Prefatory Thoughts

Meditations on the Divine Absence are not arguments in defense of an idea, nor essays in systematic theology. They are structured instead as a triptych—three panels that open onto one another, each moving closer toward silence. Their form is intentional: poetic, theological, and contemplative in turn. The sequence begins in language, passes through tradition, and ends in surrender. This is the apophatic path not only in theme, but in structure.

Apophatic theology—also called negative or via negativa theology—is often misunderstood as merely an assertion that “God is unknowable.” But more precisely, it is a spiritual and intellectual discipline: the repeated, reverent unmaking of what is known, not to assert nothing, but to refuse to make of God something.

In this spirit, Meditation I: On the Absence that Speaks begins in the poet’s voice, naming the absence and its effect upon the speaking soul. This first movement is evocative rather than doctrinal; it explores the human impulse to name the divine and the deep intuition that such naming always falls short. The language is paradoxical, metaphorical, reaching always beyond itself. It echoes the mystical poets and desert fathers who knew that silence is not the opposite of speech, but its completion.

Meditation II: The Theological Echo of Absence turns from the personal to the historical. It gathers the voices of mystics, theologians, and philosophers who have traced the contours of this absence in Christian tradition and beyond. The figures cited—Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Aquinas, and Eckhart—do not merely argue for God’s unknowability; they enact it, each in their own way, by gesturing toward the divine as that which exceeds every utterance. The inclusion of resonances from Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions is not an attempt at syncretism, but a recognition that the apophatic insight is not the possession of one creed. It arises wherever human speech meets its limit before the sacred.

Finally, Meditation III: Return to Silence abandons even these authorities. It is not a conclusion, but a relinquishment. It does not aim to instruct, but to let go. It beckons the contemplative not to grasp, but to receive. Here, the structure itself participates in the theology: movement gives way to stillness, and knowledge is overtaken by being known.

This form—poetic, theological, contemplative—is not accidental. It enacts what it describes. If the meditations succeed, they do so not by persuading, but by inviting. Not by resolving tension, but by allowing the reader to abide within it.

The apophatic tradition does not speak because it knows; it speaks in tension with what it does not know, responding to humanity’s innate compulsion to fill the pregnant void that silence presents. These meditations, too, speak—but with trembling voice, always approaching silence, always pointing beyond themselves. What is offered here is not a theology of absence, but a theological absence: a space in which the divine may be known by not being spoken.

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Meditations on the Divine Absence

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It is at a total remove from every condition, movement, life, imagination, conjecture, name, discourse, thought, conception, being, rest, dwelling, unity, limit, infinity, the totality of existence.” — Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names

Yet, humanity still strives, with its limited lexicon and limp imagination, to create a divinity in its own image, willing a revelation and incarnation, rather than a contemplation and dim remembrance.

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Meditation I: On the Absence that Speaks

We speak because we must. Language, that trembling scaffold of sound and symbol, is all we possess. We speak even into silence. Especially into silence.

Yet there is a silence so profound that it is not absence, but plenitude—so overflowing that it undoes every category into which we might try to pour it. It is not stillness, but the void that cradles movement. Not darkness, but the blinding brightness before which the eyes of the soul must close to see. This is the silence from which Pseudo-Dionysius begins—not a silence that demands filling, but one that demands reverence.

Still, we strive. We sculpt idols from our need, chisel out theology from longing. We clothe the divine in flesh because flesh is what we know. We name it with sacred syllables, not because we have grasped it, but because we fear the void its namelessness implies. What is not spoken might vanish altogether. And so, we speak.

But the more we speak, the more the divine retreats—not in spite of our words, but because of them. Each utterance of “God” tightens the net of finitude around what is unbounded. Each metaphor, however noble, is a concession to the fear of absence. We say Father, King, Fire, Light, Love—and behind every word lingers the unspoken admission: This, too, fails.

Perhaps true reverence lies not in naming, but in un-naming. In the surrender of language. In the gradual peeling away of image and doctrine until only a single breath remains—then even that dissolves. What if the highest praise is silence? What if the only true theology is awe?

The mystic knows what the theologian forgets: that to encounter the divine is to be unmade. The intellect does not ascend the mountain; it is stripped bare upon its slopes. The soul does not grasp the flame; it is consumed by it. We do not see God—we are blinded by the sight.

And yet, paradoxically, it is in this surrender that the dim remembrance awakens. A faint echo from before thought. A memory not of doctrine, but of origin. The soul recalls—not in clarity, but in yearning—that it once knew what it now cannot speak.

This remembrance is not knowledge, nor even certainty. It is the ache of what lies just beyond the veil. It is the recognition that we are not merely ignorant of the divine, but that the divine is of a nature so wholly other that even our ignorance cannot frame it. We do not fail to reach it because it is distant, but because it is other. Not far, but utterly near in a way we cannot endure.

Let us then cease striving to form God in our image. Let us instead allow ourselves to be unformed in the presence of what cannot be named. Let the lexicon fall silent. Let imagination bend toward surrender. Let us enter not into proclamation, but into mystery.

For what is remembered dimly may be closer to the truth than what is shouted from the pulpit.

And in that quiet, perhaps we will find not answers, but presence—not revelation, but a shimmering absence that speaks more deeply than all our declarations.

Not a voice, but the space in which every voice dissolves.

Not a light, but the void from which all light bursts forth.

Not a god fashioned in our image, but the image effaced in the divine.

And yet, scripture speaks—haltingly, tremblingly—of the face of God.

Not to describe it, for none who have glimpsed it speak of its contours. Rather, they speak of what it did to them. Jacob limps away, renamed and remade (Genesis 32:22-32). Moses descends the mountain veiled, his face radiant with an unbearable light (Exodus 34:29-35). Isaiah cries woe upon himself, undone in the temple (Isaiah 6:1-5). The face is never rendered, only reflected—dimly, in the trembling of the one who beheld it.

Perhaps this is the truest vision: not seeing what God is, but undergoing what it means to see. To encounter the divine is to suffer a revelation that effaces more than it illuminates. The face of God is not a surface to be studied, but a mirror that cannot hold our image. In that gaze, the self dissolves. Identity falters. What remains is not understanding, but awe—perhaps even fear—not of punishment, but of proximity.

For this is the truth the literalists miss: that these metaphors are not evasions, but vessels of meaning. They point to a reality too radiant for our eyes, too intimate for our language. The face of God is not a face—but the boundary between presence and annihilation. It is where knowing ends, and being is remade.

So let us not strive to depict that face, nor name it, nor cage it in doctrine. Let us instead receive the wound of that encounter, the mystery that leaves us silent and changed.

There, in the shimmering absence, in the dim remembrance of what cannot be retained, may we dwell—not as those who know, but as those who have been known.

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Meditation II: The Theological Echo of Absence

The paradox stands at the heart of theology: to speak of that which exceeds all speech, to name the Unnameable. If the first meditation rested on the poet’s breath and the philosopher’s silence, this second seeks resonance in the historical voice—the voices that have, across centuries, affirmed that the deepest truths of the divine lie not in presence, but in absence. Not in description, but in reverent unknowing.

The Paradox of Theological Language

Scripture speaks of God walking in the garden, wrestling with Jacob, speaking from the whirlwind. And yet, it also insists: “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). This tension—between intimacy and unknowability, between revelation and concealment—has never been resolved. Nor should it be. It is the fertile ground from which the apophatic tradition springs: the conviction that God is best approached not through affirmation, but through negation—not by saying what God is, but by peeling away all that God is not.

The tradition does not reject speech, but recognizes its limits. It affirms that the words we use—however sacred, however inspired—are at best provisional. The divine is not the sum of our highest attributes multiplied to infinity. It is not the perfection of being. It is beyond being.

Dionysius the Areopagite and the Language of Unknowing

No figure more clearly articulates this mystical approach than the one who calls himself Dionysius the Areopagite. Writing in the late fifth or early sixth century, and cloaked in the authority of the Athenian convert of Acts 17, the Pseudo-Dionysius shaped the path of Christian mysticism with profound subtlety. In The Mystical Theology and The Divine Names, he insists that God is “beyond being” and that the soul must ascend not into light, but into the “superluminous darkness” (ὑπέρφωτον γνόφον)—that paradoxical state where illumination comes through the surrender of conventional sight.[1]

His thought was deeply influential in both East and West, preserved and transmitted through Maximus the Confessor and John of Scythopolis in the East, and through John Scotus Eriugena, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas in the Latin tradition.[2]

Eastern Echoes: Gregory of Nyssa and the Divine Darkness

Long before Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa laid the groundwork for apophatic ascent. In his Life of Moses, Gregory describes a spiritual journey that moves from light, to cloud, to darkness—the very image Dionysius would echo.[3] This threefold progression is crucial: first comes the light of initial revelation (Moses and the burning bush), where God appears accessible to sensory perception. Then follows the cloud on Mount Sinai, where visibility diminishes but presence intensifies. Finally, Moses enters the “darkness where God was”—not absence, but presence so overwhelming that it transcends sight altogether. The darkness into which Moses enters is the place where God is most truly encountered—not by sight, but by an ever-deepening desire that knows it cannot comprehend.

This theology of yearning rather than seeing marks the Eastern mystical tradition and shapes Orthodox understandings of theosis, or deification, as participation in the unknowable divine mystery.[4]

Western Currents: Augustine, Aquinas, and the Limits of Reason

Augustine repeatedly affirmed that God transcends human understanding: Si comprehendis, non est Deus (“If you understand it, it is not God,” Sermon 117).[5] Aquinas, despite his systematizing impulse, echoes this humility. In Summa Theologiae, I.12.4, he asserts that we know God only through His effects, and that every name we give to God is analogical, not univocal.[6]

Meister Eckhart, building on these currents, pushed the apophatic impulse to its limits. His sermons and tracts often flirt with paradox and negation: God is “nothing” because God transcends all categories. For Eckhart, spiritual maturity requires a radical unknowing that undoes the ego and renders the soul receptive to divine birth within.[7]

The Cloud of Unknowing

In fourteenth-century England, an anonymous writer composed The Cloud of Unknowing, a guide to contemplative prayer rooted in Dionysian insight. One must abandon all images, concepts, and thoughts, and enter into a “cloud” between the soul and God. Only love, not knowledge, can penetrate this darkness.[8] It is a work of profound simplicity and depth, reminding its reader that one does not think oneself into the presence of God—one surrenders into it.

Resonances in Other Traditions

This way of unknowing is not unique to Christianity. Across diverse religious traditions, we find remarkably similar approaches to ultimate reality as that which exceeds conceptual grasp. Maimonides, in The Guide for the Perplexed, insists that “the negative attributes of God are the true attributes: they do not include any incorrect actions or any deficiency whatever in reference to God, while positive attributes imply polytheism, and are inadequate,” that is to say, in his view, the only proper theology is negative theology.[9] In Hindu Advaita Vedānta, the concept of neti neti (“not this, not this”) methodically negates all attributes when speaking of Brahman, while Mahāyāna Buddhism’s Śūnyatā (emptiness) points to a reality beyond all conceptual construction.[10] Similarly, Sufi mystics in Islam approach the divine essence (dhāt) as that which remains utterly transcendent even in the midst of intimate experience.[11]

Modern Loss and Quiet Recovery

The Enlightenment ushered in clarity, system, and the elevation of reason—but at the cost of mystery. Apophatic theology waned, but never vanished. In the twentieth century, thinkers like Simone Weil, Karl Rahner, and Jean-Luc Marion reclaimed it. Weil wrote of a God who withdraws to make room for human freedom.[12] Marion spoke of the divine as a “saturated phenomenon” that exceeds conceptual containment.[13] Denys Turner has argued that apophatic theology is not mysticism as irrationalism, but the highest form of rational humility—a rigorous acknowledgment of reason’s proper limits that represents not reason’s defeat but its most disciplined expression.[14]

To Know by Not Knowing

The apophatic path is not a renunciation of theology, but its transfiguration. It affirms that the truest knowledge of God is found not in definition, but in reverent surrender. The journey is not upward toward clarity, but inward toward mystery.

And so, we return to the face of God—not as image, but as encounter. Not as object of knowledge, but as the wound of being known. The face that blinds, that transfigures, that effaces the self who dared to see.

Let us abandon definition, and embrace mystery. Let us release certainty, and receive wonder. Let us remember, in silence, that we have been spoken into being by one who will not be spoken.

And in that shimmering absence, may we dwell.

Having traced the contours of absence through the voices of tradition, we stand now at a precipice. The theologians and mystics have led us to the edge of language, to the boundary where systematic thought dissolves into contemplation. What remains when historical survey falls silent? What emerges when the scholar’s pen is set down? We must now set aside even our carefully constructed apophatic theology, for what we seek precedes all theology—the unmediated encounter between the soul and its ineffable source. It is to this final threshold—not of further analysis, but of return to the originating silence—that we now turn.

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Meditation III: Return to Silence

The mystics spoke from silence and returned to it. Dionysius, from the summit of negation, advised: “Leave behind you everything perceived and understood….”[15] Eckhart dared to pray, “God, rid me of God.”[16] The Cloud counseled love—not thought, not form—love, as the only bridge through the cloud of unknowing.[17]

Now, having wandered long the corridors of theology, hearing the echo of centuries articulate and retreat, we arrive again—not at conclusion, but at the beginning.

Not a god named, but the God who names us. Not knowledge possessed, but a presence that possesses.

Here, the face of God no longer terrifies, for it no longer requires our gaze. Here, the void no longer threatens, for it holds us, cradles movement.

We speak, then we fall silent. We learn, then we forget. We know, then we are known.

So let the scaffolding fall. Let the doctrine be devoutly forgotten. Let the fire of yearning burn away the scroll.

The divine remains—not in image or language, but in the hush after. In that hush, we dwell.

At a total remove from condition, we find rest. Beyond movement, we discover true life. Outside imagination, we glimpse reality. Beyond name, discourse, and thought, we are embraced. Past being, unity, limit, and infinity, we return.[18]

Remembered. Released. Still.

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Endnotes

1. The phrase superluminous darkness (Greek: ὑπέρφωτον γνόφον) appears in the opening lines of the Mystical Theology attributed to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Greek text used here is drawn from Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne, vol. 3 (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1857), 997–1000. This foundational paradox of apophatic theology—a darkness more radiant than light—expresses the Dionysian claim that the divine transcends all affirmation and is to be approached through reverent unknowing. For a general discussion of the development and transmission of this tradition, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 225–230; see also Vol. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700) (1974), especially 32–39 and 215–219; Vol. 3, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300) (1978), 51–58; and Vol. 4, Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700) (1984), 234–238.
2. For a focused discussion of Pseudo-Dionysius’ apophatic theology in its patristic, philosophical, and reception context, see Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), esp. pp. 113ff. For an accessible English translation of the Dionysian corpus, see Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibhéid, ed. Paul Rorem (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987). The three introductory essays in that volume offer important perspectives on the historical reception of the Dionysian tradition: Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Odyssey of Dionysian Spirituality,” pp. 11ff; Jean Leclercq, “Influences and Noninfluence of Dionysius in the Western Middle Ages,” pp. 25ff; and Karlfried Froehlich, “Pseudo-Dionysius and the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century,” pp. 33ff.
3. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).
4. On the concept of theosis in the Eastern Christian tradition and its grounding in apophatic theology—especially as developed by Pseudo-Dionysius and interpreted within Orthodox mystical thought—see Nancy J. Hudson, “Theosis in the Greek Fathers and Pseudo-Dionysius,” in Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of Cusa (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 11–44.
5. Augustine of Hippo, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Part III, vol. 4, Sermons 94A–147A, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P., ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1992), Sermon 117, pp. 209-223.  
6. Thomas Aquinas, The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1920), I, q. 12, a. 4.
7. Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, trans. Oliver Davies (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 141-142. Meister Eckhart, in his sermons, presents a mature expression of apophatic thought through paradox and negation. For a representative example, see Sermon 52 in Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), 199ff; see also Bruce Milem, “Suffering God: Meister Eckhart’s Sermon 52,” Mystics Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1996): 69–90.
8. On the significance of The Cloud of Unknowing as a foundational text in the English apophatic tradition, see both Evelyn Underhill’s traditional rendering in The Cloud of Unknowing (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012; originally published London: Stuart & Watkins, 1912), which preserves the texture of Middle English spirituality, and Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s modernized version, The Cloud of Unknowing (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2009), which presents the text in accessible contemporary English. These complementary translations illustrate the dynamic between historical fidelity and modern readability in mystical literature.
9. For a classic treatment of negative theology within the Jewish philosophical tradition, particularly the limits of language in describing God, see Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), especially Part I, chapters L–LXI. This edition reprints the original 1904 translation first published in London.
10. On the Hindu expression of apophatic insight, particularly the formulation “neti, neti” (“not this, not this”) found in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.3.6, see Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: With the Commentary of Shankaracharya (Shankara Bhashya), trans. Swami Madhavananda (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 1950), pp. 336–337. For the Buddhist articulation of emptiness (śūnyatā) in relation to apophatic thought, see Jay L. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, trans. and comm. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 281–282 n. 104 and p. 325 n. 126.
11. William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), Chapter I, “The Divine Presence.” On the Sufi understanding of divine unknowability and the paradox of perception, see William C. Chittick, Sufism: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2000; ebook 2011), p. 42. Chittick cites Abu Bakr’s famed aphorism: “Incapacity to perceive is perception,” capturing the apophatic logic at the heart of Sufi mysticism.
12. On the notion of divine withdrawal (kenosis) and the tension between presence and absence in mystical theology, see Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002; originally published 1947), pp. 15 and 32.
13. On Jean-Luc Marion’s account of divine self-revelation as the paradigm of saturated phenomena, see Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 234ff.
14. Denys Turner frames apophatic theology as a disciplined intellectual practice, emphasizing its philosophical rigor and alignment with rational humility. He challenges the notion that apophatic theology is synonymous with mystical experientialism or irrationalism—arguing instead that it is the highest form of rational thought acknowledging its own limits. His second chapter on Pseudo-Dionysius is particularly significant, exploring the tension between knowing and unknowing, and demonstrating that apophatic theology, while paradoxical, is a systematic approach to understanding divine transcendence. See Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
15. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibhéid, ed. Paul Rorem (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987) Chapter 1, Section 1, 135.
16. This prayer appears in Meister Eckhart’s German Sermon 52. Bruce Milem discusses its significance in his essay, where the line is as “Therefore I beg God that he make me empty of God,” see Suffering God: Meister Eckhart’s Sermon 52, Mystics Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1996), pp. 81ff.
17. Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, Translated by Evelyn Underhill (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012), Chapter 6: “He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never.”
18. This concluding paragraph deliberately echoes the epigraph from Pseudo-Dionysius’s The Divine Names, bringing the meditation full circle.

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