The Church speaks, if one may say so conditionally, in three languages: the language of childhood, youth, and adulthood. With pagans and those baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity but not proclaimed, those “who do not know whether there is a Holy Spirit,” the Church speaks in the language of pedagogy, what in theological science is called cataphatic theology. Cataphatic theology is a pre-experiential language, where the word is addressed to those who have neither seen nor heard this reality and have no (conscious experience in the case of the baptized) experience of the reality being discussed. It is a language of parables, analogies, images, symbols in a secularized, earthly sense; it is an anthropomorphic language, a language of the human experience of the created world. Behind every word stands the experience (distorted, warped by sin) of the reality of the world that “lies in evil.” How to show or tell a color green to someone born blind, or how to interest him in full-fledged life, how to evoke in him the desire to go to the doctor to restore sight, or to transplant healthy eyes? Medicine is not yet able to do this, but the Church has been doing this for two thousand years—performing “transplants of any healthy organs, replacing the sick, the dead ones” so that he (the color green and the whole beautiful world) can see. “Do you hear, do you have hearing?” – the Church asks the blind. “Yes,” replies the blind, “only in the right ear, and only two percent.” Then the Church, based on the blind’s experiential hearing of sounds, begins to speak to him about colors in the language of sounds, in the language of music:
“Listen! Green color is ‘do’ of the first octave, which the Church plays for him on the violin! – Understand? – Yes! So listen further: Light green is ‘do’ of the second octave! Dark green – ‘do’ of the third octave! Red color – ‘re’ of the first octave, etc. Having rearranged and relabeled the entire gamut of basic colors and shades of the rainbow (sorry that I did not label them consistently) with sounds, it begins to paint a picture with sound colors. For example, the Icon of the Resurrection of Christ – with Vedel’s Easter canon. The proclaimed-blind cannot help but exclaim: “What a beautiful icon, what a masterpiece of painting, iconography,.. how beautiful.., I love colors, I like them very much… I want to see this icon!” This is all a process of interest, awakening the desire to see, to contemplate, to live fully. If someone has been awakened, interested, the Church brings him to the Hospital, where preparation (proclamation) for the Operation (the sacrament of baptism) begins. When after the Operation the blind sees and looks at the world with his eyes, he understands that he could not even imagine this beauty; he realizes that everything is not the way and not as they played for him on the violin; sounds and colors are absolutely different realities (yes, their nature is the same: waves of a certain length…, but we are not talking about that). But when the blind, who has regained sight, looks at the icon of the Resurrection of Christ and the musical work-icon by Vedel, he will surely say: it was correctly reflected in sounds the lines and colors of the icon. If the artist and the musician or composer are one person, then this person can paint a musical work with colors, or play a painting with sounds, or represent the same reality both in a musical work and on a canvas with colors; and it will be that one and the same reality is experienced, understood, and presented in two languages – of sounds and colors. But when the Church speaks, it speaks of the absolute “not like this and not like that”, it speaks of what “the eye has not seen, the ear has not heard, and has not entered into the heart of man”. And this “eye has not seen”, “ear has not heard” not because it has not yet come before the eyes, or there was no opportunity to overhear, but because a person, unenlightened by Baptism and the Eucharist, ontologically cannot see, hear: “looks and does not see”, “listens and does not understand”; more precisely, such a person does not have the organs to perceive Divine reality (they receive them in Baptism, and learn to use them in the Eucharist). Therefore, everything written (in words, sounds, colors, rites…), which is in the Church – is the language of cataphatic theology, addressed to the proclaimed with the purpose of interest, encouragement, urging to fight against passions, sin, in order to become capable of accepting the Grace of the Holy Spirit and adoption. The Church chooses the best that is valued in human earthly experience and marks them with Divine reality. For example: love, gratitude, justice, truth, power, knowledge, happiness…; and the Church takes these terms, which denote high qualities in a person and with them tells about God, who is transcendent to all created and says, multiplying to infinity, that God is Love, Wisdom, Happiness (the Kingdom of God), Almighty… And it says: you seek love – God is Love, you seek happiness – God is Happiness (the Kingdom of God), you seek joy – God is Joy, you seek truth – God is Truth, peace – God is Peace… Although God is neither the love we know, nor the peace we strive for, nor the truth we fight for, nor the happiness we dream of. He (God) is absolutely not like what we anthropomorphically think: “it has not entered into the heart of man who God is and how He is”. When we say that God is Love, we must understand that He is not like that, not in terms of quantity, but of quality (for example, sounds and colors). But while I am proclaimed, the Church can not tell me more (otherwise it will start to be idle talk). After proper proclamation (whether before baptism, or, unfortunately and to our great joy, if it is conducted, after baptism) and baptism, as the completion of proclamation and the actualization of the gift of deification in the Eucharist, the “blind” who “has seen”, sees that “everything is not like that and not like that”, as they told him “with sounds” about “colors” and what “illusory pictures” he imagined from what he heard. We do not immediately achieve perfection, do not immediately perceive and become capable of containing within ourselves the fullness of Divinity bodily, much work is still needed to the point of bloody sweat, to make the Gift of Divine Grace our own inalienable treasure. But the Christian-ascetic already knows from experience that God is nothing of what is in empirical earthly experience. Therefore, the Church speaks to him in the language of apophatic theology, which he can now understand, that God is not what He is represented by or spoken of by cataphatic theology. God is not love, God is not humility, God “not…”, “not…” from all that we can name with words that are born from experience according to the flesh. That is, God is Unspeakable, Supernatural, Ineffable, Invisible, Unlimited, Uncreated…, or, as the two natures in Christ: unmingled, unchangeable, indivisible and inseparable that is “not like that”, “not like that” and “not like that”! And how? And “not like that”. By denying our empirical experience according to the flesh, the Church in a negative, denying form gives us a more adequate (which is also inadequate, although more adequate for the mind, which has a partial experience of life in the Holy Spirit) conception of God. At this stage of spiritual growth, the Church communicates in the language of apophatic theology, lest the Christian reduce the experience he has lived through to psychology or emotions, and lest he stop at some stage, saying: here it is. At this stage of spiritual growth, another word is needed to verify his spiritual state, “whether we labor in vain”. And the third language of the Church is the language of the future age, that is, the language of the New Testament, in which Christians who have reached “the measure of the stature of Christ”, speak – silence about God. About God it is best to keep silent. This language is known, unfortunately, only to the Orthodox Church, and its experts, teachers are the venerable (similar in possible form in the flesh to Christ) fathers and mothers, whom tradition calls hesychasts (Greek “hesychia” – silence). Catholics stopped at cataphatic theology, even without understanding it. The fact that they do not know “hesychia in God” is enough to lead to a dispute between St. Gregory Palamas and Catholic theologians-scholastics-fantasizers. About Protestants even the talk cannot go – they have no theology at all. Thus, there are three languages of the Church: cataphatic theology for the proclaimed, pre-experiential; apophatic theology for those who “have tasted and known how good the Lord is”; silence, hesychia – the language of the perfect, who according to the word of the Venerable Isaac the Syrian – are units for entire generations. Due to lack of space, we cannot delve into this issue in detail, but we have made this schematic division to indicate where our place is – this is the antechamber of cataphatic theology. Since we cannot yet humble our proud mind with apophatic theology, we will complicate cataphatic constructions so that at some stage we do not say: “finally I understood”; because what is being discussed is not understood, but experienced integrally. God cannot be rationally understood or grasped apart from Life in God, in the Holy Spirit. But first let’s listen to the father, listen to his simple words (you can read his word again, but no longer as a fairy tale or something mundane and usual), which point to the Unfathomable Depth):