A large part of my work is an attempt to present how certain aspects of religious thinking have value beyond the religious sphere. In particular apophatic theology, I believe, may have profound meaning when interpreted in a secular manner; the apophatic, really, just amounts to an acknowledgment of the limits of rational knowledge, the acceptance of the unknowable and the mysterious, and the profound value and meaning, the positivity, that this understanding can bring to our experience of life. In pursuit of the apophatic I have found the writing of William Franke to be wonderfully enlightening. Below is an excerpt from his work On What Cannot Be Said, from a chapter on the work of Franz Rosenzweig. I have taken the liberty in this excerpt to replace the word “God” with the more general word “Life” in order to present how Rosenzweig’s writing, as with so many apophatic writers, easily transcends religiosity.

“In Part I of the Star, Rosenzweig begins from the fact that we know nothing of [Life], just as we know nothing of the world and nothing of man. To know anything implies grasping it in its totality, and this is impossible. But precisely this nothing of our knowledge is an extremely positive existential fact; it defines our whole way of being and is expressed in everything we experience. The nothing of our knowledge is itself an inexhaustibly rich phenomenon: our knowledge, by telling us nothing, tells the most essential thing about [Life], namely, [its] transcendence of our faculties and therefore of our discourse. [Life] is thus ‘metaphysical,’ a positive fact that we cannot comprehend or properly state. Similarly, the World and Man in their pure facticity transcend rational comprehension. The created world has a positivity and an order that we experience but do not comprehend; we do not see its ground any more than we see the act of Creation. Its Logos transcends knowledge; it is ‘metalogical.’ So also, man in his singular individuality is ‘metalogical’: he is governed by a vital principle- his own individual character- that escapes rational calculation.”