From Fr. Nicholas Sakharov’s I Love Therefore I Am…

As far as spiritual knowledge is concered, it has a unique basis: “Our knowledge is a result of the revelation from above.” Spiritual knoweldge is understood as “con-joined existence,” or “co-existence” (sobytie), as “uniting fusion” (spaika) of very being. In Felicite, Fr. Sophrony writes: “Knowledge is conceived as communion in being.”

Scientific “knowledge” rests on the resources of human rational thinking, while “authentic” theological knowledge embraces all aspects of human being. Man who is striving to acquire knowledge of God has to abandon the categories of abstract intellectual knowledge as incapable of conveying the facts of divine reality:

Such direct knowledge is not provable by logic. It is even impossible with the aid of the concept with which human reason operates to circumscribe this knowledge. And that, not only because the framework of conceptual thought is too narrow and would not be able to contain divine realities, but above all because true knowledge of God is only granted at the existential level by an experience lived with all our being.

Knowledge of the omnipresent God is accessible to all rational beings. But schools of theology and theological tomes are far from sufficient for its assimilation. In some inexplicable fashion true knowledge filters into our inmost being wh he (God) is with us. The operative indwelling of God in us means that we are introduced into the very act of divine being. And this is precisely that way that our spirit is given living knowledge of him.