You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature QUOTES

1 " The mind longs from the first not only to reach, but to become, that divine truth that gives being to all things. It seeks, as Maximus the Confessor says, to pass beyond all finite cognitions and enter at last into a final union with its first causes in God. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

2 " God who is the beginningless beginning to God who is the endless end.9 One sees God, then, under the form of a certain rapture of the mind, and thus discovers that the intellect cannot find true satisfaction in anything that it wholly understands, any more than it could in something that it understands not at all; rather, it must always seek “illud quod non intelligendo intelligit”: “that which it understands through not understanding.”10 And so, then, it is only within God’s own infinite movement of love that any rational desire exists, coming from and going toward the infinite that gives it being. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

3 " a final cause is always a real rational relation within—and so is constitutive of—whatever efficient movement it draws into actuality. Conversely, the mind can only be moved by what is in some sense possible for it, at the very least as a rational desire. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

4 " To acknowledge the transcendent end presupposed by all acts of rational will is to assert also the reality of that final cause as the only possible explanation for the reality of rational existence. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

5 " To recognize the shape of rational desire, then, is to acknowledge the real indwelling within rational spirit of a final cause that is nothing less than intrinsically divine. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

6 " One can, though, fairly easily identify the juncture in Western thought where it assumed its first explicitly systematic form: the epochal moment, so to speak, came with the arrival of the Kantian critical philosophy. This was the point at which it was established as a critical orthodoxy and a conscious intention of the Western philosophical project that we should not flit back and forth too nimbly between the aesthetic and the moral. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

7 " Orthodox Christology, after all, insists not merely that there is no conflict or rivalry between Christ’s divinity and his humanity, nor merely that they are capable of harmonious accord with one another. Rather, it asserts that humanity is so naturally compatible with divinity that the Son can be both fully divine and fully human at once without separation or confusion, in one agent whose actions are all therefore at once fully human and fully divine. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

8 " And, unregenerate Neoplatonist that I am, I think it obvious that—had Kant attended not merely to the formal conditions of reason, but to rational consciousness as an irreducibly intentional act, reflexively conscious of itself—he might not have fallen prey to these dreary “cognitivist” superstitions "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

9 " The formal structure of finite perception is something quite posterior to the act of reasoning; it is merely the last result and bare residue of the mind’s persistent engagement with a transcendent realm beyond the limits of sensible nature—a realm where the mind already enjoys a direct and always primordial knowledge of certain eternal and transcendental verities. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

10 " There is no abiding difference within the one gift of both creation and deification; there is only grace all the way down and nature all the way up, and “pure nature”—like pure potency or pure nothingness—is a remainder concept of the most vacuous kind: the name of something that in itself could never be anything at all. Creation, incarnation, salvation, deification: in God, these are one gracious act, one absolute divine vocation to the creature to become what he has called it to become.26 "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

11 " who believed instead that human nature in its very essence is meant to become an ever more radiant mirror of the divine beauty and ever fuller intimacy of the divine presence, and whom I tend to trust more than just about any other theologian on these matters "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

12 " Why would one imagine that the capacity for the desire to see God is not also, apart from the unnatural limitations of sin and death, the natural capacity to achieve deification? Especially if one does not make the error of thinking that such an achievement must be either a work of grace or a work of nature, but realizes instead that such a distinction is a phantom of fallen consciousness? "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

13 " Grace, to be grace, does not require a prior antithetical suppositum of something devoid of grace—pure nature or nature in itself—nor need it be a purely extrinsic gift at every level of its impartation; it need only be free in its entirety. Finite existence itself is always already nothing but the gracious effect of God calling creatures to himself out of nothingness. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

14 " Simply said, whatever is not repugnant to a finite nature is, by definition, an intrinsic possibility of that nature. If divinity is “compatible” with the humanity of a creature made in God’s image, then divinity is itself an inherent possibility of humanity—an inherent property, in fact, even if in only potential form. That this possibility can become an actuality only by way of God’s action toward the creature in no way diminishes or qualifies this truth. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

15 " potency is a specific predisposition to and capacity for a particular final end, and so that end necessarily determines that potency’s logical structure, and is already implicit in it as a real rational relation; a natural capacity for the supernatural, if conceived thus, would have to be a virtual indwelling of the supernatural in the natural. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

16 " whatever is wholly extrinsic to the creature’s nature must remain extrinsic forever. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

17 " we can become only what we are.14 And so, if we do possess a natural desire for the supernatural, it cannot be a mere contingency of providence, superadded to our nature; the potential of theosis must always already be the very structure of our nature in any possible order of reality. And, as it happens, we do possess such a desire, and could not fail to do so without entirely ceasing to be rational agents. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

18 " the caricature produced by manualism, which spoke in an attenuated early modern language of causality, presumed an early modern vision of desacralized nature, and practiced an early modern style of propositional logic? "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

19 " there is one thing on which all the great Orthodox theologians of the last century were agreed, despite all their differences from one another, it was that the entire problem of grace and nature (which was known to them almost exclusively from Thomist sources, many of them French) was a false dilemma created by an inept reading of Paul and by a catastrophic division into discrete categories of what should never have been divided. There is only χάρις, which is at once that which is freely given, the delight taken in the gift, and the thanksgiving offered up for it; and all those things that a distorted theology converts into oppositions or dialectical contraries or saltations—grace and nature, creation and deification, nature and supernature—are in fact only differing vantages upon, or continuously varying intensities within, a single transcendent act, a single immanent mystery. I "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature

20 " God became human so that humans should become God. Only the God who is always already human can become human. "

― David Bentley Hart , You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature