the text Rob quotes, God can be known by reason as one, true, creator, and lord, but not, so far as I know, as father. (There are some arguments that of course God must be a Trinity, but I suspect those arguments beg the question.)
We cannot, by *choosing* to exercise our reason in a quest for knowledge of God, reach that goal.
On the other hand, this is certainly true. The knowledge of God we can attain through reason -- which is contrasted with the faith, by the way, not with grace; broadly understood, grace underlies my knowledge of how to use a spoon -- is necessarily and knowably incomplete. We will never reach our goal of knowledge of God on our own, although we might become convinced we've learned all we can learn without faith.
Tom--
Rob says "No"? All Rob has done is quote the revealed words of Jesus Christ. If the Church makes a distinction between "God the Creator" and "God the Father" in terms of our ability to know Him, I would think that reason would more readily provide us with knowledge of the Father. After all, what do you know more intimately, your biological father, or your biological environment? You have said yourself that reason can lead one to precisely the wrong conclusion about God, based in its evaluation of the material world.
Tom--
I am contrasting reason with faith, but by pointing out that we can only develop faith after being graced by a revelation that lets us "see" the Truth.
All Rob has done is quote the revealed words of Jesus Christ.
Um, no. Rob has quoted the revealed words of Jesus Christ, then promptly offered Rob's interpretation of those words.
...I would think that reason would more readily provide us with knowledge of the Father. After all, what do you know more intimately, your biological father, or your biological environment?
I have no idea what the second sentence has to do with the first.
As it happens, though, we aren't limited to what you would think that reason would more readily provide us with. We have reason itself, and several millennia of its application. Do we find certain knowledge of "God the Father" more often, or of "God the Creator"?
You have said yourself that reason can lead one to precisely the wrong conclusion about God, based in its evaluation of the material world.
Sure -- or rather, the misuse of reason can. And the proper use of reason can lead one to precisely the right conclusion about God.
Tom--
Just out of curiosity, how do you interpret "no one knows the Father except the Son"? And how do you interpret "and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him" other than the way I "interpreted" it?
I don't even consider my use of those statements to an interpretation, unless a hammer is an interpretation of a nail.
Thanks.
I sometimes think that the questions and the topics encountered here really would take days and weeks and maybe years of prayer, reflection, and study for me to really make sense of.
Well, I am here to learn . . .
btw, Whatever the Catholic Church proposes and teaches about this and all matters, I pre-assent to.
(What is the answer, that I may believe it?)
And, also, Happy New Year, Rob dear!
'God the Father' is the First Person of the Trinity. it is impossible to know through natural human reason that God is a trinity of persons; that is why it is impossible to know the First Person except through divine revelation. That does not mean that we cannot know of the existence of the one God through natural reason. This declaration of the First Vatican Council is a rejection of atheism, so it is reasonable to interpret the statement that God 'can be known with certainty from the things that have been made' as saying that God can be known to exist from things that are made; especially since the Concil describes God as 'incomprehensible'. The anti-Modernist oath was more specific about how God can be known, saying 'I profess that God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world (cf. Rom. 1:90), that is, from the visible works of creation, as a cause from its effects, and that, therefore, his existence can also be demonstrated'.
John, right!
But what I was getting at, is if you and I have been friends forever, John L, and I run into you somewhere, and you tell me a story about something that happened to you, and I go away chuckling and thinking, "That story! That is so John L.!" isn't that a kind of knowing you different from the knowing the time and direction at which the sun and the moon rose today?
I think it is. I think it must be . . . ?
Just out of curiosity, how do you interpret "no one knows the Father except the Son"?
Here I'd guess "knows" is closer to what Marion is talking about -- personal, experiential knowledge of another -- than what Vatican I is talking about.
From which it follows, I agree, Marion.
Marion--
Happy New Year to you!
You can only establish a cause from its effects by use of reason if you can show when and how those effects resulted from that cause in an unbroken chain of subsequent events. I would say that there is nothing about a can of Campbell's chunky soup that points necessarily to the existence of a Divine Creator. But if reason can provide certain knowledge of God, then anything in creation should be lead us back to God as surely as the study of physics leads us back from the cosmos as we see it to the Big Bang. We can use reason to trace the material world back to an event, but we can only use revelation and faith to trace our world back to a Word spoken by a Person.
Once, I was at Holy Mass in a very large church, several parishes away from the one I usually attend. In a distant part of the congregation, I noticed a little girl about the age of my niece and similar in appearance. This child was too far away to identify with certainty, though, and, anyway, I decided, how could this be my niece? Her family never attended Mass at that parish.
But, it dawned on me, as I sat there, I loved that particular, distant little girl.
My heart told me it was she, even though my reason told me she didn't "belong" there, and my senses told me she was too far away to make out clearly.
And after Mass, I went over to see for myself, and it was she, after all.
I knew her because I loved her.
Is it possible to know God by actually experiencing Him personally - His very presence - in a way that is closer to the way in which we know our friends than to the way in which we know facts?
Yes, of course it is.
If we don't know this from personal experience we can know it with near dogmatic certainty because we know scripture is inerrant and scripture is replete with examples of people having this kind of knowledge of God.
I think that John L is right against Tom that Vatican I meant one could know God exists with certainty from reason and knowledge of the natural world, not that one can know him personally from reason and natural knowledge alone. If this is the kind of knowledge that was meant then why bother with prayer, reading scripture, or attending mass if he can be personally known just from natural reason ?
St Thomas says "The knowledge of him is said to be innate in us so far as we can easily know the existence of God by means of principles which are innate in us" (In Boethium De Trinitate, q I a 3 ad 6).
An interesting question is, if we know God exists with certainty by reason and natural knowledge, can we also know him by faith ? I.E. can we know him by both means at once ? St Thomas asserts that we can because "the supernatural faith comprehends truths which are not contained in natural knowledge" [cf Summa Theol. 2 11 I, 5].
Ott says [pg 17] that this is also a dogma de fide :- "God's existence is not merely an object of natural knowledge, but also an object of supernatural faith".
God Bless
If this is the kind of knowledge that was meant then why bother with prayer, reading scripture, or attending mass if he can be personally known just from natural reason ?
Perhaps because "known" doesn't mean possess completely, in this context or any other?
Zippy--
Is it possible for a human being to "possess completely" anything? It seems to me that only God can possess completely.
Certainly only God can know completely.
I have heard several statements above about "natural knowledge", etc., but they all sound to me like: "The world is created; God is the Creator; therefore God is known through creation." Huh?
Is it possible for a human being to "possess completely" anything?
Not as far as I can tell. Knowledge and mystery are not a perfect dualism, although people erroneously treat them as such all the time. Any time we know something about X, we can always ask more questions: there is always mystery. And if we know nothing about X, we know enough about X to identify it and say that we don't know any more than that.
So the knowledge-mystery dichotomy is a false dichotomy. Knowledge and mystery are two modes of encounter with the world (and with ourselves, for that matter, and with God, and each other). They can't be separated in the way modern Western people want to separate them.
Zippy--
I completely agree that knowledge and mystery are always two modes of our encounter with the world. I do not, however, agree that knowledge and mystery are two modes of our encounter with the Transcendent.
In other words, reason might provide us with a little knowledge *about* God. But knowledge *of* God is not something that we can possess; it is something by which we can *be possessed*. Always, however, there is mystery, because only God's knowledge is complete.
I think that John L is right against Tom that Vatican I meant one could know God exists with certainty from reason and knowledge of the natural world, not that one can know him personally from reason and natural knowledge alone.
There are a couple of odd things about this.
First, I agree with John L, I didn't notice he wrote anything "against" me, and I had already given much the same answer to Marion as Chris gave.
Second, and more importantly, Vatican I doesn't say one can know God exists. It says God can be known. I think Chris, and a lot of others, are selling this dogma short. The Catechism quotes Pope Pius XII:
"...human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, who watches over and controls the world by his providence, and of the natural law written in our hearts by the Creator...."
Perhaps love is part of our mode of encounter with God.
His love for us is what we are experiencing in knowing Him.
...reason might provide us with a little knowledge *about* God. But knowledge *of* God is not something that we can possess.
I have no idea what the about-of distinction is supposed to mean.
I really appreciate this post and the comments. I'm really struggling with this whole topic.
Brief technical correction for Chris Sullivan:
Actually, St. Thomas denies that one and the same person can both know and have faith regarding one and the same fact: "Now as stated above (4), it is impossible that one and the same thing should be believed and seen by the same person. Hence it is equally impossible for one and the same thing to be an object of science and of belief for the same person. It may happen, however, that a thing which is an object of vision or science for one, is believed by another: since we hope to see some day what we now believe about the Trinity, according to 1 Cor. 13:12: "We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face": which vision the angels possess already; so that what we believe, they see. On like manner it may happen that what is an object of vision or scientific knowledge for one man, even in the state of a wayfarer, is, for another man, an object of faith, because he does not know it by demonstration."
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3...umma/
300105.htm
"I have no idea what the about-of distinction is supposed to mean."
Zippy--
What we can know *about* God is what we can, for instance, read about God in a book, or on a blog, and thustry to understand God as an object for the consideration of our rational minds.
What we can know *of* God, by contrast, are those things that are not the projections of human reason, but rather things pertaining to God's own subjectivity, with which He gifts us through revelation, letting us see them directly and allowing us to know them with certainty.
So, what we know *about* God is secondary to the primary human spiritual experience of revelation. I.e.: First *there is* the actual *experience* of the man Isaiah of the real presence of the Word of God; subsequently, you have the book of the prophet Isaiah; subsequent yet again to that, you have the ponderings of theologians concerning the meaning of the Book of Isaiah. And there are further subsequencies which I don't care to go into here.
So, Rob (and Chris): we can know about God through reason, and we can know even more about God through revelation. Where is the problem?
You can know about me through a private detective. You can know more about me if I reveal myself to you. In both cases, the thing you know about is me.
I think this is a non-problem, as theological conundra go.
I'd say we can know God from the Book of Nature, from the books of Scripture, and from personal communion with Him.
As I see it, a problem only arises if we insist that "to know" has meaning in only one context or has the identical meaning in every context.
Tom and Zippy--
I'm still making a distinction, that I think is an important one, between "to know about" and "to know of". There is nothing inherent in creation that tells you anything about the Triune God, that it might not just as well be telling you about some powerful, but limited, gnostic demiurge--as proven by the fact that people came up with gnostic solutions to their questions about the creation, mostly under the influence of their anxieties about the problem of evil. It seems to me that they must have done so precisely because they were looking for "knowledge about," and lacking "knowledge of."
Tom writes, " . . . we can know God from the Book of Nature, from the books of Scripture, and from personal communion with Him."
Yes. May our knowledge of Him through "Personal communion with Him" be said to be experienced through the use of our senses and our reason (as is the case with Nature and Scripture), or through something(s) different / something(s) more? And if so, what is that something?
I would say that it is obvious from the erosion of the numbers of the faithful since the so-called Enlightenment, particularly in the economically and educationally advanced West, that the application of reason to the mysteries of creation has been detrimental to the project of the Church.
Where the numbers are growing, they are growing as a result of people (we call them "fundies") having basically rejected reason in favor of emotion and what they believe to be special revelation.
Hello everyone. I'm new to this fine blog and I should probably keep quiet, but I can't resist adding my very modest insights to this interesting discussion.
Let me begin by using one of the stock questions (which, incidentally, I could not clip and save, but I'll resist complaining in my very first post on this blog): 'can we say both/and?' Maybe Tom and Rob are both right, and here's how. Our intellects might be capable of arriving at the conclusion that God exists. However, we are, by nature, more than intellect. We have other aspects of our nature that might rebel against believing in a God to whom we owe our being and who places moral demands on us. Consequently, there is, in our nature, something that inclines us to deny that God exists and, consequently, to refuse to believe something that our intellect tells us is certain--or, in many cases, that refuses even to allow our intellects to consider seriously the evidence for the existence of God. We need grace because we need some supernatural help in freeing us from the influence of this God-denying aspect of our nature.
A second question (not stock but probably should be): Would not the claim that human beings are fully capable of coming to know God without Grace amount to a kind of Pelagianism?
"there is, in our nature, something that inclines us to deny that God exists . . ."
Perhaps this defect of the intellect and the will might be a result of original sin . . .?
A second question (not stock but probably should be): Would not the claim that human beings are fully capable of coming to know God without Grace amount to a kind of Pelagianism?
Well, I think that one is a definite "no", because "come to know (of or about) God" isn't the same thing as "skip baptism and save yourself from damnation".
I really like your handle, I can quite relate to it.
For me the question is not whether faith and reason can ultimately work together, but rather if the position being presented by Tom does not put the cart before the horse?
btw, Whatever the Catholic Church proposes and teaches about this and all matters, I pre-assent to.
I'm with Marion on this one. And, in my opinion, this is the proper use of my reason. Others might be called to use their reason to steer the direction of the Church, but that is not my calling.
Rob,
I would say that the Enlightenment produced the wrong application of reason: reason in contradiction to faith. This is a false world view. The Fundamentalists that have countered this by a "faith in contradiction to reason" also exhibit the flip side of this same false world view. So it's no surprise that a mis-application of reason has been detrimental to the Church. Mis-application of faith (in the form of superstition) is also detrimental to the goal of the Church. Faith completes reason, and reason completes faith. For example, when you read the Scriptures, do you not read with faith and reason? You accept that it is divine revelation because of your faith, but you apply your mind and your intellect to understanding what it means. In fact, I don't think that prayer is in opposition to reason (as one of the comments above seemed to be implying), I think that you must use your reason while praying. That is what some forms of meditation entail. (Not all: some forms of prayer use less reason than others, but that is no reason to set prayer and reason in opposition).
peace,
brandon.
there is, in our nature, something that inclines us to deny that God exists.
Is there really? Or is it rather something in our nature that inclines us to turn away from God? Atheism was not wide spread until the Enlightenment; heresay was more common. And some say that most modern atheists are actually doing something subtle like making Science their God.
Perhaps such a defect in our nature might lead a man to deny the One True God and to create one of his own to put in God's place - man thus effectively deifying himself.
Would not the claim that human beings are fully capable of coming to know God without Grace amount to a kind of Pelagianism?
Against Zippy, I am generally willing to see Pelagianism wherever anyone suggests it. As I suggested above, the use of reason is itself a kind of grace, so the idea of using reason without grace is a nonstarter.
I think the key words are "a kind of."
"...man thus effectively deifying himself."
Marion--
It's been that way since Eden, right?
I do agree that the term "without grace" is rather like the term "without existence" (except that existence is perhaps, in some academic sense, more dispensible).
'Against Zippy, I am generally willing to see Pelagianism wherever anyone suggests it.'
Spoken like a true Dominican!
Spoken like a true Dominican!
On the other hand, St. Dominic was said to have carried Cassian's Conferences with him wherever he went.
Rob, you asked regarding "...man thus effectively deifying himself."
Marion--
It's been that way since Eden, right?
Yes, sad to say, it has been!
And may not man's will to deify himself - albeit under the guise of "Science", "Freedom", or "Progress" - be viewed as Pelagianism taken to its logical conclusion?
Marion--
I also believe that Satan is real, and this always needs to be taken into account where human error is involved.
I also believe that Satan is real
There's a Catholic priest on EWTN who said something along the lines of, "all those people who say they don't believe in Hell, they don't believe in a devil, let them talk to one of our homeless drug-addicted guys who's been out on the streets, lost everything, including his self-respect and his sanity. These guys, they'll tell you maybe they didn't used to believe in that stuff, but they do now. Because they've been to Hell. And they've shaken hands with the devil."
Marion--
Yeah. But an example like that is, at the same time, more trivial (compare war, plague, famine) and more drastic (compare petty, but habitual, lying, cheating, and despising of one's neighbor) than necessary to convince me that Satan is real.
Agreed. They're interesting, though, those instances in which supernatural realities come up and smack one (figuratively) across the face.
I stay on the look-out for those.
Marion--
It is not the egregious and obvious evils that we need to be especially on guard against, but the banal ones.
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