ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with reaffirming the foundational dialectic in Eastern Orthodox theology regarding the essence/energies distinction of God. God’s essence (nature) is fundamentally unknowable and inaccessible. However, God is available to direct experience through his energies (his dynamic and revelatory presence in the world). The coexistence of incarnational knowing and mystical unknowing in Eastern Orthodoxy engenders a unique compatibility with psychoanalysis in general and Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular. Lacan’s concept of das Ding (the Thing) as the nothing at the center of subjective structure is compatible with the Eastern Orthodox notion of God’s essence as absent and unknowable. Both the Thing and God’s essence are at the heart of the subjective world though both are enshrouded in mystery and can only be experienced in the circulation of desire through signifiers (for Lacan) or through God’s energies (for Eastern Orthodoxy). In Orthodoxy, endeavoring to comprehend God using cataphatic (positive) theology results in conceptual idolatry. The incarnation of God in Jesus makes representation in symbol (Word) and imagery (iconography) possible. By linking the symbolic and imaginary, this also links Orthodox theology with the real, allowing for the radical unknowing in Eastern mysticism at the heart of apophaticism.
