Sufis express divinity as the Not Not.^[1] Mekubalim express divinity as the Without End. Positivists demand language to be so sufficient for expressing truths that non-falsifiable terms like ‘God’ are meaningless. Theological noncognitivists find in the word ‘God’ an abstraction so absent of reference that the word is cognitively void. Everything we think is an invention, and some things we think are so fertile that they are emergent, take a life of their own, and change us in the process.

Reposting from Facebook, 29 August 2011.

1. ”Ismāʿīlī apophaticism for the divine essence utilized the two strategies of repetitive negation and double-negation and placed God’s essence beyond all discursive possibilities, including negation itself. While the repetitive negation was formulated as “God is not X; God is not not-X”, the double negation, framed with joint denial as “Neither (God is X), nor (God is not-X),” was more popularly employed than the former.” ([Book Review] Unsaying God: Negative Theology in Medieval Islam by Aydogan Kars | Reviewed by Mehmet Emin Gulecyuz 5 March 2020[↩]

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Ain Sof” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.