Читать книгу Naming the Unnameable - Dr. Rev. Matthew Fox - Страница 12

Eckhart says “God is being” and a “fountain of being” and Aquinas says: “God is pure existence….God is essential existence and all other things are beings by participation.” Deepak Chopra writes: “God is not a mythical person—he is Being itself.” He elaborates: “The vast physical mechanism we call the universe behaves more like a mind than like a machine. How did mind ever find a way to manifest as the physical world?…The very fact that anything exists is supernatural—literally beyond the rules of the natural world.” The true miracle is existence itself.

Hart underscores the uniqueness and the necessity of God as being when he observes that “all physical reality is contingent upon some cause of being as such, since existence is not an intrinsic physical property, and since no physical reality is logically necessary.” He recognizes that “the ultimate source of existence cannot be some item or event that has long since passed away or concluded, like a venerable ancestor or even the Big Bang itself—either of which is just another contingent physical entity or occurrence—but must be a constant wellspring of being, at work even now.” Aquinas holds the very same perspective when he says: “God’s work whereby God brings things into being must not be taken as the work of a craftsman who makes a box and then leaves it. For God continues to give being.” Indeed, God “continually pours out existence into things.” Rabbi Heschel concurs when he says Creation “is not an act that happened once upon a time, once and for ever. The act of bringing the world into existence is a continuous process. God called the world into being, and that call goes on….Every instant is an act of creation.”

Hart makes a stern judgment about our culture when he declares that we are out of touch with being: we “may well be the social order that has ventured furthest away from being in its quest to master beings.” The specialness of the divine Being and its relationship to being resides in the fact that “nothing within the cosmos contains the ground of its own being.” Because “it is far easier to think about beings than about being as such….we therefore always risk losing sight of the mystery of being behind the concepts we impose upon it.”

Eckhart defines creation as “the giving of being” and says that “Isness is God.” He is saying that all being is a representation of Divinity. This would echo Aquinas’ teaching that “to exist is the most perfect thing of all, for compared to existence, everything else is potential.”