Free The Case for God by Karen Armstrong Page B

because we did not know what God was that we could say that human beings could in some way share the divine nature. Even when we contemplated Christ the man, God itself remained opaque and elusive. Revelation did not provide us with clear information about God but told us that God was incomprehensible to us. Paradoxical asit might sound, the purpose of revelation was to tell us that we knew nothing about God. And the supreme revelation of the incarnate Logos made this clearer than ever. After all, we have to be
told
about something we do not know or we would remain completely unaware of it.
    For having become man … [God] himself remains completely incomprehensible. … What could do more to demonstrate the proof of the divine transcendence of being than this? Revelation shows that it is hidden, reason that it is unspeakable, and intellect that it is transcendently unknowable. 22
    These matters could not be settled by doctrinal formulations, because human language is not adequate to express the reality that we call “God.” Even words such as “life” and “light” mean something entirely different when we use them of God, so silence is the only medium in which it is possible to apprehend the divine.
    But this did not mean that people had merely to “believe” these unfathomable truths; on the contrary, they had to work very hard to achieve the mental stillness that made the experience of unknowing a numinous reality in their lives. Maximus’s theology was based on a spirituality that had developed shortly after Nicaea. At a time when many Christians recoiled from the specter of primordial nothingness, others moved forward to embrace it. While some were engaged in wordy disputes and technical Christological definitions, others opted for a spirituality of silence—not dissimilar to the Indian Brahmodya. The monks had become the Christian heroes par excellence; they flocked into the deserts of Egypt and Syria to live in solitude, meditating on the scriptural texts they had memorized and practicing spiritual exercises that brought them the same kind of serenity as that sought by Epicureans, Stoics, and Cynics. The Greek fathers regarded monasticism as a new school of
philosophia
. The monks practiced the Stoic virtue of
prosoche
, “attention to oneself;” they too prepared for death and adopted a way of life that made them
atopos
, an “unclassifiable” breach with the norm. 23 By the mid-fourth century, some of these desert monks had pioneered an a pophatic or “wordless” spirituality that brought them inner tranquillity
(hesychia)
.
    Evagrius of Pontus (c. 348–99), who became one of the leadinghesychasts of the Egyptian desert, taught his monks yogic techniques of concentration that stilled the mind, so that instead of seeking to limit the divine by confining it within rationalistic, human categories, they could cultivate an attentive, listening silence. 24 Prayer was not conversation with God or a busy meditation on the divine nature; it meant a “shedding of thoughts.” Because God lay beyond all words and concepts, the mind must be “naked”: “When you are praying, do not shape within yourself any image of the Deity,” Evagrius advised, “and do not let your mind be stamped with the impress of any forms.” 25 It was possible to gain an intuitive apprehension of God that was quite different from any knowledge derived from discursive reasoning. The contemplative must not expect exotic feelings, visions, or heavenly voices; these did not come from God but from his own fevered imagination and would merely distract him from his true objective: “Blessed is the intellect that has acquired complete freedom from sensations during prayer.” 26 Some of the Greek fathers called prayer an activity of the heart
(kardia)
, but this did not imply that it was an emotional experience. The “heart” represented the spiritual center of the human being, what the Upanishads called the atman, his or her true