Now as all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blast of the shofar and the mountain smoking, they became afraid and trembled. So they took up a position farther away and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we shall die.” Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid, for God has come only to test you and put the fear of him upon you so you do not sin.” So the people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the dark cloud where God was. Exodus 20:18-20
The Children of Israel were all excited about meeting YHWH on His mountain in Chapter 19 where Moses solemnly prepared them for this grand moment. We must not forget this event is essentially connected in the broader narrative of Scripture to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden in Eden, the Mountain of God. The people were to stand at the very gates, so to speak, which was then protected by the Cherubim with flaming swords, keeping them from taking from the Tree of Life, in their fallen condition.
It is at this crucial juncture that the Ten Commandments are injected into the text, giving the reader the impression that the Israelites witnessed these words by the mouth of YHWH at the foot of the mountain. We have just expounded them in the previous posts, and we have seen that all these laws are filled with paradise motifs. To live out these laws is to live in the very precincts of heaven, the path (Hebrew “Halacha”) to glory, holiness, and the Sabbath rest. Law was, is, and will always be, a good thing, filled with the goodness of creation.
Here, however, the narrative picks up on the people’s reaction to the grand Theophany upon the mount, and the voice of God. It is not unlike Adam and Eve’s hiding from God when, after partaking of the forbidden fruit, they heard the “sound” of God approaching them. What was before an awesome, terrifying, yet thrilling and engaging experience, was now too much for them to bear in their sinful state. So it is here. They recede, in the face of this theophanic display of natural and supernatural fire, earth-rocking, ear-splitting, and soul rattling phenomena, back from the mountain and stood far off.
What they experienced was too much of a good thing for their nascent souls to bear. They begged Moses to mediate the word of God to them, promising that they will listen to him, with full intention to obey. Moses was not pleased. He suspected that behind this request was a deep down fear of intimacy, and would create opportunity for sin, as it did for Adam and Eve. Moses acknowledged their dilemma, but insisted that this encounter was a test they had to work their way through. The test was to instill the fear of God into their souls so they would not sin. The narrative does not give the people’s response other than they “remained at a distance.” Moses leaves them behind, ascends up the mountain, and disappears into the “cloud of unknowing.”
As we have seen with Jacob’s Ladder, which was probably a mountainous step-like structure (see Jacob’s Temple Encounter), the concepts of “ascending the mountain” and of “entering the darkness or cloud” become standard imagery for the spiritual ascent to God for the Church’s mystics, full of paradoxes. To go up, we must be willing to go down, as Jesus Teaches in the Beatitudes. To enter into the darkness or the cloud, everything we thought was true dissolves into dust. Disorientation, not knowing up from down, the terror of losing all our trusted moorings, ensues.
For leaving behind everything that is observed, not only what sense comprehends but also what intelligence thinks it sees, it [the soul] keeps penetrating deeper until by the intelligence’s yearning for understanding it gains access to the invisible and the incomprehensible, and there it sees God. This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is seeing that consists of not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a darkness.
Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, 162.
Building on this, the 14th Century book, The Cloud of Unknowing, explains this concept, often referred to as the via negative, knowing by unknowing, in this manner. The person, motivated by love (for only love, not the mind, can grasp God), must leave beneath him all transient things in a “cloud of forgetting.” Above him is the cloud of unknowing which his love must penetrate, above which exists God.
Therefore, it is my wish to leave everything that I can think of and choose for my love the thing that I cannot think. Because he can certainly be loved, but not thought. Therefore, though it is good at times to think of the kindness and worthiness of God in particular, and though this is light and a part of contemplation, nevertheless, in this exercise, it must be cast down and covered over with a cloud of forgetting. You are to step above it stalwartly but lovingly, and with a devout, pleasing, impulsive love strive to pierce that darkness above you. You are to smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a shape dart of longing love. Do not leave that work for anything that may happen.
Even the great Aquinas acknowledges this when he says, “The mind’s greatest achievement is to know that we do not know God.” St. John of the Cross picks up on this in his famous Dark Night of the Soul.
But we get way ahead of ourselves here. In our text the Israelites, still holding onto their autonomy, like the children of the fallen Eve, had no such holy yearnings: their will was weak, and as we shall see, Moses’ fears realized.
Takeaway: Israel was invited to stand and hear the voice of YHWH speaking to Moses in the cloud, but in fear, stood afar off, exposing them to suspicion and rebellion.
Questions: 1) Have you ever been fearful of too much intimacy with God? Explain. 2) What do you think about this whole concept of the via negativa and the “cloud of unknowing” as it relates to you and your spiritual aspirations?
Resources Used:
Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, in “The Classics of Western Spirituality,” #162 The Darkness.
The Cloud of Unknowing, in “Classics of Western Spirituality,” Chapter VI, pp. 130f.