A human person thinks in categories of names, images and definitions. Everything that exists in this world, every living creature, material thing, intelligible reality, have their names in human language. The name points to the place its bearer occupies in the hierarchy of the created world. Giving names to the realities of the material world, the human person demonstrates his knowledge of these realities, his ability to grasp their meaning.[1] The name becomes a symbol of the reality, it encompasses our comprehension of this reality; being uttered, it reminds us of what stands behind it.

            All names and images which we use are taken from the material world, including those we use to describe the divine. God is outside the hierarchy of created things. Therefore, though there are names and images that can remind us of Him, there is no name in the human language which would be able to characterize God’s nature. Every name is subject to human reason, but the name of God is not. God answers the question about His name with a counter-question, ‘Why askest thou thus after My name, seeing  it is secret?’[2] God reveals Himself to Moses with the name of ‘I am that I am’ (Yahweh),[3] but this name does not say anything about what God’s essence is: it only shows that God is the One Who exists. Calling Himself ‘I am that I am’, God says, as it were, ‘Only I know what I am’. Therefore, not only the names which people give to God but also those with which God reveals Himself to them, do not exhaust His nature.[4]

            In ancient Israel the name of God was surrounded by reverence, in writing it was expressed using the sacred Tetragrammaton YHWH. After the Babylonian captivity the name of Yahweh was not pronounced by the Jews at all. In all this Gregory perceives a direct indication of the fact that God’s nature surpasses every name: 

Our starting-point must be that God cannot be named. Not only will deductive arguments (logismoi) prove it, but the wisest Hebrews of antiquity, so far as can be gathered, will too. The ancient Hebrews used special symbols to venerate the divine and did not allow anything inferior to God to be written with the same letter as the word ‘God’, on the ground that the divine should not be put on even this much of a level with things human. Would they ever have accepted the idea that the uniquely indissoluble nature could be expressed by evanescent speech? No man has yet breathed all the air; no mind has yet contained or language embraced God’s essence in its fullness.[5] 

            The names of God which exist in the human language are divided by Gregory into three categories: those which refer to His essence, those which show His power over the material world, and those related to His ‘providential ordering’ (oikonomia), that is, to His actions directed towards created things. The names of the first category are O On (‘He Who is’), Theos (God) and Kyrios (Lord).[6] The second category includes such names as ‘Almighty’, ‘King of glory’, ‘of the ages’, ‘of the forces’, ‘of the Beloved’, ‘of rulers’, ‘Lord Sabaoth’, ‘Lord of forces’, ‘Lord of masters’. To the third category belong the names of ‘God of salvation’, ‘of retribution’, ‘peace’, righteousness’, ‘of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, of ‘Israel’, and other names related to the acts of God in the history of ancient Israel. The same category includes God’s names ‘after incarnation’, that is, the names of Christ.[7] Preferably to all other names God is called ‘peace’ and ‘love’,[8] and the name of ‘love’ is the one most pleasing to Him.[9]

            Every divine name refers to a certain quality of God. However, all these names are relative and incomplete: neither each one of them separately, not all of them together are able to give a comprehensive picture of God in His nature. Even if one puts together all the names of God from Holy Scripture and all the traditional images used to depict God, one will have as a result of this only an artificial picture, an idol rather than God. Divine names which are taken from the visible universe can lead one to veneration of God the Creator. However, it happened in history that people deified visible things and venerated creatures instead of their Creator. Thus a distorted theology gives birth to paganism: 

‘Spirit’, ‘fire’, and ‘light’, ‘love’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘righteousness’, ‘mind’, and ‘reason’, and so forth, are titles of the prime reality, are they not? Can you think of wind without movement or dispersal? Or fire without matter, with no rising motion, no colour and shape of its own? Or light unmixed with atmosphere, detached from what shines to give it birth, so to say?.. As for wisdom, how can you think of it except at a state involved in investigations human or divine? Justice and love are commended dispositions... they make us and change us, as complexions do our bodies... How can the simple, unpicturable reality be all these images and each in its entirety?.. Though every thinking being longs for God... it is powerless... to grasp Him... Either it looks at things visible and makes of these a god... or else it discovers God through the beauty and order of things seen, using sight as a guide to what transcends sight without losing God through the grandeur of what it sees.[10] 

            Every simplistic, partial, cataphatic idea about God is close to idol-worship: it clothes God in categories of the human thought. Those anthropomorphic concepts of God which are found in Holy Scriptures must be understood as an allegory: through the ‘written text’ of Scriptures one must penetrate into their ‘inner meaning’.[11] There are things in the Bible which are not factual: for example, when it says that God ‘sleeps’, ‘wakes up’, ‘is angered’, ‘walks’, and has a ‘throne of Cherubim’. These are all anthropomorphisms taken from the human reality and applied to God. When God retires from us, we say He ‘sleeps’; when He suddenly benefits us, we claim He ‘woke up’. His punishing us we call ‘anger’; His acting in different places, ‘walking’; His resting among the heavenly powers, ‘sitting’; His swift motion, ‘flight’; His watching over us, ‘face’; His giving and receiving, ‘hand’. ‘In short every faculty or activity of God has given us a corresponding picture in terms of something bodily’.[12]

            Gregory’s teaching on the relative and partial character of the names of God, which was to become very important for the subsequent theological tradition of the Orthodox East, is expressed in both his orations and mystical poetry. One of his poems is addressed to God as a bearer of all names and at the same time someone beyond any name, Who is glorified by both word and silence: 

O You Who are beyond everything (o panton epekeina)! For what else can be sung about You?

What word can glorify You? For You are unutterable for any word!

What intellect can look at You? For You are incomprehensible for any intellect!

You alone are unspeakable, for You have begotten all speakable things.

You alone are unknowable, for You have generated all that is knowable.

Everything that has speech and that has not proclaimed You.

Everything reasonable and unreasonable venerates You.

The desires and pains which are common for all

Are directed at You! Everything prays to You.

Everything capable to understand Your commandment sends to You a speechless hymn.

All exists because of You alone. All in its entirety longs for You.

You are the limit of all, You are both One and All, yet You are None,

And You are neither One, nor All. O You Who have all names! How can I name You,

Who are alone nameless? What heavenly intellect

Would be able to break through clouds that hide You? Be merciful,

O You, Who are beyond everything. For what else can be sung about You?[13] 

            Denys the Areopagite probably had in mind precisely this poem when he said that ‘the theologians hymn’ God ‘as both unnamable and possessing all names’.[14] In Denys’ classical treatise the theme of the divine names was further developed and systematized. However, it was Gregory who first created in Eastern Christian tradition a coherent teaching on the names of God, Who is ‘beyond everything’, beyond all human names, terms, images, definitions and descriptions.