NOTES for Deu 4:12
What is communion with God? How does it happen? One thing is obvious: no matter how hard a person, no matter the efforts displayed, he can do nothing to approach God. And that is why man cannot imagine God. Certainly, one can find in human language words to somehow characterize the Only, but all these characteristics will be only a human perception of those properties, which man attributes to the Only. But who He is really, can be said only by Him Himself, If He will want to do that of course. It is not by chance the highest achievement of heathen mysticism became apophatic, the refusal of whatever definitions and characteristics of the Only. But can’t God Himself tell man, who He is? And yes, and no. Of course, God can reveal Himself to man and indeed reveals Himself when He finds necessary.
But how can He reveal Himself to him? The way God sees and knows Himself, will never see and know Him either man, or somebody else created by Him. We can know God only as He reveals Himself to us. It would seem there is no problem here: that’s why symbols exist in the human culture, in order to express something ambiguous, something where form and content are under dynamic complex relationship. The problem however consists of fact that the fallen man is inclined to make absolute the form, often to the detriment of the content, particularly when it is about religious forms, which are mostly used for the expression and the realization of revelations.
And in such a case it is really better in general not to use the form, at least, the visual: because, it is in particular the image that is most easily transformed into something self-sufficient, darkening and relegating in the second plan what it was intended to symbolize. But isn’t necessary communication, and the words can also be emasculated, by losing their meaning? Yes, of course; but it is easier for God to communicate with us in particular through the word: because the word is a process deeply personal, it is inseparable of the expression and the realization of the meanings that man perceived and experienced, as his own.
Verbal communication can in general be over the words, nothing prevents God from communicating with man directly at the level of meanings, which man himself will materialize in words. Like this we can avoid to make absolute the form to the detriment of the meaning, dangerous for man. And God makes it, above all for the sake of man. So that the revelation arrives to those, to whom it is addressed, in maximum purity and fullness.