Anytime he speaks of the “appropriation of the human body and acts by God the Word,” St. Cyril declares it as “ineffable, beyond the mind,” “an unuttered and mysterious unity by which the Word became mysteriously and incomprehensibly man and Son of man.” The typical expressions of apophaticism appear spontaneously, being the only ones able to offer a comprehension of mystery.
The supreme theophany, God’s perfect manifestation in the world by the incarnation of the Word fully maintains its apophatic character. “Jesus’ mystery was a hidden mystery: there is no word, nor mind, that would comprise it; on the contrary, it is inexpressible as long as you speak, and unknown as long as you understand it with the mind… In his humanity, Christ the Supra-essential One was manifested in a human being without ceasing to be hidden beneath this manifestation or, to express myself in a more divine fashion, in this manifestation itself.”
“All the affirmations that have as object the Holy humanity of Jesus Christ have the excellence and the value of the most formal negations.” The basis of a theandric union is found in the unity of the two natures in one person, but its mechanism, the “how” that is so dear to any discursive knowledge, from which it begins and to which it ends, remains inaccessible to conceptual determinations and incomprehensible for cataphatic categories.
Fr. André Scrima, Apophatic Anthropology (The two un-cited quotations are from St. Dionysius the pseudoAreopagite, Epistles III & IV.)
The supreme theophany, God’s perfect manifestation in the world by the incarnation of the Word fully maintains its apophatic character. “Jesus’ mystery was a hidden mystery: there is no word, nor mind, that would comprise it; on the contrary, it is inexpressible as long as you speak, and unknown as long as you understand it with the mind… In his humanity, Christ the Supra-essential One was manifested in a human being without ceasing to be hidden beneath this manifestation or, to express myself in a more divine fashion, in this manifestation itself.”
“All the affirmations that have as object the Holy humanity of Jesus Christ have the excellence and the value of the most formal negations.” The basis of a theandric union is found in the unity of the two natures in one person, but its mechanism, the “how” that is so dear to any discursive knowledge, from which it begins and to which it ends, remains inaccessible to conceptual determinations and incomprehensible for cataphatic categories.
Fr. André Scrima, Apophatic Anthropology (The two un-cited quotations are from St. Dionysius the pseudoAreopagite, Epistles III & IV.)