The God of Revelation and the God of the Philosophers /part 2/

It is true that metaphysical credibility and its evidential force are not of the order of magnitude, and one and the same criterion should not apply to one and the other creative expression of the spirit. Still, is there any reason to deny the meaning of reason for theological reasons? In this context, personal religious experience is primarily opposed. Of course, the true knowledge of God always involves a personal encounter and real communion with the Higher Being of the transcendent "You". This fact is decisive for the inner transformation and rebirth of man. Religious experience, however, is highly subjective and its intrinsic credibility is irreplaceable. From here it can be concluded that the knowledge of God is the expression of certain spiritual abilities and experiences associated with a corresponding personal attitude.

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The distinction between religious and non-religious souls reveals that belief in God is not an expression of an inner necessity as a projection of the thirst for happiness that has remained unsatisfied with the material beginning and purely earthly ideals. Faith in God never comes from the need to have unconditional security, inner comfort, and comfort. Faith in God has nothing to do with religious beliefs of a similar kind. It is as objectively necessary as for the intellect and for the mystical soul. The harmony between the existence of God and the emotional urgency does not give any criterion for such kinds of judgments about His existence. Conversely, the reality of God is so much ahead in our objectivity, the more it contradicts the personal aspirations, the more its reality leads to antinomy in reason. And the more the Priest's will violates the logic of our designs and visions, the more we are forced to acknowledge God, somehow directly ourselves.

The encounter with God is a personal event, which must then be verified, conceived, and put in relation to other phenomena. This can not be the result of pure intelligence, but the strict examination of reason is more than necessary. Only so the self can be convinced that he has not been deceived by illusions or absorbed by an emotional impulse. Only the belief in God, which is reasoned in this way and by reason, has remained unwavering compared to the sum of other data and recognized as fully satisfying them - only such a belief has the stability and credibility of a truly justified conviction.Reason is equally necessary, both for the establishment and for the development of the personality on the path of God's knowledge. There is nothing more dangerous than a religion that pretends to circumvent or ignore reason. It leads to fanaticism, to darkness, grows up in superstition.

Rationalism and excessive pride of the spirit, claiming to master and dispose of God on the other hand, are the other possible danger on the path to God's knowledge. The opposite of this mental attitude is the natural and open pursuit of reason, in its constant aspirations to seek the deep the basis of existence, until it finally exhausts all its possibilities and stops only at that moment when the rays of the blinding light of the Absolute God illuminate it. In the Areopagic Book, it is fully justified to say that God, to whom one can raise our mind, remains the unknowable God. It exists and is revealed by His actions in nature. God's essence (oussia), however, goes beyond the limits of any logical definition. In other words, reason, and in this is his greatness, may know God, but He can only recognize Him in His external manifestations / energies, but this is already an expression of human cognitive limitation to the infiniteness of God's being.

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part 1