Ciphers of Transcendence

Abstract

This is an example of what is sometimes called apophatic theology: the theology of unknowing. Here, though, we must be careful not to let language dictate to us. To describe a question as theological implies that we already know the right kind of person to go to for an answer, i.e. a theologian. In much the same way; people these days are not said to have mental problems, they have psychological ones, the presumption being that they have problems of a kind that take a psychologist to solve. We need to watch this way of speaking. Long before any of these academic distinctions were invented, men and women had been faced with mysteries they could find no words for. They still are. All we can do is grope, for images, metaphors, anything from the familiar world that may somehow strike a match which will, however briefly, illuminate the darkness. So Bede in his Ecclesiastical History tells the story of the pagan chief who compared life to that swallow which flew in at one end of the hall and out at the other, coming from who knows whence and going who knows where an image much used by Christian preachers in centuries to follow~ So too the painter Paul Klee could compare the work of the artist to the trunk of a tree, knowing nothing either of the roots below or of the life in the branches above.3 For all of us, beyond what we know there will always be an infinite world of what we do not and never can know: It is in this soil of unknowing that the seed of all religions first take root. Once established, though, there seems to be an inevitable progression, if that is the word, though entropy might at first seem more appropriate, an inherent momentum in all religious traditions from the apophatic to the cataphatic,