The Wisdom of Knowing—and Not Knowing
Regaining the unknowing of apophatic knowing in our prayer life.
Before theology drifted into debates and the literal shedding of blood and taking of lives in doctrinal skirmishes, early Christian spirituality held onto something simple and quietly profound: there is more than one way to know God.
The tradition spoke of two paths that work together, each illuminating a different side of the same mystery.
The first is cataphatic knowing—the way of words, images, metaphors, and names.
This is prayer as most of us learned it: speaking honestly, imagining boldly, expressing ourselves with language that reaches toward God.
The second is apophatic knowing—the way that steps beyond words.
This is the prayer of silence, unclenching, and release. It’s what happens when we gently set aside our images and stop trying to frame God with our thoughts. Instead of reaching, we rest.
These two modes are companions. When both are honored, prayer becomes something fuller—less about performing or achieving and more about inhabiting a relationship with honesty and openness.
Positive and Negative Pressure in Prayer
One way to feel the difference between the two is through the language of pressure.
Cataphatic prayer carries a kind of positive pressure.
I fill the moment with my voice, my questions, my longing, my imagination. I bring the fullness of my inner life forward, giving shape to what I feel and how I see.
Apophatic prayer, by contrast, creates negative pressure.
Here, I empty my hands.
I allow my words to fall away.
I release the urge to grasp or describe.
I let stillness expand where language once lived.
As I pour myself out, a gentle vacuum forms—not a void, but a clearing. A receptive space where something not-of-my-making can move.
And in that cleared space, I simply wait.
I rest.
I notice what arrives without my control.
This contrast—filling and emptying, offering and opening—gives prayer a fuller texture. It honors both expression and surrender, intention and spaciousness.
The Lost Art of Spaciousness
The apophatic style of theology and prayer once held a cherished place in Christian spirituality. The early contemplatives believed that silence was not a lack of prayer but a richer form of it. They trusted that the empty space around the words was where God often spoke most intimately.
But over time, especially after the conflicts of the Reformation and the intellectual confidence of the Enlightenment, silence began to feel unsafe. Mystery felt too imprecise. Anything that resisted definition or rational clarity grew suspicious.
Prayer became increasingly word-driven. Theology turned argumentative. Spiritual truth was expected to be clear, provable, defensible—systematic.
In the process, we lost something fragile and vital:
the freedom of not knowing.
the permission to rest without resolving.
the ability to meet God without forcing clarity.
Yet the early contemplative tradition—the one that held both word and silence together—insists that God moves precisely in the places we cannot articulate—inside the gaps, the pauses, the unguarded moments when our certainties soften.
The God Who Fills the Gaps
Apophatic knowing was never about refusing knowledge; it was about making room for a kind of knowledge that words cannot carry.
It trusts that God speaks both through what we can say and through what we cannot.
It remembers that silence is not a retreat from meaning but an entry into a different kind of meaning.
Think of music:
if you remove the rests, the notes lose their shape.
Silence is what makes the sound comprehensible.
Apophatic prayer is a contemplative rest.
It’s the clearing in the middle of the forest.
It’s the uncluttered moment where you finally notice the light.
It’s not passive—it’s receptive.
It’s not disengaged—it’s attentive in a different register.
When we allow the space to open, God fills it with something we couldn’t have manufactured.
The Wild Knowing Called Faith
Here’s the paradox: stepping into unknowing doesn’t diminish understanding. It deepens it.
The tradition has always had a name for this deeper kind of knowing: faith.
Not the version that anxiously demands perfect insight.
Not the rigid version that treats belief as a checklist.
Faith, in the contemplative sense, is:
a trust that doesn’t panic in the presence of mystery
a willingness to remain open rather than certain
a spaciousness inside the soul that welcomes the ungraspable
a confidence that does not rely on control
This kind of knowing isn’t threatened by what cannot be explained. It doesn’t cling desperately to its own ideas. It simply rests in the One who holds all things—even the questions.
“[It’s] a kind of knowing that doesn’t need to know and yet doesn’t dismiss knowledge; a kind of knowing that doesn’t need to hold everything itself because, at a deeper level, it knows it is being held.” - Richard Rohr
Spacious Prayer
There is an undying, contemplative tradition that invites us to remember that prayer has always had more than one register. Words, images, longings, and imagination have their honored place. Yet alongside them lives another practice—quieter, more open, less shaped by intention: the apophatic way.
This is the way of resting rather than reaching, of letting silence speak, of allowing the empty spaces around our thoughts to become a meeting place with God. It does not ask us to abandon language—only to loosen our grip on it. It lets prayer breathe.
Renewing our awareness of this apophatic dimension can open something subtle but significant. It reminds us that communion with God is not limited to what we can express. It can also unfold in the places where expression falls away.
From here, another invitation quietly emerges: to recover the apophatic side of theology as well.
For centuries, Christian reflection held both together—clarity and mystery, language and silence, doctrine and the recognition that every doctrine points beyond itself. Theology in its healthiest form acknowledges that its words are signs, not cages; guides, not walls.
The apophatic tradition doesn’t diminish what we can say about God.
It simply keeps us honest about what we cannot say.
It makes room for humility.
It allows mystery to remain a companion instead of a threat.
It reminds us that the aim of theology is not mastery but wonder.
To renew our life of prayer in this way—and to allow our theology to share that same spaciousness—is to step again into a way of knowing God older than our debates and larger than our definitions.
A way where silence is not absence but presence.
A way where unknowing becomes a form of trust.
A way where God meets us not only through the words we speak,
but through the room we leave for what cannot be spoken.
And in that room, something essential can be heard again.