To our Sacred Web Subscribers:
This week, we are pleased to offer an inspired essay by a young author, Afraaz Adam Mulji. Titled ‘De Sanctitate Abscondita: Toward an Apophatic Ontology of the Holy’, it is written in the contemplative tradition with which readers of Sacred Web will be familiar, and explores the paradox of ‘saying the unsayable’. This is a theme which Mulji, who is also a gifted musician and composer, explores in that medium too. His essay brought to mind something Sir John Tavener once wrote in the pages of this journal to the effect that music was his attempt to express Silence.
Here are excerpts from Mulji’s essay:
- Every discourse concerning holiness begins already in error, for discourse presupposes that the holy may be rendered into the economy of predicates. Yet the holy is precisely that before which predication suffers an ontological insufficiency. Language names beings; holiness precedes every determination by which beings become nameable.
- The holy is where contradiction ceases without being annihilated. Justice and mercy remain distinct yet become inseparable. Majesty and humility no longer alternate but mutually imply one another. Distance becomes intimacy. Silence becomes speech. Hiddenness becomes revelation. Death becomes life without ceasing to be death.
The full essay can be read here:
De Sanctitate Abscondita
Toward an Apophatic Ontology of the Holy
Afraaz Adam Mulji