This Also is Thou; Neither is This Thou

“This also is Thou; neither is this Thou”^[1]

• Charles Williams

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

• Mark 9:24

Apophatic Thought in the Christian Church

I once taught a class on church history and learned more than I provided my students. One thing that struck me was this: Christianity ^[2] throughout history encountered God in far more ways than I had. I use the phrase ‘ways of knowing’ to describe what I had seen.

Apophatic. A big Greek word that describes a way of knowing within the Christian tradition. It’s Via Negativa, the Way of Negation. God is truly unknowable. Whatever words we use to describe God will be, fundamentally, wrong.

In the story of Jesus told within Mark, a desperate father cries out, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” That phrase, “help my unbelief,” can have two meanings. The man probably asked Jesus to help assuage his doubts. That’s the first meaning. But the second meaning expresses apophatic thought. God, help me reject the beliefs that are not you.

The Way of Negation. Reject the limits of human concepts and descriptions. Grasp truths beyond our gray matter’s ability to process, truths so incredibly beautiful, powerful, or overwhelming that human words are not up to the task.

Apophatic theology is not strong in Western culture. But it does peek through. Thomas Merton, for example, goes there. Often, it’s the individual who looks at the church and says to themselves, whatever the church is selling, that’s not God. Paul Tillich was fundamentally apophatic, but in his own way.

But the Orthodox tradition takes the cup of apophaticism and chugs it down. It’s the way of the Desert Fathers. Oh yes, don’t forget Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.^[3][4] Orthodoxy is steeped in it.^[5]

God, Unknowable

Any religion that presupposes a creator soon runs into the turtles all the way down problem.^[6] If a supreme being is the creator, who creates the creator? Tillich answers this conundrum by saying that the claim that God exists is fundamentally wrong. Way to clear the room, Paul.

But in apophatic thought, the Way of Negation, the concept of God as part of reality doesn’t jibe. God is no grumpy magic being smiting some and blessing others while waiting for us to check off a task list before dispensing a train ticket to paradise.

So then, what is God?

We are here. We exist, even if in a sophisticated hologram created by the ancestors of domestic cats. Existence, even after being stacked on an infinite number of surly turtles, according to Tillich, has a ground. Our mere existence implies an unimaginable ground on which all the natural laws and episodes of the TV show, Traitor,^[7] rest. This ground isn’t within existence, but it’s all existence. It is unimaginable nothingness, but also infinite possibilities. When Tillich says God doesn’t “exist,” he means the Ground of All Being is not contained by the framework we call reality, and is beyond that framework.

The Orthodox tradition, more deeply infused in the apophatic, has the same God as Tillich but different. According to St. Gregory Palamas “God is not only beyond knowledge, but also beyond unknowing.”^[8] Yes. God, not being part of existence, is unknowable. But, unlike Tillich’s version, God is all about relationship. There are a whole lot of fancy Greek words to express that God is unknowable and in relationships thing.

Relationship

To Tillich, God is ‘Being itself’, the ground of all and the power behind existence.^[9] Tillich’s limitation is the detachment of it all.^[10] Orthodoxy doesn’t go there.

In Orthodoxy, God is in relationship, and in that way, the Trinity and the relationships within it are key to understanding God.^[11]

The God of Orthodoxy has the three hypostases, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.^[12] God has direct relationships with us through the Son and the Holy Spirit. But God also has two aspects, essence and energies.^[13] We can never know God in Himself, the essence. That’s the apophatic part. But God is known in his energies.^[14]

It’s here where I bring up a new word, cataphatic. The opposite of apophatic, theology-wise, is cataphatic. This is where the quote “This also is Thou; neither is this Thou” comes into play. What are these energies that we can tap into? They are God’s grace in our lives and the God who is in relation to reality. Jesus emphasized the relational. Think, “Our Father”, of the Jesus Prayer.

Tillich treats the Trinity, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all as symbols. That is sure to get an Orthodox theologian’s head spinning, because relationship is central to their thought.

Despite the concept of God being relational and God’s energies as a pathway to experience communion with God, there’s still another concept of God in Orthodoxy that goes way beyond even the concept of essences, hyperousios.^[15] The two translations given for that word are ‘above essence’ or ‘above being’.

Hyperousios is the utterly transcendent, unknowable God who surpasses all categories of existence and non‑existence.^[16]

Oh Lord, you're so big!. And unknowable. Really, really unknowable. And not being. Really, really, not being. The best at not being.

That leaves a problem. If God is this unknowable, then how does someone actually meet God? The apophatic runs the risk of leaving a person with only estranged cynicism.

If we can’t know God, how do we know God?

The Mysticism and Apophaticism

The Protestant church service, with its teaching-based format, fits poorly with the apophatic mind. Augustine of Hippo stated, “Si comprehendis, non est Deus.” — “If you have understood it, it is not God.”^[17] The Way of Negation can lead to disengagement from the imperfect church.

Too often, the way apophaticism finds its place is in the contrarian who takes umbrage at the certainty with which God is described.

Apophatic thought comes easily in Western secular culture. Eh, I don’t know what God is, but it’s not that. Nope. Instead of engaging with the church, many are becoming spiritual, not religious. These are the Nones.^[18] Apophatic thought can lead to disengagement: disengagement from any community of believers, and from God.

The answer to this, in the Orthodox tradition, is mysticism. Disengage the noise of the mind to know and experience the Eternal.

Mysticism and apophaticism are peas and carrots. They belong together. There are a couple of flavors of mysticism, and they involve the same thing: experience over cognition. Go get you some God energy.

There is a thread of mysticism in Orthodoxy called, in another big Greek word, hesychasm.

The ultimate goal for hesychasts is union with God (theosis). In hesychasm, three steps are required to achieve this goal. The first is dispassion (apatheia), which involves detachment from the senses and the emotions. The second is stillness (hesychia), which requires detachment from the discursive intellect and the imagination. The final step is an abiding state of illumination called deification or perfect union with God (theosis).^[19]

• Mitchell B. Liester

The most direct example of hesychasm is the practice of interior stillness (hesychia) and the Jesus Prayer within the monastic community and the desert fathers. Hesychasm theology is a practice, not a concept.

But at its core, Christianity has a community aspect. “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”^[20] Hesychia is for the individual.

Mysticism as a communal experience with other believers can be seen in Orthodox worship. This is where the whole “this also is Thou; neither is this Thou” kicks in. Worship is an experience. The icon painted on a board is the prototype of the divine. The Eucharist is Christ, not through transubstantiation, but in mystery. The Liturgy is Heaven on Earth, even when performed by a tired priest going through the motions. The incense, oils, and sounds carrying God’s presence were bought on Amazon.^[14:1]

Protestant Mysticism

Protestant and mysticism sound like mutually exclusive terms. But they don’t have to be.

The Pentecostal tradition, with its speaking in tongues and such, has mystic alleyways. Language experts argue that speaking in tongues is not speaking in another language. When a person speaks in tongues, the result may have rhythms but no grammar. It is babbling. Still, whatever you think about speaking in tongues, the experience is very much about shutting down rational thought and trying to plug into the socket for some high-wattage God energy.^[21]

And all the way from Sand Mountain, Alabama, comes shape-note singing. This is communal mysticism.^[22] It’s the hollow square with no preacher in front. It’s experiencing the music, not intellectualizing.

Prayer and meditation serve the purpose of mysticism, as well. Most Protestants, if you pick them out of a line-up, will tell you that spending time alone in contemplative prayer is bona fide, whether they do it or not. But for some, the self-emptying prayer in the Orthodox hesychia tradition can be a little hinky. Sitting there and repeating the same thing, over and over, is that what the Roman Catholics do, don’t you know? Or worse, that’s something those people who do yoga do. That’s not legit.

But, self-emptying prayer can be a worthwhile practice within many a Protestant’s toolbox.^[23]

Then there’s Brother Roger and the movement he created. Brother Roger, the son of a Protestant pastor and from Burgundy, lived in the hell on Earth that was World War II. During the first part of the war, he lived in a small village close to the border between Vichy France and German-occupied France. There, he provided shelter for refugees, especially the Jews.^[24] The Gestapo didn’t take a shine to that, and Brother Roger had to flee to Switzerland.

After the war, he returned to the small village of Taizé and formed an ecumenical community based not only on his experience as a Protestant but also on Orthodox and Roman Catholic influences.^[24:1]

There is a type of worship called a Taizé service that follows the worship style of Brother Roger’s community. A Taizé service features repetitive chants, long periods of silence, and icons and candlelight. The Taizé service is built around several mechanisms that move the participant from analytical consciousness, getting that pesky cerebral cortex to simmer down, toward receptive openness. Get out of your head to get God.

Taizé takes the mechanisms used by Orthodox worship and makes them acceptable to the Protestant sensibility. Smells and bells, light, with no burning of incense or going crazy with the bells.

Conclusion

This also is Thou; neither is this Thou. The mystic and the apophatic are both contrary and complementary of one another.

Protestantism needs to open up a six-pack of apophaticism and its sibling, mysticism. To deny both is to deny ways of knowing God that the Christian Church has relied on since its founding. To exclude the apophatic is to exclude the questioning, skeptical group known as Nones from the body of believers. To exclude the mystic creates a gated community in which churches only allow in those who look and talk exactly like them.

Neither is this Thou! This can kill sacred cows and serve them up as hamburgers. It is humility. It refuses to mistake our own thinking for God. It is a filter through which the noise of the things that are not divine is stripped to let the quiet voice of the divine speak.

This is Thou! Don’t relegate self-emptying mysticism to solitary experiences using apps downloaded to the phone. Allow the mystical way of knowing to take its rightful place within the communion of the great cloud of witnesses.

Saying God is love, God is mercy, or God is justice is meaningless. What matters is experiencing God as love, God as mercy, or God as justice with the unexpected images of God: the lonely, the broken, the poor.

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

— Matthew 25:35-40