Thank you! It certainly is quite difficult to contemplate. While I can momentarily think of blessedness in terms of intellect and will, I'm having difficulty in the long term abstracting the "emotional" and "feeling" element from "love," "delight," "joy," "enjoyment," "satisfaction," "happiness," etc. Perhaps though, that really is the best way we can get some sort of understanding of it? But I guess this is no different from any other "emotional" or "feeling" terms being applied to God. Such words are given for our understanding while we acknowledge that they are only improperly applied to God; so here, "blessedness" as a "feeling" or "emotion" is only improperly applied to God too?
Or are there simply "levels" of accommodation? That is, God accommodates Himself for our understanding; some of that accommodated revelation explains what God is in Himself and so such language is properly applied to Him, and other parts of that accommodation either explains what God is in a figurative manner or explains something God does within history, and so such language is only improperly applied to God Himself. Would such a view of accommodation be acceptable? If so, would blessedness fall in the first category (properly applied to God) or the last? On the one hand, the Scripture language concerning God's blessedness seems to suggest the first category--for only a transcendent and self-sufficient Being could ever be eternally happy without disturbance from the creature; but on the other, it would seem we still need to abstract away the "feeling" and "emotional" element from the blessedness, which would place it in the second category? Maybe there's a third category? I suppose this paragraph could constitute its own separate question from the final question asked in the preceding paragraph.
The reason the Bible uses anthropopathic language so extensively and unhesitatingly is because it undoubtedly does give us a better idea than we would get by any other approach - as long as we remember its limitations and don't let the analogy press us too far. We are limited; we are bound by time and space; we are changeable; we are easily influenced and acted upon; we are in a body susceptible of many sensations. All these things must be removed from God's experience: there is no change, no distraction, no interruption. But that does not make his joy less than ours; on the contrary, his joy is infinite, and infinitely pure, unalloyed with anything else, as ours inevitably is. Even our intellectual and spiritual pleasures are not only very different in degree from God's, but are also rooted in our creaturely and physical reality. While great music might help us to grasp that there is a sort of intellectual and volitional pleasure that is rather different from what we normally experience, and give us a sense that we have a feeling of eternity, it is quite obvious that music is rooted in time, succession, and the physical reality of sound. So that strictly speaking, God's blessedness will be unimaginable: we can say that it is like our blessedness with all imperfections removed, but we've never experienced anything with all imperfections removed: thus there is still no experiential point of contact. In this regard also we cannot picture God. What we can say is that he has made us with a capacity for delight, and therefore his own capacity for delight is greater than ours. Though much of what we experience in delight is inapplicable to God - perhaps even aspects that we are accustomed to thinking of as fundamental - yet the real good of delight is much more in God than in us.
Consider God's intellect or knowledge. We think discursively, and successively. While God has graciously granted us some knowledge of his works, and even of himself, it is patent that not only with regard to the extent of his knowledge, but also in connection with the manner of his knowledge, God's knowledge and intellect are very far removed from ours. To know all things simultaneously through your own essence - we can't really imagine that. Our only experience of thinking is of that progress, whether plodding or fleet, from point to point: the feeling of
discovery, of coming onto new vistas, is one of the characteristic marks of intellectual activity in us. God never has that: there is nothing for him to learn, no new vistas for him to come upon, no exhilaration in the energetic running of thought, as one bounds from fact to implication until one fairly seems to be flying. This is not because God's intellect is
less than our own, but because it is greater. The flip side of those occasional airy flights through shifting rays of sun, is the confused and indecisive slithering in dense undergrowth that is very often our portion of thought, where we only grow more entangled and bewildered. For God to share our processes of thought at their best would be a descent far greater than any contrast between the lucid reasonings of great genius and the stressful and incoherent ramblings of delirium.
The one who made man physical is not therefore to be thought to have a body; but the one who made the eye is to be recognized as all-seeing. The one who made man emotional is not to be considered as changeable, with moods and feelings; but the one who made man capable of felicity is properly held to be eternally and infinitely blessed.
We have trouble conceiving of it. Without the agitation of excitement and exuberance we don't know what to make of joy and delight. Even "peace" and "contentment" almost sound to us like merely negative virtues - the absence of conflict and frustration, rather than anything more vivid. But this is due to our limitations, rather than to any shortcoming in God. After all, he is happy enough to make all rational creatures happy to the fullest extent of their capacity for happiness, merely by showing to them his own ineffable happiness.
About accommodation, I don't think that when we speak of "blessedness" that the
feeling should be uppermost in our mind. Even in our case, we expect the feeling to follow the reality, rather than vice versa (e.g., the person who stands in need of nothing he does not have
ought to be happy). All revelation, whether anthropopathic or not, is accommodated. That's true when God says very positive things in merely negative terms. For instance, we have experience of mortality; but we have so little grasp of life, that we have to be taught by the word "immortality" to think of the opposite of our experience. God uses the stencil of what we know to teach us about what we do not, as we learn that what he's talking about goes into the shapes, so to speak, of what we haven't experienced.
It's true again when God uses metaphors, whether obvious or implicit, extended or compressed. So I wouldn't think that it's really a question of different layers or degrees of accommodation - just that God uses a variety of techniques to make things as clear as they can be to us. The very variety guards against one mistake - that of thinking that one of the accommodated ways of speech is actually the proper language of God. The most clearly didactic statement from Paul is no less accommodated than the most vivid metaphor or the most compelling narrative.
