Miscellanies 5.12.81

Most wisely, then, Solon has written this about God: “Hardest of all to perceive is the unseen measure of judgment, which alone holds the limits of all things.” “For the divine,” says the poet of Acragas, “cannot be approached so as to be reached by our eyes, or grasped with our hands, which is the greatest highway of persuasion falling into human minds.” And John the apostle: “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known,” calling the invisible and ineffable the bosom of God. From this some have called him the Depth, as having encompassed and embosomed all things, unreachable and boundless. Yes, indeed, this is the most difficult of all discussions, the one about God. For since the first principle of every matter is hard to discover, surely the first and oldest principle is hard to demonstrate, which is the cause of all other things coming to be and, once they have come to be, of their being. For how could that be expressed which is neither genus, nor difference, nor species, nor individual, nor number, nor even an accident, nor that to which an accident belongs? Nor would anyone rightly call him a whole; for “whole” belongs to the category of magnitude, and he is the Father of the whole. Nor indeed are any parts of him to be spoken of; for the One is indivisible, and for this reason also infinite, not in the sense of being impossible to traverse, but in the sense of being without dimension and without limit, and therefore without form and without name.