Book on the Living God

In this central text of the Hortus Conclusus cycle, the author shows the difference between the numerous subjective, man-made images of God--ranging from the fetish of the savage to the intellectual constructs of the philosopher--and the objective spiritual reality that human beings are capable of knowing through experience. The phantom gods that human minds create owe their existence and their power to nothing more than man's own will; they vanish when there are no more believers willing to sustain them. What in this book is called the Living God is something very different. It neither is a "person" moved by human passions, nor an omnipotent, all-knowing potentate who made the cosmos out of nothing in order that it worship him. Man's individuated Living God is, rather, shown as the sublimest self-creation by and of the Spirit. It is a spiritual scintilla that is born, as light from light, within each human soul that has prepared itself to be a fitting vessel.