The Divine Names

Concerning “Wisdom,” “Mind,” “Reason,” “Truth,” “Faith.”

1. Now, if it like thee, let us consider the Good and Eternal Life as Wise and as Very Wisdom, or rather as the Fount of all wisdom and as Transcending all wisdom and understanding. Not only is God so overflowing with wisdom that there is no limit to His understanding, but He even transcends all Reason, Intelligence, and Wisdom.^[399] And this is supernaturally perceived by the truly divine man (who hath been as a luminary both to us and to our teacher) when he says: “The foolishness of God is wiser than men.”^[400] And these words are true not only because all human thought is a kind of error when compared with the immovable permanence of the perfect thoughts which belong to God, but also because it is customary for writers on Divinity to apply negative terms to God in a sense contrary to the usual one. For instance, the Scripture calls the Light that shines on all things “Terrible,” and Him that hath many Titles and many Names “Ineffable” and “Nameless,” and Him that is present to all things and to be discovered from them all “Incomprehensible” and “Unsearchable.” In the same manner, it is thought, the divine Apostle, on the present occasion, when he speaks of God’s “foolishness,” is using in a higher sense the apparent strangeness and absurdity implied in the word, so as to hint at the ineffable Truth which is before all Reason. But, as I have said elsewhere, we misinterpret things above us by our own conceits and cling to the familiar notions of our senses, and, measuring Divine things by our human standards, we are led astray by the superficial meaning of the Divine and Ineffable Truth. Rather should we then consider that while the human Intellect hath a faculty of Intelligence, whereby it perceives intellectual truths, yet the act whereby the Intellect communes with the things that are beyond it transcends its intellectual nature.^[401] This transcendent sense, therefore, must be given to our language about God, and not our human sense. We must be transported wholly out of ourselves and given unto God. For ‘tis better to belong unto God and not unto ourselves, since thus will the Divine Bounties be bestowed, if we are united to God.^[402] Speaking, then, in a transcendent manner of this “Foolish Wisdom,”^[403] which hath neither Reason nor Intelligence, let us say that It is the Cause of all Intelligence and Reason, and of all Wisdom and Understanding, and that all counsel belongs unto It, and from It comes all Knowledge and Understanding, and in It “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”^[404] For it naturally follows from what hath already been said that the All-wise (and more than Wise) Cause is the Fount of Very Wisdom and of created wisdom both as a whole and in each individual instance.^[405]

2. From It the intelligible and intelligent powers of the Angelic Minds derive their blessed simple perceptions, not collecting their knowledge of God in partial fragments or from partial activities of Sensation or of discursive Reason, nor yet being circumscribed by aught that is akin to these,^[406] but rather, being free from all taint of matter and multiplicity, they perceive the spiritual truths of Divine things in a single immaterial and spiritual intuition. And their intuitive faculty and activity shines in its unalloyed and undefiled purity and possesses its Divine intuitions all together in an indivisible and immaterial manner, being by that Godlike unification made similar (as far as may be) to the Supra-Sapient Mind and Reason of God through the working of the Divine Wisdom.^[407] And human souls possess Reason, whereby they turn with a discursive motion round about the Truth of things, and, through the partial and manifold activities of their complex nature, are inferior to the Unified Intelligences: yet they too, through the concentration of their many faculties, are vouchsafed (so far as their nature allows) intuitions like unto those of the Angels. Nay, even our sense-perceptions themselves may be rightly described as an echo of that Wisdom; even diabolic intelligence, qua intelligence, belongs thereto, though in so far as it is a distraught intelligence, not knowing how to obtain its true desire, nor wishing to obtain it, we must call it rather a declension from Wisdom. Now we have already said that the Divine Wisdom is the Beginning, the Cause, the Fount, the Perfecting Power, the Protector and the Goal of Very Wisdom and all created Wisdom, and of all Mind, Reason, and Sense-Perception. We must now ask in what sense God,^[408] Who is Supra-Sapient, can be spoken of as Wisdom, Mind, Reason, and Knowledge? How can He have an intellectual intuition of intelligible things when He possesses no intellectual activities? Or how can He know the things perceived by sense when His existence transcends all sense-perception? And yet the Scripture says that He knoweth all things and that nothing escapes the Divine Knowledge. But, as I have often said, we must interpret Divine Things in a manner suitable to their nature. For the lack of Mind and Sensation must be predicated of God by excess and not by defect.^[409] And in the same way we attribute lack of Reason to Him that is above Reason, and Imperfectibility to Him that is above and before Perfection; and Intangible and Invisible Darkness we attribute to that Light which is Unapproachable because It so far exceeds the visible light. And thus the Mind of God embraces all things in an utterly transcendent knowledge and, in Its causal relation to all things, anticipates within Itself the knowledge of them all—knowing and creating angels before the angels were, and knowing all other things inwardly and (if I may so put it) from the very beginning, and thus bringing them into existence. And methinks this is taught by the Scripture when it saith “Who knoweth all things before their birth.”^[410] For the Mind of God gains not Its knowledge of things from those things; but of Itself and in Itself It possesses, and hath conceived beforehand in a causal manner, the cognizance and the knowledge and the being of them all. And It doth not perceive each class speciically,^[411] but in one embracing casuality It knows and maintains all things—even as Light possesses beforehand in itself a causal knowledge of the darkness, not knowing the darkness in any other way than from the Light.^[412] Thus the Divine Wisdom in knowing Itself will know all things: will in that very Oneness know and produce material things immaterially, divisible things indivisibly, manifold things under the form of Unity. For if God, in the act of causation, imparts Existence to all things, in the same single act of causation He will support all these His creatures the which are derived from Him and have in Him their forebeing, and He will not gain His knowledge of things from the things themselves, but He will bestow upon each kind the knowledge of itself and the knowledge of the others. And hence God doth not possess a private knowledge of Himself and as distinct therefrom a knowledge embracing all the creatures in common; for the Universal Cause, in knowing Itself, can scarcely help knowing the things that proceed from it and whereof It is the Cause. With this knowledge, then, God knoweth all things, not through a mere understanding of the things but through an understanding of Himself. For the angels, too, are said by the Scripture to know the things upon earth not through a sense-perception of them (though they are such as may be perceived this way), but through a faculty and nature inherent in a Godlike Intelligence.

[399] All wisdom or knowledge implies the distinction between thinker and object of thought. The undifferentiated Godhead is beyond this distinction; but (in a sense) it exists in the Persons of the Trinity and between them and the world, and hence from Them comes Absolute Wisdom, though the Godhead transcends it.

[400] 1 Cor. i. 25.

[402] The term “God” is rightly used here because the manifested Absolute is meant.

[403] 1 Cor. i. 25.

[404] Col. ii. 3.

[406] i. e. They are not limited by the material world, which, with its laws, is known through sensation and discursive reason.

[407] This speculation is, no doubt, based on experience. A concentration of the spiritual faculties in the act of contemplation produces that unity of the soul of which all mystics often speak. The angels are conceived of as being always in such a state of contemplation.

[408] God is the Manifested Absolute. Hence qua Absolute He is supra-sapient, qua Manifested He is wise (cf. ch. i, § 1). The Persons of the Trinity possess one common Godhead (= the Absolute) which is supra-sapient, and in that Godhead. They are One. Yet they are known by us only in their differentiation wherein Supra-Sapience is revealed as Wisdom.

[409] Via Negativa. It is not mere negation.

[410] Susannah 42.

[411] “According to its idea,” “according to the law of its species.” We perceive that this is a rose and that is a horse because we have two separate notions in our minds—one the notion of a rose and the other that of a horse. But in the Divine Knowledge there is only one Notion wherein such specific notions are elements, as the activities of several nerves are elements in one indivisible sensation of taste, or touch, or smell.

[412] i. e. Suppose the light were conscious, and knew its own nature, it would know that if it withheld its brightness there would be darkness (for the very nature of light is that it dispels, or at least prevents, darkness). On the other hand, the light could not directly know the darkness, because darkness cannot exist where there is light. The simile is capable of being applied to illustrate God’s knowledge of the world, because the world is imperfect. It applies more fundamentally to God’s knowledge of evil, and is so employed by St. Thomas Aquinas, who quotes this passage and says (Summa, xiv. 10) that, since evil is the lack of good, God knows evil things in the act by which He knows good things, as we know darkness through knowing light.