Triads, D-F: What It Is To Know

As an Eastern father, Gregory of Palamas does not hold to a sort of catechetical knowledge of God.  This cataphatic knowledge, he thinks, is misguided.  He quotes another man in his writings who says "...the observance of the commandment can not remove the darkness of ignorance from the soul."  So then, the question must be this: What is it to know of God?  Can we know anything? As Gregory says, "What does not even remove ignorance cannot give knowledge!"

Certainly he does not think that God is altogether unknowable.  There is a sense in which we can know him. But what sense is it? Gregory speaks of contemplation much more than knowledge.  It's an interesting distinction he makes, one in which the contemplate God without truly knowing all of him.  Gregory says that if we use 'knowledge' in the transcendental sense, "...all contemplation, which depends on knowledge, since nothing surpasses the indwelling and manifestation of God in us, nothing equals it, and nothing approaches it."  Contemplation depends on a certain kind of knowledge, but truly what is happening is we are contemplating the depths of our union with God, our deification in Christ. There is, to Gregory, this "human composite, which is united to His hypostasis" that we find ourselves contemplating. So in contemplating the power and mercy of God, etc., effectual in us and in contemplating the divine without some sort of certain catechesis, we grow more into his deity.

I wonder, however, to what extent this apophatic reaches.   Clearly not to the Trinity, since he uses the Biblical terms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in regards to God.  Yet, he doesn't seem to try to explain the Trinity.  He does, however, speak of our hypostasis with Christ in our deification speaking of the union of deity and likeness of man in Christ.  Quite the doctrinal statement.  The Eastern church is a Nicene Creed endorsing church.  So perhaps he simply thinks that he can not expand any further than the Creed.  It seems to me a profound contradiction to imply that we can "know" of God, simply contemplate and subscribe to an apophatic type of theology and yet speak of the hypostasis of Christ.  Perhaps I have botched his formula, but he seems to be working from a theological contradiction.