Grasping the Spiritual

Keep on working on this nothingness that is nowhere and do not try to involve your body’s senses or their proper objects.... Do not try to use your interior or exterior senses to grasp the spiritual. Those who set out to work in the spirit thinking that they should see, hear, taste, smell, or feel the spiritual, either interiorly or exteriorly, are greatly deceived and violate the natural order of things.... What I am trying to say is that humankind knows the things of the spirit more by what they are not than by what they are. Our spiritual faculties, on the other hand, are equally limited in relation to the knowledge of God as God is in himself. For no matter how much a person may know about every created spiritual thing, his intellect will never be able to comprehend the uncreated truth that is God. But there is a negative knowledge that does understand God. It proceeds by asserting of everything it knows: this is not God, until finally one comes to the point where knowledge is exhausted. This is the approach of St. Dionysius the Areopagite who said, “The most divine knowledge of God is that which is known by not- knowing.”

– from The Cloude of Unknowyng, Anonymous, 14th century

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