17.

 Did the bishops explain the mysteries of God (that is, the Trinity, the Incarnation, etc). at the Council?

            The bishops did not explain and never imagined they had explained the mysteries of God; they merely drew a fence around them. That is, they excluded certain false ideas about them so that people would not fall into error and heresy.

            Such is apophatic or negative theology. While cataphatic or positive theology proceeds by affirmations, apophatic theology proceeds by negations. Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos explains that the Holy Fathers used apophatic language to demonstrate the incapability of the mind to understand and express God, and that they transcended philosophy by means of apophatic theology and apophatic expressions. St. Gregory the Theologian (+390), for example, says: “It is impossible to express God and even more impossible to conceive Him.”

            As Hieromonk Damascene Christensen goes on to add, St. Maximus the Confessor (+662) states in his Mystagogy that we can use both affirmative and negative expression about God. By the first, His existence is affirmed, and by the second, His transcendence is shown in relation to His created works. However, as St. Maximus also states, the being of God is simple, unknowable and inaccessible to man and altogether impossible to interpret, because it is beyond all affirmation or negation.

            Fr. Damascene continues, noting that the ancient Christian writers say that although we can apply to God such terms as Essence, Being, Mind or Thought, we have to understand that ultimately, God is beyond all these. The expression of St. John of Damascus (+750) is characteristic:

All that we can say affirmatively about God does not show His essence, but only what relates to His essence. And if you should ever speak of good, or justice, or wisdom, or something else of the sort, you are not describing the essence of God, but only things relating to His essence [Orthodox Faith, p. 172].

The same Holy Father also writes that:

The Divinity, then, is limitless and incomprehensible, and His limitlessness and incomprehensibility are all that can be understood about Him. All that we state affirmatively about God does not show His nature, but only what relates to His nature.

Fr. Damascene explains that because the mystery of the Holy Trinity has to do with the essence of God, it is ultimately incomprehensible not only to human beings, but to angels as well. St. Gregory the Theologian says that it would be impossible to speak of God's essence,

... even if you were a Moses... to Pharaoh, even if you were caught up like Paul to the third Heaven and heard unspeakable words, even if you were raised above them both and exalted to angelic or archangelic place and dignity. For though a thing be all heavenly, or above Heaven, and far higher in nature and nearer to God than we, yet it is farther distant from God, and from the complete comprehension of His essence, than it is lifted above our complex and lowly and earthly-sinking composition [Second Theological Oration, p. 289].