Gregory Palamas, fourteenth century Archbishop of Thessalonica, meeting the paradox, concluded that God was absolutely unknowable in his "essence." He was knowable only through His "energies," as revealed through the Three Persons and their activity, in His interaction with ourselves and with His cosmos. This view (expressed with more consideration and application) has become rightly accepted throughout the Eastern Churches. It is in the line of thought so carefully expressed by Dionysius: we cannot say what God, the totality and the creative life power, is. We can only say what it is not and its interaction with ourselves.

That interaction is total. "In Him we live and move and have our being." But when we seek to comprehend that ultimate, whether it be scientifically or in that more complete recognition that we call religion, then "we may find it necessary, as in modern physics, to take a step back from the objects of one's enquiry, whether they be God or Jesus, or light and matter, and be content only to speak of one's interactions with those objects" (my italics).

Why have I apparently digressed from the consideration of agape? Because agape is also at the frontiers of knowledge. Because it indicates a relationship, an interaction, which is fundamental and essential, stemming from the very essence of divine being and from the essence of cosmic harmony and life. It is the sine-qua-non.

There is a second purpose in my apparent digression - to call attention once again to the inadequacy of human communication through words. Yes, we have the gift of speech, the potential power of the word. Yes, it is our necessary means of expression and assessment; by repeated attempts to state, we draw nearer to "truth."

But never finally. The very material on which some philosophers base their arguments is indefinable. Their more and more complicated verbal structures can never attain their object. Yes, they are forever unveiling (maybe) some further facet of reality as it impinges upon them. But as one glances through recent books and reviews so skilfully critical, cancelling one another in a welter of verbal ingenuities, one looks beyond and over to further reaches of life. One remembers frustrated students of linguistics and, with them, concludes that when all is said and done, the language of poetry more nearly reflects our true apprehensions and more completely communicates with the "real" - whatever that may be.

And of the factors at work which we feel within the energies of the cosmic life, agape sets us in line with some interpretation of things "as they are" and of the all-pervading life which we can express only in apparent contradictions and paradox. "All things work together for good for them that love God." Here is the formative energy, a "living energy" in that it overcomes and transcends the physical.