An A–ZA practice of love This can be associated with Augustine, the
individual who asked, ‘What do I love when I love my God?’
He understood that he loved and longed for something which
he would never fully grasp. Love is like that: when people fall
in love, and commit to another, they engage in an essentially
future-oriented activity – saying from now on, I want to knit
my life with yours – though they don’t know what that future
contains: it’s that person they hope always to be discovering,
and themselves in that love too. How much more so with
God. ‘What do I love when I love my God?’ Augustine asks:
creation, existence, wonderment, silence? ‘I asked these ques-
tions simply by gazing at these things, and their beauty was
all the answer they gave.’ No more – but no less either. He did
love.
A practice of knowledge This can be associated with Nicholas
of Cusa, the Renaissance individual who wrote On Learned
Ignorance. He realised that the most complex, and therefore
probably the most meaningful human questions, are always
ultimately beyond our reach. The same principle is well dem-
onstrated by modern physics. Ask a physicist what light is, say,
and they will reply they don’t know, though they do know a
remarkable amount about it – how it looks like a particle if you
look at it in one way, and a wave if you do so in another. This
practice is important since it stresses that agnosticism is not
against progress in knowledge, and it is not wilful obscurantism.
Rather, it stems from the very process of learning itself. A way
of expressing that in more traditional spiritual terms would be
discernment and study.
A practice of negation This can be associated with Meister
Eckhart, the individual who went around medieval Europe
preaching, ‘If thou lovest God as God, as spirit, as Person or as
image, that must all go. Love him as he is: a not-God, a non-
spirit, a not-Person, a not-image.’ In short, whatever you say
God is, you must also say God is not, and if you don’t you risk
nothing less than idolatry. That even goes for the existence
of God, since existence is a property of fi nite things. To say