is not created alone has essential subsistence; it is the essence of all things. God is the
beginning, middle, and end of things. God's essence is unknowable to men, and even to angels.
Even to Himself He is, in a sense, unknowable: "God does not know Himself, what He is,
because He is not a what; in a certain respect He is incomprehensible to Himself and to every
intellect." * In the being of things God's being can be seen; in their order, His wisdom; in their
movement, His life. His being is the Father, His wisdom the Son, His life the Holy Ghost. But
Dionysius is right in saying that no name can be truly asserted of God. There is an affirmative
theology, in which He is said to be truth, goodness, essence, etc., but such affirmations are only
symbolically true, for all such predicates have an opposite, but God has no opposite.
The class of things that both create and are created embraces the whole of the prime causes, or
prototypes, or Platonic ideas. The total of these prime causes is the Logos. The world of ideas is
eternal, and yet created. Under the influence of the Holy Ghost, these prime causes give rise to
the world of particular things, the materiality of which is illusory. When it is said that God
created things out of "nothing," this "nothing" is to be understood as God Himself, in the sense
in which He transcends all knowledge.
Creation is an eternal process: the substance of all finite things is God. The creature is not a
being distinct from God. The creature subsists in God, and God manifests Himself in the
creature in an ineffable manner. "The Holy Trinity loves Itself in us and in Itself; †It sees and
moves Itself."
Sin has its source in freedom: it arose because man turned towards himself instead of towards
God. Evil does not have its ground in God, for in God there is no idea of evil. Evil is not-being
and has no ground, for if it had a ground it would be necessary. Evil is a privation of good.
The Logos is the principle that brings the many back to the One, and man back to God; it is thus
the Saviour of the world. By union with God, the part of man that effects union becomes divine.
John disagrees with the Aristotelians in refusing substantiality to particular things. He calls
Plato the summit of philosophers. But the
* Cf. Bradley on the inadequacy of all cognition. He holds that no truth is quite true, but the
best available truth is not intellectually corrigeable.â
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Cf. Spinoza.