Radical negation

[R]adical negation and the deliberate use of unlike likenesses will characterize our apophatic speech… the language of unknowing. Inadequate words – all words, that is – are not only to be unsaid but unlearned, unknown.…We are not to think of the kind of ignorance that just refers to a lack or deprivation of knowledge; that is like the kind of darkness that can be dispelled by light. Just as there is a higher darkness at the top of Sinai, a pregnant and shining darkness, so there is another kind of ignorance, a holy unknowing that transcends our knowing of all that is knowable… Whereas negation or unsaying is a process, a continual practice along the whole of the ascent (or, in the more passive language these texts [of the Dionysian corpus] prefer, the process of being ‘lifted up’), unknowing not only describes the repeated decision ‘not to know’ ideas along the way but also, and more often, a state of being, the mental state of one who has come into the cloud atop Sinai. If God is…