GOD, He Who is Unknown - The Apophatism of the Orthodox Church

In the book The Unknown God: the Apophatism of the Orthodox Church, Fr. Radu Roscanu, an Orthodox priest, tries to clarify to what degree theological discourse is adequate for speaking about God’s transcendence.

The author shows us what Orthodox theology understands by apophatic knowledge. Theology uses the concepts of cataphatism and apophatism when it speaks about obtaining religious knowledge and expressing that knowledge.

Concerning God, we affirm that He is the living One, the personal One, absolute Spirit having every perfection in the absolute sense; He is the All-Good, the All-Loving, the All-Wise, the All-Righteous, the All-Knowing, etc. This way of affirming truths about God is called cataphatism.

Apophatic knowledge is characterized by negating any imperfection in God, which in the end, means affirming every perfection in Him. God cannot be known in the same way we know the realities of our concrete world, by using the ideas and concepts of time and space as well as the relations between natural phenomena, for God transcends them all.

Fr. Radu deals with important aspects of his subject: the progress in the levels of apophatism, the link between apophatism and cataphatism, and the apophatic vocabulary. One idea runs through the whole book: When we want to find God and talk to Him, negative theology—apophatism—is not just a recognition of the intellectual powerlessness of the human mind to know God. It also expresses the intuition of God’s infinite nature; it expresses the experience of the link with God that increases with the man’s spiritual progress.

The book is the result of research carried out at the Faculté de théologie, d’éthique et de philosophie, Université de Sherbrooke, and constitutes a very effective initiation to apophatic theology.