Quotes about God

This synthesis of God and the world is a divine idea, which is older and more deeply hidden than all things and for which everything else remains simply an approach, a means of achievement.64

The Christian must hold that all created being, whether substance or accident, comes from nothing and therefore stands far below God's being in dignity;

God is not "Being" but beyond being, because being necessarily includes multiplicity. Yet this "many", as Maximus explains along with Pseudo-Dionysius, is always such only because of unity.

it can only be conceived as a shuttling back and forth within the bounds of finitude, while genuine unity withdraws beyond the circle of creation into the realm of the inconceivable. So "every created thing has the divine and ineffable monad, which is God himself, as its origin and its end, because it comes forth from him and ultimately returns to him".

Is gleaned from both "books" together. The "contemplation of nature" and of the structures of meaning hidden within it, structures that are part of every single being, becomes for Maximus a necessary step, a kind of initiation, into the knowledge of God.

In the union of person and existence are forced to draw together, and from the same depths of being—which is more than all intelligible essence—arises the invitation of a personal God to his created child, an event that belongs to another realm altogether than all the in-built natural orientations—however mystical—of intellectual beings.

The goal God sets for the world is now not simply dissolution in him alone but the fulfillment and preservation also of the created realm, "without confusion", in the Incarnation of his Son.

We have seen how someone else has encountered the word of God, we have even profited by his encounter, but all the same it was his and not ours—and we ourselves have achieved nothing.

God does not only oppose the enemy of the divine from an external or superior standpoint, but also does the unthinkable: he exposes himself to Satan's fascination, in order to burst the dazzling bubble from within.

This paradox of a synthesis that unites creatures by distinguishing them and distinguishes them by uniting them—a paradox that can be found throughout the whole edifice of the universe—takes its origin in the most original relation of all things: their relation to God.

God creates only one world. Human beings have spoilt the Creator's work, the Son has redeemed the old creation through his Cross, the Spirit has sanctified it. This one world will be enough for God in eternity, and for us, whom he has created, redeemed, and sanctified, this God will be enough.

And when Wisdom, the focal point of this divine involvement in the world, finally shone forth for Christian faith as the personal Word, the human Christ, all doubts about the possibility of a reconciliation between God and the world disappeared.