An Hypothesis of Epektatic Satiation for Formative Spirituality
the journey IS our destination and the quest IS our grail.
“God is not only the ultimate reality that the intellect and the will seek, but is also the primordial reality with which all of us are always engaged in every moment of existence and consciousness, apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever” ~DBH
This evokes for me notions like the upper blade of Lonergan’s epistemic scissors & his accounts of meaning, understanding & unrestricted desire; also of Maritain’s connaturality, Polanyi’s tacit dimension, Newman’s illative sense, Hegel’s self-positing & intellectual intuition, Fries’ nonintuitive immediate knowledge & even Peirce’s abduction.
While I don’t suggest we could easily map these concepts, I want to lean into some intuitions, which they’ve collectively evoked for me.
When Lonergan distinguishes between horizontal & vertical finalities, when Boersma & Gaine distinguish theophanic & supra-theophanic knowledges of God, when Hjort distinguishes Nyssen’s visions via energies & Aquinas’ via noetic identity, when theologians distinguish the lights of experience, faith & glory, those distinctions refer to modally distinct ways of knowing as have been primordially gifted us per the divine gratuities of creation & grace, which are a single gift.
That’s all to say that we are always already knowing God via both immediate & mediated modes (Love being a many splendored thing). That’s an oversimplified account, I know, but it’s less inadequate (thanks GNaz) than would be its simple denial.
The divine illuminations enjoyed per our various modes of knowing (not only what’s true, beautiful & good, but Truth, Beauty & Goodness, Godself) progress seamlessly through the divine protological, historical & eschatological continuum with ever greater degrees of divine luminosity.
Allow me to riff on DBH’s account of divine apatheia:
I suggest, therefore, that — to become wholly satiated in a truly holy way is to become at peace with the infinite longings of one’s infinitely growing desires, which will invite ever novel fulfillments, to become at peace with becoming, itself, to become at peace knowing that, constitutively, one will everlastingly remain in infinite potency to God.
The above reflections are not mere idle speculations but have practical implications for formative spirituality.
For example, they underwrite the 1st Step of 12 Step programs: There IS a higher power and it’s NOT me!
They inspired my own realization that the journey IS our destination and the quest IS our grail.
More poetically, I’ll offer with Gerald May’s beautiful insights:
“Love is present in any desire … in all feelings of attraction, in all caring and connectedness. It embraces us in precious moments of immediate presence. It is also present when we experience loneliness, loss, grief and rejection. We may say such feelings come from the absence of love, but in fact they are signs of our loving; they express how much we care. We grieve according to how much of ourselves we have already given; we yearn according to how much we would give, if only we could.”
“The only way to own and claim love as our identity is: to fall in love with love itself, to feel affection for our longing, to value our yearning, treasure our wanting, embrace our incompleteness, be overwhelmed by the beauty of our need.”
And, finally, Maximus:
“who is by nature limitless & honourable & naturally stretches to infinity the appetite of those who enjoy him thru participation”
~ Maximus Amb Io 7 (PG 91.1089B)