Christian Agnosticismis thick with possibility. On the one hand, the offi ce recognises
that the night’s silence may be full of ‘fears and terrors’, in the
words of the offi ce hymn – for sustained silence is a frighten-
ing thing. On the other hand, the silence portends the moment
of death, the moment when words will cease forever. Compline
powerfully conjures up another replete silence.
Beyond experience
The apophatic tradition, also known as mystical theology,
stresses a similar process of speaking in order to clear an intel-
lectual path through what God is not to silence. In Christianity,
one of the fi rst great articulators of the unknowability of God
was Gregory of Nyssa. He argued that God was both infi nite –
lest God was limited by something – and unknowable, even in
theory: after all, he says, echoing debates that continue to this
day, we do not even know what the essence of an ant is, much
less God.
Gregory taught that the inability to comprehend God forms
the basis of a progress from the initial darkness of brute igno-
rance, through spiritual illumination, to a second darkness when
the mind appreciates the mystery of God. He used the story of
the encounters between God and Moses to illustrate the point.
Before the Burning Bush, Moses was simply ignorant. The
Burning Bush represents the phrase in which he tried to speak
of God: for Moses, the high point of enunciation was in the rev-
elation of the name of God – ‘I am that I am’ – though clearly,
and quite deliberately, that phrase is no name. Next, Moses
meets God in the pillar of cloud. This emphasises that, for all
the light of his earlier theophany, God cannot actually be seen
with the senses. Finally, on Mount Sinai, Moses learns that God
cannot be known with the mind too. Divine darkness is the end
of the journey that started with ignorant darkness.
Nicholas of Cusa, a fi fteenth-century cardinal and human-
ist of the Renaissance, fi lls out the parameters of this negative
way. His best-known work is entitled De docta ignorantia, ‘Of