Ascent into Darkness

We must ask ourselves, where does a human being meet God? And the answer has to be, not ultimately in or with the human mind, but in the darkness. This is called “apophatic knowing,” knowing through darkness which is not the absence of God, but the experience of full Presence.

It is hard, perhaps, to imagine that the word darkness could mean anything other than annihilation and death. But in terms of the deepest sapiential teaching, it means something that is quite opposite. To ascend into the darkness is not a descent into disintegration, but to transcend the “lesser lights” of human reason and understanding, and to move into the mystery beyond our capacity to grasp God intellecutally but to experience the “dazzling darkness of God.”

One cannot grasp God (for God is, by definition, beyond the human mind), but one can experience God by moving into that Presence beyond the visible and reasonable into the invisible “Cloud of Unknowing” where human consciousness meets the divine Consciousness as one living Presence. It is there, beyond human forms of cognition, that we enter the invisible Cloud of Divine Consciousness to discover, as Gregory of Nyssa once said, “the dark obscurity where God is.” One cannot call this ascent into darkness anything else but communion with God, which is not some seizure of God by the mind, but the deepest of relationships between living persons. It is here, paradoxically, in the depths of the heart, that one ascends into the sanctuary of divine darkness which becomes the passageway, called resurrection, from death into life.