Main news for 22 February 2017

What is communion with God? What forms can it take? One thing is obvious: however hard a person may try, whatever efforts he may make, he can do nothing to draw near to God. Therefore a person cannot imagine God either. Of course, in human language one can find words to somehow characterize the One, but all these characteristics will be only human perceptions of the properties that the same human being ascribes to the One. What He is actually like can be told only by Him Himself, if, of course, He wishes it. It is no accident that the highest achievement of pagan mysticism became apophaticism, the renunciation of any definitions and characteristics of the One. But can God Himself not tell a person what He is like? Yes and no. Of course, God can reveal Himself to a person and really does reveal Himself when He considers it necessary. But how can He reveal Himself to him? No human being, nor anyone else created by Him, will ever see or know Him as God sees and knows Himself. We can know God only as He reveals Himself to us. It would seem that there is no problem here: symbols exist in human culture precisely in order to express something ambiguous, something in which form and content stand in complex, dynamic relations. The trouble, however, is that fallen man is inclined to absolutize form, often to the detriment of content, especially when the matter concerns religious forms, which are most often used to express and embody revelation. In that case it is better to do without form altogether, at least visual form, for it is the image that most easily becomes something self-sufficient, obscuring and pushing into the background what it was meant to symbolize. But communication is necessary, and words too can become emptied out, losing their meaning. Yes, of course; but it is simpler for God to communicate with us precisely through the word, for speech is a deeply personal process, inseparable from the expression and embodiment of meanings a person has perceived and experienced as his own. Verbal communication can even be supraverbal; nothing prevents God from communicating with a person directly at the level of meanings that the person himself will embody in words. In this way the dangerous human absolutization of form at the expense of meaning can be avoided. And God accepts this above all for the sake of the human being himself, so that revelation may reach those to whom it is addressed in the greatest possible purity and fullness.