Wow! I really lack the words to express how much I appreciate your explanation, but I guess that's the point. Your students are blessed indeed! Thank you so much for this!!!

Just fantastic. Excellent analysis! thank you so much. -Pastor Kent Simmons

Enjoyed this talk very much thank you.

Excellent work. Thank you.

I teach theology online and appreciated this much. thanks.

While I admire the mental gymnastics here, I wonder why it is that we think we can use mere human reason to understand an entity which is not even created, unlike everything else in the universe we know about, and is infinitely more intelligent that we are, as inspection of any aspect of the universe will show. Why not just accept that we do not and cannot know God?

100% agree. ALL words about god are useless. Nothing more need be said. So, now we turn to ways of directly experiencing God and here the Eastern paths are way ahead of Western methods.

Fantastic

An alternative version of this video could just be this lady mimicking Cratylus' heavenward finger.

I realize no one's commented on this video in a while. Just now getting to St. John's timeline myself. But, wondering, if a state of apophasis is beyond words...is it also true to say it is beyond thought as well?

It doesn't seem as if language fails as we couldn't have known beforehand if it was up to the task of elucidating God. So, the failure is one of desire. If we curb our desire, then language is perfectly adequate. Maybe you want to ask, "Whence the desire?" Ok, but shouldn't the starting point be temporal and biological as opposed to eternal and immaterial?

To say that creatio ex nihilo isn't a biblical doctrine is not entirely true. Yes, you won't find it in the so-called 'Protestant' old testament, but you do find it in 2. Maccabees 7:28: "I beseech you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed. Thus also mankind comes into being." And St. Paul at least hints at it, in Romans 4:17, when he says that God "calls into existence the things that do not exist."

Why wasn't this presented to me in church?

“There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia. I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blossom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. ... Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can't take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower... I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism_, less well defined: an open hearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assisi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant moments: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God's arms. When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, 'Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.' That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism. But, I'm sorry, I'm going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.” ― Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd ----------------

Your voice is easy on the ears. Great summarization on the subject.

Taking your point, yet it is called the “via negativa”

1:30 bookmark

Wow...It seems to me that if this is truest speech we can have about God, we should just stop talking about Him altogether.

Non-dual. God is simply All (which includes Nothing). Or more succinctly, I Am.

Great! Yet, via negativa is experienced by mystics, not by preachers.

Is apophatic theology just deconstruction?

It is called catharsis and it works... As a matter of fact, the method stands on its own two feet, strongly, as we speak.

I think it is funny that when she discusses the Pseudo-Dionysius they show a picture of a saint with a halo. He was a faker, plain and simple. That he had some interesting ideas does not contradict that basic fact, which does not get emphasized here. So it seems a tad unrealistic, ironically when talking about ultimate things.

It’s impossible to talk meaningfully about something that is by definition beyond language

They all need to give up the word God.

It’s not that all language fails there is deceptive language in every language and this is not the language of the Lord. Think of a naturally created thing or attribute. then think of a word that describes that thing with no negative connotations, that is the correct way of reasoning. Words with only negative connotations or meanings that have the opposite of the lords language is language used to deceive. holy🤚wholly✋Holy for example

1 kings 8 1-12.

Apophatic theology's philosophical ancestor is probably the Upanishad (see Swami Sarvapriyananda and Deepak Chopra) which was adopted and heightened by Buddhism's on Nothingness, hence if Pilate were to ask "What is Truth?"-- Buddha would answer, "The Truth cannot be said" and like Jesus, remain silent. 😊 Considering the Indo-European roots of most western languages, so much theological thinking along with the Sanskrit vocabulary was borrowed from India.

What a pointless idea