The second story of the same kind, in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John, is the story of a woman taken in adultery. Everything is against her; it is taken in action; she is brought to Christ; against it is the law of the Old Testament; They want to trap Christ in the fact that He will say: "Disregard the law, have pity on her..." And Christ does not do this; He does not say that an adulteress can be let go in peace; He does not say that it is possible to circumvent the law; He poses a question to people: if you want to apply the law, apply it; but be worthy of the law; whoever is without sin among you, let him punish this sinner with stoning... And one after the other they come out, because not one of them can say to himself that he does not fall under such a lawful condemnation. Christ turns to this woman, and it is clear that He does not say to her: "God is love – He will forgive everything", He says to her: "Where are those who condemned you? "They're all gone. "And I do not condemn you, go and sin no more..."

Christ is not speaking to an adulteress taken in sin, but to that woman who, because she was taken, because she stood before the condemnation of death through the law, discovered that sin is death; to the woman who stood before Him in terror of imminent impending death, and who, indeed, thought: if I were granted life, it would be a new life... And He turns to this woman, in whose heart, in the depths of her heart, either she has always been, in spite of her sinfulness, or the possibility of a new life was born, and says: Go, but sin no more...

Here, too, Christ, beyond everything that seems, everything obvious and provable, turns to a secret man, whom God sees, but whom people have not seen, because we judge by actions, by words, but not by the depths of our hearts... And this is also the realm of faith: the conviction that what is invisible is more real than what is visible...

Let's go back to the example I gave you earlier: to the stained glass window, which has gone out because the day is leaning towards night, and the light is no longer shining through it, and there are no more colors, no lines, but only a gray spot in the wall. If we return to these images, we are faced with the question of doubt: what I saw is real? Or was it a dream? dream? My desire, projected on reality? Is it there – or has it never been?..

The word doubt consists of two parts: so and opinion, to imagine two different things at the same time. We always perceive doubt – at least believers – tragically: suddenly everything has shaken; What seemed unconditional, indubitable begins to double, and we make a huge mistake, a double mistake.

First, doubt does not refer to the Living God Himself, but to what we thought of Him, as we imagined Him; The Living God does not change from our doubt. And secondly, we are afraid in vain, because doubt does not tell us: "What if there is no God, and what if everything I believed in does not exist," but only says: "You thought as a child, it is time for you to start thinking like an adult; you had children's ideas, it's time for you to form adult ideas; you thought about God in a primitive way, think about Him more deeply, more truthfully."

Doubt is a scientist's tool. When he has collected in a handful all the existing disparate facts, he tries to combine them into some theory, a general idea.

And he can question his idea because he does not hesitate for a single minute in the reality that is around him.

A believer and a theologian could do the same; when he begins to find that one or another of his ideas about God, about man, about the world does not satisfy him, then instead of being frightened, he could say: "How wonderful, how wonderful! It means that I, as a particle, a conciliar particle of the Church, have grown into a new measure, doubt is beginning to arise in me, which means that there are new answers, new data, a new depth of knowledge, which now, now, can open up before me." And this is very important; This does not mean that we should lightly destroy and shake the foundations of our faith, but it means that all that has been said is unsatisfactory. As one of the Fathers of the Church said, everything we say about God in accordance with His own revelation and with the experience of the Church may be the ultimate truth for the earth, but it is not the entire truth for God; God is always more than anything we can say about Him. Truth is an expression of what is, but not reality itself. Reality is both incomprehensible to the end and inexpressible to the end. It could, although if reality and truth do not coincide, be expressed adequately by a pure symbol. In the twelfth century, the Jewish writer in Spain, Maimonides, said that if we want to find a way to express God directly, without evoking any mental representations and therefore without causing any prejudice or negative reactions, we must single out one musical note that we have no right to use for anything else. And this note should sound every time we want to say the word God or express the concept of God; because it would be a pure symbol that carries nothing in itself except what it signifies. But even so, it is a designation, not God Himself.

And here in our thinking it is very important, it seems to me, to remember that no matter how we express our knowledge, our experiential knowledge about God, about man, about the universe, about the spiritual world, it is only an expression; and that even when we take the Holy Scriptures as revelation, it is a revelation according to the measure of man, and not according to the measure of God; it is revelation in the sense that it says all that man could comprehend about God, but not all that God is. It is an expression of what a human word should convey about God, and nothing more.

And therefore, however sacred, however dear this or that truth may be to us, we must remember that it is a designation, not the thing itself. Only once Truth and reality were perfectly combined: in Christ, Who says: "I am the truth" (John 14:6). He is God and He is the revelation of God. But here we encounter something else: that Christ as truth is not a concept, but a living being; the truth in Christ is not something, but Someone. The truth-Christ can coincide with the reality of God, because it is a personal phenomenon. But if we try to express Christ in words, we again descend to the level of designation.

God, on the other hand, transcends all our perceptions, reveals Himself by truth, expressible and inexpressible experience, in contemplative silence and in theological affirmation, and is revealed beyond all expression in silence and in the sacraments, which, according to the teaching of the Ancient Church, are the door to the knowledge of God, because they are the way of our communion with Him, of communion with Him, and communion is always deeper, always wider and more significant. than all that can be said about him. This is the realm of faith, and the realm of faith, theologically, is not only the realm of formulations, but the realm of what the Greek Fathers called apophatic theology:20 a theology that accepts all affirmations, but says: when all this is said, the whole mystery of God remains before us, and we enter into this mystery through the sacraments, prayer, and contemplative silence.

About God[21]