Your comment seems to suggest you have no understanding of eternity except as just like time, only longer. (Probably why so much of Catholicism -- and by the same token, Eastern Orthodoxy -- is incomprehensible to you.) The Processions of the Trinity are not temporal, but eternal.
Kolo -- some time back you cited a saying of IIRC (which I may not) an order of Greek monks starting "God does not exist . . ." and I forget the rest of it, but I think it might be illuminating here, if you would fill it in here, please!
I believe the point of the saying was to the effect that to say “God exists” actually diminishes God.
And what? You think you or any other Catholic does?!?!?!
What a joke.....
No, I understand eternity. However it is Catholicism which has messed up so much basic theology. You're right....I don't understand catholicism because a lot of it does not line up with the Word.
However, this still leaves us with verga's post from #160 which so far no catholic is denying as false. Bold emphasis mine.
>>When God came into existence there was nothing else all was void. His first thought must have been self awareness. The only possible outcome of an omnipotent being becoming self aware would be for that awareness to be a mirrored reflection or that omnipotent perfection.<<
God has either existed forever or He hasn't. He did not come into existence as noted by verga.
The saying is “I believe in God; God does not exist.” The point is that God created “existence”. He is the “Being which created being.
What you all are avoiding, as Western Christians, is the concept of the Monarchy of the Father. Here is what Met. John Ziziouls, one of the greatest living Orthodox theologians and a clwrittenose friend of +BXVI has written:
Among the Greek Fathers the unity of God, the one God, and the ontological “principle” or “cause” of the being and life of God does not consist in the one substance of God, but in the hypostasis, that is, the person of the Father. The one God is not the one substance but the Father, who is the “cause” both of the generation of the Son and of the procession of the Spirit. Consequently, the ontological “principle” of God is traced back, once again, to the person. Thus when we say that God “is,” we do not bind the personal freedom of God—the being of God is not an ontological “necessity” or a simple “reality” for God—but we ascribe the being of God to His personal freedom. In a more analytical way this means that God, as Father and not as substance, perpetually confirms through “being” His free will to exist. And it is precisely His trinitarian existence that constitutes this confirmation: the Father out of love—that is, freely—begets the Son and brings forth the Spirit. If God exists, He exists because the Father exists, that is, He who out of love freely begets the Son and brings forth the Spirit. Thus God as person—as the hypostasis of the Father—makes the one divine substance to be that which it is: the one God. This point is absolutely crucial. For it is precisely with this point that the new philosophical position of the Cappadocian Fathers, and of St Basil in particular, is directly connected. … The being of God is identifed with the person (Being as Communion [BC], pp. 40-41)