"I began, as I often like to joke when asked what is God and what is not God, by answering: God is a word. Let’s begin with that. In the case of this particular word, which has quite a lot of potency, both positive and negative, in cultural discourse, it’s important to acknowledge that words have meaning not just because of what they explicitly denote but because of what they implicitly connote. We always speak into silence and out of silence, so in the background of every word there is this emptiness.

Words foreground certain meanings and direct our attention, and yet they also leave much unsaid. So there is always a dialectic between silence and utterance. To speak more symbolically, you could call it a dialectic between Logos and Sophia, almost like a masculine and feminine polarity. There needs to be the space for words to be uttered into, the air to reverberate, such that words can even be transmitted between us, from mouth to ear and back. But the silence also seems to be pregnant with the possibility of speech.

So while there may be a temptation to oppose the apophatic and the cataphatic, I think even Dionysius the Areopagite was quite proficient in both modes, offering many, many names for the divine while also unsaying every single one of them. These two modes of relating to God are not necessarily opposed; they almost require one another. It’s a delightful combination for getting a good conversation going."

MS