Silence forms an important means of ascetic practice in many religious traditions, most often in those variants where the mystical flavor is clearly felt. The discovery of this means and the formation of the corresponding ascetic technique and its theoretical comprehension do not presuppose a single center and take place under certain circumstances quite independently, which, however, does not at all remove the question of influences and borrowings. It is worth recalling that even at the non-religious level, an individual, purely personal appeal to silence as one of the types of reaction to a certain deficit and/or crisis (usually acute) situation takes place in everyone independently (although needless to say that not everyone has the ability to react in this way?) and moreover, more often spontaneously, without the participation of reason, relying on the deeper layers of consciousness and the unconscious. on intuition, in a word, on what is better adapted both to catching the whole and to choosing the most adequate reaction to the obstacles that arise on the way to the goal.

For Sergius, the main goal, constantly realized, but never approaching exhaustion, was that unceasing and ever-present movement towards God, which constitutes life in God. God was the absolute and most real of all realities, revealed by the power of faith. Such a reality presupposes both the maximum striving towards it, and at the same time the openness of God to those who aspire to it. All this can be understood only within the framework of some ultimate divine-human contact, a meeting where words are not needed. But Sergius was a man, and the language given to him was human. Moreover, the tongue remained in him and exerted its influence even when the mouth was closed. Even silent prayer presupposed a certain Self and a certain You, and this already referred to the power of the tongue, albeit essentially hidden. As soon as God moved from the sphere of personal communication to the liturgy, all statements about him involuntarily became "linguistic," and language could not but be tasked with being as adequate as possible to convey the essence of God. And it is in this situation that the question arises of the expressibility of this essence in language.

In the tradition of Christian apophatic theology (as well as in a number of other religious movements) they came to the conclusion early on about the inexpressibility of God's essence, and since it was impossible not to speak, not to think, not to experience the image of this essence, the only way to designate this essence was only "negatively", apophatically. A well-known theologian of our time writes:

The apophatic (or negative) path of knowledge of God is a mental ascent, gradually stripping off all its positive properties from the object of knowledge, in order to reach in the end, through complete ignorance, a certain knowledge of Him Who cannot be the object of knowledge. It can be said that this is an intellectual experience of impotence, of the defeat of thought in the face of the transcendence of the intelligible. Indeed, the consciousness of the affliction, of the weakness of human understanding, is an experience common to all that may be called apophatic or negative theology, when, remaining within the boundaries of the intellectual, it is simply convinced of the radical inadequacy of our thinking with the cognizable reality, or, striving beyond the boundaries of understanding, it perceives its bewilderment at what God is by His inaccessible nature as a kind of superior, mystical knowledge of the "super-mind" as knowledge ΰπερ νοΰν.

(Lossky 1975, 95 [Lossky 1995, 26]; Lossky 1967, 7–23; cf. also Lossky 1991, 87–102; Lossky 1975a [Lossky 1995]; Lossky 1995a and others).

Apophaticism and apophatic theology, indeed, must be understood as the awareness of the "intellectual defeat" in the implicit presence of dependence on language, albeit in its "negative" variants (God is incomprehensible, unknowable, inexpressible, etc.), which, however, do not abolish this "linguistic" captivity. At the same time, this dependence of the expressed (God) on the means of expression, of course, is not exhausted only by the sphere of language; As is known, it extends to the sphere of fine arts, and history knows many examples of fierce polemics between iconoclasts and their opponents, sometimes turning into undisguised violence.

However, as Lossky 1975, 95; Lossky 1995, 26; Lossky 1967, 7, neither the iconographic "anti-naturalistic" apophaticism can be defined as iconoclasm, nor the negative, anti-rationalistic path of negation can be identified with the rejection of knowledge, with epistemomachy, for "this path cannot lead to the abolition of God-thinking; for this would affect the main factor of Christianity and Christian teaching – the incarnation of the Word – the central event of Revelation, which made possible the emergence of both iconography and theology." In this context, and in the historical perspective of the development of Christianity, the situation did not become clear immediately and not everywhere in the same way. The iconographic aspect of the problem seems to be more diagnostically important in practice. After a certain initial period of "indifference", which manifested itself both in the appeal to pagan means of expression, on the one hand, and in the ignorance of the "iconographic" image of Christianity ("iconographic" apophaticism), on the other, there comes a period of transition to religious art, in which the use of "old" means for the expression of "new" ideas is avoided. A certain barrier arises between the old and the new: although there is a tendency, which is gaining more and more strength over time, to get rid of "naturalism", from schemes such as "x depicts y", the "old" expressive heritage, its alphabet, and partly its language (in the semiotic sense of the word) are still used, but the direct connection between the image and the depicted becomes different, mediated: it is no longer "x depicts y, and "x refers to y", "x reminds of y". The Holy Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, proclaiming the dogma of the veneration of icons, recognized that, first, the nature of fine art is undoubtedly valuable, and that, second, art itself is "reminiscent," not in the spirit of subjectivism and psychologism, but ontologically, in the sense in which Plato uses the word άνάμνησις, recollection, the manifestation of the idea itself in the sensual (see Florensky 1969, 80, etc.). This is what has been clearly manifested in Christian fine art since the time of the great "Trinitarian" fourteenth century, when allusions, allegory, and symbolism began to play an increasingly important role in this art: the image is preserved, but what is "depicted" in it fades and recedes into the background, which retains its value only for pagans; A Christian, on the other hand, reads the old image in a new way, if you will, more subtly, assuming in it a different and at the same time greater depth. A "new" pictorial language appeared, which was destined to develop into a new genre of Christian art – icon painting and which implied a new projection of Christian values. Neither Old Testament apophaticism with its ban on the sphere of the depicted, nor the full-blooded "naturalism" of ancient art, both Greek and Roman, were assimilated by the emerging Christian art, but were taken into account by it and played, each in its own way, a significant role in the formation of Christian art, primarily icon painting. What this cost is best evidenced by the more than a century of Byzantine history from the ascension to the throne of Leo III the Isaurian (717) and the triumph of the iconoclasts to the restoration of the veneration of icons (843) soon after Michael III became emperor, under whom the lands confiscated from the monasteries were also returned to him.

Before leaving the topic of apophaticism, it is necessary to point out a certain connection, or rather, the fraught with connection between it and the idea of trinity, Trinitarian theology itself:

The Old Testament apophaticism, expressed in the prohibition of any image, was eliminated by the fact that the very "Image of the essence of the Father" was revealed, which took upon Himself the nature of man. But a new negative aspect enters the canon of iconographic art: its sacred schematism is a call to detachment, to the purification of the senses, so that the senses could perceive the contemplated image of the Divine Person who came in the flesh. Likewise, what was negative and exclusive in the Old Testament monotheism, in the thinking of God in the New Testament disappears before the need to recognize in Christ the Divine Person, One in Essence with the Father. But for the possibility of the emergence of Trinitarian theology, it was precisely the apophase that had to guide the purification of thought, for this thought had to rise to the concept of God, transcendent to all created being and absolutely independent in what He is, from created existence.

In spite of the irrefutable fact that the negative elements of the progressive purification of the thought of Christian theologians are usually associated with the speculative technique of middle and modern Platonism, it is wrong to see in Christian apophaticism a sign of the Hellenization of Christian thought. Apophaticism, as a transition beyond everything that is connected with the inevitable end of all creation, is inscribed in the very paradox of Christian Revelation of God: the transcendent God becomes immanent to the world, but in the very immanence of His economy, culminating in the incarnation and death on the cross, He reveals Himself to be transcendent and ontologically independent of all created being.

Without this aspect, we could not comprehend either the essence of the voluntary and perfect gift of redemption, or in general the essence of the entire Divine oikonomia, beginning with the creation of the world, when the expression ex nihilo precisely indicates the absence of any need ex parte Dei (on the part of God), indicates, we dare say, a certain Divine arbitrariness: in the act of creative "volition," oikonomia is a manifestation of will, the trinitarian being is the essence of the transcendent nature of God.

This is the principle of that theological distinction between economy (οικονομία) and theology (θεολογία) [...] θεολογία, which for Origen was the knowledge, the gnosis of God, of the Logos, in the fourth century has in mind everything that relates to the doctrine of the Trinity, everything that can be said about God in Himself, independently of His creative and redemptive economy. Thus, in order to arrive at this "pure theology," we need to go beyond the aspect in which we know God as the Creator of the universe, to free the concepts of "theology" from the cosmological elements inherent in "oikonomia." To the "oikonomia" in which God reveals Himself by creating the world and becoming incarnate, we must respond with "theology," with the confession of the incomprehensible nature of the Most Holy Trinity in that mental ascent which will always be moved by apophase.