The Inadequacy of Natural Knowledge of God.
Of course, the knowledge of God which can be attained by our
natural faculties is inadequate and incomplete. It merely prepares us to receive
Divine Revelation through Sacred Scripture. Scripture is the treasure house
which contains our knowledge of God. According to Basil "there is not a single
superfluous word in it." However, even Scripture does not enable us to
completely understand God, for God must ultimately remain incomprehensible to
us. By the evidence of our senses we know that God exists. We can even
comprehend how God exists. But what God is, and what His "essence"
is, is not and cannot be known by man or by any of the celestial intellectual
powers. "I know that God is," says Basil, "but His essence is beyond my
understanding." The primary reason for this is that God is eternal and
boundless, but the capacity of the created mind is always limited. Our knowledge
of God is therefore never complete. It is at most an aspiration.
This does not invalidate the objectivity of religious
cognition. Something which is incomplete is not necessarily untrue. "We have
been given eyes so that we can know what is visible. However, this does not mean
that everything that is visible is within our range of vision. The entire vault
of heaven cannot be completely viewed at once. We observe as much as we can, but
there is much that remains unperceived by us. However, we do not say that the
sky is invisible simply because there is a part of it we do not see. On the
contrary, it is just this limited perception we have of it that makes it visible
and knowable to us. The same should be said of God."
Furthermore, since that which we perceive must be expressed by
multivalent concepts, we can never penetrate beyond the properties and qualities
of things. These qualities enable us to perceive and to express the nature of
things, but never exactly or completely. In other words, the essence of things,
even created things, is ultimately inaccessible to us. We cannot even comprehend
the essence of an ant. This idea was later developed in greater detail by
Gregory of Nyssa.
The problems of the limitation of man's knowledge of God and
the role that cognition plays in the formation of religious concepts became
particularly important in Basil's continuing debate with Eunomius. The
problematics of religious anthropology and of cognition became the focal points
of this controversy, which was as much a matter of philosophy as it was of
theology. The Anomoean doctrine of Eunomius was based on Gnostic principles.
Basil responded to Eunomius by developing his theories of religious cognition
and the creative character of human cognitive activity. These theories were not
systematically elaborated, and Basil only indicated their basic premises. His
work was later completed by his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa.
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