Classical Theism Reframes God as Ground of Being, Not Supreme Agent

A critical distinction separates classical theism from what might be called common theism. Common theism treats God as the supreme being — an omnipotent agent describable in anthropomorphic terms. Classical theism, articulated through Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, Eriugena, and formalized in Eastern Christianity's doctrine of epektasis, identifies God not as a being among beings but as the ground of being itself: the inexhaustible source of intelligibility that functions simultaneously as the terminus of emanation downward and the attractor of Emergence upward. Karen Armstrong's formulation is precise: God is "that which you move toward as you experience transcendence." The standard theist-atheist debate, then, constitutes a Category error — both parties contesting a super-being that classical theology itself would reject.

What extended naturalism recovers from this tradition is better described as non-theism: sacredness understood as the being-side of the experience of the sacred. This is neither projection nor psychological comfort but a real conformity between the participatory capacity of the knower and the emanation-Emergence polarity of what is known. Sacredness, like meaning and relevance, is transjective — it cannot be located purely in subject or object but arises in the right relational coupling between them.

This transjective structure finds epistemic support in the concept of learned ignorance. At the limits of intelligibility — quantum complementarity, Gödelian Incompleteness, the apophatic paradoxes of Cusa, Eriugena, and Nishitani — propositional knowing encounters not failure but signal. The essence of fire is not fire, because fire cannot burn itself. These paradoxes demonstrate the structural incapacity of any complete and consistent formal system to capture reality. The appropriate response is Cusa's docta ignorantia: a simultaneous shining-in and withdrawal, where heightened apprehension coexists with the recognition that full comprehension is impossible — a phenomenologically honest encounter with the genuinely infinite.