YAKOV KROTOV

Written in 1993:

HOW TO UNDERSTAND RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY: APOPHATISM

The western myth states that the main difference between Eastern and Western Christianity is equal to the difference of rational and mystical, positive (kataphatical) and negative (apophatical) ways of knowing God. Dan Clendenin illustrates the theses by negative reaction of some of his Russian students to the books of CS Lewis: "too logical and rational."

Such statement is not totally false but it is certainly too banal to be true. It is the myth created in the XIXth century on the base of romantic and post-romantic pattern. This pattern operates mostly by the juxtaposition of "natural" (mystic, good, eastern) and "artificial" (rational, bad, western). The more profound view is that all Earth, West and East are in the one human soul. Any alive culture, religion, nation contains all the contradictions inside itself, not outside. So Clendenin forgets that CS is very popular in Russia now, here his books are edited in an astonishment amount of copies. On the other side he forgets that CS had a strong criticism in the West. He was criticized for being too logical and rational! So the opposition rational/irrational explains very little. Certainly, it depicts some truth - but only a slight accent. Moreover, it is unlogical to equal the pair logical/illogical and apophatic/cataphatic. You can speak about silence very logically and eloquently. This is the case with Eastern Orthodox theologians. Yes, there was no creators of Summa's, of systems - but there have been the stage of scholasticism. St. Mark of Ephes (XV century) is no less rational and logical then St. Thomas Aquinas (XIV century).

It is better and more correct to speak about the myth itself, about the self-conscience of West and East. West prefers to think about rationalism as more valuably quality than irrationalism, West thinks he is rational - and East prefers to think that he is irrational and apophatic. But these are mere slogans. It is the ideal construction, not the diversity of reality. This distinction doesn't exterminate the mentioned opposition - it only put it on more precise place.

The insistence in God's unknowability is connected with the perception of revelation as a process through which eternal Truth comes to the world of time. This process can never be fully or adequately expressed in terms of human language, because time is one of language's fundamentals and so the essence of language is incompatible with the essence of God (a nice example: language gives us a chance to ask the absurd question, "What did God do before creation?")

Certainly, the Eastern Orthodox perfectly well know the places in the Gospel calling us to know God (John 1:18, 17:3, Philippians 3:8). But we distinguish two concepts of knowledge: one is identical with the ancient Middle Eastern Bible mentality, the second with ancient Greece and Rome, mentality of the great philosophers. One is the knowledge as a process of love to somebody, an infinite going inside one's person without damaging either participant of love. Such knowledge is the knowledge of marital love, as it is present in the Song of Songs.

The second concept is empirical knowledge through science, through mechanical analysis of some object. To know something in the first sense you must love this, to know something in the second sense you had better kill this and then investigate it. The first kind of knowledge is infinite and risky. The second is limited, with strict criteria for success.

So when Fairbairn writes: "The Eastern emphasis on God's unknowability leads to the belief that the purpose of theology is union with God rather than knowledge of Him," he makes a false opposition. I hope I make the point that union with God is just the same as knowledge of Him. It is to Russians.