1471. Being Itself

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In What Sense Is God "Being Itself"? 

"God is that in the cosmos whereby it is a cosmos; [God] is the individual case on the cosmic scale of all the ultimate categories . . . thanks to which these categories describe a community of things, and not merely things each enclosed in unutterable privacy, irrelevant to and unordered with respect to anything else" (Man's Vision of God: 51). 

"God is that without which other beings would not exist at all, would be nothing. And it seems only another way of saying this to state that God is in some sense Being itself, while all other things participate in being through God. . . . [93/94] [God] is that without which all lesser individuals would be nothing, since devoid of definitive measure, ground of relationship with others, etc." (93 f.). 

"The absolute dependence upon God which religion involves is dependence for existence. Without God we should be nothing, and existence itself would be the same as non-existence. The great 'I am' is for religion the essential factor of existence as such" (107). 

"God enables us to be by knowing us, but let us not forget that we too have knowledge, and that if we are able to know that God's knowledge creates us, this can only mean that [God's] knowing us at least can be our object, our something known, hence constitutive of us as knowing" (The Divine Relativity: 123). 

"Only an adequate awareness can fully measure and contain the being and value of everything. We are what the ideal knower knows us to be, our value is that which we have for the ideal valuation, and if we were not thus adequately known and valued, we should have no determinate, objective, public being and value. It is not that we are made what we are simply through being known and valued by deity; as the realists rightly insist, merely being known does not suffice to constitute the existence of anything. The point is, we know we are (or will be) known; our being entirely known is itself known by us. We enjoy God's enjoyment of ourselves. This enjoyment-of-being-enjoyed is the essential factor in all our enjoyment" (141). 

n.d.; rev. 5 August 2002