The Experience of God

An honest and honorable critic of any idea will always seek out and try to understand the strongest possible formulations of that idea, as well as the most persuasive arguments in its favor, before attempting its refutation.

“Love is sufficient in itself, gives pleasure through itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself. … I love because I love, I love so that I may love. Love is something great insofar as it returns constantly to its fountainhead and flows back to its source, from

God is not only the ultimate reality that the intellect and the will seek but is also the primordial reality with which all of us are always engaged in every moment of existence and consciousness, apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever.

A stone is capable of affecting and being affected, but an insect has a much greater range of affective powers, and a rational animal has powers immeasurably more various and comprehensive still (most especially creative powers); hence, in the rational creature, being’s power unfolds itself more fully, for both good and ill, than in things lacking

Beliefs regarding God concern the source and ground and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular thing and of the totality of all things, the ground of the possibility of anything at

The soul was seen as the body’s life, spiritual and organic at once, comprising the appetites and passions no less than rational intellect, while the body was seen as a material reflection of a rational and ideal order.

One might almost say that our free decisions seem to act as formal causes of action, imposing determinate order upon the otherwise inchoate promptings of our neurons.

contemplative prayer involves the discipline of overcoming, at once, both frantic despair and empty euphoria, as well as a long training in the kind of discernment that allows one to distinguish between true spiritual experience and mere paroxysms of sentiment.

whether there is a God or not, for truly rationally reflective persons—persons, that is, who allow themselves neither to lapse into brutish indifference to everything other than practical concerns nor to fall under the sway of some inflexible materialist ideology—the question of God never ceases to pose itself anew, and the longing to know about Go