"Almost every atheist I've ever spoken to" "Almost every atheist I've ever spoken to doesn't understand what we mean by God." "So what an atheist is denying, I would deny, too." "Most atheists deny that there is some supreme being who is an item in the world or above the world." "I would deny that, too." "Or God is, at best, a sort of distant object who maybe wound things up and then went into retirement." "I would deny that, too." "So I would tend to agree with the atheists." "Also, most atheists construe God as a competitor, competition to us." "Somehow, "lf God gets the glory, I get less glory." "If God's in charge, I can't be in charge."" "But that's exactly what Thomas Aquinas saw, that God is not a competitor to us." "If God is the very ground of our being, the more glory we give to God, the more we are elevated." "So I would say I tend to agree with most atheists." "I think they're right in denying this false God." "But the true God, I think they have just as much hunger for." "After many years of exile from the royal court of Egypt where he had been raised, a Hebrew man named Moses found himself on the slopes of Mount Sinai tending the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro." "He noticed a strange sight, a bush that was on fire but was not being consumed." "He resolved to take a closer look." "As he approached, he heard a voice, "Moses, Moses, come no nearer." "Take off your shoes, for you are on Holy ground."" "Then the speaker identified Himself, "l am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."" "This deity then gave Moses the mission to liberate His enslaved people in Egypt." "When Moses asked for the name of this divine power who was addressing him, he heard, "Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh."" ""l am who I am."" "Moses was asking a reasonable enough question." "He was wondering which of the many gods this was." "He knew there were gods of this place and that, gods of the mountain and the river, gods of one people or another." "The answer that he received was revolutionary, for this God was implying that he was not one god among many, not a being who could be delimited or defined." "His name was simply to be, "the One who ls."" "Following these prompts, the mainstream of the Catholic theological tradition has refused to refer to God as a being," "as a supreme thing among many." "Rather, it tends to refer to God as being itself, ipsum esse in Thomas Aquinas' Latin." "Aquinas goes so far as to say that God is not in any genus, even the genus of being, which means that God cannot be defined." "St. Anselm of Canterbury famously described God as" ""that than which nothing greater can be thought."" "At first blush, you say," ""Well, that's straightforward enough." "God is the highest thing."" "But think, the highest thing plus the world would be greater than the highest thing alone, therefore, it wouldn't be" ""that than which nothing greater can be thought."" "Though it's a supreme paradox, the true God plus the world is not greater than God alone." "All of this conduces to the point where we say all of our words, all of our concepts fall short of who God really is." "God is essentially mystery." "That word comes from the Greek word "muein,"" "which means "to shut the mouth."" "The 20th-century theologian Karl Rahner said," ""God is the last thing we should say before falling silent."" "And St. Augustine long ago said, "Si comprehendis, non es Deus."" ""lf you understand, that isn't God."" "The things that we can understand clearly and easily are the things right around us, things in the world." "So there you are and you're not over there, there you are and you're not that person, and by comparing and contrasting, I understand the things of the world." "If I were to say, "Here I am in this place, there you are, oh, there's God, and here I am, and there's the pillar."" "Well, no, that's what God is not, one of the items in the world." "God is not the biggest thing around." "There's you and me and then some bigger things, and God is the biggest thing around." "God isn't the biggest thing around." "God is." "See, and of course it goes back to Moses." ""What's your name?" "When the people ask me, what should I tell them?" "What's your name?"" "Well, that's a, you know, commonsensical question." ""Who are You?" "How do I define You?"" "And God says, "l am who I am," which tells Moses precisely nothing." "It's a way of saying, "Stop asking me stupid questions." "That's the wrong question to ask me."" "See, if I know your name, I can call you and you respond." "I have, to that degree, control over you." "I can look you up in the phone book." "I can look you up on the lnternet." "I can know a lot about you if I know your name." "So, "God, what's Your name?"" ""l am who I am." "You have no control over me."" "So the theological language is in service of the spiritual life that way." "It's meant to change you spiritually in your relation to God." "God is the one whom I can never control." "In affirming that God is not a being, I've certainly held off idolatry, but have I left us thereby in an intellectual lurch doomed simply to remain silent about God?" "If God cannot be in any sense defined, how do we explain the plethora of theological books and arguments?" "After all, the same Thomas Aquinas who said that God cannot be placed in any genus also wrote millions of words about God." "The 33rd chapter of the Book of Exodus gives us a clue as to the resolution of this dilemma." "Moses passionately asks God to reveal His glory to him, and Yahweh acquiesces." "The Lord specifies, saying," ""l will make all my goodness pass before you, but you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live."" "God then tells Moses that while the divine glory passes by," "God will place His servant in the cleft of a rock and cover Moses' eyes." ""Only then," He says, "will I take away my hand and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen."" "God can indeed be seen in this life, but only indirectly, through His creatures and effects." "We can understand them, but only obliquely, glimpsing Him, as it were, out of the corners of our eyes." "We see His back as it's disclosed in the beauty, the intelligibility, and the contingency of the world that He's made." "I first encountered Thomas Aquinas' arguments for God's existence when I was 14." "And the experience changed my life." "They gave me a sense of the reality of God that I have never lost." "Thomas formulated those five arguments for God's existence when he was here at the Dominican Convent of Santa Sabina in Rome." "They say that Thomas would walk at high speed around this cloister when he was deep in thought." "He gave us five arguments." "I'll just develop one of them." "The one I think is the most fundamental, the most basic." "It's called the Argument from Contingency." "Contingency is something that's really part of our very ordinary experience." "It names the fact that things come into being and they pass out of being." "Think for a second of a great majestic summer cloud that billows up and then fades away in the course of a lazy August afternoon." "It comes into being and then, in a very evanescent way, it passes out of being." "Now think of all the plants and flowers that have grown up and then withered and faded." "Think of all the human beings who have come and gone." "Psalm 90 says," ""Lord, teach us to remember the shortness of our lives,"" "that we're like grass that grows in the morning and by evening withers and fades." "The Psalm says, "Our lives are over like a sigh."" "Even those things that seem so permanent -- think of a great mountain range like the Rocky Mountains." "If we had, over the many eons and millennia, a time-lapse camera that could film the emergence of the Rocky Mountains, their endurance for a long period of time, and then their erosion, and then we speeded up that film," "the Rocky Mountains would look for all the world" "like that fleeting summer cloud." "Well, that's the starting point of Thomas' proof, things come into being and they pass out of being." "And this means something." "It means they don't carry within themselves the reason for their own existence." "We have to explain them by appeal to an extrinsic cause." "So, go back to that summer cloud." "You say, "Well, what causes it to be?"" "Oh, you mention the moisture in the air, you mention the wind, you mention the atmosphere, and that's fair enough as far as it goes." "But as any meteorologist will tell you, those things, too, are contingent." "They come into being and pass away." "So you go a step further, and you say," ""Well, they're caused by the jet stream, which is caused by the movement of the planet."" "Oh, but the planet itself is contingent." "Scientists tell us it came into being four billion years ago, and it, too, will one day pass away." "Okay, another step." "The planets are caused by, oh, events within the solar system, within the galaxy." "But those, too, change coming into being and passing out of being." "So you say, "Okay, they're all grounded in the great structures of the universe."" "Scientists have told us the universe itself came into being 13 billion years ago through the Big Bang." "Here's the point -- we have still not explained the existence of that summer cloud." "Aquinas concludes if we are to avoid an infinite regress which finally explains nothing at all, we must come finally to some reality which does exist through itself." "We must come finally to some necessary being whose very nature it is to be." "This, he says, is what people mean by God." "Then he makes this connection -- keep that proof in mind and then remember the answer that Moses got when he asked God," ""lf they ask for your name, what will I tell them?"" "And the Lord responded, "l am who I am."" "Not one being among many, not one contingent reality among many, but God says on Thomas' reading," ""l am the one whose very nature it is to be."" "This is what Christians mean by God." "In 1968, a young German theology professor named Joseph Ratzinger," "later Pope Benedict XVl, wrote a book entitled "Introduction to Christianity."" "In the course of that book," "Ratzinger formulated a neat argument for God's existence, one that I believe is especially relevant to our time when religion and science are so often set in opposition to each other." "Ratzinger begins with the observation that finite being as we experience it is marked through and through by intelligibility, by a formal structure that makes it capable of being known by an inquiring mind." "that makes it capable of being known by an inquiring mind." "The medievals had a dictum, ens est scibile, "being is knowable."" "In point of fact, no science would ever get off the ground unless its practitioners believed this mystical principle." "unless its practitioners believed this mystical principle." "How could a psychologist go out to meet the psyche with confidence unless he thought it was marked by intelligibility." "How could the physicist go out to meet the physical world unless he was convinced that through and through, it is knowable." "unless he was convinced that through and through, it is knowable." "I know no other place on Earth that better exemplifies the harmony of religion and science than the Vatican Observatory perched on a high mountain outside of Tucson, Arizona." "Now, Ratzinger argues that the only finally satisfying explanation for this universal objective intelligibility is some great subjective intelligence, some mind which has thought the universe into being." "Our language gives us a rather intriguing clue in this regard," "Our language gives us a rather intriguing clue in this regard, for we speak of our acts of knowledge as moments of recognition." "Re-cognition, literally thinking again what has already been thought." "Ratzinger cites Einstein himself in support of this proposition." "Ratzinger cites Einstein himself in support of this proposition." "The great scientist said," ""ln the laws of nature, a mind so superior is revealed that in comparison to it, our minds count as something worthless."" "In the prologue to his Gospel, St. John says," "In the prologue to his Gospel, St. John says," ""ln the Beginning was the Word."" "His Greek term is logos, which could as just as well be translated as "mind."" "He then specifies that through this mind, all things came to be." "He then specifies that through this mind, all things came to be." "He applies thereby that the universe is not dumbly there." "It's intelligently there, having been spoken into being by a great creative mind." "The argument offered by Joseph Ratzinger is but a specification of this great revelation." "is but a specification of this great revelation." "The Bible is not a book of science, it's a book of theology and spirituality, it's a book of theology and spirituality, so it's telling in this sort of cosmological myth a great religious truth," "which is that God creates the whole universe, all of being comes from God." "That's the biblical idea." "Now, how that happened precisely, what are the details of it," "I won't look to the Bible so much, I'll look to science to explain it." "I won't look to the Bible so much, I'll look to science to explain it." "Here's something about the Big Bang that's interesting." "Thomas Aquinas was a very honest philosopher, and he said, "Look, I can't prove philosophically that the world had a beginning in time, and so he found other proofs to get to the existence of God." "If he had known what we knew, he'd say, "It's as easy as pie proving that God exists,"" "because once you say," ""Hey, the whole world came into being in one big bang,"" "well, it must have had a cause outside of itself." "But, see, he was so honest, he said I don't know that in the 13th century." "If he knew what we know now, it would have been much easier." "So I invoked it there to support his proof," "So I invoked it there to support his proof, but, actually, that makes it easier to defend what he was saying." "If we consult the story of Adam and Eve, we find revealed one of the most fundamental spiritual dynamics, the tendency of a sinner either to grasp at God or to flee from Him." "Let me consider that grasping tendency first." "Let me consider that grasping tendency first." "The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in the symbolic language of Genesis, stands for that unique prerogative of God since God is Himself the ground of morality." "Therefore, when Adam and Eve grasp at the fruit of that tree," "Therefore, when Adam and Eve grasp at the fruit of that tree, they are, symbolically speaking, attempting to dominate God, to control and manipulate Him." "God is infinite, unbounded, immense." "It just means that God can't be measured by our ordinary categories." "We say that God is eternal." "It just means that He's outside of time." "It just means that He's outside of time." "We say that God is immaterial, immutable." "It means He's not like any of the material and changeable things that we see." "What is God we really don't know." "Thomas Aquinas said that in this life, we don't know what God is," "Thomas Aquinas said that in this life, we don't know what God is, we know what God is not." "All these terms I've been using signal the divine transcendence, the otherness of God." "They're all ways of saying to us, "Don't grasp."" "You see the great Cologne Cathedral behind me." "You see the great Cologne Cathedral behind me." "With its sheer immensity and all those upward thrusting lines, the whole building is speaking of God's transcendence," "God's radical otherness." "But if we one-sidedly emphasize the transcendence of God, we can fall into another spiritual trap, and here again the story of Adam and Eve is instructive." "Once they were foiled in their attempt to grasp at God," "Adam and Eve hid from God, hiding themselves in the underbrush of Eden." "hiding themselves in the underbrush of Eden." "But, of course, God discovers them immediately." "The point is this, being itself, God, cannot be grasped, but, at the same time, being itself cannot be hidden from." "God insinuates Himself into every nook and cranny of what He's made." "God insinuates Himself into every nook and cranny of what He's made." "Psalm 139 puts it this way," ""Lord, You search me and You know me." "You know my resting and my rising, You discern my purpose from afar."" "God knows everything about us." "The same Cologne Cathedral that spoke so eloquently of the transcendence of God that spoke so eloquently of the transcendence of God speaks as well of the immanence of God." "We see plants and animals and trees and people and angels and devils, the natural, the supernatural." "God grounds and informs all of His creation." "God is immanent to the world." "God is immanent to the world." "Therefore, the same God who cannot be grasped in His transcendence, in His immanence, cannot be hidden from." "And so the theological tradition uses another set of words to designate this unavoidable quality of God." "to designate this unavoidable quality of God." "It speaks, for instance, of God's omnipotence." "This doesn't mean that God is the strongest being around, it means that God presses upon everything He's made with unconditioned power." "with unconditioned power." "It speaks of God's omniscience." "This doesn't mean that God is the smartest being around, it means that God has known everything into being and therefore that His knowing proceeds and determines all that is." "and therefore that His knowing proceeds and determines all that is." "It speaks of God's omnipresence." "This doesn't mean that God is an all-enveloping energy," "like the Force in "Star Wars."" "It means that God stands under all finite reality, and is hence inescapably present to it." "and is hence inescapably present to it." "God is, as the psalm says, "So high you can't get over Him, so low you can't get under Him, so wide you can't get around Him."" "We should stop trying to grasp at God, stop trying to flee from Him." "stop trying to flee from Him." "We should fall in love with Him." "You know, no matter how good the universe is, and it is wonderful, but it fades away." "and it is wonderful, but it fades away." "You know, all that's good and true and beautiful within nature and culture comes and goes." "And even this great place has been around for a long time, it will fade away." "They all do." "Whatever is glorious in nature fades away." "So when the belief came along that there's a God who is truly eternal, that there's a God who is truly eternal, who made all these things, all these things reflect Him, but He doesn't fade away." "And so Augustine can say, "Only in God is my soul at rest."" "Because our souls are looking for that eternal safety and that eternal satisfaction, and that eternal satisfaction, and they won't get it in anything here below." "One of the most fundamental ideas in the Bible is that God is the Creator of all things." "You find it reflected in the earliest creeds of the Christian Church," "You find it reflected in the earliest creeds of the Christian Church," ""We believe in one God, the Father of the Almighty, the maker of Heaven and Earth."" "If God is the sheer act of being itself, then anything else that exists apart from God must have come in its entirety from God." "must have come in its entirety from God." "I'd like to contrast this view with what you find in the ancient philosophies and mythologies." "There you see God or the gods shaping preexistent matter or imposing their will through power on some rival force." "or imposing their will through power on some rival force." "But there's none of this in Christian theology." "We say that God creates the world ex nihilo, from nothing." "That means that God does not impose His will on some rival power," "God does not wrestle some opponent into submission," "God does not wrestle some opponent into submission, rather through a sheerly generous, non-violent act of love," "God gives rise to all things." "This also means that Creation is not simply an event in the distant past, rather Creation is happening now." "rather Creation is happening now." "Thomas Aquinas talks about creatio continua, continual creation." "It implies that creatures don't so much have a relationship to God, rather creatures are a relationship to God." "rather creatures are a relationship to God." "That's why Meister Eckhart said that the spiritual life is not so much climbing the mountain to the distant God as sinking into God." "The doctrine of Creation also implies the interconnectedness of all things." "When I find my deepest center, that place in me where I am here and now a being created by God," "I've also necessarily found the deepest center of everyone else" "I've also necessarily found the deepest center of everyone else and everything else in the cosmos." "Every other human being is my ontological sibling." "In fact, in light of the doctrine of Creation," "I can make bold to speak with St. Francis of Assisi of Brother Sun and Sister Moon." "Now, this God who is continually making the universe, who is present to all things in the most intimate way, must be described as provident." "must be described as provident." "God is not a distant deist force who wound up the clockwork of the universe and then retired." "No, God in the language of the Book of Wisdom," ""Stretches from end to end mightily and orders all things sweetly."" ""Stretches from end to end mightily and orders all things sweetly."" "God is pushing, pulling, drawing His universe according to His purposes, much as an artist shapes his material according to his design." "This helps to explain why there's still a kind of unfinished quality to the world." "why there's still a kind of unfinished quality to the world." "The universe is like an artist's studio." "God's creation from nothing is non-violent." "He's not manipulating something, not dominating something." "He makes the world from nothing." "He makes the world from nothing." "The Bible does that now as a sheerly generous act of speech," ""'Let there be light,' and there was light."" "It's getting at that idea of the non-violence, the non-interventionist quality of Creation." "And, see, that has overtones all across the board." "And, see, that has overtones all across the board." "How does God provide for the world?" "How does God direct and govern the world?" "Not so much through intervention." "Not so much through an aggressive manipulation of things." "But always sweetly, as the Bible says." "God orders all things sweetly, indirectly, non-violently." "God orders all things sweetly, indirectly, non-violently." "Now link it up to Jesus' teaching about non-violence." "And we say, "Well, yeah, that's, I guess, if you're living in a fantasy world, you can live that way." "What He's saying is live your life in a way that puts you in touch with the deepest level of reality." "that puts you in touch with the deepest level of reality." "At the deepest level, you find non-violence, so you ought to live that way." "So it always is of a peace there, the doctrine of Creation, the doctrine of providence, and the moral teaching of Jesus." "I realize that even those who are following the logic of my argument, even those predisposed to believe in the existence of a provident God still balk at the problem of evil." "If God exists, how could there be so much evil in the world?" "The 19th-century British philosopher, John Stuart Mill, formulated the objection this way," ""lf God is, as classical Christian theology says, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, there should be no evil." "If He's omniscient, He'd know about it, if He's omnipotent, He could do something about it, if He's omnibenevolent, He'd want to do something about it, therefore if there's evil, such a God cannot exist."" "In the 13th century," "St. Thomas Aquinas formulated the objection even more pithily." "Thomas said, "lf one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed." "But God is called the infinite good, therefore if God exists, there should be no evil." "But there is evil, therefore there's no God."" "Powerful arguments those, and I don't know any place on the face of the Earth where the force of them is felt more than here at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp." "If an all-good, all-knowing, provident creator God exists, how do you begin to explain what happened here?" "This is the hardest, most vexing, and puzzling theological question of all." "Any answer we give will necessarily be inadequate, but at least we can perhaps gesture in the direction of an answer." "The first observation to make is this, evil in the strict sense does not exist, for it's always a deprivation, a lack of what ought to be there," "like a cavity in a tooth or a cancer compromising an organ." "Therefore, we should never speak of God as creating evil and we should never think of evil as a positive force opposing God." "But this just postpones the question a bit." "Why does God permit evil in His creation?" "The classical answer, articulated by Augustine, Aquinas, and a whole army of their followers, is that God permits evil so as to bring about a greater good." "We all have experience of this from time to time, some great calamity, an illness, a failure, the loss of a loved one, results over time in some good that would never have come about in another way." "We sometimes sense that growth comes through pain." "But in the presence of truly profound evil, the kind that we sense here, doesn't that explanation seem a tad facile?" "Well, the Bible understands this." "Look at the Book of Job." "In one fell swoop, Job loses everything and everyone dear to him." "He loses wealth and livelihood, family, health." "For seven days, he sits in sullen mourning on an ash heap." "He's joined by three friends, who sit silently with him." "But finally the friends speak and they articulate what most of us would take to be a pretty commonsensical argument." ""Job, you must have done something to offend God." "Somehow, Job, this terrible suffering of yours must be the result of your sin."" "But Job knows he's righteous, and so he protests." "Eventually, he dismisses the three friends, and then, in one of the most dramatic scenes in the Bible, he calls God into the dock, challenging God to explain why He's allowed him to suffer this way." "Here Job speaks for anyone who's gone through undeserved suffering." "Chapter 38 features God's response," ""Then the Lord addressed Job out of the storm and said," "'Who is this that obscures divine plans with words of ignorance?" "Gird up your loins now like a man." "I will question you and you will give Me the answers." "Where were you when I founded the Earth?" "Tell me if you have understanding." "Who determined its size?" "Do you know?" "Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning or shown the dawn its place?" "Have you entered into the source of the sea and walked about in the depth of the abyss?"'" "God goes on and on, taking Job on a great tour of the cosmos, acquainting him with its infinite mysteriousness, with all of its puzzles and anomalies." "The implication is that God is an artist and that His canvas is all of space and all of time." "God is producing a work of extraordinary complexity, the darks and lights coming together to form patterns that we in principal couldn't even begin to see." "Behind me is Georges Seurat's great pointillist masterpiece," "Sunday Afternoon on La Grand Jatte." "They say that when Seurat painted this picture, he sat on a high stool and carefully applied the colors point by point with long brushes." "If you look at this picture with your nose pressed against it all you'll see are a few blotches." "But if you step back, you begin to see how the points have formed themselves into patterns." "Then, as you step back even further, how those patterns have arranged themselves into figures and groups." "When you stand now at the back of the room, you take in the entire picture, you see how all of those points of color, all the light and darkness have arranged themselves into a composition of stunning harmony and order." "God is an artist." "But what do we see of God's creation as we look at our little swath of space and time?" "Just a few blotches, perhaps a hint of pattern." "It's only when we survey creation from the vantage point of God Himself can we see how all of the points of nature in history, all the darks and lights have arranged themselves into the great pattern." "I might propose another analogy along these lines." "The American philosopher William James told the story about his library and his dog." "James said that his dog would come into his master's study at the end of the day, he'd look around and see everything -- the books on the shelves, the papers on the desk, the globe in the corner." "It occurred to James that though the dog saw everything, he understood almost none of it." "And if his master had tried to explain it to him," ""Oh, those books are collections of pages on which are symbols of words that in turn signify ideas." "That globe, that's a symbolic representation of the planet that we both live on that's hurtling through space."" "Well, the dog would have looked at him with perfect incomprehension." "It then occurred to William James so are we vis-à-vis that great intelligence that orders and governs the universe." "Though we see everything, we understand very little of it." "And given the limited capacity of our minds," "God could not even in principal begin to explain it to us." "Still unsatisfied?" "Good." "Though all these images, perspectives, and insights are illuminating, none finally solves the problem of reconciling a loving God and a universe marked by great cruelty." "For the Christian faith, the only adequate resolution of this dilemma is the one affected by God Himself on the Cross of Jesus Christ." "On that Cross, the darkness of the human condition met the fullness of the Divine love and found itself transfigured into life." "On that Cross, God went to the limits of God forsakenness and made even death itself a place of hope." "Thus far, almost everything I've said about God could be echoed by a faithful Jew or Muslim, believers in the one God." "So what is it that makes the Christian doctrine of God distinctive?" "The answer is given every time we make the Sign of the Cross, when we invoke the three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." "God is one, but God is not monolithically one." "Rather in His unity, He is a communion, a family of love." "Where does this doctrine come from?" "As usual, the touchstone is Jesus." "Jesus consistently referred to Himself as one who was sent by the Father." "Well, in this regard, He would seem little different than say Abraham or Moses or Isaiah." "But there was something altogether unique about Jesus, something that set Him apart from those figures." "He spoke and acted in the very person of God." "Therefore, Jesus was sent by another, whom we acknowledge as divine, and yet He Himself was divine." "More to it, Jesus promised that He and His Father would send another advocate, a Spirit who would lead the Church into the fullness of truth." "It was this divine Spirit who invaded the church at Pentecost and who sustained the early Christian community." "The very first Christians were all Jews trained in the strict monotheism of Israel." "They all held passionately to the great Shema declaration from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy," ""Hear, oh, Israel, the Lord your God is Lord alone."" "And yet, they knew that the one God had revealed something new through Jesus and the Spirit." "None of the pioneers of the faith summed up this novelty more succinctly than St. John, who in his first letter said simply, "God is love."" "He wasn't defending the proposition that God has love or that love is one of God's attributes, rather he was saying that love names the very essence of God, and this means that God must be in His own life" "a play of lover, the Father, beloved, the Son, and shared love, the Holy Spirit." "What the Bible bequeathed to the great tradition, therefore, was attention, a dilemma, how to reconcile the Shema with the claim that God is love." "Well, it took several centuries for some of the greatest minds in the history of the Church to work out that relationship." "Around the year 400, one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived," "St. Augustine of Hippo, wrote a great text called the De Trinitate About the Trinity." "In the ninth book of that treatise," "Augustine proposed a fascinating analogy for the Trinity." "He knew from the Book of Genesis that we human beings have been made uniquely in the image and likeness of God." "What's distinctive to us is the intellect." "Therefore, Augustine sought to find within the very dynamics of the mind itself a mirror of the Trinity." ""Mens, notitia sui, amor sui. "" ""Mind, self-knowledge, self-love."" "The mind doesn't split into three, but the one mind subsists in three modalities or relations." "So the Father is the "mens" of God, the primordial ground of a divine mind." "The Son is the "notitia sui" of God, the self-possession of the Father." "And the Spirit is the "amor sui" of God, the love breathed out between the Father and the Son." "This means that God is one, but God subsists in a play of relationships, a give and take, a breathing in and a breathing out." "I realize how abstract all this can sound, but actually it's not." "Every time you say, "What was I thinking?", or "What was I doing?", you're exemplifying exactly what Augustine is talking about because you're posing yourself to yourself as the object of your own question." "You are simultaneously the subject and object of the same question." "You haven't split into two things, but they're two dimensions to your own psychology." "You know, you see it reflected in the languages." "The expression in French for I wonder is, "je m'interroge,"" "Iiterally, "l ask me."" "The same thing in Spanish, "yo me pregunto," "l ask me."" "Again, you're not splitting into two, but you're identifying two modalities, two elements within your mind." "Now, push it further." "Suppose in the course of many long conversations with a good friend or in the course of therapy or spiritual direction, you come to know yourself much more deeply." "You then come to love yourself more thoroughly." ""Mens, notitia sui, amor sui. "" ""Mind, self-knowledge, self-love."" "Not three things, but three elements, three movements, three dynamics within the same self." "That's the Imago Trinitatis, that's the image of the Trinity that St. Augustine is talking about." "You know, in the liturgy, we use incense." "And you put incense around the altar." "And, to some degree, that symbolizes our prayers going up to God." "But our present pope, Benedict XVl, said the incense also symbolizes how you're meant to block your vision, how smoke gets in your eyes and you can't see and it blocks your approach to the altar." "Well, that's part of theological language." "It's meant to get in your eyes, it's meant to obfuscate a bit, it's meant to confuse you because the minute you say," ""Oh, I got it." "Oh, yeah, I understand." "So I see you, I see things in the world, and, oh, and I understand God, too."" "Then you don't have it." "That isn't God." "So Augustine's thing is the minute you've got a clear concept, drop it." "That isn't it." "So theological language does have, to some degree, that purpose to confound you." "A very good example, of course, is that God is both three and one." "God is supremely one and God is a trinity of persons." "Well, go figure." "And that's part of the purpose of it, is to block the mind and to block the kind of eagle-eye approach we have to things," ""Got it, got it, see it, understand it."" "No, you don't when it comes to God." "We ask about many things, but there is a particular question that the philosophers call the question after being." "It is the inquiry not into this or that particular state of affairs, but rather into the meaning of it all." "What is it all about?" "The Christian answer to that question is love," "for love is what God is."