Myer on the Unknown and Unknowable

Isaac Myer, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages taken from Blavatsky's review of Isaac Myer's Qabbalah: The Philosophical Writings of Solomon Ben Yehudah Ibn Gebirol, published in Lucifer in February 1889 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XI. The full review is in the site's Blavatsky Speaks Series; what is given here is the long extract from Myer's own introduction which the review singles out.

Myer's argument is that the nearest a man can come to the unseen is an inner communion working silently in the soul which cannot be put into absolute language or into any words at all — something beyond formulation into word-symbolism yet standing on the border of it and of the unknown spiritual world. He names this conceptualism, and locates it in the heart and in inner thought rather than in doctrine: silence, meditation, intercommunion with self. What follows is a defence of negative statements about God. Many of our ideas are only negations, he says, the Highest Deity being clothed as to its essence and appearance in darkness so far as finite thought is concerned — and yet even these negations are affirmations. The reason given is that all our so-called absolute knowledge is raised upon and carried on through matter-world knowledge and symbolism, so that the Deity and its attributes can only be an absolute negation of it. His illustration is time: eternity is not past, present and future, since those are in time, and can be conceived only as an absolute negation of all thought of time — and in the same way spirituality only by the absolute negation of all matter-world thought and existence. The extract ends on the formula the file is arranged around: the Non Ego is the nearest approach to the invisible, and the Ego is a manifestation.

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