How Plato Changed Christian Theology

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]In the book of Exodus, Moses reaches the summit of Mount Si to meet God. But God is shrouded in darkness. The text says, "Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was." Though Moses wanted to see more of God. A few chapters later, he asks, "Please show me your glory."

[00:00:19]But God refuses. You cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live. Now, a lot of readers have taken that refusal as a warning. God's glory is just too much for the human body to physiologically handle. Kind of like, I don't know, some sort of radiation warning. Stand back, mortal. Not safe.

[00:00:38]But when Christian theologians read that story in the first few centuries CE, one of them read this passage differently.

[00:00:44]Sometime in the late 300s, a Greek bishop named Gregory of Nissa sat down and wrote a curious book called The Life of Moses. With a title like that, you'd think it was some sort of biography. But Gregory was more interested in Moses as a model of the spiritual life. In Gregory's interpretation of the scene, the darkness Moses walks into and God's refusal to show his face symbolize the Christian encounter with God. He wrote, "The divine voice granted what was requested and what was denied." This truly is the vision of God, never to be satisfied in the desire to see him. All right, that's some confusing theological speak. So, let's break down what he's saying. The divine voice granted what was requested and what was denied.

[00:01:26]Gregory is saying that the no was the answer that Moses was looking for. Now imagine if God had said yes the way Moses thought he was asking. If God had given Moses a face to look at, a fixed image, Moses would be satisfied. He would have a God image in his head and the yearning that had brought him up the mountain would be over. And for Gregory, that is the true meaning of man cannot see me and live. He's talking about a spiritual death rather than a physical death. To grasp God in our mind is to lose him because what you'd have grasped wouldn't be God anymore. It would be your own image of God frozen and small enough for the human mind to comprehend.

[00:02:03]But for Gregory, humans can't comprehend God. In the same passage, he writes, "The characteristic of the divine nature is to transcend all characteristics.

[00:02:13]This being is inaccessible to knowledge." So a true vision of God is a desire that cannot be filled. To see God is to keep reaching for something that transcends all characteristics. To know God is to know more and more deeply a being that is literally inaccessible to our knowledge. What Gregory is describing is at the heart of one of the most mystical traditions in the history of Christian thought. Apothetic theology, sometimes called negative theology. It's a Christian theological method of approaching God by saying what God is not. It runs from ancient Christianity through the mystical writers of the Eastern Church through medieval visionaries in Western Europe and into modern Eastern Orthodox thought. For a lot of Christians, it's an unconventional way of thinking about the divine. And the rest of this video is about that logic, where it came from and how it works. This video is a companion to my fellow YouTuber and colleague told in stone. He just published a video on pseudoius, the theologian who gave apehatic theology its most famous form. I'm going to cover the method, but if you want to learn more about pseudoinesius, click the link in the comments below. Okay. To understand apehatic theology, we need to first understand its opposite.

[00:03:20]Cataphhatic theology from the Greek katapasis, meaning affirmation. For anyone who's ever tried to put into words what God is, that person has engaged in cataphatic theology. God is good. God is wise. God is the creator of heaven and earth. These are cataphatic statements, affirmative statements.

[00:03:35]Aphatic theology comes from the Greek apoasis, meaning denial or unsaying.

[00:03:40]Apathetic theology takes those same positive statements and negates them.

[00:03:44]God is not good in the way we mean good.

[00:03:46]God is not wise in the way we know wisdom. God is not even strictly speaking a being in the way that other beings are beings. In other words, you speak about God by refusing to speak about God. You approach the divine by insisting that nothing you say about God is quite right. Now, Christian apathetic theologians would argue they're not necessarily contradicting the cataphhatic statements. They are pointing out that those statements are made of human words and human words are notoriously made for finite things. For Christians though, God is not a finite thing. So whatever a Christian says, that language is going to fall short.

[00:04:20]When someone says God is good, you're using a word you learn from a finite thing. A good meal, a good friend, a good night's sleep, the word carries all of that finite baggage with it, even when you point it at God. So the affirmation actually smuggles in a bit of the finite world into your idea of the infinite. Apathetic theologians argue that negation doesn't do that.

[00:04:38]When you say God is not good in the way we mean good, you're not adding any new content. You're just refusing to smuggle in that finite world. So that's why apathhatic theologians thought negations were sharper tools than affirmations. An affirmation says something, a negation unsay something. And when you're talking about a God who is by the Christian definition bigger than anything you can say, unsaying is the more honest move.

[00:05:02]You can already see this at work in Gregory's interpretation of Moses on Mount Si. Gregory takes the cataphatic affirmations of his tradition that God is glorious. God is visible to his servant Moses. But then he reads the refusals as the apehatic correction.

[00:05:14]Yes, God is glorious. No, you can't see that glory and truly live. The two motions affirmation and negation are doing different jobs. And Gregory argued that Christians need both. In fact, a lot of aphatic theologians would argue that apehatic theology should take primacy because it's a theological method with breaks. It uses words about God while constantly destabilizing them.

[00:05:35]But why bother with the negation at all?

[00:05:37]Why not just stick with cataphatic theology? Just say God is good, God is wise, God is the creator, and call it a day. Well, for apehatic theologians, part of the answer goes back to the second commandment of the Ten Commandments. In Exodus 20, you shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything in heaven above or in the earth beneath. In other words, no idols. And most Christians have read this as no statues, like don't carve a golden calf. Don't bow to an image of Athena or Artemis. And sure, that's part of it, but aphatic theologians read the commandment more conceptually. An idol in the deepest sense of the word is anything finite that you mistake for God. And that includes your ideas about God. As the argument goes, the moment a Christian becomes a little too comfortable with their mental image of God, I don't know, like a kindly old man with a beard or a cosmic judge, whatever it is, they've made something small and manageable, something that the human mind can grasp and imagine. And if you start worshiping that two solidified mental image of God, that idea of God is doing exactly the same thing as that statue of Artemis. In fact, the English words idea and idol both derive from the same Greek word, idolone, which literally means a visible form or an image. So when an apehatic theologian says a Christian's idea of God can become an idolone, they're actually sticking close to the original sense. So proponents of apehatic theology argue it can balance cataphhatic theology, preventing a concept of God from solidifying into an idol. Every time someone says God is good, and then immediately says, "But not good in the way we mean good," the idea is that they're loosening their conceptual grip, admitting that their mental image is not the thing itself. They're refusing to mistake their idea of God for God himself. Aphatic theology predates Christianity, and in fact, we can see similar ideas in religions all around the world. Mystical attempts to unsay what the divine really is. But apehatic theology in Christianity has two main roots we'll explore here. We see hints of apatheticism in the Hebrew Bible like when the prophet Isaiah speaks for God asking to whom then will you compare me that I should be like him and the answer of course is that no one god is incomparable. You can hear the same impulse when Moses encounters God at the burning bush. Moses asks for God's name and God answers I am that I am. Which many Christian theologians have argued functions like a refusal to be named.

[00:07:53]The second source is Greek philosophy.

[00:07:55]In the tomus, Plato says to discover the father and maker of the universe would be a difficult task and would be impossible to declare what one had found to everyone. And in his republic, he makes an even bigger claim. The form of the good, the highest reality in his philosophy is beyond being. What Plato meant is that the highest reality, the form of the good is not a thing that exists alongside other things. It's the source of existence itself. Think of it this way. When you ask, "Does a tree exist?" you're using the word exist in a particular way. A tree is one thing among many other things. It exists the way rocks and rivers and people exist.

[00:08:34]But when Plato points at the good, he's pointing at whatever it is that makes the very category of existence possible in the first place. So the good can't be a being because it's what beings come from. Plato himself reaches for an analogy in his Republic called the analogy of the sun. He says, "The good is to the mind what the sun is to the eye." The sun isn't something you can see. It's what makes seeing possible.

[00:08:56]You can't stare directly at it. But every visible thing in the world is visible because of it. The good works the same way for thought. It isn't one of the things you can think about. It's what makes thinking about anything possible. And that phrase beyond being goes on to echo through the next 1,000 years of theology. The neoplatonist Platinus picks it up as well as the philosopher Proclas. And eventually the famous apehatic theologian Pseudo Dionius picks it up and uses it to talk about the Christian God. You see, Christian theologians grew up reading the Hebrew Bible and Plato. And they saw the same impulse in both places. The same insistence that God or the good, whatever you want to call it, is something different in kind, incomparable, inconceivable, beyond description, and beyond being. And they began to build a theology around it. the first great apeatic theologians in the Christian tradition are a circle of bishops from the region of Capidokia in what's now central Turkey. We've already met one of them, Gregory of Nissa, but there's also his brother Basil of Cesaria and his friend Gregory of Nazanzus. Together, they're known as the Capidokian fathers, and they're some of the most important theologians in Christian history, and they all have a deep aphatic streak. Basil of Cesaria drew a distinction between God's essence and his energies. He argued that God's essence, what he actually is, is unknowable. We can never approach it.

[00:10:14]But God's energies or his activities, you know, the way he reaches out into the world, well, these we can know. As Basil puts it, from his activities, we know our God, but his very essence we do not profess to approach. For his activities descend to us, but his essence remains unapproachable. He's basically saying that even when people encounter God, even when God reveals himself to humanity, people don't get to see his essence. What we see is what God does, not what God is. The divine essence stays hidden. It's kind of like a black hole. Here's a photograph of the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Or let me be more precise. Here's a photograph of the glowing matter at the edge of that black hole. The black hole itself is unphotographable. Light can't escape it.

[00:11:00]So what we're seeing here is the thing's effect on everything around it. The dis of hot gas drawn in by the black hole's invisible gravity and the shape of the absence at the center. Basil's claim is that God's essence is something like that hidden by its very nature. So what Christians encounter in revelation is God's activity, the shape of his presence and things people can see. A lot of aphatic theologians would argue that this essence energies move is the thing that keeps aphatic theology from collapsing in on itself. to continue the black hole metaphor because the obvious objection to apathetic theology is if God is unknowable then why are you writing all these books about God why are you reciting the Nyine creed saying that God is a trinity basil's answer is that you're not knowing the essence you're knowing the energies the black hole remember is unphotographable but the disc around it you can study it for the rest of your life you can describe it you can measure it you can paint it you can sing about it you can make a nice creed about it he would say none of that gets you to the black hole itself but all of it is real knowledge of something real so apathetic theologians keep writing, keep preaching, keep reciting the nyine creed. They just keep reminding themselves that all of this is happening at the edge of the thing itself, not at the essence. Basil's younger brother, Gregory of Nissa, took this and pushed it into the spiritual life. Like what we saw earlier in his treatise on Moses, Gregory rereads the Exodus story as an allegory of the soul's journey toward God. And he notices that Moses meets God three times in the story, and each meeting is darker than the last. First, the burning bush, pure light. Then the cloud on the slope of Sinai. Light and darkness mixed. And finally at the summit, Moses enters the thick darkness where God was. For Gregory, it's a map of the soul's journey. Religious life begins in light in the clear vision of God's existence and his activities in the world. But by the end, we encounter darkness. God's overwhelming presence beyond words and understanding. Gregory writes, "This is the true knowledge of what is sought.

[00:12:50]This is the seeing that consists in not seeing because that which is sought transcends all knowledge. Being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness. So that's the apohatic move.

[00:13:04]He would say Moses doesn't see nothing on the summit of Mount Si. He sees that there's nothing he could possibly see because God is separated on all sides by incomprehensibility. And that recognition is what knowledge of God turns out to be. This brings us finally to the most famous apehatic theologian who ironically and in true apohatic fashion is anonymous to us. Though he wrote under the pseudonym Dianius the Aropagite, an obscure figure from the New Testament and scholars today call him pseudo Dianius. Writing around the year 500, the aphatic tradition was already old and well established because of the Capidokian fathers. But Pseudoius is the first to deploy the technical vocabulary aphatic versus cataphhatic for Christian theology. Borrowing the vocabulary from the Athenian neoplatonist Proclas Proclas laid out two complimentary ways of approaching the one the highest reality of neoplatonic philosophy. The first he called analogy the idea that everything in the world bears some likeness to the one and through that likeness we can point upward. A good thing in our world is like the one in some way. Goodness is the trace of the one in something we can see. This is basically cataphhatic theology. An analogy pointing from what we know to what we don't. The second way is negation. We can say the neoplatonic one is not a particular thing in order to mark the gap between the one and everything else. Process argued that the two ways belong together. Affirmation and negation work in tandem to point at a reality that neither can capture on its own. But process warns when you say the one is not good, you're not saying that the one lacks goodness. You are saying that our word good is too small.

[00:14:37]Whatever the one is, it overflows that word. PseudoDinesius takes this entire framework and Christianizes it, especially in his two treatises, the divine names and the mystical theology.

[00:14:48]He writes, "God is therefore known in all things and as distinct from all things. He is known through knowledge and through unknowing. Of him there is conception, reason, understanding, and many other things. On the other hand, he cannot be understood. Words cannot contain him, and no name can lay hold of him. And because no word or name can truly describe God, pseudoius actually does something quirky with his language.

[00:15:14]He invents a vocabulary that pairs ordinary cataphhatic words about God with the Greek prefix hepair, meaning beyond. This prefix obviously makes its way into English with words like hyperactive or hypertension. So God isn't just good, he is heper agthos, beyond good. He isn't just being, he is heerios, beyond being. He isn't just God, he is hetheos, beyond God. His core idea comes out in the same paragraph.

[00:15:39]This is the sort of language we must use about God. For he is praised from all things according to their proportion to him as their cause. Okay, this is confusing, but I want you to focus on that word cause. By this he means everything in the world comes from God.

[00:15:53]Trees, planets, people, ideas, all of it flows out from God like light from a source. So everything in the world bears some trace of God. A tree is good in some way and God is the source of that goodness. A person is wise in some way and God is the source of that wisdom.

[00:16:08]This means we can cataphatically talk about God by talking about the world. We can say God is good and God is wise because we have learned what those words mean from things that God created. This is cataphhatic theology and pseudodines thought it was valuable. The world is full of God's traces and naming them is a real way of knowing God. But he would argue because God is the cause of all these things. God himself is not one of these things. He made the trees but he's not a tree. He made human minds, but he is not a mind in the same way our minds are minds. Every word humans have was learned from things that God created.

[00:16:39]Every concept humans form is the type of concept that a human mind can grasp. So pseudoius argues when we apply those words and concepts to God, they fit and they don't fit at the same time. They fit because creation reflects its source. They don't fit because the source is not creation. All right. Up until this point, we've been talking about aphatic theology as a way of thinking, a theological method of disciplined negation. But aphatic theology also made its way into daily practice, especially in Orthodox Christianity. As one modern Greek Orthodox theologian puts it, the apothetic move pushes Christian theology toward the language of poetry and images for the interpretation of dogmas much more than the language of conventional logic and schematic concepts. And this is exactly what happens in Eastern Christianity. The most striking evidence of pseudodines's influence is actually found in Eastern Orthodox hymns. His odd hyper vocabulary like beyond being, beyond good, beyond deity was picked up in Byzantine hymnwriters and put into lurggical poetry. From the 500s onward, Greekeaking Christians at worship were addressing God using the same prefix that pseudodians had used in his apehatic theology. Apehaticism also showed up in Christian mysticism, contemplative practices aimed at direct encounters with God. The most famous Christian apothetic practice is hessicasm from the Greek word hessikia meaning stillness or quiet which developed during the medieval Byzantine world on Mount Aos the orthodox monastic enclave in northern Greece. The practice works like this. The hessiccast monk sits in stillness often for hours. He synchronizes his breath and repeats a short prayer over and over again called the Jesus prayer. Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. the same words over and over and over again.

[00:18:19]The repetition is meant to quiet the discursive mind to shut down the chattering inner voice that is constantly forming concepts, images, and judgments about God. Remember, every single one of those concepts could become a small idol. Every mental image of God is an idolone. The Jesus prayer is a tool for getting underneath all of that. As thoughts pop up, the practitioner would notice them and then let them go, returning focus to the prayer. And over time, this was supposed to lead to a kind of deep inner stillness where your mind isn't jumping around anymore. In Eastern Orthodox tradition, that quiet focused state is where someone might experience a stronger awareness of God's presence. So basically, this is apathetic theology as embodied practice. And the serious hessiccasts, the ones that were practicing this for years, reported that after long periods of inner stillness, they sometimes experienced God as light.

[00:19:11]They believed they were participating in their own bodies in the light that Christ revealed at the transfiguration.

[00:19:16]An experience they called theosis or henosis, joining themselves to God in their lives. In the 1300s, this practice set off one of the biggest controversies in Eastern Christian history. A scholar named Barlam attacked the Hessiccasts, arguing that any claim to directly experience God was theological nonsense.

[00:19:34]God is unknowable. Full stop. The practitioners found their defender in Gregory Palamos who reached back to Basil's old distinction between God's essence which is forever hidden and God's energies his real activities in the world which we can encounter.

[00:19:47]Palomos won the argument and the Hessiccast tradition has continued more or less unbroken to the present day and the essence versus energies distinction has become a central piece of Eastern Orthodox theology. Now, Western Christianity developed its own aphatic mystical traditions too, including a remarkable medieval English text called the cloud of unknowing, which translates the whole project into a single line.

[00:20:08]God can be loved but not thought. So, a few things to notice here. First, aphatic theology was never a fringe tradition. Gregory of Nissa, Basil of Cesaria, these are big-time mainstream theologians writing for the church, defining doctrine, shaping liturgy, the tradition we've been describing as the spine of Eastern Orthodox theology and a major current in medieval Western thought. Second, aphatic theology has its critics and always has. Barlam was not the only one. A lot of theologians, especially in the Western Scholastic tradition, argued that the aphatic move can go too far. That if you push it all the way, you end up unable to say anything about God at all, which makes ordinary religious life impossible. Now, of course, aphatic theologians have answers to that, but the disagreement runs deep, and you can hear it echoing in Christian theology to this day. And third, what we're seeing in apehatic theology is one specific religious solution to a problem that shows up in nearly every monotheistic tradition and even in some non-monotheistic traditions. How do you talk about the divine which is by definition beyond anything humans can talk about?

[00:21:04]Christianity's answer was apoasis, but other traditions found their own answers. All of this was a companion video to my friend and colleague told in stone. He runs an amazing channel about the ancient world and he has a video about pseudo Dianius if you want to dive deeper into that figure. Link in the comments below.