The Eclipse and the Via Negativa

An eleven-year-old boy in our neighbourhood told me that for today’s eclipse passing through Eastern Ontario, he was going to fill up a big bowl of water and look at the phenomenon in the reflection to protect his eyes. I immediately thought of how we cannot behold God directly but only indirectly due to His grandeur and being totally “Other”.

Saint Paul explains, “We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face. Now I know I part; but then I shall know even as I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). We see only a small percentage of reality from our human vantage. We are rational animals and so the beginning of knowledge, for us, always begins with the senses.¹ Immaterial and metaphysical truths are accessible after reflection.

Since all we know through our senses is change (motion, in the broad sense, in the Thomistic vocabulary), we can’t fathom One who does not change or is unmoved. It is hard to grasp a Being which does not change, so we know God through the light of natural reason by what He is not, namely, for example, that He is unmoved.²

This way of knowing is the via negativa, the negative way: “The approach to God in which his nature is held so to transcend man’s understanding that no positive statements can be made about it.”³

Likewise, we only know time. We have never experienced lack of time with our senses. Time is the measure of motion, such as the movement of the earth spinning or moving around the sun. When we say that God is eternal, we only know this indirectly, for we do not know eternity directly. Thus, God is not time-bound.⁴

He transcends our intellect so much that all words and language fall short – no positive statements can be made about Him – but we can approach God through negative statements.

God’s Word reveals, “Thou canst not see my face: for man shall not see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). We cannot look at God directly and live. He is beyond anything we can imagine.

He is not “a very large being in the universe,” as some say; He is, rather, Being Itself. He is the very essence of what it is to be. “God said to Moses: I AM WHO AM” (Exodus 3:14). There is no difference between His essence and His existence; there is no difference between who He is, what He is and that He is. For me, the nature of man exists as a form apart from my individual existence. But God’s nature is Being Itself.⁵

Much of this was rendered by the philosophers through the negative way; St. Thomas Aquinas perhaps most notably among them.

Why is any of this important? Because many of us become too comfortable with God. We have become so “used” to His merciful self-revelation in salvation history, and in Christ, that we lose the terror – the fear of the Lord – a gift of the Holy Spirit – the angels had who cried, “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God of hosts, all the earth is full of his glory” (Isaiah 6:3). The natural and proper response to Him is awe, wonder and worship.

Notes

Summa Theologiae 1.12.12
ST 1.2.3
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “’via negativa’ in via (n.), sense 3.b,” September 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1030438930.
ST 1.10.2
Ibid., 1.3.4

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