The Divine Darkness

"He made darkness His covering" 

Psalm 18:11

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There is a story of a traveler and his congregation, wandering through a desert. The traveler arrives at the foot of a mountain and tells his congregation to wait at the bottom. Atop the mountain, there is fire and thunder, trumpet blasts and heavy smoke. The traveler gropes through the darkness of the thick settled smoke, toward the increasing sound of trumpets like thunderclaps, the ground rippling beneath him like oceanic waves. He was told that if anyone else so much as touched the stone of the mountain they would die, but he was to ascend the mountain into a temple of darkness. It is there that he meets with God. 

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The Fathers use the image of Prophet Moses entering the glory cloud of God as a symbol of God dwelling in Divine Darkness. We could ask, why is God, whom we know as Light, conveyed in terms of Darkness? The answer is contained in John 1:18: "No one has seen God". St John here refers to the Divine Essence as unseen and unknowable in fullness. He is the God of paradoxes and dichotomies, the God of superabundance and transcendence, who to us remains entirely ineffable and inconceivable in His fullness. We cannot perceive Him as He is nor can we understand what He is. In terms of His Essence, He is as dissimilar to His creatures as the mind of a playwright is to the characters he creates. Scripture uses luminous darkness as a symbol of the unknown and unseen God. And it is here, in the darkness of Mt Sinai, that the God of Mystery dwells. Obscured in His transcendence, yet ever present in His immanence. The mind of man reaches out to grasp God, but He cannot be held by the intellect; the heart must rise in faith to meet Him.