There is a saying – ‘the first thing one knows is the last thing one understands’, and such is faith.
“Now faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not” (Hebrews 11:1), but, by the Grace of God, in some manner we can aspire to “the ultimate summit of your mystical knowledge, most incomprehensible, most luminous and most exalted, where the pure, absolute and immutable mysteries of theology are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their Darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories surpassing all beauty.” (Dionysius the pseudoAreopagite, The Mystical Theology, I, 1)
The ‘ultimate summit’ is such that it cannot be known, because it transcends all forms, and thus cannot be attained by knowledge, but only by faith, and a ‘leap into the dark’, which again, is what faith is.
Thomas 24/02/2024
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