The Experience of God

There are certain perennial problems to which all interesting philosophy returns again and again; but there are no such things as logical discoveries that consign any of the older answers to obsolescence.

As often as not, the history of philosophy has been a history of prejudices masquerading as principles, and so merely a history of fashion.

we know far more than we are usually aware of knowing, in large part because we labor to forget what is laid out before us in every moment, and because we spend so much of our lives wandering in dreams, in a deep but fitful sleep.

This state of amazement, once again, lies always just below the surface of our quotidian consciousness; but beauty stirs us from our habitual forgetfulness of the wonder of being.

the experience of beauty can never be wholly reduced to any set of material constituents. It is something mysterious, prodigal, often unanticipated, even capricious.

highest power to act—and hence the most unconditioned and unconstrained reality of being—is rational mind. Absolute being, therefore, must be absolute mind. Or, in simpler terms, the greater the degree of something’s actuality, the greater the degree of its consciousness, and so infinite actuality is necessarily infinite consciousness.

subjective consciousness becomes actual only through intentionality, and intentionality is a kind of agency, directed toward an end.

clearly teach that there is no approach to the knowledge of God that does not involve turning the mind and the will toward the perception of God in all things and of all things in God.

It is, before all else, the practice of allowing that existential wonder that usually comes to us only in evanescent instants to become instead a constant inclination of the mind and will, a stable condition of the soul rather than a passing mood.