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This chapter examines the spiritual dialectic of purification and illumination, or praxis and theoria, within which Christians come to know God. In turn, it addresses Gregory's response to the Eunomians; the theological example of Moses; Gregory's missionary approach to Greek culture; his pioneering style of moderate Christian monasticism or “philosophy,” defined as a middle path between solitude and public service; his use of Plato and Plotinus compared to the Bible; the respective roles of the human body and soul in purification; the transcendence and incomprehensibility of God; God's grace; the central place of Christian baptism; the question of Gregory's apophaticism; the positive knowledge of the divine light; the relationship between faith and reason; and the basis of Christian theology in the divine economy of salvation

This chapter discusses the meaning and sources of the overarching theme of Calvin's Institutes, that true wisdom chiefly consists in the knowledge of God and of ourselves. The origins of this theme in ancient philosophy and later in Augustine are explored. Calvin's view is discussed, and compared with Augustine's encounter with the Platonists as recounted in his Confessions. Taking up some of the issues in Stephen Menn's book Descartes and Augustine, Descartes, who was also influenced by Augustine in the matter of the relation of God and the soul, is also discussed. The views and respective methods of Calvin and Descartes are compared.

Barth’s critique of Romans marked his first major effort to explain his new theology. He sought to establish an eschatologically conditioned theological realism which would overcome every attempt to ground theology in the human subject. He wanted to speak of a knowledge of God grounded in itself alone, place God’s reconciling activity in Christ beyond the reach of historical investigation, and faith beyond the reach of psychological investigation.

This chapter explores the theology of Romans II. It covers Barth’s theological epistemology, the source of the charge of scepticism, dialectics, emergence of a critically realistic ethic, and political action. Barth’s later critique of Romans II is also presented.

According to Jacques Maritain, his essay “La dialectique immanente du premier acte de libert é (notes de philosophie morale)” is closely tied to two very important texts of St. Thomas, firstly, on the question: Can the human being, by its natural power, without grace, love God above all? The other on the question: Can venial sin be present in someone along with original sin alone? He also recommends reading Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan's commentary on the latter item. This chapter recalls Maritain's teaching and raises some questions about it. It also looks at Cajetan's comments on Thomas. It shows that Maritain makes knowledge of God a central feature of the first moment in the moral life.

Gregory Palamas’s defence of human perfection and deification through the dogmatic distinction between divine essence and divine energy sparked a theological controversy that continues into the present day. One of the charges laid against Palamas is that he introduces divine energies as another mediator between humanity and God, effectively replacing the mediation of Christ in the process. This chapter argues that such a charge is fundamentally flawed and reflects a deep misunderstanding of Palamas’s theology. Through a close reading of his seminal Triads and other texts, it is shown that Palamas’s approach to human knowledge and experience of God (which culminates in deification), far from sidelining the person of Christ, places him at its heart; without the Incarnate Christ, no access to human perfection is conceivable for Palamas.

This chapter presents a striking feature of the Ethics, which is Spinoza's decision to put God at the very beginning. Knowledge of God is, apparently, a precondition for knowledge of anything else. The opening eight definitions, followed by seven axioms, are intended to establish the framework for the system as a whole. These provide in a highly compressed and elusive manner the elements, the fundamental categories, of substance, attribute, infinity, causality, freedom, and eternity. The God that emerges in the opening pages of the Ethics is not the God of Scripture who created man in his image, but that of an infinitely extended substance with neither beginning nor end and who is not distant from the world but immanent within it.

The chapter sketches the surprising history of the concept of “revelation”. Thomas Aquinas distinguished between revealed and non-revealed knowledge of God, thus developing a strictly epistemological interpretation of revelation that subordinated not only the natural to the revealed way of knowing God, but also the natural knowledge of God to an eschatological “science of the blessed”, inaccessible in this life. Thus revealed theology lacks access to the principles that would render it a fully-fledged science. Subsequent theologians responded in two ways to this problem, either validating the epistemological interpretation of revelation, or challenging it with interpretations deemed more fitting. Francisco Suárez made the best effort at the former, securing revelation’s status as science by effectively decoupling revelation from faith. The Roman magisterium, by contrast, refused to countenance revelation as science. The question therefore arises: did God reveal himself in order to be known, or to love and be loved?

The author suspects that hardly anyone, if anyone at all, knows whether God exists. In this chapter he explains, and to some extent defends, this suspicion. His focus is limited to exploring what seems to be the most promising proposal as to how it might be that at least some people could know whether God exists—which turns out to be a way by which some theists might know that God does indeed exist: by means of religious experience. The author explains why it looks to him as if, at least in almost all cases, even if these people are right about God’s existence, the way in question fails to be a way by which they know that God exists.

Theological Aristotelianism produced a dual concept of the knowledge of God as natural and supernatural. But the appearing of God, the chapter argues, must be an event of love that elicits love. Belief can only appear in company with love. Where the object of faith is in question, truth is proposed, but not self-evident. Faith does not affirm God as a matter of necessity, but does recognize the importance of its possibility. In knowledge there is continuity as well as discontinuity, and the wall between faith and reason, like that between the “God of Abraham” and “the god of philosophers,” must come down. Philosophical reflection on God, too, can be seen as part of the economy of divine revelation.

This chapter engages two interrelated aspects of Paul Fiddes’s thought, namely his ideas on the futurity of God and his engagement with literature. The first part of the chapter sketches a constructive account of Christian eschatology in dialogue with Fiddes and with Martin Heidegger, emphasizing the implications of eschatology for our (always future) knowledge of God and of self, and asking to what extent futurity can be predicated of God himself. The second part responds to Fiddes’s choice to formulate his eschatological thought in dialogue with literature, and tests the relevance of literary form (particularly Shakespearean drama) to the theological concerns at hand.

This chapter analyzes Gallus view of the faculties and acts of the soul that he associates with the order of the “Dominions” (the sixth rank or level in the human soul). This is the apex of the soul’s purely natural capacities, those that are within the power of human nature (enstatic, that is), without any further elevating assistance from grace. In particular, this chapter considers what kind of intellectual knowledge of God (cognitio Dei) is available to the soul naturally, through the various forms of contemplation, analyzed with a schema borrowed directly from Richard of St. Victor. Contrary to some interpretations of Gallus, this chapter argues that he does in fact view such intellectual knowledge as important in, even if ultimately transcended by, the mystical ascent.

This chapter considers Gallus’ notion of ecstatic, intellectual cognition of God, received from above, rather than drawn or extracted from created things below, a cognition that he associates with the Cherubim in the angelic hierarchy and that is made possible by the power of the Holy Spirit and life in Christ. While this knowledge of God is superiorly distinct from the natural, enstatic kind discussed in Chapter 5, it is nonetheless similar to it in that it remains an intellectual act oriented toward concepts or ideas, which Gallus calls the divine theoriae. At the same time, it draws the soul out of itself, above and beyond its natural capacities, and is thus an ecstatic form of cognition.

Scotus rejects the view that the representational content of a cognitive act is fixed by its causal relations to an external object. He holds instead that this content is fixed simply by the internal structure of the act. He talks about this content as the act’s measurability, and maintains that measurability is an intrinsic feature of the act, had by it irrespective of the existence of any items external to the act itself. Some cognitive acts have real objects, and these acts are said to tend to their objects (to have intentionality). Scotus’s account of representational content is thus a narrow, internalist account. There is one exception to this: the content of God’s cognition of contingent particulars is wholly dependent on the contingent particulars themselves, and Scotus thus proposes a wide, externalist, account of the representational content of God’s thoughts.