“To say ‘heavenly glory cannot be expressed’
expresses more of the nature of that glory
than to say ‘this is what heavenly glory is like.’”
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Carta Athenagorica (1690)

I will confess to being perplexed by Timothy Troutner’s “The Eclipse of the Word.” I am not simply perplexed by some of its specific claims, though I do find some perplexing, but am more comprehensively perplexed by it. Indeed, I am so perplexed that not only can I not say with Ephraim Radner, “I agree with everything in it,” I also cannot really say that I disagree. I think I understand the words, and even how they connect into sentences, but for all that I feel as if I am missing something crucial. This may be because I am above all perplexed by both the irascible and appetitive passions that drive this essay, which is a clever Thomist way of saying that I am perplexed by both its fears and its desires, what it is fleeing (or fighting) and what it is running towards. Perhaps to not be perplexed, to be capable of either agreement or disagreement, I would need to share the essay’s irascible and appetitive passions. What follows is therefore intended less as agreement or disagreement (though perhaps a bit of that), but more as something of a meditation, for my own sake, if for no one else’s, on why I am perplexed.[i]

As to irascibility, what the essay both flees and fights is “modern apophaticism,” by which it means a kind of unknowing that was born in Kant’s critical philosophy and spread forth in its offspring: the “grammatical Thomists” and the continental post-Heideggerians. Both of these branches present themselves as doing theology—engaging in speech about God—but are always actually talking about something else—the limits of human experience and conception—and thus are on the way, if not already arrived at, simple agnosticism, the night in which all cows are black. Ephraim Radner suggests that what is actually fear-worthy is the liberal form of modern apophaticism, which claims that since God is unknowable we must hold loosely to any and all of our theological truth claims. But Troutner’s essay seems to be more comprehensively irascible. Figures like Herbert McCabe or Jean-Luc Marion hardly seem like liberals who want to avoid making truth claims, yet they are numbered among those who must be fought or fled. The problem is not liberal apophaticism, but any apophaticism that is grounded in both the limits of human cognitive capacities and the very nature of God, which results in it being “systematic, total, and regulative of Christian doctrine.” I should add that, though the essay speaks of modern apophaticism, Troutner has the honesty to recognize that the fearsome specter is likely already haunting figures like Aquinas (see, e.g., note 26).

A significant fear expressed in the essay is that modern apophaticism restricts our knowledge of God to God’s effects, and thus forestalls knowledge of “what God is like in himself.” This seems to suggest that the claim that we know God only by his effects means that we don’t know God at all, but only some detritus left strewn about by the absent God. I suppose if one takes Kant as the source and summit of modern apophaticism, then this might be a not-totally-implausible read (though I am not sure that it would be entirely fair to Kant). But the claim that we know God only through his effects need not be read in a Kantian way. Where Troutner sees this claim as barring access to something—what God is like in himself—I take it to mean that God is never the passive “object” of our knowledge, but always the active “subject” who gives himself to be known, whether through nature or grace. To know God through his effects has never struck me as some second-best sort of knowledge, but simply the way in which a creature knows the creator.    

A related fear is the one aroused by claims, like Herbert McCabe’s, that “when we speak of God we do not know what we are talking about.”[ii] Even taking into account the somewhat juvenile delight McCabe can take at times in making shocking statements, this might indeed seem a fear-worthy statement, suggesting as it does that our God-talk is meaningless gibberish. But McCabe, while occasionally juvenile, is almost always precise in what he says, and in this case it seems to me quite proper to say that we don’t know what we are talking about when we speak of God, since the divine essence cannot be comprehended by any creature (a point that is not, I think, being disputed). We don’t know what we are talking about when we talk about God, but this is something quite different from not knowing who we are talking about. To state that we don’t know the “what” (quidditas) of God when we speak of God need not mean, as Troutner seems to fear, that our language somehow “misses” God, fails to refer to God. Indeed, the whole point of the distinction between the modus significandi and the res significata is that the first can be taken from God’s created effects without imperiling our ability to speak of the latter.[iii] That a creature would speak of God in the language of creatures, and yet not fail to speak about God, seems a perfectly satisfactory description of how things are while we are yet in status viatores. I find nothing here either to fear or to fight.[iv]

As to appetite, I think what the essay desires is already suggested in its statement of what it fears: loss of genuine knowledge of “what God is like in himself.” Knowledge of God in se is a worthy object of desire, and one that I share, since I agree with St. Thomas’s that the human mind is not satisfied until it grasps, regarding the cause of all things, “what it is.”[v] But in via this desire is lodged within the virtue of hope, which has its object a future good that is difficult but attainable.[vi] More specifically, the object of hope is what Thomas first describes as “an arduous intelligible” (arduum intelligibile) or better, he quickly corrects himself, something exceeding the intellect (supra intellectum).[vii] In hope, the will is oriented to what at present exceeds the intellect, but will one day be given through the light of glory. So for a thinker like Thomas—indeed for the Christian tradition ancient, medieval, and modern—knowledge of “what God is like in himself” is eschatological. It can be desired, but can only be had in the proleptic form of faith, which has as one of its defining features that its object is unseen.[viii]

But Troutner’s essay is not willing to let the last day have the last say, for to do so would be to implicitly deny (no matter how much one might explicitly affirm) that the eternal Word has taken flesh and dwelt among us. The Word made flesh delivers to us “what God is like in himself,” and as it were gives us a language adequate to speak of God, since in the incarnation the ineffable divine nature is hypostatically united to human nature. This “Neochalcedonian” Christology amounts to a sharp rebuke to modern apophaticism and its claims that we know God only through his effects. But here my perplexity returns, because I fail to see how this Christology is substantially different from the Christology found in Thomas Aquinas or Herbert McCabe (who takes his Christological cues from Thomas). For example, if one reads the exchange between McCabe and Maurice Wiles in God Matters, one finds McCabe rejecting the view that Christ cannot be spoken of as a human person (what else would one call a hypostasis that possesses a human nature?), as well as the notion of a logos asarkos (at what point exactly does the eternal Logos lack a human nature?), both of which are identified by Troutner as characteristic of Neochalcedonian Christology.[ix] There is nothing remotely “Nestorian” about such a Christology.

What is particularly perplexing to me in all this is that even though Aquinas and McCabe seem to be in substantial agreement with the Christological logic that Troutner characterizes as Neochalcedonian, they do not draw the same conclusions with regard to the apophatic nature of theology. Perhaps the answer to this perplexity lies in what one desires a doctrine, and theology more broadly, to do. For Troutner, “the work of speculative and theoretical innovation” is an “unavoidable” task for the theologian. For McCabe (and in this I think he is being true to Thomas), the purpose of a doctrine like the incarnation is mainly “to block certain blind alleys in our search for Jesus,” and the task of the theologian is to try to map those blind alleys.[x] This might seem a tedious, even menial, and certainly undesirable task. And perhaps it is, particularly when compared to the delights of speculative and theoretical innovation. But my general view is that all genuine theological innovation happens regardless of what we do or desire, as the Spirit leads us into all truth, and the task of the theologian is rather more modest.

This perhaps locates most clearly the divergence in desire, and by implication fear, that lies at the heart of my perplexity. In my life as a theologian, I not only have been untroubled by the inability of my own thinking to deliver “what God is like in himself,” but have found it consoling and freeing. The sense that God is the ineradicable mystery that lies not merely beyond the limits of my concepts but at the heart of that mysterious process that we call “thinking” suggests to me a God who is very near indeed. And the undoubtedly true dogmatic claim that Jesus—who shat his diapers and died in agony—is “what God is like in himself” does not for me reduce my sense of unknowing but only increases it, on rare occasions to the point of silencing my thoughts so that the Word himself speaks through the silence. And this is freeing, because it tells me that all the God-talking and God-thinking that I spend so much time doing does not have to bear the burden of delivering “what God is like in himself,” but simply to try to help me, and maybe on occasion others, to be able to distinguish the mystery of the Word from mere conceptual confusion, so that God might be speak in silence and show himself in darkness.

This may be merely a tolerable difference of theological temperament, though to say that is perhaps disingenuously irenic. I get the impression that Timothy Troutner thinks that thinking like mine does not represent a benign difference to be tolerated but a threat to be defeated. And I myself must admit that I remain perplexed that someone would fear what I find consoling and desire what I deem burdensome.

Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt is Professor of Theology at Loyola University in Maryland.


[i] I will speak mainly about Thomas Aquinas and Herbert McCabe in this response because, while I have read many of the figures that Timothy Troutner identifies with “modern apophaticism,” they are the authors whose views are most ready to hand in my memory.

[ii] God Still Matters (Continuum, 2002), 27.

[iii] The essay in a couple of places seems to misspeak when it worries about modern (or medieval) apophaticism “wholly denying our knowledge of God-talk’s modus significandi.” We know perfectly well the modus significandi of our God-talk: it is that of creatures.And knowing this is quite useful, since it helps us avoid idolatry.

[iv] Similar fears might be aroused by Stephen Mulhall’s statements about God-talk as “nonsense,” though I must confess that I don’t know if I understand his arguments sufficiently to mount (or even want to mount) a similar defense. I think his point is that sense-making involves understanding something in terms of something else (for example, understanding creation in terms of change), but that God, as first principle, cannot really be understood in terms of anything else, so that proper God-talk must take the form of a negation of everything else (i.e. it must take the form of nonsense). Such a view seems to me defensible on much the same ground as McCabe’s, but I also get the feeling that Mulhall might be making a stronger claim than this, one that might be happy to say that theological language is gibberish that not only cannot mean but also cannot even refer. See Mulhall’s aptly named The Great Riddle (Oxford, 2015).

[v] Summa theologiae I-II q. 3 a. 8.

[vi] Summa theologiae II-II q. 17 a. 1.

[vii] Summa theologiae II-II q. 18 a. 1 ad 1.

[viii] Summa theologiae II-II q. 1 a. 4.

[ix] See God Matters (Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 54-74.

[x] God Matters, 73. Cf. Summa Theologiae II-II q. 1 a. 6. McCabe does also suggest that a theologian might also try to figure out how to maintain the doctrine of the incarnation while not maintaining the terminology employed by Ephesus and Chalcedon, but I take it that this is because he thinks it possible that such terminology has, in the modern context, itself become something of a blind alley, given modern understandings of “nature” and “person.”.

Next Conversation

“To say ‘heavenly glory cannot be expressed’
expresses more of the nature of that glory
than to say ‘this is what heavenly glory is like.’”
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Carta Athenagorica (1690)

I will confess to being perplexed by Timothy Troutner’s “The Eclipse of the Word.” I am not simply perplexed by some of its specific claims, though I do find some perplexing, but am more comprehensively perplexed by it. Indeed, I am so perplexed that not only can I not say with Ephraim Radner, “I agree with everything in it,” I also cannot really say that I disagree. I think I understand the words, and even how they connect into sentences, but for all that I feel as if I am missing something crucial. This may be because I am above all perplexed by both the irascible and appetitive passions that drive this essay, which is a clever Thomist way of saying that I am perplexed by both its fears and its desires, what it is fleeing (or fighting) and what it is running towards. Perhaps to not be perplexed, to be capable of either agreement or disagreement, I would need to share the essay’s irascible and appetitive passions. What follows is therefore intended less as agreement or disagreement (though perhaps a bit of that), but more as something of a meditation, for my own sake, if for no one else’s, on why I am perplexed.[i]

As to irascibility, what the essay both flees and fights is “modern apophaticism,” by which it means a kind of unknowing that was born in Kant’s critical philosophy and spread forth in its offspring: the “grammatical Thomists” and the continental post-Heideggerians. Both of these branches present themselves as doing theology—engaging in speech about God—but are always actually talking about something else—the limits of human experience and conception—and thus are on the way, if not already arrived at, simple agnosticism, the night in which all cows are black. Ephraim Radner suggests that what is actually fear-worthy is the liberal form of modern apophaticism, which claims that since God is unknowable we must hold loosely to any and all of our theological truth claims. But Troutner’s essay seems to be more comprehensively irascible. Figures like Herbert McCabe or Jean-Luc Marion hardly seem like liberals who want to avoid making truth claims, yet they are numbered among those who must be fought or fled. The problem is not liberal apophaticism, but any apophaticism that is grounded in both the limits of human cognitive capacities and the very nature of God, which results in it being “systematic, total, and regulative of Christian doctrine.” I should add that, though the essay speaks of modern apophaticism, Troutner has the honesty to recognize that the fearsome specter is likely already haunting figures like Aquinas (see, e.g., note 26).

A significant fear expressed in the essay is that modern apophaticism restricts our knowledge of God to God’s effects, and thus forestalls knowledge of “what God is like in himself.” This seems to suggest that the claim that we know God only by his effects means that we don’t know God at all, but only some detritus left strewn about by the absent God. I suppose if one takes Kant as the source and summit of modern apophaticism, then this might be a not-totally-implausible read (though I am not sure that it would be entirely fair to Kant). But the claim that we know God only through his effects need not be read in a Kantian way. Where Troutner sees this claim as barring access to something—what God is like in himself—I take it to mean that God is never the passive “object” of our knowledge, but always the active “subject” who gives himself to be known, whether through nature or grace. To know God through his effects has never struck me as some second-best sort of knowledge, but simply the way in which a creature knows the creator.    

A related fear is the one aroused by claims, like Herbert McCabe’s, that “when we speak of God we do not know what we are talking about.”[ii] Even taking into account the somewhat juvenile delight McCabe can take at times in making shocking statements, this might indeed seem a fear-worthy statement, suggesting as it does that our God-talk is meaningless gibberish. But McCabe, while occasionally juvenile, is almost always precise in what he says, and in this case it seems to me quite proper to say that we don’t know what we are talking about when we speak of God, since the divine essence cannot be comprehended by any creature (a point that is not, I think, being disputed). We don’t know what we are talking about when we talk about God, but this is something quite different from not knowing who we are talking about. To state that we don’t know the “what” (quidditas) of God when we speak of God need not mean, as Troutner seems to fear, that our language somehow “misses” God, fails to refer to God. Indeed, the whole point of the distinction between the modus significandi and the res significata is that the first can be taken from God’s created effects without imperiling our ability to speak of the latter.[iii] That a creature would speak of God in the language of creatures, and yet not fail to speak about God, seems a perfectly satisfactory description of how things are while we are yet in status viatores. I find nothing here either to fear or to fight.[iv]

As to appetite, I think what the essay desires is already suggested in its statement of what it fears: loss of genuine knowledge of “what God is like in himself.” Knowledge of God in se is a worthy object of desire, and one that I share, since I agree with St. Thomas’s that the human mind is not satisfied until it grasps, regarding the cause of all things, “what it is.”[v] But in via this desire is lodged within the virtue of hope, which has its object a future good that is difficult but attainable.[vi] More specifically, the object of hope is what Thomas first describes as “an arduous intelligible” (arduum intelligibile) or better, he quickly corrects himself, something exceeding the intellect (supra intellectum).[vii] In hope, the will is oriented to what at present exceeds the intellect, but will one day be given through the light of glory. So for a thinker like Thomas—indeed for the Christian tradition ancient, medieval, and modern—knowledge of “what God is like in himself” is eschatological. It can be desired, but can only be had in the proleptic form of faith, which has as one of its defining features that its object is unseen.[viii]

But Troutner’s essay is not willing to let the last day have the last say, for to do so would be to implicitly deny (no matter how much one might explicitly affirm) that the eternal Word has taken flesh and dwelt among us. The Word made flesh delivers to us “what God is like in himself,” and as it were gives us a language adequate to speak of God, since in the incarnation the ineffable divine nature is hypostatically united to human nature. This “Neochalcedonian” Christology amounts to a sharp rebuke to modern apophaticism and its claims that we know God only through his effects. But here my perplexity returns, because I fail to see how this Christology is substantially different from the Christology found in Thomas Aquinas or Herbert McCabe (who takes his Christological cues from Thomas). For example, if one reads the exchange between McCabe and Maurice Wiles in God Matters, one finds McCabe rejecting the view that Christ cannot be spoken of as a human person (what else would one call a hypostasis that possesses a human nature?), as well as the notion of a logos asarkos (at what point exactly does the eternal Logos lack a human nature?), both of which are identified by Troutner as characteristic of Neochalcedonian Christology.[ix] There is nothing remotely “Nestorian” about such a Christology.

What is particularly perplexing to me in all this is that even though Aquinas and McCabe seem to be in substantial agreement with the Christological logic that Troutner characterizes as Neochalcedonian, they do not draw the same conclusions with regard to the apophatic nature of theology. Perhaps the answer to this perplexity lies in what one desires a doctrine, and theology more broadly, to do. For Troutner, “the work of speculative and theoretical innovation” is an “unavoidable” task for the theologian. For McCabe (and in this I think he is being true to Thomas), the purpose of a doctrine like the incarnation is mainly “to block certain blind alleys in our search for Jesus,” and the task of the theologian is to try to map those blind alleys.[x] This might seem a tedious, even menial, and certainly undesirable task. And perhaps it is, particularly when compared to the delights of speculative and theoretical innovation. But my general view is that all genuine theological innovation happens regardless of what we do or desire, as the Spirit leads us into all truth, and the task of the theologian is rather more modest.

This perhaps locates most clearly the divergence in desire, and by implication fear, that lies at the heart of my perplexity. In my life as a theologian, I not only have been untroubled by the inability of my own thinking to deliver “what God is like in himself,” but have found it consoling and freeing. The sense that God is the ineradicable mystery that lies not merely beyond the limits of my concepts but at the heart of that mysterious process that we call “thinking” suggests to me a God who is very near indeed. And the undoubtedly true dogmatic claim that Jesus—who shat his diapers and died in agony—is “what God is like in himself” does not for me reduce my sense of unknowing but only increases it, on rare occasions to the point of silencing my thoughts so that the Word himself speaks through the silence. And this is freeing, because it tells me that all the God-talking and God-thinking that I spend so much time doing does not have to bear the burden of delivering “what God is like in himself,” but simply to try to help me, and maybe on occasion others, to be able to distinguish the mystery of the Word from mere conceptual confusion, so that God might be speak in silence and show himself in darkness.

This may be merely a tolerable difference of theological temperament, though to say that is perhaps disingenuously irenic. I get the impression that Timothy Troutner thinks that thinking like mine does not represent a benign difference to be tolerated but a threat to be defeated. And I myself must admit that I remain perplexed that someone would fear what I find consoling and desire what I deem burdensome.

Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt is Professor of Theology at Loyola University in Maryland.


[i] I will speak mainly about Thomas Aquinas and Herbert McCabe in this response because, while I have read many of the figures that Timothy Troutner identifies with “modern apophaticism,” they are the authors whose views are most ready to hand in my memory.

[ii] God Still Matters (Continuum, 2002), 27.

[iii] The essay in a couple of places seems to misspeak when it worries about modern (or medieval) apophaticism “wholly denying our knowledge of God-talk’s modus significandi.” We know perfectly well the modus significandi of our God-talk: it is that of creatures.And knowing this is quite useful, since it helps us avoid idolatry.

[iv] Similar fears might be aroused by Stephen Mulhall’s statements about God-talk as “nonsense,” though I must confess that I don’t know if I understand his arguments sufficiently to mount (or even want to mount) a similar defense. I think his point is that sense-making involves understanding something in terms of something else (for example, understanding creation in terms of change), but that God, as first principle, cannot really be understood in terms of anything else, so that proper God-talk must take the form of a negation of everything else (i.e. it must take the form of nonsense). Such a view seems to me defensible on much the same ground as McCabe’s, but I also get the feeling that Mulhall might be making a stronger claim than this, one that might be happy to say that theological language is gibberish that not only cannot mean but also cannot even refer. See Mulhall’s aptly named The Great Riddle (Oxford, 2015).

[v] Summa theologiae I-II q. 3 a. 8.

[vi] Summa theologiae II-II q. 17 a. 1.

[vii] Summa theologiae II-II q. 18 a. 1 ad 1.

[viii] Summa theologiae II-II q. 1 a. 4.

[ix] See God Matters (Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 54-74.

[x] God Matters, 73. Cf. Summa Theologiae II-II q. 1 a. 6. McCabe does also suggest that a theologian might also try to figure out how to maintain the doctrine of the incarnation while not maintaining the terminology employed by Ephesus and Chalcedon, but I take it that this is because he thinks it possible that such terminology has, in the modern context, itself become something of a blind alley, given modern understandings of “nature” and “person.”.

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