When Thomists says that God is "being itself" they do not mean being in general, or else this would be pantheism. Rather what is meant is that God is the source of all being, from which all other beings derive their existence from, and which subsist or participate in his being (as pure act) to sustain their own existence. God is not merely a being among beings though, he is his own being, and in God there is no distinction between being and existence, his existence is his being, his being is his genus, he is his own genus, and he is the first being, the first in a chain by which the subsistence and cause of all other being terminates.

>>81683651 (OP)
that just means panentheism

>>81683651 (OP)
No one was confused by this. This is like someone saying "When St. Anselm says 'God is the greatest thing that can be conceived', he's talking about our thoughts, not what we can create in physical space."

Did you just want to show off that you read a sparknotes of the Summa Theologicae?

gibberish bibberish

>>81683651 (OP)
If god is all seeing that means he has to constantly see everyone's hairy assholes and therefore I feel bad for him/her/it

>>81683658
Perhaps. Christian metaphysics both Catholic and Orthodox are essentially Panentheism but in different ways. Orthodox posit a wholly different structure within God to explain how he sustains the world with his attributes. This is the essence-energy distinction. Catholics do not have this. God is his ousia and his relations (the Trinity), and nothing more.

>>81683673
No I'm just repeating to myself what I learned reading Summa Contra Gentiles so far to make sure I understand Aquinas correctly. Feynman technique.

>>81683700
and why did you think this was revolutionary enough to make a thread about?
"muh god is the monad/source and uhh pantheism is based..."
okay? lol

>>81683726
I want to discuss metaphysics in general.

>>81683735
i see, good luck

>>81683651 (OP)
Nigga who cares tho, pick the fanfiction that intuitively tickles your balls and wait until you die of natural causes and see which if any were correct

>>81683769
What is existence? What is being?

>>81683651 (OP)
God is non-being or beyond being. Using the aphohatic approach the essence of reality cannot be a thing nor said to exist in the conventional sense. A thing has boundaries and limits and existence refers to phenomena, neither of which applies to God, whom is unlimited, boundless, and noumenal.

>>81683821
If all our predicates about God are equivocal, how could we know about God at all?

>>81683946
>If all our predicates about God are equivocal
I don't know what this means to be honest, could you explain or rephrase it?
>how could we know about God at all?
God can't be known, if God were to be known it would be phenomenal and limited and thus not God. You can only know what God isn't though apophaticism. Ultimately God is ineffable, words only point the way.

>>81684019
>I don't know what this means to be honest, could you explain or rephrase it?
You claim that we can only speak about God apophatically i.e. by saying what God is not e.g. "God is not good", because one of the premises underlying apophatic theology is that God is so utterly unlike anything in the world that to say God is good would be equivocating on the word "good". But if this were the case, if all our concepts about God are equivocal in that sense, then what can we really say about God? And if we can't say anything about God, then what can we know about him?


>You can only know what God isn't though apophaticism.
What does knowing what he is not tell me about God though? This just seems to collapse into nonsense. You aren't saying anything to my mind.

>>81684095
God is unlike everything in the world but that doesn't mean there aren't things which are more like God. A math problem has infinite wrong answers and one right answer, while simultaneously having answers which are closer to being right. In the same way the aphohatic approach is supposed to take you closer to God, until there is no more distinction. In one sense, all things are similarly unlike God, in another sense there are things more God-like.
>What does knowing what he is not tell me about God though?
It tells you everything, if I were to describe a room by everything that it's not, could you not deduct what it is? If God isn't any-"thing", would that not tell you what it's nature is? God is like an eye, you can never see your eye except in a reflection or an image, likewise God only sees it's reflection or image, never itself. What is seen is synonymous with things, objects, phenomena, that which sees therefore cannot be a thing, an object, or phenomena.

If God Lives in a City Does He Work Outside?

>>81684424
>In the same way the aphohatic approach is supposed to take you closer to God, until there is no more distinction.
Btw this is the meaning of atman=brahman. There is no distinction between what you are and what God is.

>>81684424
>but that doesn't mean there aren't things which are more like God.
So then why not just have a univocal concept of being while distinguishing between different modes among these concepts? This is what Catholic logician Duns Scotus does, he just makes distinction between infinite being (God) and finite being (creatures).

> if I were to describe a room by everything that it's not, could you not deduct what it is?
No, you honestly couldn't. You can't derive a positive conclusion as long as all your premises are negative. This is basic syllogistic logic. The only way you could do that is if you provide a list of everything a room could possibly have and I just work based on process of elimination to deduce what it does have. But then I think this defeats your analogy, because then you could say positive things about the room.

God is the only being that exists. Everything experienced in the sensory world is an illusion. It's really just our perception of God's attributes from a limited perspective. There is no "other". There is no "me" or "I". There is only God. He is pure actuality. And if there was only ever pure act, how could there have ever been anything potential in the first place to make actual? Therefore I preach and believe in the doctrine of wahdat al wujud.

>>81684436
Who keeps a sun inside? o_O