God Is Known Better By Non-knowledge

God is known better by non-knowledge

Augustine, De ordine

System comes from the Greek συνίστημι, I put together, and this can mean two things. First, order things in such a way that not only is what is present and occurring distributed and preserved according to an already existent network of places for example, the way the windowpane is inserted into a completed windowframe--but order in such a way that the order itself is thereby first projected. But this projection, if it is genuine, is not only thrown over things, not only dumped on top of them. A genuine projection throws beings apart in such a way that they precisely now become visible in the unity of their inmost jointure for example the jointure which determines a living thing, a living being, σύστημα τοῦ σώματος; we still speak today of the nervous system, of the systems of digestion and procreation.

Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist

So what are we going to say, brothers, about God? For if you have fully grasped what you want to say, it isn’t God. If you have been able to comprehend it, you have comprehended something else instead of God. If you think you have been able to comprehend, your thoughts have deceived you. So he isn’t this, if this is what you have understood; but if he is this, then you haven’t understood. So what is it that you want to say, seeing that you haven’t been able to understand it?

Augustine, Sermo 52

The profound reverence for age and for tradition–all law rests on this double reverence,– the belief and prejudice in favour of ancestors and unfavourable to newcomers, is typical in the morality of the powerful; and if, reversely, men of “modern ideas” believe almost instinctively in “progress” and the “future,” and are more and more lacking in respect for old age, the ignoble origin of these “ideas” has complacently betrayed itself thereby.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,§260

It is the inept guardians of tradition who should be fought against. This can happen only if we ourselves strive to create an occasion for the transformation of the basic problems, for the metaphysica naturalis in Dasein itself. This is what I mean by the destruction of tradition. It is not a matter of doing away with two millenia and setting up oneself in their place. But, as decidedly as we must find our way back to the elemental force of central problems conceived in their universality and radicality, so would it be fatefully misguided were we to absolutize these very problems and so negate them in their essential function. We humans have a tendency, not just today and just on occasion, by which we either mistake what is philosophically central for that which is interesting or easily accessible, or we absolutize a central point immediately, blindly, and once we grasp it, we fixate on a single potential stage of the originating problematic and make it an eternal task, instead of summoning and preparing the possibility of new originations. 

Martin Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic

All of the ultimate questions and problems of value are beyond human reason, but to grasp the boundaries of reason: that is real philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist