How to Speak of God Through “Not” Without Breaking Logic or Masking Petty Arbitrariness as Sacred Mystery

“Supernal Trinity, above deity and goodness.”

— Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology, I.1; opening fragment of a prayer invocation, English translation prepared for this article from the Russian adaptation of John Parker.

When a believer passionately insists that God is good, all-wise, and alive, only to turn around a minute later and declare that God is “neither good, nor all-wise, nor alive,” any ordinary person’s eye will twitch with good reason. It immediately sparks suspicion: is this closeted atheism or just a hall pass for blatant nonsense? But hold on: the formulas “this object physically does not exist” and “this source of being cannot be shoved into your kitchen-drawer categories” mean entirely different things.

I. What Negative Theology Actually Negates

Apophatic negation does not announce that God does not exist. It merely raps our vocal apparatus on the knuckles whenever it attempts to stuff the incomprehensible into cheap everyday templates. The assertion “God has no body” is not an admission of emptiness, but a negation of material limitation. Saying “God is not good” in theological discourse does not imply that He is evil, but that His goodness is not exhausted by the human way of attributing goodness.

Paired hand-in-glove with apophatics is cataphatics — the affirmative route. First, we boldly address God as loving and wise, and then we painstakingly dissect which part of that description points toward Him and which part belongs purely to the narrow confines of our own skulls. Negation does not dangle in midair; it works exclusively upon already articulated affirmations.

In ordinary life, we employ similar limits: the phrase “a friend is not a utility to me” does not mean the friend is useless; it simply forbids reducing a living person to pragmatic payoff. Of course, that is merely a conditional everyday illustration that proves nothing about God Himself, where the scale is incommensurably grander. Negation is designed to fix specific mental glitches. If one simply scatters the word “not” indiscriminately, apophatics degenerates into verbal fog, allowing anyone to dodge straightforward questions under the pretext of “transcendence”. Authentic apophatics is rigorous mental discipline, not a life preserver for lazy minds.

II. Dionysius: Prayer to the Trinity First, Revoking Definitions Later

The treatise The Mystical Theology does not kick off with an abstract abolition of common sense, but with a direct prayer invocation of the Trinity and guidance addressed to his pupil Timothy. This Christian trinitarian context is essential: the author is not running a philosophical debunking of religion or trying to prove its impossibility. Right in chapter one, Dionysius stresses that affirmations and negations here cannot be taken as crude, head-on opposites (The Mystical Theology, Chapter I).

Modern scholarship dates the corpus to the late fifth or early sixth century, which is why it is historically accurate to call the author Pseudo-Dionysius rather than the literal disciple of the Apostle Paul (SEP Historical and Philosophical Overview). His text weaves together Christian tradition and late Neoplatonism while remaining inside the boundaries of church tradition, Scripture, and reflections on divine names.

At first glance, a paradox looms: why pray to Someone about Whom you refuse to speak coherently? But Dionysius distinguishes between a personal relationship with God and the illusion of holding an exhaustive formula about Him. A prayerful appeal does not require that you first cram the Creator into a pocket manual of concepts. The apophatic way dismantles the smug assumption that piling up terms brings us closer to exhausting the incomprehensible. At the same time, this short treatise on sacred silence cannot be torn from its habitat to serve as an indulgence for stamping any private subjective feeling as supreme truth.

III. Why “Not Living” Does Not Mean “Dead”

The main stumbling block for superficial reading lurks in chapter five of the treatise, where not only corporeal attributes are systematically dismantled, but even concepts of intellect, light, and life itself (Chapters IV–V). The casual observer jumps to a conclusion: if not living, then obviously a corpse. But theology refuses to buy into that primitive binary game.

When speaking of a living creature, losing life spells death. Yet by no means is every negation of a property a privation. God is not an ordinary item in a warehouse catalogue of things. In apophatics, “not living” signifies transcending the entire category, not suffering a loss, defect, or absence. Our biological and conceptual term “life” is simply inadequate to encompass the Primal Source of all being.

This is precisely where the famous trope of “dazzling darkness” originates. Following Moses ascending Mount Sinai, the theologian enters a darkness that signifies the outer boundary of human reasoning, not demonic plots or intellectual deficiency (Chapter I, §3, and Chapter II). It would be extraordinarily naive to reduce this “darkness” to a physiological brain state or some trendy psychological technique. Dionysius is discussing a theological stance toward God through prayer and philosophy, not monitoring neuron firing rates.

IV. Positive Names: Why You Can’t Just Shut Up

If language is so feeble, why not simply zip our lips and stay silent? Within the religious life under examination, positive assertions are indispensable for prayer, doctrine, and ethical claims.

Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae unpacks the inner workings of divine names in detail (Summa Theologiae, I, Question 13, Article 5). He repudiates two extremes:

Univocal equivalence: when the statement “God is wise” is taken in the exact literal sense as “Grandpa is wise,” merely blown up to infinite scale. Infinitely magnifying a human attribute just paints a cosmic trivia master who collects data.
Pure equivocation: when words applied to God carry no human meaning whatsoever, turning all speech into hollow noise.

Aquinas puts forward the analogical mode of speech, which rests on the ontological relation of creation to its Primal Source. This is neither a hunt for flashy poetic metaphors nor a bid for emotional drama; Aquinas justifies this link through a theological model of the world’s origin in God.

Positive names and apophatic negations act as a system of checks and balances. Cataphatics prevents dialogue from drowning in shapeless indeterminacy, while apophatics keeps us from cobbling together an idol out of concepts and crowing, “Behold, an exhaustive portrait of God!” A formulation can be completely meaningful without claiming to exhaust the reality it points to.

V. Apophatics, Agnosticism, and Atheism: Don't Confuse Apples with Engine Oil

Superficial critics love to brand apophatic theology as bashful atheism or a flavor of agnosticism. That is a fundamental blunder. Agnostic positions vary: they can express doubt or suspend judgment regarding God’s existence, or dispute the availability of knowledge about Him. The Christian theologian, by contrast, already operates from within faith, probing the limits of language when addressing the One being worshipped.

Atheism denies God’s reality, whereas apophatics merely denies that God is an entity among entities in the physical world. The official Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly prescribes purifying human speech of finite imagery, without doing away with the reality of knowing God (Catechism, §§39–43).

That said, apophatics must never serve as a bulletproof vest for shady rhetoric. Acknowledging that the Divine surpasses human categories is one thing; using that formula to sanction moral relativism or the arbitrary whims of abusive clergy is quite another. Intellectual honesty demands critiquing what a tradition actually asserts, rather than caricatures invented on its behalf.

VI. Silence: The Fruit of Heavy Lifting, Not an Empty Head

Theological silence has nothing in common with intellectual laziness. In Dionysius, silence falls at the summit of intricate, demanding analytical work, not because someone kept their mouth shut for three minutes and fancied themselves a mystic.

Silence takes many shapes: ignorance of facts, fear, reverent deference before tragedy, or sheer tongue-tied helplessness. In a hypothetical modern scenario, someone suffers a heartbreaking calamity, and a bystander mumbles through their teeth: “The Lord works in mysterious ways”. Such a platitude can abruptly shut down any space to voice pain. This is an ethical modern application, not an instruction manual by Dionysius on grief counseling. Respecting the edge of language ought to show up as compassionate presence and practical help, not as sanctimonious tropes.

Furthermore, invoking sacred mystery is utterly illegitimate where facts are required. When dealing with damages, broken agreements, or abuses of authority, crying “divine incomprehensibility” fails to answer what actually happened. A religious mystery does not turn a bank account balance into a mystery.

VII. The Mystery of the Creator vs. The Petty Secrets of Human Management

Here lies the watershed protecting common sense from gaslighting. The Creator’s incomprehensibility and the opacity of a bureaucrat, supervisor, or spiritual guide belong to entirely different orders of reality. In the Christian framework examined, a finite definition cannot exhaust God; human opacity, on the other hand, consists of hidden circumstances that can and should be investigated. Coating earthly despotism with the word “mystery” does not make it holy.

There is a world of difference between authentic humility (“I cannot exhaust God in a formula”) and coerced servility (“you have no right to question management”). Human limitations constrain leaders every bit as much as their subordinates.

Incomprehensibility never invalidates rational critique: you cannot reach out and touch the horizon, but that is no excuse for navigating with a bogus map. Apophatics does not license spouting nonsense across every domain of life. The phrase “a long wait” is not absurd — we are simply transposing a spatial category onto a temporal scale. But if someone meets every straightforward question with evasive contradictions, that neither justifies what was said nor constitutes an apophatic breakthrough.

VIII. Incomprehensibility Does Not Abolish Morality or Consent

The limitations of human vocabulary do not render all behavior equally indifferent. Jumping from “God surpasses our concepts” to “therefore I cannot tell sadism from care” is a monstrous fraud that apophatics does not authorize for a second.

When a spiritual mentor or cult leader commits abuse while murmuring, “Simpletons cannot grasp the higher spiritual logic,” that does not relieve them of accountability for their actions. Any preacher remains a human being whose actions are subject to scrutiny. No mystical surrender of the ego ever cancels out the foundational necessity of personal consent, clear boundaries, and the right to walk away.

Ethics demands affirmative concepts: harm, rights, care, responsibility. Justice cannot be constructed solely on an apophatic suspicion of words. Harm remains harm, no matter how ornate the theological drapery thrown over it.

IX. Words Without Claims of Absolute Ownership

Apophatic theology teaches a rare intellectual sobriety: speaking meaningfully without fancying oneself the owner of the reality being spoken of. Dionysius keeps the flame of prayer burning without dismantling faith; Thomas Aquinas builds a rigorous doctrine of analogy without reducing God to an oversized human.

For modern life, the takeaway is grounded and practical:

Say less when your tongue is itching to pronounce absolute verdicts on someone else’s fate.
Speak with razor-sharp precision when someone attempts to camouflage tangible harm behind pious smog.
Remember: not all silence is profound, and not all incoherence is sacred.

Voluntary Authorial Practice of Language Calibration

The following exercise is purely voluntary and personal in nature. It is a secular analytical tune-up for one’s own phrasing, not a sacramental religious rite or a universal interdenominational liturgy:

Pinning down the assertion. Select a sweeping everyday judgment (“He never had any respect for me,” “My entire career is ruined”).
Separating the fact from the totalizing portrait. Isolate verifiable events (“He raised his voice during yesterday’s meeting”) and sever them from global psychic projections (“He has always despised my entire being”). Narrowing the scope of judgment does not excuse bad behavior — it simply decouples the concrete incident from an imagined cosmic catastrophe.
Defining the boundary. Draft a clarified version: “If his action crossed my boundaries, I can name that violation without attributing motives to him that I cannot know”. This defends personal boundaries without pretending to read other people's minds.
Testing the consequences. Did the revised wording help resolve the problem and clearly articulate the facts, or did it merely provide an excuse to bury your head in the sand? Tamping down one’s own intellectual arrogance is healthy; paralyzing one’s capacity to act and protect oneself is disastrous.

When reading religious texts, a different sequence is helpful. First, locate the positive affirmation. Next, identify precisely what the author is negating. Finally, watch whether the text circles back to prayer, action, or specific doctrine. That way, paradox stops being a detached, clever quip and reveals itself as an unfolding movement of thought.

If you already participate in Christian communal life, this kind of work can unfold within your own tradition, discussing tricky passages with a qualified interlocutor. This article does not establish a uniform prayer practice across denominations. If you do not share the faith, grasping the internal logic of the argument is quite enough without mimicking religious experiences.

Second Key Citation

“It is neither darkness nor light.”

— Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology, V, English translation prepared for this article from the Russian adaptation of John Parker. Negating both terms shows that the point is not choosing gloom over radiance, but stepping beyond the human habit of categorizing reality altogether.

Analytical Comparison of Traditions

These comparisons highlight logical parallels in framing questions, without claiming genetic doctrinal kinship. The Christian Trinity, Kabbalistic tzimtzum, the Upanishadic concept of Brahman, and Stoic self-discipline represent fundamentally distinct frameworks that cannot be blended into a single pot.

Question	Positions Examined	Core Parallels	Boundaries and Distinctions
Negation and naming	Dionysius, I.1–2 and Aquinas, I q13 a5	Seeking meaningful language about God without the illusion of an exhaustive definition.	Dionysius is immersed in prayerful ascent; Aquinas's logical treatise on analogy is an independent metaphysical argument, not a mere paraphrase of Dionysius.
Conceptual limits and real speech	Dionysius, IV–V and Catechism, §§39–43	Pairing the recognition of linguistic limits with the preservation of doctrinal speech.	The Catechism sets a Catholic dogmatic baseline, which does not automatically turn every daring paradox of Dionysius into a universal rule.
Negation in instruction	Dionysius, V and Brihadaranyaka, II.3.6	The formula “not this, not that” (neti-neti) bounds predicates without negating Ultimate Reality itself.	Vedantic Brahman and the Christian Trinity are distinct doctrines; a snippet from one text does not capture the vast diversity of Indian philosophical schools.
Rejection of corporality	Dionysius, IV and Shneur Zalman, Tanya, Chapter 7	Literal physical and spatial imagery can distort speech about God.	The Hasidic doctrine of non-literal contraction (tzimtzum) tackles different concerns and deploys an entirely different conceptual apparatus than Christian apophatics.
What is restricted	Dionysius, I.2 and Epictetus, §§1, 5	Disentangling objective reality from baseless human projections and overreaching claims.	Stoic governance of one's judgments is ethical mental hygiene, not mystical theology; it proves nothing regarding the Creator's incomprehensibility.

Sources with Direct Links

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Mystical Theology, Chapter I, §§1–2, translated by John Parker: prayerful opening and the relationship of affirmations to negations.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Chapter I, §3; Chapter II: the ascent of Moses, divine gloom, and the movement of negations.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Chapters IV–V: systematic negation of sensible and intelligible categories.
Kevin Corrigan, L. Michael Harrington. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: historical background of the corpus and the metaphysical distinction between negation and privation.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, I, q.13, especially Article 5: doctrine of the analogical use of divine names via the relation of creature to source.
Catechism of the Catholic Church. §§39–43, How Can We Speak about God?: theological guidelines for limited yet authentic discourse concerning God.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, II.3.1–6, translated by F. Max Müller, SBE XV: negative method of characterizing Brahman in the Upanishadic tradition.
Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Tanya, Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah, Chapter 7, with Chabad commentary: non-literal interpretation of tzimtzum and the impermissibility of attributing spatial locomotion to God.
Epictetus. Enchiridion, §§1, 5, translated by Elizabeth Carter: distinguishing judgments within our power from external circumstances in the Stoic tradition.

About the Authors

Andrey Zarinsh — author and founder of the United Wisdom project. Explores themes of inner transformation, unity among traditions, intercultural dialogue, and contemporary spiritual discipline. Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh.

Maria Evilkut — co-author at United Wisdom. Alongside research work, she focuses on testing these ideas in practice and observing how principles of unity and mutual understanding function in real-world human and cultural contexts. Instagram: @ilkutki.