T H E E N D C O M M U N E

The Second Areopagite

  just as no cartographer nor any historian

  can properly and fully represent the reality

  which they try to communicate,

    no theologian nor any religious seeker

    can properly understand the properties

    of the very God

    they claim to worship.

   all language fails with God,

    the mystery dissolves all.

   all things fail in describing God.

   all logic fails in respect to God.

   reason hold little value

  in the inner gardens of theology,

         in the pairi daeza

       of human religious ideation.

           Pseudo-Dionysius!

    you taught me that no God

      is understood by affirmation,

        because we simply don't know

           what it is we should affirm.

   and i give praise to you,

           Areopagite.

   you say:

all names and theological descriptions of God

  must be negated, and negated, and negated.

you evoke the Divine silence,

  the darkness of unknowing.

you said to travel upward,

up the chain of abstractions

  where even negations fail

    to describe the mysteries,

  the true apophaticism which outlines but poorly

    the most acute verisimilitude

      of the fundamental truth

     we can possibly phenomenologically comprehend,

                     spiritually survive.

    nothing merely human

    can rationally comprehend the Divine,

    so we had to become something else,

    which we in fact discovered

    we already were:

             potential agents of holy transcendence.