For many years of my life now, I have been slogging the well-trodden ways to an understanding of Christian theology as well as some of the many intellectual streams that mingle within the lineaments of that tradition. Put more concretely, I have striven to understand the nature of God and his world and the place that humanity does and ought to occupy within the latter and in relation to the former. This search has often been marked by a chasing of ephemeral yet glinting conceptual horizons, the stretching of limb over limb to climb into theoretical heights where some reflection of glory is hinted. Yet I have found, again and again, that once the threshold has been crossed and the treasure of understanding attained, all that remains is a crepuscular luminosity, the tasting of something that cannot ultimately satisfy, and so one turns again to look upon the far horizon for yet more gleamings, pursuing with rapacious determination one’s mites of knowledge, only to again find that as soon as one has passed the brief delight of the moment of understanding, the mystery that so attracted one, the hints of the transcendent in the thing studied, seems to collapse into the commonplace.
I do not wish to entirely disparage this way of living, however. It is fueled by a genuine curiosity and élan that longs for greater communion with the mystery of being, to pierce the accustomed ways of seeing to achieve clarity and insight. This is laudable, and, I believe, possible. But recent influences (which I cannot help but regard as forces breaking down a fantasy) have forced me to acknowledge the futility of encountering the mystery of the divine through any amount of conceptual knowledge, no matter how profound. This may be rather obvious to most people, but for those who have dedicated themselves to knowledge, it can be difficult to perceive this clearly, for one is always tempted to feel that mystery always ahead, always waiting in the next insight, the next move of brilliant philosophical technic. And there is a very real sense in which speculative understanding can transform a person, open one to new possibilities, and deepen one’s encounter with the world. But this is rarely (if ever) more than in the promptings to a new kind of attention or to the destruction of narrow ways of thinking habitually hardened into stone, the accretions of shadow upon openness otherwise natural to the human mind in its pure and childlike state. All philosophy begins in wonder, says Plato, and it is thus best understood as the handmaid of that wonder, as the maintenance of the openness to being. As Walter Pater puts it in Marius the Epicurean,
Surely, the aim of a true philosophy must lie, not in futile efforts towards the complete accommodation of man to the circumstances in which he chances to find himself, but in the maintenance of a kind of candid discontent, in the face of the very highest achievement; the unclouded and receptive soul quitting the world finally, with the same fresh wonder with which it had entered the world still unimpaired, and going on its blind way at last with the consciousness of some profound enigma in things, as but a pledge of something further to come.
Indeed, I have come to think that all speculation, and likewise all religious doctrine and formulae, are properly understood not as ends in themselves but as means largely of a preventative nature. That is, they proscribe ways that lead away from the central intuition, experience, or revelation that lies at their center. They safeguard one from prematurely rejecting certain possibilities, prodding one to take up a certain kind of life directed toward a certain end. They are, in short, maps, meant to be taken as useful indicators of where one ought to go, what one ought to be open to, or as the contingent attempts of those who have been to far experiential lands to articulate what is is they saw there.
If religious and philosophical speculation is not this, it is mere conceptual apparatus with no more than a vague aesthetic interest completely disconnected from reality, “arm chair philosophy” at is worst. This is no less true for the dogma of the Trinity than it is for the highest soarings of Plato—they are tools to prod a mind in a certain direction. None are strictly true in an absolute sense, and all become harmful when taken as such. It is precisely for this reason that the Christian tradition has so emphasized apophaticism, or negative theology, and one can find shocking statements in the declarations of figures like Ps. Dionysius: speaking of what we call God, Dionysius states that
it has no power, it is not power, nor is it light. It does not live nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity or time. It cannot be grasped by the understanding since it is neither knowledge nor truth. It is not kingship. It is not wisdom. It is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness.
The point of such statements is not that God is falsehood or foolishness or evil, but that even the most exalted and analogically appropriate concepts are, because finite, infinitely insufficient to express the reality of the infinite God. If we say God is love or goodness or truth, it is because it would be blasphemous to call him hate or evil or falsehood, because if one must attempt to categorize the uncategorizable, one must use the most carefully selected and appropriate terms. All positive statements, however, must be paired with negative statements in an ascesis of the mind wherein all concepts are periodically discarded, their contingency and futility revealed, lest they become idols. They are always only signs, fingers pointing at the moon (to repurpose a Zen adage). Understanding this, one ought to sympathize with those who prefer to forbear from any conceptual formulae whatever, fighting against form in order to foster a direct encounter. The encounter is the point, after all, and that the formulae are able to do as much harm as good is, I believe, indisputable.
This fact also makes much of the squabbling regarding the exclusive correctness of doctrine, practices, and so on, to the extent that participants in these interminable debates do not recognize the contingency of such forms, absolutely absurd, the laughable tragedy of spiritual deadness. We might appropriately say that religious forms ought to flow from an encounter with the mystery, like a trail of breadcrumbs marking the path. That there could only be one correct path (or one kind of bread able to serve this function) is, at best, naïve and, at worst, monstrous.
Rather than master the abstruse systems of theologians and philosophers (although one certainly may if so inclined), then, one would do better to foster a sensitivity to the present, to the mystery of the world and the self so as to draw closer to it. One does not need formulae for this (although, again, they can point the way), and I believe people often do it despite the otherwise obtrusive nature of their own proclaimed convictions. There’s no reason, for instance, to suppose that an avowed atheist cannot, despite his beliefs, encounter God in a moment of openness, in a brief flash of something, or someone, speaking through the phenomena. Anyone who studies mysticism knows that conceptual apparatus are applied to mystical encounters after they occur, often as a means to structure ordinary consciousness so it does not collapse under the weight of said experience’s sheer otherness. Such conceptual structures derive their life from the inexplicable and never the other way around.
So what does this mean for me, as a Christian? Certainly what it does not mean is a rejection of all doctrine of the historical reality of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Yet it requires the recognition that all that has ever been said about Christ, all the system building and linguistic development, has been a means to safeguarding the revelation of the divine made manifest in him, to prevent a shadow or a ceiling from falling over the imagination and the spiritual longings of those who ought to approach him, not as a distant or merely historical reality, but as a living presence calling to us now, as the (or a) central locus of God made truly manifest. In Christ we find the mystery reaching out to us, becoming like us to call us to itself, to make those trapped in the mundane aware of the mystery that is always present in and through the mundane, the kingdom shining out through the fallen world.
It is not difficult to comprehend the metaphysical arguments for God’s existence, nor to acquire an overview of orthodox Christology, but neither are worthwhile if one does not then take up one’s hat and go looking for God, if one does not take up one’s cross and follow Christ. And this can only be done through spiritual praxis—prayer (alone or in community), sacraments, charity, cultivation of virtue, contemplation, meditation, and so on. These are the real tools, the ladder of ascent into the divine always seeking us. Ideas can point in the right direction, but we must go, we must set out, and once we have, all certain reliance on knowledge of the purely conceptual sort ought to be sacrificed for the sake of that path, upon the altar of the “divine darkness,” the unknowing by which one may know.
Thank you for this insight, Benjamin. According to Elder Zacharias, I think that St Sophrony would agree with you (I guess you're in good company : )
If I understand the Elder correctly, the Saint taught that the apophatic approach to defining God had been well-used when the Fathers were battling some of the original heresies. However, says the Elder, in this present day of mass skepticism, St Sophrony thought it might be more beneficial for the seeker to understand that a true knowing of God is progressive, and only occurs, not by understanding what God isn't, but by experiencing what God is.