In its very negation, apophatics affirms both that which is denied by it, from which it removes its limitations, and the incomprehensible, ineffable fullness of the Godhead. In true apophatics there is a true contact with God, a true abiding of God in the God-speaking. It is a special kind of comprehension of the Divinity, an integral, mystical one, which reduces our opposition to God to the limits of the possible and thereby limits God the least. It leads to the Abyss of Divine Incomprehensibility, not in order to reject what is achieved by positive theology, but in order to plunge what it has achieved into Incomprehensibility and to recognize its insufficiency.

However, apophatic theology also limits God. It is not an integral acceptance of God, for even in it the one who attains it opposes God and thereby limits God. Apophatics is a limited-cognitive acceptance of God, although not logical-cognitive. It is an approach to God; and to the extent of the remoteness of the attainer from God, it is not substantiated. Not being a complete communion of God, apophatic theology does not attain complete certainty. And since he who comprehends God is not one with God, he doubts. And any empirical comprehension of God presupposes a lack of unity with Him.

Our goal is in the knowledge of God, and — since there is no longer a childlike faith in us — in the knowledge of God through rational knowledge and doubts (§ 1). But God, Who is, as will be shown later, the All-Universal Truth and the True All-Unity, cannot be accepted or retained within oneself by thought alone. We seek Him by the way of knowledge and strive to cling to Him forever. But in order not to be torn away from God and not to fall again into the utter darkness of doubt and confusion, it is necessary to participate in Him completely, not only with thought, but with all one's being: thought, active love, and all life. The Universal Truth does not hide Itself, and more than once, dear reader, in our search, She will allow us to touch Her and for a moment illumine us with Her unflickering Light. We ourselves fall away from Her into our searches and doubts. But perhaps even the short and few illuminations of Her undoubted radiance will give you and me the strength to survive the times of separation from Her and, having been nourished by Her fragrance, not to fall away from Her too far and too long. Perhaps, after many falls and many new contacts, we will be able to unite with Her more firmly and completely. And this will only be the beginning of our true existence. The more fully and clearly we come to know the Truth, the more we realize its inexplicability and the infinity of our movement in it and towards it. Unquenchable is the thirst for the Infinite Truth; And joyful is this insatiability, which, while remaining itself, is also quenched only in the overcoming of earthly existence. We complain that God does not reveal Himself to us enough—we lie. For God reveals Himself to us so generously, so assures us of Himself, that we lose the consciousness of His incomprehensibility. Everything seems to us to be clear, so authenticated that we cease to notice and recognize what is verified, but we reject the indubitable and, not realizing the incomprehensibility, we lose the last faith. And it is not to prove and substantiate everything, dear reader or even dearer reader, that you and I should strive, but to see and comprehend God's Incomprehensibility, unfathomable depth and completeness behind what is verified and already clear. It is impossible to know what it is, but it is necessary to know what it is, and to cling to it by "learned ignorance".

Doubt is completely insurmountable if there is no way to overcome the separation of™ man from God, the limitation of the comprehendor, the limitation of the Comprehensible by him. The position of the one who seeks God is hopeless if he can never go beyond the boundaries with which he himself delineates the Divine. But he is aware of these boundaries and even draws them himself. This means that he is already in the middle of them, in a sense, and behind them. Somehow he has both a certain and what he determines. The very thought of definiteness, the very consciousness of the boundary, is already the thought of something that exceeds the limit, the consciousness of something higher and containing the boundary in itself. By limiting myself to cognitive communion with God, I am already partaker of Him, and more than cognitively. Otherwise, I would not be aware of my limited-cognitive Communion of God as such. In each act of my knowledge of God there is my actual Communion with God, which is less limited than knowledge. Rational reasoning about God implicitly contains both a deeper intellectual (intellectual) comprehension, and a mystical comprehension (§§ 2, 3), and a total or universal comprehension, which can no longer be called comprehension, because it tends to lose the opposition of man to God, as only oppositions. it is never wholly explicit in empiricism. In empiricism, the spheres of the knowledge of God that are "farthest" from God seem to break away from those "closer" to God and containing them (())(p), less definite or limited.

No one will dispute the possibility and legitimacy of doubts in the field of our sensory knowledge, although for us the sensual in itself seems to be the most indubitable, and doubts about it are usually deceitful and perhaps caused by the fact that we boast of our imaginary spirituality. With even greater readiness everyone will agree with the doubtfulness of the rational sphere, which is even more doubtful for us in practice. But it seems that the predominant domain of doubt is precisely the very beginnings of knowledge and being. But it is easy to see that in them doubt is of a very different character from that in the realm of rational and sensory experience, where doubt rests on the recognizable or assumed (even if only for the time of doubt) certainty of a higher sphere. When we doubt the experience of the senses and the conclusions of reason (and reason, or reason, as distinct from the contemplating mind, intellectus, always only "deduces," "concludes"), we do not in the least shake the higher sphere, on the contrary, we most often clarify and strengthen it, at any rate we penetrate into it and doubt it on the basis of it. That is why doubt is the path to true knowledge, and skepticism reveals a psychological kinship with mysticism. In doubting the higher sphere, we in no way remove the lower doubts: they remain in the same force and even acquire a greater one: the vibration of the principles shakes the beginning. It is obvious that our highest doubt rests not on the certainty of the lower spheres, but on the certainty of something higher. And if there is a way to overcome skepticism at all, it can only be found in the highest – beyond the principles of being and knowledge. Thus, the problem of doubt is nothing but the problem of the religious act.

4. In every religious act there is a confrontation between man and God. The insurmountable difference between man and God, their dualism, lies at the basis of all religious experience, being a necessary precondition for religious activity, thinking about God, prayer, and mystical ecstasy. Without this dualism, there is no religion and there cannot be.

Many mystics, describing and comprehending their experience, are inclined to assert the "dissolution" of the soul in God, its "destruction" or "death" in Him, its complete merging with Him. They liken their "soul" to a drop of water: plunging into a cup of fragrant wine, it accepts its color and aroma, disappearing in it without a trace. But here we have a hasty and incorrect theorizing. In fact, before and after ecstasy, the mystic undoubtedly opposes God and distinguishes himself from God. He further identifies himself before ecstasy with himself after ecstasy. With all this, the mystic affirms a certain continuity of his being distinct from God, denying the discontinuity of his being proclaimed by him in his words about merging with God. Such continuity is impossible if ecstasy is a moment of absolute interruption in the mystic's being, a moment when it and its opposition to God completely disappear. If the confrontation ceased and the mystic's being disappeared, even for the most instantaneous moment, he would not be able to "remember" himself to the point of ecstasy and "return" to himself. And it is very significant that Christian mystics, free from heresy, affirming their "unity" with God in the "raptus" or "procession" (extasis) from themselves, insist on the "diversity of essence" of God and man. They reduce the "mystical union" (unionem mysticam) to the "conjugation of wills" (voluntatum conjunctio), although they attach the least importance to their personal being. The Christian ideal of the unity of man with God is most fully expressed in Jesus Christ, in whom the Divine and the human are one "inseparably and unmerged," in Whom there are two natures, two wills, two souls, although one person is the Hypostasis.

But if there is no religiosity without the dualism of man with God, the ideal of religiosity is in their complete unity. A religious act is impossible without dualism. It is impossible without unity, and not only the initial one.

Let us try to imagine the complete separation of man from God, which is unnatural, and therefore not at all easy. "Then God will turn out to be absolute for us (i.e., God) only in the sense of His absolute inaccessibility to us. Then we will be perplexed to ask ourselves, not only "whence do we get the idea of God," but also: "Whence do we get the idea of the absolute, i.e., in the end, Divine inaccessibility to us of anything and that" (cf. § 1). Then our idea of God is not God Himself in any sense or to any degree, but either our invention or a copy of God which is in us and is only ours. (Note that we have already made two illegitimate assumptions: first, we have admitted in ourselves the idea of God, i.e., of the absolute, although we consider ourselves relative, and have not explained where it comes from; secondly, we have admitted the existence in us of a copy of God, without also explaining its origin.) So, the idea of God is either our invention or our copy of God. But we cannot say whether our "copy" is correct or not (for lack of an original), nor even whether our idea of God is a copy or an invention. From this it follows that any further knowledge of God is objectively unfounded, i.e., meaningless. But once religious knowledge is meaningless, religious feeling and religious activity lose all meaning, since neither the second nor the third exists outside and without the first. The dualism we have noted turns out to be a dualism between our "I" at the moment and our "I" as an imaginary (but by no means real) state of our imaginary unity with an imaginary God. This state can be considered as my "ideal" or my "absolute task". But when the objectivity of God is rejected, it ceases to be real, and religiosity ceases to be religiosity, i.e., to exist at all.

Assuming the absolute and only dualism of man with God, we must, not only for the sake of explanation, but even for the simple description and understanding of the fact of our religiosity, establish the concepts of: (1) our "I" in itself, and (2) God, to whom it strives and desires union with it, as with something outside it. Since we have already recognized our complete separation from God's otherness, i.e., we have limited our "I" to Him alone, we are obliged to recognize God as this "I" only. From this it follows that the "I" is broader than the "I in himself" (I): it is both the "I in himself," outside of God (1), and I as God (2), E = e + d. Our "I" (E) is both the "I" proper, which is absolutely outside of God, and our "imaginary" God (d), which is absolutely outside the "I" (e), and the unity of the "I" with this God, i.e., e + d. By transferring the whole religious problem into our "consciousness" or "I," we try to overcome the irreconcilability of dualism with unity by admitting our "big I" (E). But it is either the unity in k d, which is the negation of dualism and makes it impossible, or the separation of e and d, which explains nothing, or it is both unity and duality end. The last statement, which remains to us, can be expressed schematically as follows: 1) E = e + d, 2) E = e, 3) E = d, but 4) e not = d. We call this relation duality, and by E we do not think of anything third that goes beyond e and d.

In trying to eliminate the incompatibility of duality with unity, we assumed the absolute and only dualism of man with God, i.e., we rejected God. And we have come to a paradoxical duality within man. But then it turns out that with the help of our saving assumption we have gained nothing, but, perhaps, lost a great deal, even if we do not talk about our intermediate assumptions. In fact, we must recognize the very reality and the same degree of dualism that were given to us in our religious experience even before we were admitted, i.e., we must recognize the objective reality of God. And since it is possible to explain religiosity within our "I" with the help of such a paradoxical concept as duality, it is incomprehensible why it is impossible to accept the same duality without any subjective assumption, i.e., without denying God. In this case, we will not have to contradict our experience and build deliberately unfounded hypotheses.

How—let's leave our assumption valid for a moment—is E at once e, d, and e = d? Either e is deducible from E, or d and E are deducible from e. If the latter is true, how does it create from nothing in the most literal and precise sense of the word, and moreover perceive what it does (d and E) as something else? The old truth fully reveals its indisputability: while it is still possible (?) to deduce "potentiality" from an "act," an "act" cannot be deduced from "potentiality." In addition, under this assumption, the whole meaning of religious experience is lost. Religiosity is comprehensible only if God is before the religious man and is, as it were, complete in His fullness, and is not created by man out of nothing to the measure of human need, and is not a problematic magnitude. For all these reasons it is necessary to assume that e is deducible from E. But then E is richer and fuller than e: it already contains in itself all that it will become and what it can become at all. E is the completeness, completeness, and reality of both e and d, i.e., it is God as the duality of God with man, and not human subjective consciousness (e) and not God only in man (d), which can be explained only if E is really D. — D (E) = e + d.

Thus, the analysis of the religious reveals the duality of God with man, or God-manhood, as the basic religious aporia. As a paradoxical fact of religious consciousness, this aporia does not depend on whether we recognize or deny the existence of God. But in the second case, religious life itself loses all meaning and some specific difficulties arise. Be that as it may, the denial of the existence of God does not make the religious aporia more intelligible, and in fact is not due to the desire to understand it. It would be more correct to assert that the denial of the existence of God, or rather the doubt in it, follows from religious aporia. After all, it does not consist in the fact that man is partly one with God, and partly opposes Him. Its meaning is that man is wholly and one and dual with God, dual in every moment and moment of his existence. And the complete duality of man with God, their complete separation, is nothing but man's denial of God (cf. § 3).

5. Man is not always and not in all his discoveries actual-religious. But from the undoubted unity of the human soul it necessarily follows that there is nothing absolutely non-religious in man, if by non-religious we mean not the simple absence or insufficiency of the religious, but some specific being, other than the religious. There is nothing absolutely human in man, for then it would be absolutely-relative, i.e., it would either not exist at all or would coincide with the Divine. The religious is that which is connected with God, and everything is connected with God; He must be all in all, everything; and there can be no human who opposes the Divine outside of their unity (§ 4).