15. We Are United to God as to One Unknown.
15. We are United to God as to One Unknown.15
Aquinas has much to say about the Apophatic Divinity. “The cause at which we wonder is hidden from us,” he writes. We can and do wonder, and wonder is the beginning of our spiritual journey. But the cause of what we wonder at is hidden behind a veil of mystery.
We also “are united to God as to one Unknown.” God is, therefore, “the Unknown One.” Aquinas insists upon the transcendence of the divine, but he does not define the divine transcendence in a lazy fashion. For him God is not transcendent because divinity is “out there” some place or far away or up in the sky. No! For Aquinas, “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” And “God is in all things in the most intimate way” (87).
God is transcendent, says Aquinas, because God is “far beyond anything we think.” God is so profound that we cannot go there. “God alone knows the depths and riches of the Godhead, and divine wisdom alone can declare its secrets.” There are secrets that only the divine knows. Sometimes we can partake of those secrets, but rarely and by invitation only. We call it grace. We call it revelation. Eckhart called it “breakthrough,” in which we learn “that God and I are one.”
Says Aquinas: “There is something about God that is altogether unknown to persons in this life, namely what God is. For this reason Paul found in Athens the altar inscribed to an ‘unknown God.’ This is so because human knowledge begins from those things that are connatural to it, that is from creatures known from sense. Yet these are not proportionate to represent the divine essence.”
Humans simply cannot “wrap their mind around God,” as Estelle Frankel, psychotherapist and student of Kabbalah (a form of Jewish mysticism), puts it in her important book, The Wisdom of Not Knowing.20 Wisdom is bigger than knowledge. It is often beyond words.
Aquinas lived the Via Negativa, becoming mute for a year up to his death. This was a radical act of letting go, one probably brought on by a stroke. Aquinas discovered the Via Negativa in a special way during the final year of his life when he was struck dumb and tasted silence. Silence reigned. This prolific writer and communicator of knowledge put down his pen forever.
The greatest accomplishment
of the human mind
is to know
that it does not know
who God is.