Apophatic theology. The doctrine of the being of God. Apophatic and cataphatic theology. Alexandria School. Clement of Alexandria and Origen

Apophatic (negative) theology(from the Greek ἀποφάσκω - to deny), in a narrow sense, a method of discursive knowledge of God, in which in the description of the properties of God, as absolutely transcendent to creation, all created attributes are excluded, and the need to use superlatives in the categories used is also indicated (for example, “super-goodness "). In a broad sense, the spiritual-ascetic attitude of a fundamental refusal to use any created analogies and images in “theology” (in the tradition of Eastern theology, “theology” is the doctrine of “God in Himself,” while “oikonomia” - theological section dealing with issues of Divine revelation). In the sphere of asceticism and prayer practice, apophatism acts as a call for continuous ascent, purification, and “formlessness” of the mind.

Apophatic theology represents one of two “paths” in the knowledge of God - the path of negations. If the path of affirmations, i.e. cataphatic theology, applies to God all the highest perfections that are only conceivable in the world (for example, goodness, wisdom, life, love, being), then the apophatic path denies everything unusual for God. In the plane of discursive thinking, the logic of negations is applicable in any cognitive process. The process of cognition is twofold. One can try to detect similarities in the object being studied, points of commonality with already known objects and phenomena, and then this method of cognition should be called the method of analogies. Or, trying to cognize the “very essence” of a phenomenon or object, one can point to the special features of the cognizable phenomenon, different and irreducible to the general - this method will be a method of negations: a given object is not this and that, it does not have such-and-such. such and such qualities.

The apophatic method finds its meaning in philosophical and religious religions. systems that postulate the presence of an Absolute beginning of the world. One can find features of apophatic theology in a wide variety of theological and philosophical systems, where the transcendental Absolute plays a crucial role: in Buddhism, Platonism, Neoplatonism, etc. Therefore, apophatic theology in the narrow sense is precisely as a discursive technique of “denials” of certain aspects.” this-worldly", immanent in the transcendental Absolute - is not the prerogative of Christianity. Apophatic theology, precisely as a philosophical, discursive technique, was borrowed by Christian thinkers of the first centuries from representatives of the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition of Greek thought. Of course, this borrowing, like any use by Christian theology of the achievements of Greek thought, was not uncritical. The apophatic technique was adopted and radically transformed by Christian theology.

Apophatism in the teachings of ancient Greek philosophers

Historically, apophatic techniques developed in platonic or platonic philosophical schools. Apophatism is a characteristic feature of Plato's teaching about ideas, which Plato sharply contrasts with all their sensory similarities and reflections. Sensible things are necessarily changeable and transitory, but ideas are not subject to any change or transformation, are completely identical and are eternal entities, always equal to themselves (Phaed. 78d). Ideas are completely transcendental, inexpressible in any images of sensory experience, in any concepts and categories of number, space and time. Plato's teaching about ideas contains two aspects: ideas have a self-existent existence in a “smart place”, representing something transcendental to world existence, as being, but they also justify it, being is involved in them, and they are involved in being. The highest idea, according to Plato, is the idea of ​​the Good. Good is not an essence, but in dignity and power it stands above the limits of essence. It is the unsupposed beginning of all things, it dominates everything. The good is immanent and at the same time completely transcendental in relation to being and knowledge (RP. VI 507-509). To some extent, Aristotle is no stranger to apophaticism. He repeats more than once that one should abandon the understanding of the Divine, for any attempt in this direction will inevitably fail (Met. XII 7. 1073a). However, Aristotle’s “god” - the Form of forms, crowning the ladder of ideas (forms) in their natural hierarchy - cannot be completely separated from the world, for he is a kind of cosmic agent, the prime mover (which itself, however, remains motionless). Aristotle's attitude towards the world is generally characterized by duality: “One must weigh (he says) in which of two ways the nature of the whole good, or the best, is contained: as eternally separate, independently existing in itself, or as a structure of its parts. Of course, simultaneously in both ways...”(Met. XII 10. 1075a 10).

A striking example of apophatic theology in the proper sense is given by Philo of Alexandria, in whose worldview the Old Testament faith in the One God and the desire to express it in Greek categories were contradictorily combined. philosophy. Those who strive to cognize the Beginningless with the help of created things go from bottom to top, as if along some kind of heavenly ladder, ascending through reflection from works to the Creator. These people, says Philo, are similar to those who want to know the nature of the monad through the dyad (De praemiis et poenis. 41, 43, 46). Therefore, philosophical knowledge can only lead a person to the recognition of the existence of God. God is absolutely simple and therefore incomprehensible to discourse. One can approach the understanding of what God is only by denying what He is not. Any qualitative certainty would introduce a limitation into the Divinity, and therefore Philo calls God a qualityless, pure being and not having any definite attribute. God cannot be thought of as unconditional goodness and love, nor as absolute beauty, nor as the most perfect mind; in His essence, God is higher than all these attributes of personal existence, better than goodness and love itself, more perfect than virtue itself, more beautiful than beauty itself; It cannot be called reason in the proper sense, for He is above all rational nature; It is not a monad in the strict sense of the word, but it is purer than the monad itself, and simpler than simplicity itself; Finally, He cannot be called life, He is greater and higher than life, He is the eternal and inexhaustible source of life.

The elements of apophaticism are very strong in the philosophical system of Plotinus. In it, the central place is occupied by the doctrine of the absolute origin of all things, the One, which itself is above existence, or, following Plato, “beyond essence” (RP. VI 509b). It represents the concentration of everything that exists in one indivisible point, which so completely and comprehensively embraces everything that exists that, apart from it, there is nothing else left, so that there is nothing from which it would be different in any way. This means that it is not characterized by any quality, no quantity, it eludes all thinking and knowledge, it is above all being and essence, it is not any name or category and it is above any name and title. It is impossible to pronounce even the simplest judgment about it: “It exists.” In this sense, the One is not, but everything that is has existence through communion with the One, since to be means to be one and different from another, to compose a whole from the multitude, from its parts and aspects. But this means that the One is the ineffable fullness from which, in a meaningful way, everything eternally “flows” (Enn. III 2. 2; V 2. 1). The One for Plotinus has a dual character: being the fundamental principle, immanent in all being, it at the same time remains above all being, as transcendent to the world and a simple One.

The peculiarity of the apophatism of the Neoplatonic tradition is that, trying to comprehend God, it rejects the properties belonging to being, not because of the absolute unknowability of God, but because the sphere of being, even at the highest levels, is necessarily plural and does not have the absolute simplicity of the One. God Plotinus is not unknowable by His nature. If it is impossible to understand the One either through knowledge or direct intelligibility, then this is because the soul, when it perceives any object through knowledge, moves away from unity and is not completely one. To know the One, one must resort to ecstasy, to unity, in which a person is completely absorbed by the object and forms one with it, where all multiplicity disappears, where the subject no longer differs from its object.

Alexandria School. Clement of Alexandria and Origen

The philosophical apophatism of Platonism was adopted by the Christian philosophers of the School of Alexandria: Clement of Alexandria and Origen. With all the typological similarities between the apophatic method of these thinkers and the philosophical tradition, significant differences in the apophatic method are also outlined in their systems, which would later appear in a completely transformed, Christianized form among the Cappadocian fathers and to an even greater extent in the Areopagitics.

Clement of Alexandria’s 12th chapter is devoted to the development of the idea of ​​the unknowability of the Divine by reason. Book V "Stromat":

“What name should we call Him who is unborn, has no differences in himself, no definite form, no individuality, no number?.. Will you say that God is the whole? The definition is imperfect, because the whole is still a quantity commensurable, and God is the Father in general of everything that exists. Do you want to endow Him with different parts? But you are not able to do this, for in its essence this One is indivisible. That is why God is infinite, infinite, not at all in the sense as we imagine it , - as if we could not embrace Him with our thoughts, but in the fact that God is not subject to measurement and there are no limits, boundaries in His being. There are also no forms in Him, and equally He cannot be named. And if sometimes we call Him with such expressions as the One, the Good, the Spirit, the Existing, the Father, God, the Creator, the Lord, we do not use them as His name. We resort to the help of these beautiful words only due to a difficult situation, in order to beware of others names by which the Eternal One could be humiliated. None of these sayings, taken separately, gives the concept of God; yet together they speak of Him as the Almighty. Things are known either by their own nature, or by their mutual relations with each other; none of this applies to God. He also cannot be revealed by evidence, because they are based on previous principles and higher concepts, but nothing can exist before an uncreated Being. To comprehend the unsearchable Being, nothing remains, therefore, except His own grace and His revelation through the mediation of the Logos abiding in His depths."

The recognition of the unknowability of the Divine, therefore, leads Clement of Alexandria to the affirmation of Revelation as the only source of positive knowledge about the Divine.

Refers to the image of Moses and St. Gregory the Theologian:

“I went forward in order to know God. Therefore, I separated myself from matter and from everything carnal, I gathered myself as much as I could and climbed to the top of the mountain. But when I opened my eyes, I could see the back of God (Exodus 33 , 22-23), and it was covered with stone (1 Cor 10, 4), i.e., by the humanity of the Word, incarnate for the sake of our salvation. I could not contemplate the all-pure First Nature, cognizable only by Herself, i.e., the Holy Trinity . For I cannot contemplate what is behind the first veil, hidden by the cherubim, but only what descends to us - the Divine splendor visible in creatures."(Or. 28).

As for the Divine Essence, this is the Holy of Holies, which is also hidden from the seraphim themselves. Divine nature for St. Gregory the Theologian is a sea of ​​essence, indefinite and infinite, extending beyond any concept of time and nature. If our mind tries to create a weak image of God, contemplating Him not in Himself, but in what surrounds Him, then this image eludes us before we try to catch it, illuminating the higher faculties of our mind, like lightning blinding the eyes.

And in the Areopagitica the path of apophatic knowledge of God is likened to the ascent of Moses to Sinai to meet God. The path of “detachment” from all things, leading to the Divine Darkness, is compared here with the art of a sculptor who, by removing everything that hides a statue in a block of material, reveals its innermost beauty (MT II). The path of renunciation must be an ascent from the lower to the higher. This is an ascetic path. It begins with purification. It is a “single gathering” or concentration, “entering into oneself,” abstraction from all knowledge, from all images, sensory and mental. This apophatic ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but perfect knowledge, incommensurable with any partial knowledge. God is known not from afar, not through thinking about Him, but through an incomprehensible union with Him, which is possible only through going beyond all limits, through “frenzy” (MT I 1). And this means entering into sacred darkness, into the “darkness of ignorance,” into the “darkness of silence.” This “origin” is true knowledge, but knowledge without words and concepts and therefore incommunicable knowledge, accessible only to those who have achieved it and have it - and not even completely accessible to him, for no one can describe it to himself. This is the area in which reflection is inactive and the soul touches God, touches the Divine. One must rise higher and higher, pass all the sacred peaks, leave all heavenly sounds, and lights, and words - and enter the “mysterious darkness of ignorance”, where the One who is above and beyond everything truly dwells (MT I 3).

For true knowledge of God, according to St. Maximus the Confessor needs, first of all, purification of the heart (Cap. theol. II 79-81), and then reverent boldness. This is the path of active overcoming of corruptible passions, the path of gradual ascension, and then entry, like Moses, into Divine darkness, into “a formless and matterless place of knowledge” (Ibid. I 85). God is completely transcendental to the world. Only faith and love open the heart to the influence of grace, which introduces a person to the Divine life. Only the one who has wisely learned how to love God, Who is above words and knowledge and every relationship in any sense and is free from nature, who will leave everything sensible and imaginable, all time and eternity and place, and will finally be completely freed from any activity conditioned by feelings, word or mind, he will achieve in an inexpressible and incomprehensible way Divine sweetness, surpassing word and mind. This path and word are known only to God, as the source of grace, and to those worthy to receive grace from God. On this path there is nothing natural or intelligible, since everything that can be said or known is completely overcome and covered in silence.

So, patristic theology calls not for the search for positive knowledge about the Divine essence, but for the experimental knowledge of that which surpasses all understanding. “Talking about God is a great thing, but it is even better to purify oneself for God,” according to St. Gregory the Theologian (Sermo 32). The goal of Apophatic theology is a union with God that transcends reason; to achieve it, one must go beyond the limits of knowledge and beyond the limits of existence, to which all knowledge is relative. Apophatic theology leads to an awareness of the weakness of human understanding. The affirmation of the unknowability of God does not mean for the holy fathers a renunciation of the knowledge of God. But this knowledge follows a path whose main goal is not knowledge, but unity with God, deification. This is not an abstract theology operating with concepts, but a contemplative theology, elevating the mind to “mind-transcending” realities. Therefore, the dogmas of the Church often appear to the mind as antinomies, the more insoluble the more sublime the mystery they express. The task is not to eliminate the antinomy by adapting dogma to our understanding, but to change the mind in order to come to the contemplation of the God-revealed reality. Therefore, apophaticism is, first of all, a disposition of the mind that refuses to formulate concepts about God, turning every theological science into contemplation of the mysteries of Revelation. Christianity is not a philosophical school that operates with abstract concepts, but above all communication with the living God. The Holy Fathers, faithful to the apophatic principle of theology, managed to keep their thought on the threshold of mystery and not replace God with His idols. There is an abyss between the philosophical search for God and Christian theology, even when theology seems to follow in the footsteps of philosophy. St. Gregory of Nyssa and the author of the Areopagitik see in apophaticism not Revelation itself, but only its container, since, as they argue, only on the apophatic path can one achieve the personal presence of the hidden God.

The Divine hiddenness and inaccessibility of the Divine do not mean hiddenness. On the contrary, God reveals himself. Apophatic theology does not exclude Revelation. “Ascent” is possible because God “descends,” opens, appears. In contrast to the “negations,” the apophatic path that leads to union, the path of “affirmations,” the cataphatic path, descends as a ladder of “epiphanies” or manifestations of God in the created world. But at the same time, in the immanence of Revelation, God affirms Himself as completely transcendent to creation.

As the author of the Areopagitik writes, in his essential existence God is unknowable and incomprehensible. He is above every concept and name, above all definitions, “above mind, and essence, and knowledge.” But this does not mean that God is far from the world or that He hides Himself from intelligent spirits. God essentially reveals, and acts, and is present in created beings - creation exists, and abides, and lives by the power of this Divine presence everywhere. God is present in the world not by His being, which always remains inaccessible, unknowable and ineffable, but in His “providences” and goodness, which emanate from the incommunicable God in an abundant current and with which existing things participate. He abides in the world in His “essential processes” and “beneficent industries”, in His powers and energies. In this self-revelation to the world, God is knowable and understandable. This means that God is understandable only from Revelation. “In general, one should neither think nor say anything about the essential and hidden Divinity other than what is Divinely revealed to us in the Word of God.”(DN I 1). There is, however, another revelation. This is the world. In God there is a “substantial prototype” of the world, through participation in which the world has existence. God is knowable and understandable in His face, which is open and revealed to the world; in other words, God is known and comprehended in His relations to the world or to creation. It is in these relations, and only in them, that God, as it were, proceeds from Himself, invariably and unceasingly proceeds into the world and, however, in this incessant action of His remains motionless and unchanging, remains with Himself in the perfect identity and simplicity of His own being - that and another. Because of His goodness, God creates, creates, gives life, and accomplishes all things. Just as from the source of light its life-giving rays extend everywhere, so the Supreme Good, with its unchanging radiance, illuminates everything that exists, exudes everywhere its super-essential and life-giving rays, “rays of complete goodness.” The Sun is only a visible and distant image of the Divine and spiritual Light. Light is the image of the Good. Everything that exists strives and gravitates toward this radiant light. And only through communion with these radiant insights, to the extent of capacity, everything that exists both exists and lives - since it is, as it were, permeated with rays of spiritual and intellectual light. At the same time, these luminiferous rays can be called “rays of Divine darkness,” for they blind with the power of their inconceivable light—the “impregnable light” of the Divine is darkness, inconceivable from the excessiveness of the emitted illumination.

All things speak about God, and none speaks enough. All testify of Him, and none reveals Him. And all the cataphatic names, images and concepts speak about His actions and “industry”, but not about His Being. In the plurality of His “processes,” God remains unchanged, and the plurality of God’s names denotes the plurality of His works, without violating the essential simplicity and supermultiplicity of His existence. Being all-nameable, God is also nameless. Being all in all, He is nothing in nothing. The ladder of cataphatic theology, revealing the Divine names, extracted mainly from the Holy Scriptures, is a series of steps that serve as support for contemplation. The antinomy of cataphatic theology and apophatic theology, says St. Gregory Palamas, has its real basis in God. Like all theological antinomies, e.g. The antinomy of unity and trinity, which postulated the distinction between nature and Persons, the antinomy of the two ways of knowing God, reveals to our mind a mysterious distinction in the very existence of God: the distinction between His essence and His actions, or Divine energies. All negative theology refers specifically to essence, while the manifestations of God in the world, His energies, the Old Testament theophanies, are accessible to naming and description. The highest theophany - the most perfect manifestation of God the Incarnate Word in the world - is also completely apophatic. Apophatism is inscribed in the very paradox of the Christian revelation of God: the transcendental God becomes immanent to the world, but in the very immanence of His economy, ending with the incarnation and death on the Cross, He reveals Himself as transcendent and ontologically independent of all created being. In the humanity of Christ, according to the Areopagitics, the Supreme One appeared in human essence, without ceasing to be hidden in this very phenomenon (DN I 4). Affirmations relating to the humanity of Christ have all the height and value of the most categorical denials. It is in Christ that the incomprehensible is revealed and makes it possible to speak about God, that is, to “do theology.” In Christ, God is fully revealed to humanity and given the opportunity to contemplate the radiance of the Divine nature.

Literature

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Used materials

• Priest Vasily Shmaliy. “Apophatic (negative) theology” // Orthodox Encyclopedia, vol. 3, p. 134-140

De vita Moysis. Praef. 46-47

The divine essence is incomprehensible to the mind. Cataphatic and apophatic methods in theology are two ways of knowing God. Apophatic theology is mystical (mysterious), while cataphatic theology is ascendant from human reason to God, i.e. from Divine actions in the world. The path of cataphatic theology is not opposed, but leads to an apophatic knowledge of God.

1. Apophatic theology - (Greek apophatikos – negative). According to apophatic theology, transcendental(lat. transcendens - going beyond)God can be expressed only through negative definitions, which interprets the knowledge of God as “mysterious theology”, leading “beyond the limits of light... the sacraments of theology tear away the darkness of the mysterious theology, which exceeds all light.”

Apophatic theology has a very long history. In Greek philosophical theology, one of the first was Xenophanes: « There is only one God, the greatest among gods and people, not similar to mortals either in appearance or consciousness.”

Plato , trying not to attribute to the gods any human passions in the description of the divine principle, in the Phaedrus the “supracelestial region” is described as “colorless and formless and intangible, the truly existing essence of the soul, visible only to the royal mind.”

Aristotle comes to the form of all forms, which has as its content only itself, the thinking of thinking, the first moving force, constituting both the source of all movement and its subject, as universal striving and love. This form is generally the deity, depicting him as the first mover. In the tones of “apophatic theology,” Aristotle writes: “It is clear that there is an eternal, immovable, separate from the sensible and independently existing essence. But it has also been proven that this essence cannot have magnitude, but is indivisible and indivisible. For it sets in motion infinite time, and nothing limited has unlimited power. But since every magnitude must be limited or unlimited, on this basis it cannot have a limited magnitude, and an unlimited magnitude does not exist at all.”

Plotinus states that in verbal expressions it is impossibleto enclose the infinite One in concepts that, by defining It, limit it, writes: “The One is everything and at the same time none of the creatures.”

In the Neoplatonic tradition Dionysius the Areopagite writes: “And the one thing that exceeds thought is incomprehensible to any thought... it surpasses every word and every knowledge and remains above any mind and essence, embracing everything that exists, uniting, combining and grasping in advance, while itself being completely incomprehensible for everything, not perceivable by any sense , neither by imagination, nor by judgment, nor by name, nor by word, nor by touch, nor by knowledge.”

Philo of Alexandria is a representative of negative theology in a rather decisive form. “Any qualitative certainty would introduce a limitation into the Divinity.” Philo calls God τό άποιον - qualityless, pure being and not having any specific attribute. Philo writes: “God is inaccessible to our knowledge, except by being; for only existence, that’s what we know about it, except existence - nothing.” “A person can know about God not what he is, but only that he is.”

Apophatics in Christian theology .

Christian theology was created by the Cappadocians, Antiochians and Alexandrians. The Cappadocians and Antiochians accepted the literal meaning of the books of Holy Scripture, and representatives of the Alexandrian school developed a tradition of allegorical interpretation of Holy Scripture.

Alexandria School:
Clement of Alexandria O founder of the Alexandrian school, argued: “Indeed, what name should we call Him who is not born, has no differences in himself, no definite form, no individuality, no number... sometimes we call Him in such expressions as One, Good, Spirit, Jehovah, Father, God, Creator, Lord, we do not use them as His name, (but) ... we resort to the help of these beautiful words only due to a difficult situation, in order to beware of other names that could be the Eternal is humiliated.

Origen V In his first book, “On Principles,” he emphasizes the transcendence and incomprehensibility of God: “Having refuted, as far as possible, every thought about the corporeality of God, we affirm ... that God is incomprehensible and inestimable.”

Cappadocians

Basil the Greatstates that “of the Names said about God, some show what is in God, and others, on the contrary, what is not in him. For in these two ways, that is, by denying what is not, and confessing what is, a kind of imprint of God is formed in us.” “The essence of God for human nature is unthinkable and completely ineffable.”

Gregory the Theologian in the “word on theology” he says: “as I reason, it is impossible to speak, and to understand (God) is even more impossible. ..."

Gregory of Nyssa: “God cannot be embraced either by name, or by thought, or by any other comprehending power of the mind; He is above not only human, but also angelic and all worldly comprehension - ineffable, ineffable, above all meaning in words; has only one name, which serves to recognize His own nature, namely, that He alone is above every name.”

Dionysius the Areopagite in “On Divine Names” develops the main idea in affirming the absolute transcendence and unknowability of the Divine, the mind can and should follow the apophatic path, always using glorification in theology, combining concepts with the prefixes above-, above-, super-, non-, without-, self-, self-, (super-essential being; super-divine divinity, super-good good, flaming self-deification). According to Dionysius the Areopagite, the only statement that is consistently present in statements about God and His definitions is a single, all-dividing, unconditional NOT - absolute NOT: “... God is not a soul and not a mind, .. He is not a mind, .. He is neither number nor measure, neither great nor small, neither equality nor inequality, neither likeness nor dissimilarity; He neither rests nor moves nor grants peace; has no power and is neither power nor light; does not have existence and is neither being, nor essence, nor eternity, nor truth, nor kingdom, nor wisdom, nor one, nor unity, nor deity, nor goodness, nor spirit - in the sense as we imagine it, nor sonship, neither paternity, nor anything at all that can be known by us or other (intelligent) beings. He is neither anything that does not exist, nor anything that exists, and neither the existing can know Him in His being, nor does He know the being of the existing, since for Him there are no words, no names, no knowledge; He is neither darkness nor light, nor error nor truth; in relation to Him, neither positive nor negative judgments are completely possible.. (He) is beyond all that exists - infinitely.”

Maxim the Confessor believed that negative theology is the basis of positive theology. We know God only to the extent that He reveals himself to us, but the very essence of God remains incomprehensible to man: “God is everything and nothing, and above all.” Maxim reasoned as follows: all thinking presupposes multiplicity or, more precisely, duality: the thinking, which corresponds to a certain energy of thought and the essence and object of thought. But there is no room for this division in God.

The apophatic method in Christian theology was also used:

John of Damascus, who spoke of God as the One who is above the light,

Gregory Palamas, who distinguished between the unknowable essence and manifested energy in God,

I.S. Eriugene, who argued that nothing that exists or does not exist can express God’s essence,

Nicholas of Cusa, who defined God as the One who is not this and that, who is not here and there, who is, as it were, everything, but at the same time nothing of everything,

M. Eickhart, who understood God as the pure One into which we must plunge from being into Nothingness,

J. Bem, who expressed God as groundlessness ( Ungrund).

Kant spoke with a fundamental criticism of rationalistic theology, because for this theology, everything is provable, everything is understandable, and, therefore, everything is immanent to reason. For Kant, God is the inaccessible, transcendent, NOT of created, human self-consciousness.

2. Cataphatic theology uses positive (affirmative) statements, designations, attributes, because considers this method justified in view of the analogy of created existence.

Anselm of Canterbury He kept within the limits of Catholicism and was imbued with the conviction that faith in itself excludes all doubt; he demanded that we move from faith to knowledge. In his Monologue, Anselm proves the existence of God on the basis of the existence of goods, which must have a cause in the form of the highest good, the highest essence, the highest individual spirit, i.e. God, and expresses that all the truths of doctrine can be deduced by reason, without reference to the authority of Scripture. Here Anselm chooses a general place: “If someone... does not believe, denies one nature, the highest... he can be convinced of (all) this with the help of only reason (solaratione), even if he has an average mind.” The author rarely uses the word “God”. In his “Proslogion” Anselm ascends from human reason to God, from the logic of thinking of the mind to the proof of the existence of God and discovers one undoubted argument in favor of the existence of God, using the formula “that than which a greater cannot be imagined”: “.. something ... exists and in the mind, and in reality... exists so truly that it cannot be imagined as non-existent... Therefore, if that which cannot be greater than cannot be imagined can be imagined as non-existent, then that which cannot be greater than cannot be imagined is not that which is greater than which cannot be imagined; contradiction. This means that something greater than which cannot be imagined exists so truly that it cannot be imagined as non-existent.”

Thomas Aquinas your metaphysics borrows almost entirely from Aristotle and says that since God is eternal, He is immovable; since in God there is no passive potentiality, God is pure actuality, pure action, therefore God never passes away, He is incorruptible. Since God is simple and one, therefore He has no complexity, therefore He is not a body. According to Thomas Aquinas, human intellect corresponds to things in their internal structure and essence. And therefore in knowledge he can become identical with things and be involved in their essence, thus, through our knowledge of creation we can come to some knowledge about God: “the statement “God exists” is not self-evident to us, but needs more to us through things known, although less obvious in nature, namely, through consequences ... there is a connection between the absolute Being and creation, which consists in the fact that both exist ... the agent must be connected with that in which he acts, moreover, at the very moment of action and through some force.” Thomas rejects the idea of ​​directly innate knowledge of God and formulated for the human intellect five arguments for the existence of God: the first unmoved mover (“actus puras”), the first cause (“ens a se”), absolute necessity, absolute perfection, and finally, the highest reason.

The word “apophatics” must be understood here in the same sense in which Dionysius the Areopagite understood it. He said that there are two paths to the knowledge of God - cataphatic and apophatic. The first way is to attribute certain positive definitions to God, endowing Him with predicates that seem appropriate to Him, such as “Almighty,” “Omnipresent,” “Good,” and so on. This is the answer to the question “What is God?” The second way is the awareness of all predicates related to God as inaccurate or false and their consistent rejection in order to obtain an increasingly complete answer to the question “What is God not?” and finally plunging into “Divine darkness,” from which the true image of God, inexpressible in human language, will then mysteriously emerge. The apophatic method, according to Dionysius, is much higher than the cataphatic one; only this intellectual asceticism, similar to the existential asceticism of the monks, can reveal the Truth to us.

It is common to think that apophatics is a specifically theological epistemology, and it is not applicable to scientific knowledge. This is a big misconception. Already at the very emergence of European science, one of its founding fathers, Francis Bacon, proclaimed the apophatic method as the main scientific tool, urging scientists to focus not on those facts that confirm their theories, but on those that are incompatible with them. Detailing this installation, he developed a whole program for expelling “idols”, i.e. false ideas about the world. He divided them into four large groups based on their origin, i.e. the reasons why they arise.

1. Idols of the family- errors associated with specific characteristics of perception and thinking, characteristic of all people in general, the entire human race. At this point, he anticipated Kant's apriorism, but unlike the latter, he did not put up with it, but proposed to overcome it.

2. Idols of the Cave- errors associated with the psychological characteristics of certain human groups, with the specifics of class or professional mentality. Here, too, one can discern an anticipation, but not of Kant, but of Marx, who argued that the worldview has a class character.

3. Market idols- errors resulting from the imperfection of the language, in particular, from the ambiguity of the meaning of words.

4. Theater idols- mistakes generated by following authorities and trusting generally accepted opinions.

Note that Bacon calls for freeing oneself from false judgments in advance, without waiting for correct judgments to replace them. Like Dionysius, he assumes that after liberation from lies, the process of filling the resulting void with truth will begin.

This program of total purification of consciousness was not only proclaimed, but also implemented; another founder of science, Rene Descartes, before starting to build his system of the world, rejected absolutely everything as unreliable, except for the single thesis “I think, therefore I am.” Bacon's apophaticism was adopted by other pioneers of science and bore abundant fruit. It contained a deep cultural and historical meaning.

Let us remember how and why European science arose. Its appearance was the result of two factors: Protestantism and the capitalism it generated. Capitalism demanded such a study of matter that would maximize its utilization and the development of industrial technologies, and for this it was necessary to study matter in itself, as if it were a substance. Protestantism gave its blessing to this. But this was not easy to do, because in reality it is not a substance - its existence is derived from the Creator and Almighty. The creature and the Creator are so closely intertwined in the Christian consciousness that they have become inseparable from each other. This type of consciousness developed within the framework of scholastic theology and found its final expression in the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, where the principle of “Faith above reason” was complemented by the comprehensive systematization of Aristotle’s “Organon.” It was impossible to throw out the first and keep the second, so Bacon demanded that everything be thrown out and deliberately called his work “New Organon,” as if canceling Aristotle. Only by starting from scratch was it possible to carry out the “Copernican revolution,” which consisted of placing the creature in the focus of attention not the Creator, as before, but the creature, and bringing the Creator to the periphery. At first, scientists still saw Him with peripheral vision, but then He fell out of there, and matter acquired the full status of a substance. On this ideological basis, which transformed from methodological to worldview, great European science passed its entire four-hundred-year journey.

Today this cycle is ending and a situation arises symmetrical to that which existed under Bacon. In its long study of matter, science has reached such milestones where the autonomy of matter clearly ends and the presence of its Creator, who created it for certain purposes and has some plans for its future fate, begins to be felt. Everything that we could find out about it within the framework of the presumption of its substantiality has already been clarified, and this presumption becomes an obstacle to further progress. But during this time it has so permeated the entire conceptual component of science that it is no longer possible to say: this is where this presumption sits, but here it is not. Therefore, if we want to go further in our knowledge of the created world, we have no other choice but to make a “reverse Copernican revolution” and begin to abandon what is called the “scientific picture of the world”, in the center of which sacred matter is depicted sitting on a throne, preserving At its disposal only experimental and observational material and proven technologies. To do this, we need to focus our attention not on what existing theories can explain, but on what they are fundamentally unable to explain. This will be the apophaticism that we are talking about.

Everything rational, if not initially real, then sooner or later becomes real, so there is no doubt that science will certainly turn towards apophaticism in the relatively near future. The objective need for this turn, in addition to the interests of the development of knowledge, is also determined by the fact that, having gone beyond the limited area where it had a pragmatic justification, the doctrine of the substantiality of matter is increasingly poisoning our civilization, not only in the mental, but even in the moral. respect. The desire to get away from teleology at all costs creates Augean stables of lies and fraud in science and leads to a lowering of the criteria of evidence. Now we have slipped to the point that it is enough for a materialist theory to correspond to the facts in only one point out of ten for it to be recognized as true: we joyfully seize on the only confirmation and close our eyes to everything that refutes it. Of course, this cannot but corrupt minds and souls, robbing human thought of its main dignity: self-criticism and meticulous demands for the validity of one’s conclusions. The fear of the appearance of even a shadow of an external creative principle in the picture of the world, similar to the well-known “phobias” of psychiatry, makes the modern scientist almost a schizophrenic, indulging in stupid, but ideologically consistent fantasies instead of an honest understanding of existence.

One of the most striking examples of such fantasy is Darwinism - this abscess in the body of science and culture. To avoid terminological misunderstandings, we will immediately say that in the future we will understand by “Darwinism” the statement that the ascent of living forms from simple to more complex recorded in the fossil record occurred under the influence of only two factors: small random deviations of the characteristics of descendants from the characteristics of their parents (variability) and natural selection. This is the most concise and complete formulation of the principle of substantiality as applied to biological matter, or, as materialist philosophers put it, its self-development. And no matter how sophisticated the names of modern evolutionary theories may be, after peeling the husks, it is precisely this initial axiomatics that is revealed in them. And it is the same naive fiction as the Iroquois explanation of a dark spot on the Moon by the fact that their distant ancestor threw his tomahawk there. And in order to see the absurdity of Darwinism, it is not at all necessary to get acquainted with all the qualified objections against it, which were put forward by major experts from Agassiz, Baer and Virchow to Danilevsky, Berg and Meyen, but it is enough just to pose three questions, the essence of which is clear to every person.

1) If the driving force behind the evolution of species is adaptation to the environment, then why does evolution proceed from simple forms to complex ones, and not vice versa: after all, simple creatures are much more tenacious than complex ones. The cockroach adapts to a wide range of conditions, it is almost indestructible, but the rhinoceros is easily vulnerable and capricious, its female gives birth to a single cub every three years. According to the logic of Darwinism, all rhinoceroses should have long ago turned into cockroaches, but in fact, something opposite happened - ancient boogers, similar to our cockroaches, gave way to rhinoceroses. Why?

2) It is quite obvious that the points of viability in the multidimensional space of characteristics are separated from each other at large distances, because in order to live on earth, a species needs the finest consistency of all its characteristics - weight, height, skin thickness, hair covering, shape, reflexes, type of metabolism, the principle of operation of the immune system and thousands and thousands of others. How can one species evolve evolutionarily into another, if for this one agreed upon set of characteristics must first go wrong and only then achieve a new mutual balance? After all, as soon as the original adjustment is canceled, the species will immediately become extinct. To say that a lizard gradually turned into a bird is as absurd as to say that the opera “The Queen of Spades” arose as a result of the accumulation of random errors made by copyists of “The Magic Flute”. As soon as the number of such errors reaches a critical level, no one will listen to the resulting cacophony, and the process of “evolution” will end on its own.

3) Anyone who has ever been in the forest or observed the life of a swamp, it is obvious that it is not individual species that survive, but large symbioses of species, biocenoses. On this basis, Vernadsky put forward the hypothesis of the constancy of biomass, now confirmed by data on the percentage of sulfur isotope in sediments, preferably assimilated by living organisms. Even at the earliest stages of evolution, the volume of living matter on the planet was the same as it is today. Where did it come from, if even according to the Darwinists themselves, the transformation of inanimate into living required completely exceptional coincidences of many factors? After all, such a happy combination can occur in one place and once, and not all over the earth at once.

Until Darwinists have answered these questions as clearly and intelligibly as they were asked, we should not be interested in any of their articles and monographs, and since such answers are impossible, everything that has been written over 150 years about the self-development of living forms must be thrown overboard of civilization as unnecessary and burdensome ballast.

This is apophaticism: nitpicking about what doesn’t fit with facts and logic. What we have now applied indicatively in relation to Darwinism must be applied anywhere and everywhere where we want to understand something. Apophatics should become (and, of course, will soon become) the everyday norm of a scientist exploring the world.

How will our cultural tradition change when apophatic behavior truly becomes the norm? No cataclysm will happen, but many things will look different. For example, in school textbooks it will be written: “In the old days, two hypotheses were put forward about the origin of oil: organic and inorganic, and their supporters waged heated debates among themselves, similar to the debates between the blunt and pointed ends of Swift. In our age of true knowledge, it has become clear that None of these hypotheses are true, and the presence of oil in the ground remains a great mystery, which may or may not be revealed over time." You feel how smart and modest it will be, how beneficially it will influence the upbringing of children! As for “big science,” which will greatly reduce its personnel, now inflated to completely unnecessary proportions, the titles of dissertations and publications will be something like this:

“On the fundamental impossibility of classifying elementary particles on the basis of group theory” or “Equivalence of the volume of unknowability of the phenomenon of Joan of Arc and the myrrh flow of icons.” When we become accustomed to such common-sense approaches to knowledge, the twentieth century, with its cataphatic science obsessed with the construction of universal models, will be perceived by us as a dark era of pretentiousness of reason, which led to the loss of intellectual honesty.

This is about the institutional side of apophatics. But there is also a personal aspect to it. Truly valuable scientific discoveries are always born in the minds of individuals. A genius is always a personality, a kind of prophet. So here it is; when science enters an apophatic phase, we will immediately have geniuses, who have not been seen lately. Why can such a forecast be made?

The fact is that Bacon was right about his “idols”: the human mind, his logic and his language are not adapted to comprehend the essential characteristics of the universe, for they were formed for orientation in the sphere of phenomena, and essences lie in the noumenal sphere, forming in their totality what is called truth. Reason, logic and language make up our “day consciousness”, the specificity of which is determined by the cerebral cortex, which transforms sensory information in such a way that it allows us to quickly make a behavioral decision. But besides it, we also have a “night consciousness”, corresponding to the “precortical” part of the central nervous system, and it is much more receptive to entities, and therefore to truth, than the mind. However, it is usually drowned out by the daytime consciousness, because it is self-confident and loud, and the truth runs away from the shouting. “A great and strong wind, rending the mountains and breaking the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; after the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; after the earthquake there was fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; after the fire there was a breath of quiet wind, and the Lord was there.” (5 Kings 19, II). In the same way, in the silence of apophatics, the scientist will hear the quiet voice of truth and convey what he heard to people. Thus, negative knowledge in an incomprehensible way will turn into positive.

APOPHAATIC THEOLOGY - “negative” (or mystical) theology, a system of revealing and justifying the truths of Christian doctrine, which developed by the 6th century. and became widespread mainly in the Christian East in the form of two main movements. Representatives of the first movement, such as Clement of Alexandria, sharply denied the possibility of any conceptual knowledge about God, who is incomprehensible by nature. Dr. the trend begins to take shape in the works of Origen, for whom God turns out to be incomprehensible not by nature, but only due to the weakness of the human mind, unable to escape from the carnal world of the multiplicity of things and sensations. Gregory of Nyssa, polemicizing with Eunomius, who asserted the knowability of the Essence of the “Unborn” in concepts, adhered to the same point of view as Clement of Alexandria, but in general the Cappadocian tradition is characterized by a tendency towards the second trend. Thus, for example, Basil the Great distinguished from the incomprehensible Essence the “actions” of God, which descend into the world and in which God is known. Gregory the Theologian distinguished between the “first,” “incommunicable” Nature and the “last that reaches us,” seen, according to the Holy Scriptures, by Moses at Sinai. Gregory of Nyssa, while remaining a nominalist on the issue of divine names, developed the Cappadocian doctrine of intelligible theophanies. Thus, a clear dilution of T. a. and cataphatic theology becomes possible thanks to the strict distinction developed by Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa and others between the unknowable essence of God (“ousia,” that is, what God is in Himself) and its theophanic manifestations - actions or energies. Fundamental contribution to the formation of T; A. contributed by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. To a certain extent, he managed to synthesize both of the above approaches. Particular attention to T. a. in the Areopagitik corpus is given in the treatises “On the Divine Names” (I, 4-6; VII, 1-3; XIII, 3), “On the Heavenly Hierarchy” (II, 3), in the 1st and 5th Epistles and in a special treatise “On Mystical Theology”, one of the chapters of which - “What is cataphatic theology and what is apophatic theology” - is a brief summary of the preliminary results of what was said in the unpreserved “Theological Essays” and “Symbolic Theology”. Negative knowledge of God is contrasted with positive knowledge as more perfect. It leads to Divine Wisdom, which for man is “ignorance.” By denying all knowledge that necessarily relates only to existing things, by detaching the knower from himself, a mysterious “union” with the Divine Rays is accomplished - the goal of T. A. God as a “non-existent” can only be comprehended by ignorance, for which it is necessary to leave the limits of knowledge and existence in ecstasy, in procession. However, apophaticism is not limited to the theology of ecstasy, since it is, first of all, a state of mind that refuses to form abstract concepts about God. If Plotinus’s intellectual catharsis is aimed at liberating consciousness from the multiplicity of all things, then for the Areopagite, purification is tantamount to abstraction in general from everything created, as hiding God. Supporters of T. a. there were Evagrius of Pontus (4th century) and Maximus the Confessor (7th century) - an interpreter of the Areopagitik corpus, whose scholia, along with the paraphrases of George Pachymer, are a significant addition to the treatises of Pseudo-Dionysius. In apophatics, Maximus the Confessor follows the Areopagitics, and in the doctrine of the knowledge of God he is close to Evagrius: in the fullness of his being, God is incomprehensible to a created being. The human mind can only comprehend that there is a first cause (God), but not that it is. True knowledge of God comes down to the denial (due to his superiority) of all conceivable categories and properties inherent in created being, including the concepts of essence and movement. This way of knowing is accompanied by insight. On the verge of apophatic and cataphatic for Maximus the Confessor is the knowledge of the Trinity of the Divine, which is experienced by the “worthy” as illumination with a “triscendent light”, bringing the mind closer to ecstatic direct knowledge of God. This is knowledge of the secret of “intradivine life,” which is expressible in words, but comprehended only in the experience of deification. John of Damascus also adhered to T. a. and pointed out in the “Accurate Statement of the Orthodox Faith” that linguistic expressions mean not that God exists, but that He does not exist, since “... The Divinity is limitless and incomprehensible. And only this... in Him is comprehensible” (chapter 4). The attitude of Gregory Palamas to T. a. was ambiguous: he refused to call “Divine Darkness”, i.e. positive experience of “Unapproachable”, the term about “T. a.”, since in his era “theology”, “theology” certainly meant expression and conceptualization. And his opponents, primarily Varlaam, nominalistically absolutized T. a. Palamas assumed the insufficiency of the negative path, since it is only renunciation of beings, accessible to many. According to Palamas, a person, “seeing God as God,” perceives the existence of God and some of His properties, including “Divine inaccessibility,” without cognizing His Essence. T. a. Pseudo-Dionysius had a significant influence on the theological thought of the Christian West. The exegetes of Areopagitica were John Scotus Eriugena, Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa and many other theologians. So, T. a. has as its goal the most adequate expression of the absolute transcendence of the Divine through the consistent negation of everything created that obscures God, including human ideas about Him. I.P. Davydov

[from Greek ἀποφάσκω - to deny], in the narrow sense, a method of discursive knowledge of God, in which in the description of the properties of God, as absolutely transcendent to creation, all created attributes are excluded, and the need to use superlatives in the categories used (for example, “super-goodness”) is indicated. . In a broad sense, the spiritual-ascetic attitude of a fundamental refusal to use any created analogies and images in “theology” (in the tradition of Eastern theology, “theology” is the doctrine of “God in Himself,” while “oikonomia " - theological section dealing with issues of Divine revelation). In the sphere of asceticism and prayer practice, apophatism acts as a call for continuous ascent, purification, and “formlessness” of the mind.

A. b. represents one of two “paths” in the knowledge of God - the path of negations. If the path of affirmations, i.e. cataphatic theology, applies to God all the highest perfections that are only conceivable in the world (for example, goodness, wisdom, life, love, being), then the apophatic path denies everything unusual for God. In the plane of discursive thinking, the logic of negations is applicable in any cognitive process. The process of cognition is twofold. One can try to detect similarities in the object being studied, points of commonality with already known objects and phenomena, and then this method of cognition should be called the method of analogies. Or, trying to cognize the “very essence” of a phenomenon or object, one can point to the special features of the cognizable phenomenon, different and irreducible to the general - this method will be a method of negations: a given object is not this and that, it does not have such-and-such. such and such qualities.

The apophatic method finds its meaning in philosophical and religious religions. systems that postulate the presence of an Absolute beginning of the world. You can detect features of A. b. in a variety of theological and philosophical systems, where the transcendental Absolute plays a vital role: in Buddhism, Platonism, Neoplatonism, etc. Therefore, A. b. in a narrow sense - namely, as a discursive technique of “denials” of certain aspects of the “this-worldly”, immanent in the transcendental Absolute - is not the prerogative of Christianity. A. b. It was precisely as a philosophical, discursive technique that Christ was borrowed. thinkers of the first centuries among representatives of the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions of the Greek. thoughts. Of course, this is borrowing, like any use of Christ. theology of achievements Greek. thoughts were not uncritical. Christ. The apophatic technique was adopted by theology and radically transformed. Historically, apophatic techniques developed in platonic or platonic philosophical schools. Apophatism is a characteristic feature of Plato's teaching about ideas, which Plato sharply contrasts with all their sensory similarities and reflections. Sensible things are necessarily changeable and transitory, but ideas are not subject to any change or transformation, are completely identical and are eternal entities, always equal to themselves (Phaed. 78d). Ideas are completely transcendental, inexpressible in any images of sensory experience, in any concepts and categories of number, space and time. Plato’s teaching about ideas contains two aspects: ideas have a self-existent existence in a “smart place”, representing something transcendental to world existence, as being, but they also justify it, being is involved in them, and they are involved in being. The highest idea, according to Plato, is the idea of ​​the Good. Good is not an essence, but in dignity and power it stands above the limits of essence. It is the unsupposed beginning of all things, it dominates everything. The good is immanent and at the same time completely transcendental in relation to being and knowledge (RP. VI 507-509). To some extent, Aristotle is no stranger to apophaticism. He repeats more than once that one should abandon the understanding of the Divine, for any attempt in this direction will inevitably fail (Met. XII 7. 1073a). However, Aristotle’s “god” - the Form of forms, crowning the ladder of ideas (forms) in their natural hierarchy - cannot be completely separated from the world, for he is a kind of cosmic agent, the prime mover (which itself, however, remains motionless). Aristotle’s attitude of God to the world is generally characterized by duality: “One must weigh (he says) which of two ways the nature of all good is contained, or the best: as eternally separate, existing independently in itself, or as a structure of its parts. Of course, at the same time in one and the other way...” (Met. XII 10. 1075a 10). A striking example of A. b. in the proper sense, Philo of Alexandria gives, in whose worldview the Old Testament faith in the One God and the desire to express it in Greek categories were contradictorily combined. philosophy. Those who strive to cognize the Beginningless with the help of created things go from bottom to top, as if along some kind of heavenly ladder, ascending through reflection from works to the Creator. These people, says Philo, are similar to those who want to know the nature of the monad through the dyad (De praemiis et poenis. 41, 43, 46). Therefore, philosophical knowledge can only lead a person to the recognition of the existence of God. God is absolutely simple and therefore incomprehensible to discourse. One can approach the understanding of what God is only by denying what He is not. Any qualitative certainty would introduce a limitation into the Divinity, and therefore Philo calls God a qualityless, pure being and not having any definite attribute. God cannot be thought of as unconditional goodness and love, nor as absolute beauty, nor as the most perfect mind; in His essence, God is higher than all these attributes of personal existence, better than goodness and love itself, more perfect than virtue itself, more beautiful than beauty itself; It cannot be called reason in the proper sense, for He is above all rational nature; It is not a monad in the strict sense of the word, but it is purer than the monad itself, and simpler than simplicity itself; Finally, He cannot be called life, He is greater and higher than life, He is the eternal and inexhaustible source of life.

The elements of apophaticism are very strong in the philosophical system of Plotinus. In it, the central place is occupied by the doctrine of the absolute origin of all things, the One, which itself is above existence, or, following Plato, “beyond essence” (RP. VI 509b). It represents the concentration of everything that exists at one indivisible point, which so completely and comprehensively embraces everything that exists that, apart from it, there is nothing else left, so that there is nothing from which it would be somehow different. This means that it is not characterized by any quality, no quantity, it eludes all thinking and knowledge, it is above all being and essence, it is not a k.-n. name or category and it is above every name and title. It is impossible to utter even the simplest judgment about it: “It exists.” In this sense, the One is not, but everything that is has existence through communion with the One, since to be means to be one and different from another, to compose a whole from the multitude, from its parts and aspects. But this means that the One is an ineffable fullness, from which in a semantic way everything eternally “flows” (Enn. III 2.2; V 2.1). The One for Plotinus has a dual character: being the fundamental principle, immanent in all being, it at the same time remains above all being, as transcendent to the world and a simple One.

The peculiarity of the apophatism of the Neoplatonic tradition is that, trying to comprehend God, it rejects the properties belonging to being, not because of the absolute unknowability of God, but because the sphere of being, even at the highest levels, is necessarily plural and does not have the absolute simplicity of the One. God Plotinus is not unknowable by His nature. If it is impossible to understand the One either by knowledge or by direct intelligibility, then this is because the soul, when it perceives k.-n. an object through knowledge moves away from unity and is not completely unified. To know the One, one must resort to ecstasy, to unity, in which a person is completely absorbed by the object and forms one whole with it, where all multiplicity disappears, where the subject no longer differs from its object.

The philosophical apophatism of Platonism was adopted by Christ. philosophers of the Alexandrian school (see Theological schools of the ancient Church): Clement of Alexandria and Origen. With all the typological similarities of the apophatic method of these thinkers with the philosophical tradition in their systems, significant differences in the apophatic method are also outlined, which later. among the Cappadocian fathers and to an even greater extent in the Areopagitica they will appear in a completely transformed, Christianized form.

Clement of Alexandria’s 12th chapter is devoted to the development of the idea of ​​the unknowability of the Divine by reason. Book V “Stromat”: “What name should we call Him who is unborn, has no differences in himself, no definite form, no individuality, no number?.. Will you say that God is a whole? The definition is imperfect, because the whole is a quantity that is still commensurable, and God is the Father of everything that exists. Would you like to give Him different parts? But you are not able to do this, for in its essence this One is indivisible. This is why God is infinite, infinite, not at all in the sense that we imagine it, as if we could not embrace Him with our thoughts, but in the fact that God is not subject to measurement and there are no limits or boundaries in His being. There are also no forms in Him, and He also cannot be named. And if sometimes we call Him with such expressions as the One, the Good, the Spirit, the Existing, the Father, God, the Creator, the Lord, we do not use them as His name. We resort to the help of these beautiful words only due to a difficult situation, in order to beware of other names by which the Eternal One could be humiliated. None of these sayings, taken separately, gives the concept of God; yet together they speak of Him as the Almighty. Things are known either by their own nature, or by their mutual relations with each other; none of this applies to God. He also cannot be revealed by evidence, because they are based on previous principles and higher concepts, but nothing can exist before an uncreated Being. To comprehend the unsearchable Being, nothing remains, therefore, except His own grace and His revelation through the mediation of the Logos abiding in His depths.” The recognition of the unknowability of the Divine, therefore, leads Clement of Alexandria to the affirmation of Revelation as the only source of positive knowledge about the Divine.

According to Origen, God is incomprehensible and invaluable (De princip. I 1.5), invisible (I 1.8) and incorporeal. He is simple and does not allow any complexity in Himself and is unity and singularity (I 1.6). The nature of God is incomprehensible, and the power of the human mind, even the purest and holiest mind, is unable to understand it. “Even if we were given the opportunity to know or understand something about God, we still, of necessity, must believe that He is incomparably better than what we have learned about Him” (I 1.5). Origen's intellectualism did not allow him to fully adhere to the apophatic position about the complete unknowability of God. Origen, and in this he agrees with Plotinus, considers God not an absolutely transcendent creature, but only a completely simple principle: “God should not be considered as some kind of body or abiding in a body, but as a simple spiritual nature, not allowing any complexity in Himself. He has nothing greater or lower in Himself, but there is - from any side - the Monad and, so to speak, Unity" (I 1.6). God, according to Origen, is incomprehensible not by nature, but only due to the weakness of our mind, darkened by the flesh and associated with sensory images and plurality. A. b. Origen comes down to the negation in God of everything that relates to matter and plurality, in order to cognize Him in absolute simplicity, excluding all complexity - “pure Spirit”, “intelligent Nature”, Monad or Unity. Origen is close to the teachings of Plotinus and his school about the knowledge of absolute Unity.

A. b., characteristic of the Orthodox holy fathers. Church, is fundamentally different not only from the apophatic techniques of the Greek. philosophical thought, but also from the use of apophatism in subsequent Christ. traditions of the West. Apophatism among the holy fathers points to the absolute inexpressibility and indefinability of God, while philosophical apophatism points to the lack of definition, uncertainty as a state of potentiality, unidentifiedness, and not as a fundamental indefinability. From the unconditional “no” of the negative theology of the holy fathers there is no logical transition to any “yes” of the positive teaching about God and the world; here the opposition is not dialectical, but antinomic. In the philosophical Platonic tradition and Western. in theology, antinomy is replaced by dialectical contradiction. The transcendence of God to the world He created is considered by the holy fathers not as a philosophical premise, but as a fact of faith, a fact of Revelation. We are talking here not so much about the denial of this or that definition, but about its absence, about the impossibility of expressing the inexpressible, the limit not only for the concept, but also for thought and consciousness in general. The unknowability of God among the holy fathers has a completely radical meaning. This unknowability cannot be justified by the perfect simplicity of the Divine Being: then one could assume an essence that is knowable - if not completely, then at least partially - with the help of analogies: a simple essence, analogous to its attributes. On the contrary, based on the unknowability of God, one can rather assert that one cannot speak of Him as a simple essence, since this would be an encroachment on His absolute unknowability. However, A. b. affirms the possibility of knowing God.

For St. Basil the Great, names that deny this or that property in God, borrowed from the created world, cannot determine the positive content of the concept “God”. We know with certainty that God exists; and we can know and understand how God exists. But what God is, what the “essence” of God is, no one knows and cannot know. First of all, because the capacity of the created mind is always limited, but the existence of God is infinite and limitless. St. Basil the Great claims that there is not a single concept that could embrace the entire nature of God and would be sufficient to express it. The essence of God is both unknowable and completely ineffable, and this unknowability and ineffability of the Divine nature also applies to the angelic world. “...I know that God exists,” says St. Vasily.- But what His essence is, I place this above understanding. So how can I be saved? Through faith. But faith is content with the knowledge that God exists... Consequently, the consciousness of the incomprehensibility of God is the knowledge of God’s essence, and we worship what is comprehended not in the sense of what kind of essence it is, but in the sense that this essence is” (Ep. 226 (234)) . For St. Basil the Great, not only the Divine Essence, but also created essences cannot be expressed in concepts. Contemplating objects, we analyze their properties, which allows us to form concepts. However, analysis can never exhaust the very content of the objects of our perception; There always remains a certain “residue”, which eludes this analysis and cannot be expressed in concepts - this is the unknowable basis of things, what constitutes their true, indefinable essence.

St. Gregory the Theologian also provides a striking example of the apophatic approach to theology. In his characteristic form of sublime poetry, he speaks of the ineffability of the Divine: “O Thou Who art above all! for what else am I allowed to say about You? How can I sing praises to You? for You are ineffable by any word. How will the mind look at You? for You are incomprehensible to any mind. You alone are unspoken, because you produced everything that can be spoken! You alone are unknown, because you have produced everything that is comprehended by thought. Everything gives honor to you: both gifted and not gifted with reason! ...You are the end of everything, You are one and all, You are neither one, nor one, nor all. O All-Named One! What shall I name You, the only unnameable One? And what kind of heavenly mind penetrates through the veils of the clouds? Be merciful, O Thou Who art above all! for what else am I allowed to say about You?” (Hymn. ad Deum. 1).

Significant contribution to the development of A. b. contributed by St. Gregory of Nyssa, whose entire theology is permeated with the idea of ​​the fundamental impossibility of knowing God by rational-discursive means. St. Gregory says that human nature does not have the strength to accurately know the being of God - no matter how much one strains the mind, the same amount it avoids curiosity. First of all, due to the fact that the distance is great and impassable, the uncreated nature is separated from the created essence. Everything that exists outside of God is nothing in His eyes. Human language is inadequate to describe not only the Divine being, but also the relationship between the Creator and the creation. Human thought must stop at the border of creation; it cannot jump over the gap separating the creature and the Creator. For St. Gregory, logic, applicable to creation, cannot be applied to the Creator due to the fundamental ontological difference between the Creator and the creature. Even the angelic world is not able to know the Creator. Every concept applied to God is a ghost, a deceptive image, an idol. Concepts that we form according to our natural opinion and understanding, which are justified by Ph.D. by speculative ideas, instead of revealing God to us, they create only His idols. St. Gregory of Nyssa emphasizes that A. b. its purpose is not to assert anything about the Divine essence, which is unknowable, but to teach the proper way of thinking about God (De vita Moysis. 165).

Its peaks and classical forms are the negative theology of the patristic tradition of the Orthodox Church. He reaches the Church in the Areopagitica. The deity is both nameless and many-named, says the author of the Areopagitik. None of the names of God found in the Holy. Scripture does not express the Divine being; God is beyond all this. His name is wonderful, for He is above every name. The Deity is not only not subject to sensory and spatial definitions: it has neither outline, nor form, nor quality, nor quantity, nor volume - the Deity is above all speculative names and definitions. God is neither soul, nor mind, nor imagination, nor opinion, nor thinking, nor life. He is neither a word nor a thought - and therefore is not perceived by either a word or a thought - in this sense, God is not an “object” of knowledge. He is beyond knowledge. It is neither number, nor order, nor magnitude, nor smallness, nor equality or similarity, nor inequality or dissimilarity. He is neither power, nor light, nor life, nor time, nor age, nor knowledge, nor truth, nor kingdom, nor wisdom, nor unity. God in this sense is a nameless God. He is above everything (MT 4, 5), “not something of non-existence and not something of existence,” “in everything there is everything and in nothing there is nothing.” Therefore, the path of knowledge is the path of abstraction and denial, the path of simplification and silence, in order to know God “as removed from all things.” Nothing from the sensory world can help in finding even an approximate definition of God. God is not even being, not because He is lower than being, but because He is outside of being, not included in the causal series inherent in being. He is “true Nothing”, as “extracted from everything that exists.” God, unknowable by His nature, Who, according to the psalmist, “made darkness His covering” (Ps 17:12), is not the primary God-Unity of the Neoplatonists. In the treatise “On Divine Names”, when considering the name “One” applied to God, its insufficiency is shown and it is contrasted with another “highest” name - the Holy Trinity, which says that God is neither unity nor plurality, but that He surpasses this antinomy, being unknowable in what He is (DN XIII 3).

The mysterious author of the Areopagitik had a significant influence on A. b. St. Maximus the Confessor. According to St. Maximus, God is not an essence in the sense that the essence of created objects is said. Both positions, that God is and that He is not, can be admissible in theology, and at the same time, neither can be accepted in a strict sense. All thinking, says St. Maxim, assumes plurality or, more precisely, duality: thinking, to which corresponds a certain essence and the ability to think, and the object of thought (Cap. theol. I 82). In God there can be no place for this division, He is an absolute unit, in Him the subject and object of thinking coincide (Mystagogia. Praef.). God in essence is thinking, and holistic thinking, and only that. And He Himself is the essence corresponding to this thinking, and the integral essence, and only it; and all of Him is above essence, and all of Him is above thinking (Cap. theol. II 3), for there is also a monad that is indivisible, indivisible and simple. What is truly good in its essence is neither the beginning, nor the goal, nor the cause of being and has no relation to what is the source of movement towards the cause of being. God is everything and nothing and above all. God is a being that has essence and remains above essence, has power and remains above power, is filled with all effectiveness and inexhaustibility, in a word, God is the effective source of all essence, power, effectiveness, beginning, middle and end. Everything that exists is called conceivable because it has principles for its explanation. God, in His essence, is not thinkable, He is above all thought and is the object of our faith, based on the intelligible, which has God as its source (Cap. theol. I 8-9). So, nothing that is thought, that is, from the objects of the created world, can in any way be compared with God.

St. Gregory Palamas in his reasoning also largely repeats the author of the Areopagitik. The incomprehensibility of the essence of God is unconditional, and not only for the human mind, but also for the angelic world. True knowledge of God cannot be achieved either by studying the visible created world, or through the intellectual activity of the human mind. The most refined theology and philosophizing, abstracted from all material things, cannot give a true vision of God and communication with Him. If we theology and philosophize about perfect objects, separated from matter, then this, although it brings us closer to the truth, is far from the vision of God and is as different from communication with Him as possession is different from knowledge. Talking about God and communicating with Him are not the same thing. St. Gregory Palamas has a positive attitude towards individual scientific disciplines: he recognizes their relative usefulness in the study of the created world and justifies in this area the methods of knowledge characteristic of them - syllogisms, logical proofs, examples from the visible world. But in the matter of knowing God, he asserts their insufficiency and even speaks of the inexpediency of using them. For him, the essence of God is, first of all, completely unnameable and completely incomprehensible to the mind, because “God exceeds everything that exists, and He is above all nature.” His nature is “super-essential,” “pre-divine,” and His essence is “super-essential.”

A. b. for the holy fathers is not limited to the area of ​​discourse. It is the entire spiritual dispensation of the ascetic, ascending to God, striving for unity with Him, for deification, cleansing his soul from passions, it turns out to be an attitude that must be realized through his entire life and ascetic deed. In this aspect A. b. fathers is expressed not in dry philosophical categories, but in biblical symbols that surpass them. Most importantly A. b. in the Holy Scripture for the holy fathers is the ascent of Moses to the “mountain of knowledge of God,” where in the darkness he meets God. The image of Moses approaching God in the darkness of Sinai becomes the fathers’ favorite image of the unknowability of the Divine nature by human experience.

For St. Gregory of Nyssa, the ascent of Moses to Sinai into the darkness of Divine unknowability is a path of contemplation, a meeting higher than his first meeting with God, when He appeared to him in the burning bush. Then Moses saw God in the light; now he enters darkness, leaving behind everything visible or knowable; in front of him is only the invisible and unknowable, but what is in this darkness is God (De vita Moysis. Praef. 46-47). For God dwells where our knowledge, our concepts have no access. At each stage of this ascent, approaching higher images or ideas, following Moses, one must be careful not to create concepts from them - “idols of God.” Only then will it be possible to contemplate the Divine beauty itself, to see God insofar as He becomes visible in creation. Speculative thinking gradually gives way to contemplation, knowledge is more and more erased by experience, for, eliminating concepts that captivate the mind, apophatism at every stage of positive theology opens up boundless horizons for contemplation. True knowledge of God leads from “knowledge,” which is actually ignorance, to “ignorance,” which is actually above all knowledge.

An important biblical image of the unknowability of God is for St. Gregory of Nyssa, the elusiveness of the Divine Bridegroom from the book. Song of Songs. The Beloved of the Song of Songs seeks the Elusive, calls upon the One Who cannot be reached, and reaches the Unattainable in the consciousness that the union will be limitless, the ascent endless. The Bride rushing after the Groom is a soul seeking God. The Beloved appears and slips away - so does God: the more the soul knows Him, the more He eludes it and the more it loves Him. The more God saturates her with His presence, the more she thirsts for a more complete presence and rushes after Him. This running becomes endless, and in this endless opening of the soul, in which love is continually replenished and renewed, in these “beginnings of beginnings” St. Gregory and Christ sees. concept of bliss. If man knew the very nature of God, he would be God. The union of the creature with the Creator is that endless flight in which the more full the soul is, the more blissfully it feels this distance between it and the Divine essence, a distance that is constantly shrinking and always infinite, which makes love possible and evokes. God calls us, and we are embraced by this call, which simultaneously reveals and conceals Him; and we cannot reach Him except in this very connection with Him, and for this connection to exist, God in His essence must always remain inaccessible to us. In spiritual ascent, the absolute unknowability of the Divine nature is revealed more and more reliably. Striving more and more towards it, the soul constantly grows, comes out of itself, surpassing itself, in a thirst for more; thus the ascent becomes endless, the desire insatiable (In Cant. Cantic. 12).

Refers to the image of Moses and St. Gregory the Theologian: “I moved forward in order to know God. Therefore, I separated myself from matter and from everything carnal, I gathered myself as best I could into myself and climbed to the top of the mountain. But when I opened my eyes, I could see the back of God (Exodus 33:22-23), and it was covered with stone (1 Cor 10:4), that is, the humanity of the Word incarnate for the sake of our salvation. I could not contemplate the all-pure First Nature, cognizable only by Itself, i.e., the Holy Trinity. For I cannot contemplate what is behind the first veil, hidden by the cherubim, but only what descends to us - the Divine splendor visible in creatures” (Or. 28). As for the Divine Essence, this is the Holy of Holies, closed even from the seraphim themselves. Divine nature for St. Gregory the Theologian is a sea of ​​essence, indefinite and infinite, extending beyond any concept of time and nature. If our mind tries to create a weak image of God, contemplating Him not in Himself, but in what surrounds Him, then this image eludes us before we try to catch it, illuminating the higher faculties of our mind, like lightning blinding the eyes.

And in the Areopagitica the path of apophatic knowledge of God is likened to the ascent of Moses to Sinai to meet God. The path of “detachment” from all things, leading to the Divine Darkness, is compared here with the art of a sculptor, who, by removing everything that hides a statue in a block of material, reveals its innermost beauty (MT II). The path of renunciation must be an ascent from the lower to the higher. This is an ascetic path. It begins with purification. It is a “single gathering” or concentration, “entering into oneself,” abstraction from all knowledge, from all images, sensory and mental. This apophatic ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but perfect knowledge, incommensurable with any partial knowledge. God is known not from afar, not through thinking about Him, but through an incomprehensible union with Him, which is possible only through going beyond all limits, through “frenzy” (MT I 1). And this means entering into sacred darkness, into the “darkness of ignorance,” into the “darkness of silence.” This “origin” is true knowledge, but knowledge without words and concepts and therefore incommunicable knowledge, accessible only to those who have achieved it and have it, and even for him it is not completely accessible, for no one can describe it to himself. This is the area in which reflection is inactive and the soul touches God, touches the Divinity. One must rise higher and higher, pass all the sacred peaks, leave all heavenly sounds, and lights, and words - and enter the “mysterious darkness of ignorance”, where the One who is above and beyond everything truly dwells (MT I 3).

For true knowledge of God, according to St. Maximus the Confessor, what is needed first of all is purification of the heart (Cap. theol. II 79-81), and then reverent boldness. This is the path of active overcoming of corruptible passions, the path of gradual ascent, and then entry, like Moses, into Divine darkness, into “a formless and matterless place of knowledge” (Ibid. I 85). God is completely transcendental to the world. Only faith and love open the heart to the influence of grace, which introduces a person to the Divine life. Only the one who has wisely learned how to love God, Who is above words and knowledge and every relationship in any sense and is free from nature, who will leave everything sensible and imaginable, all time and eternity and place, and will finally be completely freed from any activity conditioned by feelings, word or mind, he will achieve in an inexpressible and incomprehensible way Divine sweetness, surpassing word and mind. This path and word are known only to God, as the source of grace, and to those worthy to receive grace from God. On this path there is nothing natural or intelligible, since everything that can be said or known is completely overcome and covered in silence.

So, patristic theology calls not for the search for positive knowledge about the Divine essence, but for the experimental knowledge of that which surpasses all understanding. “Talking about God is a great thing, but even better is to purify yourself for God,” according to St. Gregory the Theologian (Sermo 32). The goal of A. b. is a connection with God that exceeds reason; To achieve it, you need to go beyond the limits of knowledge and beyond the limits of existence, of which all knowledge is relative. A. b. leads to an awareness of the weakness of human understanding. The affirmation of the unknowability of God does not mean for the holy fathers a renunciation of the knowledge of God. But this knowledge follows a path whose main goal is not knowledge, but unity with God, deification. This is not an abstract theology operating with concepts, but a contemplative theology, elevating the mind to “mind-transcending” realities. Therefore, the dogmas of the Church often appear to the mind as antinomies, the more insoluble the more sublime the mystery they express. The task is not to eliminate the antinomy by adapting dogma to our understanding, but to change the mind in order to come to the contemplation of the God-revealed reality. Therefore, apophaticism is, first of all, a disposition of the mind that refuses to formulate concepts about God, turning every theological science into contemplation of the mysteries of Revelation. Christianity is not a philosophical school that operates with abstract concepts, but above all communication with the living God. The Holy Fathers, faithful to the apophatic principle of theology, managed to keep their thought on the threshold of mystery and not replace God with His idols. Between the philosophical search for God and Christ. There is an abyss in theology, even when theology seems to follow in the footsteps of philosophy. St. Gregory of Nyssa and the author of the Areopagitik see in apophaticism not Revelation itself, but only its container, since, as they argue, only on the apophatic path can one achieve the personal presence of the hidden God.

The Divine hiddenness and inaccessibility of the Divine do not mean hiddenness. On the contrary, God reveals himself. A. b. does not exclude Revelation. “Ascent” is possible because God “descends,” opens, appears. In contrast to “negations,” the apophatic path, which leads to union, the path of “affirmations,” the cataphatic path, descends like a ladder of “epiphanies” or manifestations of God in the created world. But at the same time, in the immanence of Revelation, God affirms Himself as completely transcendent to creation.

As the author of the Areopagitik writes, in his essential existence God is unknowable and incomprehensible. He is above every concept and name, above all definitions, “above mind, and essence, and knowledge.” But this does not mean that God is far from the world or that He hides Himself from intelligent spirits. God essentially reveals, and acts, and is present in created beings - creation exists, and abides, and lives by the power of this Divine presence everywhere. God is present in the world not by His being, which always remains inaccessible, unknowable and ineffable, but in His “providences” and goodness, which emanate from the incommunicable God in an abundant current and which exists in the Crimea. He abides in the world in His “essential processes” and “beneficent industries”, in His powers and energies. In this self-revelation to the world, God is knowable and understandable. This means that God is understandable only from Revelation. “In general, we should neither think nor say anything about the essential and hidden Divinity other than what is divinely revealed to us in the Word of God” (DN I 1). There is, however, another revelation. This is the world. In God there is a “substantial prototype” of the world, through participation in which the world has existence. We know and comprehend God in His face, which is open and revealed to the world; in other words, God is known and comprehended in His relations to the world or to creation. It is in these relations, and only in them, that God, as it were, proceeds from Himself, invariably and unceasingly proceeds into the world and, however, in this incessant action of His remains motionless and unchanging, remains with Himself in the perfect identity and simplicity of His own being - that and another. Because of His goodness, God creates, creates, gives life, and accomplishes all things. Just as its life-giving rays extend everywhere from the source of light, so the Supreme Good illuminates everything that exists with its unchanging radiance, exuding everywhere its super-essential and life-giving rays, “rays of complete goodness.” The Sun is only a visible and distant image of the Divine and spiritual Light. Light is the image of the Good. Everything that exists strives and gravitates toward this radiant light. And only through communion with these radiant insights, to the extent of capacity, everything that exists both exists and lives - since it is, as it were, permeated with rays of spiritual and intellectual light. At the same time, these luminous rays can be called “rays of Divine darkness,” for they blind with the power of their inconceivable light—the “impregnable light” of the Divine is darkness, inconceivable from the excessiveness of the emitted illumination.

All things speak about God, and none speaks enough. All testify of Him, and none reveals Him. And all the cataphatic names, images and concepts speak about His actions and “industry”, but not about His Being. In the multiplicity of His “processes,” God remains unchanged, and the multiplicity of God’s names denotes the multiplicity of His works, without violating the essential simplicity and supermultiplicity of His existence. Being all-nameable, God is also nameless. Being all in all, He is nothing in nothing. Ladder of cataphatic theology, revealing the Divine names, extracted ch. arr. from the Holy Scripture, there are a number of steps that serve as support for contemplation. The antinomy of cataphatic theology and apophatic theology, says St. Gregory Palamas, has its real basis in God. Like all theological antinomies, e.g. The antinomy of unity and trinity, which postulated the distinction between nature and Persons, the antinomy of the two ways of knowing God, reveals to our mind a mysterious distinction in the very existence of God: the distinction between His essence and His actions, or Divine energies. All negative theology refers specifically to essence, while the manifestations of God in the world, His energies, the Old Testament theophanies, are accessible to naming and description. The highest theophany - the most perfect manifestation of God the Incarnate Word in the world - is also completely apophatic. Apophatism is inscribed in the very paradox of Christ. Revelation of God: the transcendent God becomes immanent to the world, but in the very immanence of His economy, ending with the incarnation and death on the Cross, He reveals Himself as transcendent and ontologically independent of all created being. In the humanity of Christ, according to the Areopagitics, the Supreme One appeared in human essence, without ceasing to be hidden in this very phenomenon (DN I 4). Affirmations relating to the humanity of Christ have all the height and value of the most categorical denials. It is in Christ that the incomprehensible is revealed and makes it possible to speak about God, that is, to “theologize.” In Christ, God is fully revealed to humanity and given the opportunity to contemplate the radiance of the Divine nature.

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Priest Vladimir Shmaliy