quote:

While Aristotelian tradition emphasizes that there is nothing particularly divine and exciting about this realization that "the soul is all existing things" and Thomism emphasizes that the soul cannot experience God directly, apart from the divine intervention, the Platonic tradition emphasizes that we the ground of our soul is in contact with God as the source of our being.

Lonergan, a neo-Thomist, would concur with the view that the Ground (which he calls the Apex) is a contact between God and the soul. Here's how Carla Mae Streeter, OP, a Lonergan scholar (and my spiritual director) puts it:

quote:

This depth or height is the point of entry and indwelling of God’s self-gift in love. . . It (the idea of the Apex) appears in the writings of the early mystics and often takes on the rich imagery of the history of the time of its use. Catherine of Siena refers to the “cell” of the heart. Teresa of Avila speaks of the “innermost room of the castle” to refer to this inner point of divine encounter. . . They (the mystics) describe a hidden depth when're the Divine is found shrouded in the darkness or opaqueness of faith in the midst of mundane activities.

Anyway, I wan't meaning to get us too far afield into anthropology and epistemology, but I have been impressed of late with triadic structures:
- Knower -> Knowing -> Known
- Lover -> Loving -> Beloved
- Speaker -> Speaking -> Word
- See-er -> Seeing -> Seen
etc.

It is the verb in the middle that establishes relationships and ties things together. One can draw all sorts of implications, my own earlier point being that the mind and its knowing presumes a knower and something that is known, and that in this process, we, as knowers, become real to ourselves, just as we do as lovers, speakers, see-ers, etc.