If the considerations of the preceding chapter have achieved their purpose, they have led the reader to become convinced that, in addition to the whole sphere of objective reality, there is something that truly exists—something that truly exists, not less, but rather more, than objective reality—which we have agreed, unlike the latter, to call reality. It is directly revealed in the person of the inner spiritual life of man; and at the same time it necessarily goes beyond the purely inner, personal world of the "I", uniting it from within with what is already outside the "I", and in the end forms an all-embracing and all-pervading unity and the basis of all existence in general.

At first glance it seems that this is an impossible and, so to speak, pointless task. Every description and definition, every logical analysis, presupposes a certain variety, and consists in dividing it, in pointing out the difference between one part and another, and in discerning the relations between them. Something absolutely primary and simple, and at the same time all-embracing, can be experienced, but it cannot be described, expressed in words, or defined; it is possible to know it, but it is impossible to know anything about it – except that it is given to us, that it is present, that it is. This, it seems, is the property of what we have designated under the name of "reality." Just as we know very well—we know immeasurably more deeply and intimately than anything else—what we mean when we speak of our own existence, and yet we are unable to express it in words and concepts, to describe the content of what we are thinking, so we, having attained in inner experience the discernment of what we have called reality (in its general all-embracing sense), we know what this common soil and atmosphere, this basis or background of our own existence is, and at the same time we are powerless to express this knowledge, to define it, to analyze its content. In the very essence of the matter, it would seem to be a kind of mute, ineffable knowledge; Since to understand, to comprehend, means precisely to express in concepts, i.e., to establish the difference between one and the other and the connection between them, to "explain" one by indicating its relation to another, "reality" in its very essence coincides with the "incomprehensible." [17] "Incomprehensible," as is self-evident from what has just been said, does not mean, of course, "unknown," "unfamiliar," "hidden." On the contrary, it is quite clear, remaining mysterious only in its inexplicability, irreducibility to anything else, in its inaccessibility to logically analytic thought. It is what Goethe called the "manifest mystery" (offenes Geheimnis). Our consciousness, our experience, is wider than the sphere of our thought; Thought helps us to orient ourselves in the diversity of its content, but it does not extend to that ultimate something that forms the primary basis and general essence of our experiential heritage. This can be expressed in another way. We mean something and say about it or see something in it; logically this is the difference between the subject and the predicate of the judgment; And it is this duality between reality itself and its content that determines the fact that our knowledge has the character of a judgment – the character of saying something about something. [18] From this it would seem obvious that it would be a logical contradiction to try to "know", "understand", "explain" reality itself, the subject itself (the subject) in its categorical difference from the predicate. For to "know," to "understand," is nothing else than to see the "contents" inherent in this reality, to see what it "has" or of which it is the bearer. The attempt to "know" reality itself in the same way, precisely that which constitutes its very essence, as distinct from its inherent "contents," seems to be fundamentally untenable, containing a contradictio in adjecto. [19]

This sounds extremely convincing at first glance. But however true this may be, it is not difficult to see that, if we were to rest on such a negative attitude, we would not have reached the firm ground of sound reasonableness at all, but, on the contrary, would lose sight of the most essential point constituting the idea of reality which we have already reached. Or, since we would continue to be guided by this idea, we would fall into a hopeless logical contradiction.

As we have seen above (Chapter I, 4), reality, as an all-embracing unity, has all negation within itself, simply because it has nothing outside of itself. The moment of negation is only a moment that expresses its inner dismemberment. But if this is so, then by distinguishing reality itself from all its rationally definable contents, by contrasting it with the latter simply as a purely irrational and therefore indefinable something, we actually apply to it the category of logical difference that is not applicable to it. In this way we fall into a peculiar contradiction between the form of our utterance and its content: declaring reality indefinable and incomprehensible, in this sharp and unambiguous distinction between it and everything else, we thereby define it in the same way as we define everything definable in general; and, having in mind the all-embracing unity, we, by logically distinguishing it from all that is particular, i.e., by excluding the latter from it, transform it into something also particular, depriving it of its property of being a truly all-embracing unity; We replace this concrete all-embracing unity with an abstract unity that has a multiplicity outside of itself. In this way we are plunged into a kind of, to use Augustine's apt expression, a fatal and hopeless "confrontation of words" (pugna verborum).

Augustine uses this expression in relation to the idea of the incomprehensibility of God. By recognizing God as "incomprehensible," we thereby define Him, ascribe to Him a certain definite quality, i.e., we diminish His fullness that transcends reason, we replace His superrational being with a logically definite, albeit only negative, concept. In order to clarify our topic, it is useful to continue this analogy by considering the essence of the so-called "negative theology." It goes without saying that we take this trend here only from its purely logical aspect, in its analogy with the course of general thought that occupies us, since at this stage of our reflection we are still far from any theology and have not met with the idea of God at all.

"Negative theology" (the creator of which, as we know, was the unknown Christian mystic of the East, known as Dionysius the Areopagite) asserts that we attain an understanding of God or approach it only through the denial, in relation to God, of all the qualities known to us from our knowledge of the "created" world. And since all our concepts are drawn from our earthly experience, we cannot have any positive definitions of the essence of God at all. We do not know and cannot say what God is; we only know that He is not. We only know that He is something absolutely alien to everything known to us from the experience of created being. Not only do we not have the right to apply to God any spatial or sensuous-visual representations, but we do not even have the right to apply to Him such spiritual or abstract categories as "goodness" or "being," etc., because all these concepts in their usual sense are burdened with their application to earthly, created being, and therefore are inadequate to the supermundane being of God.

But what do we mean when we say that we only know that God is not, but do not know that He is? In our ordinary, logically formed knowledge, negation (on top of its didactic-psychological meaning as the rejection of false opinions) has the meaning of distinction. We know or define something by distinguishing it from something else. Affirmative and negative judgments are only different logical forms, correlative moments of knowledge as determinations, i.e., as the perception of a certain definiteness. From this it is evident that negation in its usual logical sense of distinction is possible only in relation to separate, particular contents, for it means a choice between them. But in this case, what is the meaning of the demand of "negative theology" to reject all known or conceivable signs in relation to God in general? Taking negation in its usual logical sense, it will be necessary to say: the negation of all generally accessible and conceivable attributes in relation to an object makes its object meaningless; to deny everything is simply to affirm nothing; negative theology in this interpretation would be reduced simply to an unconditional agnosticism in relation to God, to the assertion that we can know nothing about God at all.

Of course, in fact, "negative theology" means something quite different. Its creators and adherents are not dry pedants who "determine" the essence of God through the logical function of negation, and still less are they agnostics. They have a special, ineffable positive vision of God, and it is only this ineffability of their vision that they formulate in affirming the difference between God and everything else. But if we try to express the positive content of this vision in an abstract logical form, it can have only one meaning. The denial of all positive attributes in relation to God here means the denial of them as particular and derived determinations. God is neither one nor the other, not in the absolute or abstract logical sense, but in the sense that He is all at once, or the primary source of everything. But this means that the logical form of knowledge itself, in which we have everything particular, singular, derivative, is not applicable to God. "Negative theology" is guided by the intuition that the essence of God as the primary source and primary basis of being is superlogical, super-rational, and precisely for this reason imperceptible in the form of any logical definition that makes sense only in relation to the particular and derived contents of being. The meaning of the denial of all positive definitions is to give the impression of the categorical difference between God and all existence accessible to us from earthly experience.

The proximate, as it were, striking, and therefore historically most influential result of this attitude is the perception of the reality of God as something absolutely detached, transcendent of all the rest of the "earthly" reality accessible to us. Consciousness here plunges into some completely new, usually unknown dimension of being, goes into some dark depths that lead it infinitely far away from the usual "earthly" world. There is no need here to consider the usual practical religious result of this attitude, namely, the boundless and immeasurable spiritual detachment to which it leads, and by virtue of which it shows some resemblance to Hindu religiosity. For us, we repeat, only its general logical essence is essential.

That this rejection of God of the logical form in which we think of all the rest, the ordinary, "earthly" content of being, contains a certain amount of truth, is quite obvious. But one must clearly understand what this rejection actually consists in and under what conditions it can really lead to the desired goal. The fact is that with an ordinary, uncritically verified understanding of the meaning of this rejection, we imperceptibly fall into the contradiction noted above. We can now formulate it in this way. Negation in general is the moment that constitutes the logical form of knowledge (as we have seen above: for negation is a way of defining one, particular content in its distinction from everything else). By applying negation to the logical form of knowledge itself, we thus fall into the contradiction that in the very act of this negation we use the very form of knowledge which we reject. Immediately below we will understand the positive, valuable methodological meaning of this contradiction. At this point, however, we must point out what is untenable in it.

Since we try to know the essence of God only through his negative attitude towards all earthly experience and its very logical form, we unwittingly, contrary to our main plan, again subordinate it to this form, transform it into something particular, limited, having everything else outside itself. For negation as such, to whatever it is applied, is precisely a form of rational, "earthly" knowledge.

Therefore, in order to grasp the genuinely transcendent, unconditionally peculiar being of God, it is necessary not to use negation in its ordinary, logical sense, which does not achieve its goal here, but a special superlogical overcoming of the very categorical form of earthly existence. This overcoming is possible only through going beyond the principle of contradiction, i.e., the inconsistency of affirmative and negative judgments. Only in this way do we really rise above all that is particular and subordinate, above all that is "earthly"; Only by embracing and including it do we reach the sphere that rises above it.

The creator of "negative theology" himself understood this well. The true essence of his "mystical theology" consists, as he points out, not in the simple negation of earthly concepts as applied to God, but in a combination or unity of negation and affirmation, which transcends the usual logical form of thought. Although, on the one hand, no positive definitions are applicable to God in their usual sense, but, on the other hand, they are also applicable to Him in a different, figurative sense. For example, it cannot be said that God is "good" in the sense of possessing this quality as something that determines His nature, but at the same time it is possible and necessary to say that, being the source of goodness, He is "super-good"; it is impossible to call Him "existing" in the ordinary, "created" sense of the concept of being, but we must recognize Him as the primary source of all being, "super-existent". "And one should not think that here the negation contradicts the statement, for the first cause, rising above all limitations, surpasses both all statements and all negations." [20]

Let us now apply this consideration to the general problem of reality that concerns us. In what sense are we to call it "incomprehensible," and what really follows from this definition of it, properly understood?