My response to Timothy Troutner’s theses on modern apophaticism has three parts.
First, a catena of repeat-worthy insights from Timothy’s richly suggestive essay.
- Under thesis #1, he assembles a genuinely alarming set of quotations about the impossibility of knowing of God – though I take heart from Ephraim Radner’s observation that no one really believes such things as stated.
- Timothy’s analysis of the Kantian roots of modern negative theology reminded me of the vigorous anti-Kantianism of the Reformed theologian and apologist, Cornelius Van Til. That comparison, to clarify, counts as a commendation.
- I glossed Timothy’s observation that “perhaps there is little distinctively modern about ‘modern apophaticism’” with a marginal “Yikes!” I agree no simple return to the tradition suffices. It never does. Reditus is never merely a return to the point of exodus.
- Timothy accurately identifies the impulse behind contemporary apophaticism, namely, resistance to totalizing rationalism, and he’s equally correct that modern apophaticism is no more a solution than the neo-Romanticism that “plac[es] all its chips on metaphor and symbol.” Both “solutions” feed off Kant and leave him entirely untouched. (Echoes of Van Til again.)[i]
- Yes indeed: “negative theology [must] be ‘shaped’ or ‘regulated’ by doctrinal horizons, rather than vice versa.” And we must resist any negative theology that functions as a “superdoctrine” that determines what revelation is permitted to reveal.
Second, a friendly amendment to Timothy’s Thesis #5. His Neochalcedonian proposal distinguishes the logic of hypostasis from logic of natures. The latter is “disjunctive,” such that “the divine nature, taken abstractly, is strictly unknowable and absolutely different from our own.” Thus, “no natural relation between the two is conceivable.” If God were only His divine nature, “then something like modern apophaticism would be true.”[ii]
The incarnation also unveils a logic of hypostasis capable of transcending “natural limits and barriers.” Hypostases, Timothy argues, don’t entirely lack positivity, but, since they have “no natural content,” a hypostatic union and identity is possible between “quiddities which remain absolutely (naturally) different.” There is no such reality as “the divine nature, taken abstractly,” no surplus of unhypostatized ousia, since God is Father, Son, and Spirit. As Timothy puts it, since “the divine nature eternally exists only as hypostatized in the external exchange of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,”[iii] divine nature isn’t “all that God is.” There’s no apophatic void transcending the Persons, hovering behind the incarnate Son. Rather, the hyper– beyond the divine essence is hypostatic.[iv] Here’s where we locate negation: Divine Persons, like human persons, “remain mysterious even when genuinely known.”
I can see how this counts as an apophaticism that incorporates “a kataphatic moment”: What is known is enveloped by what is unknown. But it seems equally plausible to describe it as a kataphatic theology that incorporates an apophatic moment, or, more paradoxically, as an intertwining of two modes of encounter in which each moment is both a knowing and an unknowing. We are never more intimate with others than when we glimpse their unfathomable depths. Does the distinguished gentleman accept this amendment?
Third, a modest positive contribution of my own.
Timothy’s Neochalcedonian framework provides theological grounding for knowing God in His words and actions. But what, in practice, does this mean for our engagement with the Bible? Once the word has emerged from the eclipse, what should we expect of it? Timothy’s brief remarks on a theology of language help to pinpoint errors of modern apophaticism, which are also sources of ambiguity in classical apophaticism. One is a rejection or an inadequate thinking-through of the implications of creation. “God is a speech event,” Timothy says, and creation is spoken into existence. Thus, as Psalm 19 indicates, all creatures are speech. As a discourse of and about the speaking God, creation is from top to bottom the Creator’s self-disclosure. This makes knowledge of God not only possible but inescapable: “if I am alive, I know God as He who makes me,” as Radner puts it.[v]
Creation likewise justifies the use of human language to speak of the Creator. Referring created things to God isn’t improper in the least. On the contrary, anthropo- and cosmo-morphisms articulate the nature of things. As Timothy puts it, “Language proper merely brings to luminosity the linguistic character of created being.” Or, in the words of Olivier-Thomas Venard, as quoted by Troutner: Analogy establishes “a semantic and linguistic community between divine and human being,” which amounts to “a sort of ‘identity’ between words and the Word.”
I get vertigo at this level of abstraction. So I ask, What does it actually mean for our understanding and use of Scripture? What, for instance, are we to make of Deuteronomy 4:24 (quoted in Hebrews 12:29): “Yahweh your God is a consuming fire.” In what sense is that true? In Deuteronomy, Moses is reminding Israel of their experience at Sinai, when Yahweh spoke out of the fire, not for the first time: Yahweh revealed His name from the burning bush on the same mountain (Exodus 3). Elsewhere in Scripture, Yahweh’s tongue (Isaiah 30:27) and breath (Psalm 18:8) are fire. When He’s angry, His “nose burns,” and the arm He stretches out over His enemies is an arm of fire (Isaiah 33:11). The eyes of the glorified Jesus are flames of fire (Revelation 1:14). To approach Yahweh is to approach an intense flame – at the mountain, at the altar, in theophanies, in the inner sanctuary of the temple.[vi] Fire consumes, and so too Yahweh is an “eating” (Heb. ‘akal) fire, who stokes up His altar-table to “eat” (‘akal) altar portions as His bread.[vii] God is love, which is to say, in the terms of the Song of Songs, that the God who is the heart of all things is an unquenchable flame (Song of Songs 8:7-8).
Metaphor piled on metaphor. What do we do with it? Revel in it, for starters. And that reveling is a mode of knowing. I affirm Ephraim’s suggestion: “words are powerful in themselves, and divine Scriptural words in a supreme degree” such that “our usage of them, over and over, through time and circumstance, represents our opening to their reach.” But that opening, once experienced, must be communicated in catechesis, preaching, theological formulation. And how does that work? Ought we, for example, ponder the phenomenal aspects of fire as a way of opening to the fiery character of God – on the creational assumption that fire was created precisely to manifest the consuming Fire? May we ponder the paradox of a God who speaks “I am” from the midst of the most protean of created substances? May we think God as a source of light (literal and figurative) and warmth (also literal and figurative)? Fire destroys and purifies; it purifies by destroying impurities; should we imagine God inviting us into the fire so that we might be translated by fire into fire?
These musings lead me to an apophaticism driven primarily by consideration of the scriptural word. To say God is a consuming fire is simply to say fire exists as a sign of the fieriness of the fire’s Maker. Here the semper maior grounds rather than subverts human language. We ascend not from the metaphor of fire to a transcendent One who is entirely unlike fire; rather, the Creator is infinitely more fiery even than the ball of burning gas at the center of our solar system (God is also “sun and shield”). On this understanding, negation isn’t a distinct via at all, but merely an inference along the way of eminence. Not: God is not at all like fire. Rather: God is fire in an incomprehensible way that infinitely surpasses created fire. This way is the one I described above: The apophatic doesn’t incorporate kataphatic, nor vice versa, but rather every moment in our reception of the biblical word is both a knowing and unknowing, a knowing of the speech of the speaking God who infinitely exceeds our knowing, a knowledge that simultaneously casts us out on a vast sea of mystery.
Peter Leithart is president of Theopolis.
[i] I’m not convinced the victory over neo-scholasticism is as secure as Timothy suggests.
[ii] One corollary: Modern apophaticism presumes God is only divine nature. That is, the eclipse is the w/Word is also, unsurprisingly, an eclipse of the Trinity.
[iii] The point must be generalized: No abstract, un-hypostatized nature exists, as Timothy observes (fn. 60).
[iv] This is how Timothy understands Dionysius’s notion of hyperessentiality (fn. 64).
[v] This universalizes the scope of apophatic mystery. If everything speaks of the incomprehensible God, then everything – not just God – is beyond our comprehension. We cannot perfectly understand a fly, as Thomas Aquinas observed (Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum, Prologue). Mystery envelops our knowledge of everything.
[vi] See the prayer for the final day of Sukkot: “For the sake of the patriarch Abraham cast into flames of fire;
For the sake of Isaac his son bound on the wood for the fire; For the sake of Jacob the mighty who wrestled with a prince of fire . . . O save, we beseech Thee.”
[vii] Deena Grant argues that Yahweh’s fire the visible medium of His interaction with creation; “Fire and the Body of Yahweh,” JSOT 40.2 (2015) 139-61.
My response to Timothy Troutner’s theses on modern apophaticism has three parts.
First, a catena of repeat-worthy insights from Timothy’s richly suggestive essay.
- Under thesis #1, he assembles a genuinely alarming set of quotations about the impossibility of knowing of God – though I take heart from Ephraim Radner’s observation that no one really believes such things as stated.
- Timothy’s analysis of the Kantian roots of modern negative theology reminded me of the vigorous anti-Kantianism of the Reformed theologian and apologist, Cornelius Van Til. That comparison, to clarify, counts as a commendation.
- I glossed Timothy’s observation that “perhaps there is little distinctively modern about ‘modern apophaticism’” with a marginal “Yikes!” I agree no simple return to the tradition suffices. It never does. Reditus is never merely a return to the point of exodus.
- Timothy accurately identifies the impulse behind contemporary apophaticism, namely, resistance to totalizing rationalism, and he’s equally correct that modern apophaticism is no more a solution than the neo-Romanticism that “plac[es] all its chips on metaphor and symbol.” Both “solutions” feed off Kant and leave him entirely untouched. (Echoes of Van Til again.)[i]
- Yes indeed: “negative theology [must] be ‘shaped’ or ‘regulated’ by doctrinal horizons, rather than vice versa.” And we must resist any negative theology that functions as a “superdoctrine” that determines what revelation is permitted to reveal.
Second, a friendly amendment to Timothy’s Thesis #5. His Neochalcedonian proposal distinguishes the logic of hypostasis from logic of natures. The latter is “disjunctive,” such that “the divine nature, taken abstractly, is strictly unknowable and absolutely different from our own.” Thus, “no natural relation between the two is conceivable.” If God were only His divine nature, “then something like modern apophaticism would be true.”[ii]
The incarnation also unveils a logic of hypostasis capable of transcending “natural limits and barriers.” Hypostases, Timothy argues, don’t entirely lack positivity, but, since they have “no natural content,” a hypostatic union and identity is possible between “quiddities which remain absolutely (naturally) different.” There is no such reality as “the divine nature, taken abstractly,” no surplus of unhypostatized ousia, since God is Father, Son, and Spirit. As Timothy puts it, since “the divine nature eternally exists only as hypostatized in the external exchange of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,”[iii] divine nature isn’t “all that God is.” There’s no apophatic void transcending the Persons, hovering behind the incarnate Son. Rather, the hyper- beyond the divine essence is hypostatic.[iv] Here’s where we locate negation: Divine Persons, like human persons, “remain mysterious even when genuinely known.”
I can see how this counts as an apophaticism that incorporates “a kataphatic moment”: What is known is enveloped by what is unknown. But it seems equally plausible to describe it as a kataphatic theology that incorporates an apophatic moment, or, more paradoxically, as an intertwining of two modes of encounter in which each moment is both a knowing and an unknowing. We are never more intimate with others than when we glimpse their unfathomable depths. Does the distinguished gentleman accept this amendment?
Third, a modest positive contribution of my own.
Timothy’s Neochalcedonian framework provides theological grounding for knowing God in His words and actions. But what, in practice, does this mean for our engagement with the Bible? Once the word has emerged from the eclipse, what should we expect of it? Timothy’s brief remarks on a theology of language help to pinpoint errors of modern apophaticism, which are also sources of ambiguity in classical apophaticism. One is a rejection or an inadequate thinking-through of the implications of creation. “God is a speech event,” Timothy says, and creation is spoken into existence. Thus, as Psalm 19 indicates, all creatures are speech. As a discourse of and about the speaking God, creation is from top to bottom the Creator’s self-disclosure. This makes knowledge of God not only possible but inescapable: “if I am alive, I know God as He who makes me,” as Radner puts it.[v]
Creation likewise justifies the use of human language to speak of the Creator. Referring created things to God isn’t improper in the least. On the contrary, anthropo- and cosmo-morphisms articulate the nature of things. As Timothy puts it, “Language proper merely brings to luminosity the linguistic character of created being.” Or, in the words of Olivier-Thomas Venard, as quoted by Troutner: Analogy establishes “a semantic and linguistic community between divine and human being,” which amounts to “a sort of ‘identity’ between words and the Word.”
I get vertigo at this level of abstraction. So I ask, What does it actually mean for our understanding and use of Scripture? What, for instance, are we to make of Deuteronomy 4:24 (quoted in Hebrews 12:29): “Yahweh your God is a consuming fire.” In what sense is that true? In Deuteronomy, Moses is reminding Israel of their experience at Sinai, when Yahweh spoke out of the fire, not for the first time: Yahweh revealed His name from the burning bush on the same mountain (Exodus 3). Elsewhere in Scripture, Yahweh’s tongue (Isaiah 30:27) and breath (Psalm 18:8) are fire. When He’s angry, His “nose burns,” and the arm He stretches out over His enemies is an arm of fire (Isaiah 33:11). The eyes of the glorified Jesus are flames of fire (Revelation 1:14). To approach Yahweh is to approach an intense flame – at the mountain, at the altar, in theophanies, in the inner sanctuary of the temple.[vi] Fire consumes, and so too Yahweh is an “eating” (Heb. ‘akal) fire, who stokes up His altar-table to “eat” (‘akal) altar portions as His bread.[vii] God is love, which is to say, in the terms of the Song of Songs, that the God who is the heart of all things is an unquenchable flame (Song of Songs 8:7-8).
Metaphor piled on metaphor. What do we do with it? Revel in it, for starters. And that reveling is a mode of knowing. I affirm Ephraim’s suggestion: “words are powerful in themselves, and divine Scriptural words in a supreme degree” such that “our usage of them, over and over, through time and circumstance, represents our opening to their reach.” But that opening, once experienced, must be communicated in catechesis, preaching, theological formulation. And how does that work? Ought we, for example, ponder the phenomenal aspects of fire as a way of opening to the fiery character of God – on the creational assumption that fire was created precisely to manifest the consuming Fire? May we ponder the paradox of a God who speaks “I am” from the midst of the most protean of created substances? May we think God as a source of light (literal and figurative) and warmth (also literal and figurative)? Fire destroys and purifies; it purifies by destroying impurities; should we imagine God inviting us into the fire so that we might be translated by fire into fire?
These musings lead me to an apophaticism driven primarily by consideration of the scriptural word. To say God is a consuming fire is simply to say fire exists as a sign of the fieriness of the fire’s Maker. Here the semper maior grounds rather than subverts human language. We ascend not from the metaphor of fire to a transcendent One who is entirely unlike fire; rather, the Creator is infinitely more fiery even than the ball of burning gas at the center of our solar system (God is also “sun and shield”). On this understanding, negation isn’t a distinct via at all, but merely an inference along the way of eminence. Not: God is not at all like fire. Rather: God is fire in an incomprehensible way that infinitely surpasses created fire. This way is the one I described above: The apophatic doesn’t incorporate kataphatic, nor vice versa, but rather every moment in our reception of the biblical word is both a knowing and unknowing, a knowing of the speech of the speaking God who infinitely exceeds our knowing, a knowledge that simultaneously casts us out on a vast sea of mystery.
Peter Leithart is president of Theopolis.
[i] I’m not convinced the victory over neo-scholasticism is as secure as Timothy suggests.
[ii] One corollary: Modern apophaticism presumes God is only divine nature. That is, the eclipse is the w/Word is also, unsurprisingly, an eclipse of the Trinity.
[iii] The point must be generalized: No abstract, un-hypostatized nature exists, as Timothy observes (fn. 60).
[iv] This is how Timothy understands Dionysius’s notion of hyperessentiality (fn. 64).
[v] This universalizes the scope of apophatic mystery. If everything speaks of the incomprehensible God, then everything – not just God – is beyond our comprehension. We cannot perfectly understand a fly, as Thomas Aquinas observed (Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum, Prologue). Mystery envelops our knowledge of everything.
[vi] See the prayer for the final day of Sukkot: “For the sake of the patriarch Abraham cast into flames of fire;
For the sake of Isaac his son bound on the wood for the fire; For the sake of Jacob the mighty who wrestled with a prince of fire . . . O save, we beseech Thee.”
[vii] Deena Grant argues that Yahweh’s fire the visible medium of His interaction with creation; “Fire and the Body of Yahweh,” JSOT 40.2 (2015) 139-61.
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