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Fr. Thomas Hopko, of blessed memory, liked to say something that sounds like it came out of a fortune cookie: “You cannot know God—but you have to know Him to know that.”
I’ve puzzled over that line for years. It lands somewhere between a Zen koan and the boy in the Matrix telling Neo there is no spoon. The longer I spend with the Church’s mystical theology, the more sense it makes—and the more it rearranges how I talk about God.
Most of us, if we’re honest, picture God as the biggest thing in the universe. Bigger than the sun, older than the stars, smarter than Einstein, but still a thing, parked at the top of reality’s org chart. The Fathers would call that picture an idol, and a pretty small one.
So let’s look at the two ways the Church talks about God, why the Fathers leaned so hard on the one that says “no,” and where the two finally meet.
Two Roads
Vladimir Lossky, following St. Dionysius the Areopagite, lays it out plainly: “Dionysius distinguishes two possible theological ways. One—that of cataphatic or positive theology—proceeds by affirmations; the other—apophatic or negative theology—by negations.”
Cataphatic theology says what God is: good, wise, loving, holy. It depends completely on revelation, above all on God revealing himself in Jesus Christ, and it’s the language of our hymns and prayers. Apophatic theology says what God is not. He’s infinite—not finite. He’s unchangeable, invisible, incomprehensible, beyond every category we’ve got.
Here’s where it gets a little strange. Lossky argues the negative way is the more fitting one:
All knowledge has as its object that which is. Now God is beyond all that exists. In order to approach Him it is necessary to deny all that is inferior to Him, that is to say, all that which is.
The Line on the Whiteboard
Picture a whiteboard. Draw a line down the middle. Put God on one side. Put everything else on the other: time, space, galaxies, molecules, amoebas, mosquitoes, people, angels. Put knowledge over there too. Then add existence and being to that side as well.
That’s the picture. Everything created has more in common with a mosquito than with God.
St. Gregory Palamas puts it this way: “If that which is not God be nature, God is not nature, and likewise He is not being if that which is not God is being.” St. John of Damascus pushes it further: “God does not belong to the class of existing things: not that He has no existence, but that He is above all existing things, nay even above existence itself.”
St. Gregory the Theologian says plainly that “it is impossible to express God and even more impossible to conceive Him.” Evagrius warns us about this in prayer: “The beginning of error is the vanity of mind…which tries to circumscribe the divine in forms and shapes.” Lossky calls the whole experience “the consciousness of intellectual failure.”
It sounds bleak. It turns out to be a relief. The God we can’t box up is also the God nobody else can box up—no philosopher, no skeptic, no guy on YouTube with a whiteboard of his own.
St. Gregory the Theologian says plainly that “it is impossible to express God and even more impossible to conceive Him.” Evagrius warns us about this in prayer: “The beginning of error is the vanity of mind…which tries to circumscribe the divine in forms and shapes.” Lossky calls the whole experience “the consciousness of intellectual failure.”
Drinking from the River
Then how does anybody say anything true about God?
St. Cyril of Jerusalem offers a helpful picture. None of us can swallow a whole river, but that doesn’t stop us from drinking. “For in what concerns God,” he writes, “to confess our ignorance is the best knowledge.” St. John of Damascus says the same thing in tidier terms: “God, then, is infinite and incomprehensible, and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility.”
And we do drink. God has spoken. “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). St. Paul describes God as the one “who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim 6:16)—and he writes it in a letter about knowing and serving that very God.
Fr. Michael Pomazansky adds that, for Christians, “to believe in God signifies not only to acknowledge God with the mind, but also to strive towards him with the heart.”
Knowing God was never a spectator sport.
Into the Dark on Purpose
One of the favorite imagess among the Holy Fathers of the apophatic way is Moses on Sinai. “The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was” (Exod 20:21).
Read that again. Moses walks into the dark. St. Gregory of Nyssa built an entire book, The Life of Moses, around that climb. Lossky, drawing on Dionysius, says Moses “passes into the truly mystical darkness of ignorance, where he shuts his eyes to all scientific apprehensions.” And he explains why the darkness is there: “For God makes His dwelling there where our understanding and our concepts can gain no admittance.”
That darkness is reverence. It’s what happens when a creature gets close enough to the Creator to realize his categories have stopped working.
Where the Two Roads Meet
So do we have to pick a road? Lossky shows that they run into each other. On the positive road, God comes down to us through “a ladder of ‘theophanies’ or manifestations of God in creation.” On the negative road, we climb toward him. “God condescends towards us in the ‘energies’ in which He is manifested; we mount towards Him in the ‘unions’ in which He remains incomprehensible by nature.”
The place they meet is Jesus Christ. Lossky again: “The ‘supreme theophany,’ the perfect manifestation of God in the world by the incarnation of the Word, retains for us its apophatic character.” God shows us his face in Christ, and that face turns out to be deeper than we’ll ever see to the bottom of.
The Church knows how to hold both threads at once, because she sings. The Canon of the Sunday Midnight Office puts it this way: “At a loss for words to express the meaning of Thine incomprehensible Thrice-radiant Godhead, we praise Thee, O Lord.”
At a loss for words—so we sing.
Which brings us back to Fr. Tom’s riddle. We can’t know God. But we have to know him to know that, because the only people who understand how far beyond us God is are the ones who’ve walked into the cloud and met him there.
The Church knows how to hold both threads at once, because she sings. The Canon of the Sunday Midnight Office puts it this way: “At a loss for words to express the meaning of Thine incomprehensible Thrice-radiant Godhead, we praise Thee, O Lord.” At a loss for words—so we sing.
Next in this series: why the Fathers borrowed the philosophers’ vocabulary and then refused their god.
Sources
Freeman, Stephen. “Knowing What We Don’t Know.” Glory to God for All Things (blog), Ancient Faith Ministries, September 18, 2010. Source for the Fr. Thomas Hopko quotation.
Lossky, Vladimir. In the Image and Likeness of God. Edited by John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Translated by members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976. Source for the quotations from St. Dionysius, St. Gregory Palamas, St. John of Damascus, and Evagrius.
Pomazansky, Michael. Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: A Concise Exposition. 3rd ed. Translated by Seraphim Rose. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2005. Source for St. Cyril of Jerusalem and the Canon of the Sunday Midnight Office.
Vlachos, Hierotheos. The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition. Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1993. Source for St. Gregory the Theologian.
Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version unless another one snuck in there somewhere.