“…always providing that one has the courage to ask questions, to be dissatisfied, to think with the mind and heart one actually has and not with the mind and heart one is supposed to have.”
Karl Rahner S.J.
Tag: Constantine’s Sword
Defining God
“mathematically speaking, is why God is more like a line than a point.”
“Nicolaus proposed thinking of God in an image more than like the line which is by definition unbounded,
Constantine’s Sword page 349
impossible to hem-in or to possess.
Instead of thinking of God in constrained images equivalent to mathematical symbols of the sphere or the triangle…”
he suggested viewing God as a line.
“Theologians spoke of God as they understood God fully, and they sought to enforce a uniformity of thought that left no room for mystery, ambiguity or paradox. Nicolaus of Cusa saw, on the contrary, that God is God precisely in escaping and transcending total comprehension by human beings. Just as a line is defined by its movement in opposite directions at once, so God is the coincidence of opposites, the one in whom maximum and minimum fall together. In God, the coincidence occurs in such a way that the contraries maintain their differences, which, mathematically speaking, is why God is more like a line than a point.”
The Sword of Constantine page 350
Burdon of Tyrany
“To a world threatened by dissolution,
Constantine’s Sword page 181
the unifying impulse can only seem virtuous,
yet the perennial human problem is how to keep the ideal of unity free of the burden of tyranny”