Midway through Plato’s Symposium, the initial programme of six speeches on the meaning of love is suddenly interrupted by Aristophanes’ bout of hiccups.[1] In the repetition of this interruption, we find a comic portent of the re-ordering of the programme of the speeches, which also echoes the final interruption of Alcibiades’s surprise arrival.[2] In recounting his love for Socrates that was once sought yet is now lost, he recalls again the theme of rupture. As a synecdoche of this sudden narrative re-ordering, the hiccups gesture to the suspended middle of the dialogue, to the instruction of Socrates by the priestess Diotima, and to the ladder of heaven-bound ascent from the image of beautiful bodies to the idea of Beauty itself.
With a sudden gasp of air, this surprise response has been invited to interrupt the orderly progression of replies. The previous five responses to Timothy Troutner’s “Five Theses on Apophaticism” have cautioned sober restraint in the exercise of speculative reason, and suspended the dialectical circuit of ascending negations that could be sustained by a kenotic descent. The course of these responses has since notably recapitulated the spiritual ascent of Pseudo-Dionysius’ Mystical Theology from the cataphatic to the apophatic to the analogical. The meaning of the negative is then neither below nor above, but the inmost difference of speech that ever reflects a christological centre of a trinitarian ontology. In a metaleptical recapitulation of the post-Nicene development of Christian doctrine, the pivotal break with Analytical and Continental formal ontologies that had formerly suppressed the Trinity is specifically reconstituted in a more radical and Christological register. Yet since, as Troutner observes, “the precise relationship between the via negativa and the advent of divine revelation remains rather underdeveloped”, we have, like Alcibiades snake-bitten paean in praise of Socrates, come only a little nearer to understanding this higher sense of negation.
In the Lord’s Prayer, we call for ‘Our Father, who art in heaven”, and “on earth as it is in heaven.”[3] As the religion of the meek who inherit the earth, Christianity elevates the negative.[4] To speak beyond the world is also to negate the direct reference of any predicate to this subject. As the ‘negative way’ (via negativa), apophasis pivots on such specific negations that turn away from (apo-) the evident meaning of speech (phanai). For Parmenides, what is not is inwardly contrasted in a pure opposition and proto-contradiction that is produced in and from the ground of Being as Truth. For Plato, negation is used, not only in the ordinary sense of denial, privation, and loss, but, in a way that is both higher and more originary, in a reflective ascent of abstractions in and from a higher productive ground of heavenly ideas. And, in Proclus, this higher sense of plentiful negation is schematically elevated above the finite square of opposition so as to found a new poetic grammar.
In the sense of a hyperbole (ὑπερβολή), this higher sense of negation can be called a ‘hyper-negation’, as the negative is initially spoken in excess of its target subject, and ultimately as it enters in to be spoken of in a more intensive and expressive way. We can only begin to speak of God by speaking hyperbolically beyond yet in and through the world: first, a positive judgment speaks of God; second, a hyper-negative judgment suspends direct reference in and from the originary source of both positive and negative judgments; and, third, the infinite negativity of all such hyper-negative judgments is immanently reversed, even as it constitutes the higher ground from which to speak of God. Since, moreover, these successive moments are communicated through the Spirit from the Son to the Father, such hyper-negations are carried aloft by concentric spheres in the hierarchical order of spiritual intelligences and ideas – even as these ideas are simulated to be spoken of as negations.
In this light, Troutner’s five theses propose a systematic and speculative answer to the anti-theological trajectory of post-Kantian apophaticism. For Kant and his heirs, judgments can only be verifiable “within the scope of sensible intuitions”; “no intuition can correspond” to a God beyond the world who is “empty” of content”; and no appeal to “special revelation” can be corroborated by critical reason. After the waning of Neo-Kantian apriorism, Analytical and Continental philosophers of religion have continued to uphold a residual Kantian suspension of the transcendent. In post-Kantian apophaticism, this negative “natural theology”” has assumed “the regulative status of a superdoctrine”, in which “substantive Christian [doctrinal] commitments” are judged according to the tribunal of secular reason, which insists that the “Incarnation cannot challenge its notions of transcendence and incomprehensibility.” Yet as critics of Liberal Theology from Karl Barth to George Lindbeck have argued, this secular correspondence of theology to the wisdom of the world surrenders the Christian way of coming to know of God.[5] For, as Troutner argues, once all positive judgments have been “emptied of intelligible contents”, there can remain no credible sense in which it would be possible to receive, interpret, and answer to the call of revelation at all.
In answer to post-Kantian apophaticism, Troutner calls for a Neochalcedonian apophaticism. He reads the tradition of negative or apophatic theology from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to Maximus the Confessor in a reciprocating hermeneutic loop that unreservedly draws from the resources of Hegelian dialectics for readings of the Church Fathers. The dialectic of Hegel’s Logic provides a conceptual engine for sublating the pure oppositions that arise from regimes of artificial and a priori restrictions upon reason. Although there is “no [conceivable] natural relation between the two [natures]”, nevertheless, Troutner claims, “the “logic of natures” to be disjunctive”, in a disjunctive syllogism that proceeds as it is communicated in and from the self-dirempting ground of the divine hypostases. “The [two] natures” can thus “remain without “mixture” or “confusion”, as “the properties of the one come to characterize the concrete existence of the other”, in a “perichoretic interpenetration” of natures or modes. From this hypostatic union, “our speech becomes modally divine (deification) precisely to the degree that God’s becomes modally human (kenosis), and the ground and realization of this linguistic communion is the single existence of the incarnate Word.” The activity of becoming human (kenosis) thus mirrors that of becoming divine (deification). For “the Incarnation reveals the unforeseen existence of a “logic of hypostasis”, in which the simulated arguments of logic are grounded in the divine Logos, the Logos and its logic are communicated by the Son, and, in its trinitarian dynamics, logic, grammar, and every speech of the negative can be said to “transcend natural limits and barriers.”
Has Troutner thus conceded Neochalcedonian apophaticism to the spectral influence of Hegel? In his defence, I believe Troutner can be argued to have made two decisive advances: first, a sharp distinction of Sacra Doctrina from natural or secular logic; and finally, an immanent critique of secular reason, in which, as arguably still for Hegel, the concept of speculative reason (Vernuft) is held apart in a transcendental register from the revelatory and sacramental images of saturated representations (Verstand). Crucially, Troutner has not naïvely asserted the Christological identity of two natures in one hypostasis to be a natural product of a Hegelian dialectic of difference that would simply be resolved into the identity of the concept. Rather, in critically distinguishing sacred from secular logic, he elevates this Christological identity to act as the concrete exemplar for the unity of opposites in any concept, including the inner unity of analogy. There can, for Troutner, be no unsurpassable opposition between the dialectic of the Logos and the grammar of analogy: for, in Christ, the simulation of argument for and against the distinct modes of signification are principally grounded, eternally consummated, and sacramentally performed. Once, therefore, the order of signification has been centred on Christ, the negative way to knowledge of God can be reconceived as an ascent of hyper-negations, in which this infinite negativity is immanently reversed by the kenotic descent of Christ.
With this speculative advance, he passes beyond the signature aporiae of Kantian philosophy. He “parts ways with modern [post-Kantian] apophaticism in refusing to simply unsay”, negate the saying, and negate the judgments of “God’s speakability and thinkability.” Rather, he proposes that “negative theology must itself be doubly regulated”: first, as apophatic theology is “set within a robust theology of language”, which is “unfurling within expansive Trinitarian, Christological” and “Scriptural horizons”; and second, as apophatic theology is “given a specifically Christological shape”, in the Neo-Chalcedonian “logic of Incarnation.” In this incarnational logic, “negative theology” “has a specifically Christological shape”, as “its ultimate reduction is not to divinity”, but rather to “the person of the Word”, in whom “the event of God’s identification with a nature absolutely different from God’s own” is the christological identity of every difference – even the ever-greater difference of analogy.
This Neochalcedonian apophaticism further invites a trinitarian reconsideration of dialectic and analogy. Philip Gonzales has argued that, in the absence of the analogia entis, the ever-greater difference of creatio ex nihilo must collapse into the empty identity of the identitatis entis, univocity, and nihilism. As I have argued elsewhere[6], this reductio ad nihilo argument neglects the essential role of dialectic in dividing the elements of analogy, reversing the infinite negativity of ascending hyper-negations, and analysing these grammatical notes of speech in and for a dialectical analogy. When Gonzales writes “this [Neochalcedonian apophaticism] misses the analogical unity-in-difference that Christ Is as the concrete analogia entis, he is not just the second Person”, he calls upon this Christological centre of analogy to insist upon an unargued for conflict between the dialectical identity of two divine natures in one hypostasis and the analogical unity-in-difference of the intra-divine life of the Trinity. Since, however, this incarnational consummation of the logic of the Logos renders such a dialectical identity of each and every concept as an analogical participation in the concrete analogia entis of Christ, nothing should prevent Troutner from affirming this most originary difference of the divine hypostases, the creatio ex nihilo difference of creation from its creator, and the analogia entis as an essentially proportioned grammatical formula of these trinitarian differences concentrated in a christological identity.
As Christ teaches us how to speak of the Father, Troutner’s Neochalcedonian apophaticism could serve as a model to instruct us in how we too could speak of God in an ascending series of hyper-negations, in which this infinite negativity is immanently reversed and yet sustained by the kenotic descent of the Son into the most abyssal depths of the sign. The “trinitarian utterance” is, he writes, ” articulated around the words and flesh of Jesus Christ”, in whom, “the second person of the Trinity”, who is never ‘without flesh’ (logos asarkos), is “incorporated” in the hypostatic union that eternally holds together the perichoretic exchange of the divine hypostases. Yet where the previous respondents would urge caution, I would, like Hegel, ask Troutner to stare this hyper-negative in the face, and even “tarry with it.”[7] For the decisive question must, I suggest, be that of how the infinite negativity of ascending negations can be immanently reversed and yet sustained by Christ in the hierarchical order of analogy. If the negative is neither simply nothing nor something, but rather a sheer difference that cannot be affirmed, and even this sheer difference reflects the most originary difference of God from God, and radiates through the scalar differentiation of spiritual intelligences and ideas, then such expressions of the hyper-negative can be heard to echo like the Psalmist ringing in a cold desert night with a Christian and Trinitarian voice. This voice can be heard as much in Plato’s Symposium, as in responses to an unwritten dissertation. To stare its denials in the face is to wrestle with the spirits of all that awaits to be said again.
Dr. Ryan Haecker is a Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and Lecturer at the London Jesuit Centre.
[1] Plato, Symposium, 185c.
[2] Plato, Symposium, 212d.
[3] Matthew 6:9-13; Luke 11:2-4.
[4] Matthew 5:5.
[5] 1 Corinthians 3:19.
[6] Ryan Haecker, Review of Philip John Paul Gonzales, Reimagining the Analogia Entis: The Future of Erich Przywara’s Christian Vision [Reviews in Religion and Theology, Vol. 26, Issue 3, July 2019, pp. 426-429] doi.org/10.1111/rirt.13596
[7] George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) par. 32, p. 19.
Midway through Plato’s Symposium, the initial programme of six speeches on the meaning of love is suddenly interrupted by Aristophanes’ bout of hiccups.[1] In the repetition of this interruption, we find a comic portent of the re-ordering of the programme of the speeches, which also echoes the final interruption of Alcibiades’s surprise arrival.[2] In recounting his love for Socrates that was once sought yet is now lost, he recalls again the theme of rupture. As a synecdoche of this sudden narrative re-ordering, the hiccups gesture to the suspended middle of the dialogue, to the instruction of Socrates by the priestess Diotima, and to the ladder of heaven-bound ascent from the image of beautiful bodies to the idea of Beauty itself.
With a sudden gasp of air, this surprise response has been invited to interrupt the orderly progression of replies. The previous five responses to Timothy Troutner’s “Five Theses on Apophaticism” have cautioned sober restraint in the exercise of speculative reason, and suspended the dialectical circuit of ascending negations that could be sustained by a kenotic descent. The course of these responses has since notably recapitulated the spiritual ascent of Pseudo-Dionysius’ Mystical Theology from the cataphatic to the apophatic to the analogical. The meaning of the negative is then neither below nor above, but the inmost difference of speech that ever reflects a christological centre of a trinitarian ontology. In a metaleptical recapitulation of the post-Nicene development of Christian doctrine, the pivotal break with Analytical and Continental formal ontologies that had formerly suppressed the Trinity is specifically reconstituted in a more radical and Christological register. Yet since, as Troutner observes, “the precise relationship between the via negativa and the advent of divine revelation remains rather underdeveloped”, we have, like Alcibiades snake-bitten paean in praise of Socrates, come only a little nearer to understanding this higher sense of negation.
In the Lord’s Prayer, we call for ‘Our Father, who art in heaven”, and “on earth as it is in heaven.”[3] As the religion of the meek who inherit the earth, Christianity elevates the negative.[4] To speak beyond the world is also to negate the direct reference of any predicate to this subject. As the ‘negative way’ (via negativa), apophasis pivots on such specific negations that turn away from (apo-) the evident meaning of speech (phanai). For Parmenides, what is not is inwardly contrasted in a pure opposition and proto-contradiction that is produced in and from the ground of Being as Truth. For Plato, negation is used, not only in the ordinary sense of denial, privation, and loss, but, in a way that is both higher and more originary, in a reflective ascent of abstractions in and from a higher productive ground of heavenly ideas. And, in Proclus, this higher sense of plentiful negation is schematically elevated above the finite square of opposition so as to found a new poetic grammar.
In the sense of a hyperbole (ὑπερβολή), this higher sense of negation can be called a ‘hyper-negation’, as the negative is initially spoken in excess of its target subject, and ultimately as it enters in to be spoken of in a more intensive and expressive way. We can only begin to speak of God by speaking hyperbolically beyond yet in and through the world: first, a positive judgment speaks of God; second, a hyper-negative judgment suspends direct reference in and from the originary source of both positive and negative judgments; and, third, the infinite negativity of all such hyper-negative judgments is immanently reversed, even as it constitutes the higher ground from which to speak of God. Since, moreover, these successive moments are communicated through the Spirit from the Son to the Father, such hyper-negations are carried aloft by concentric spheres in the hierarchical order of spiritual intelligences and ideas – even as these ideas are simulated to be spoken of as negations.
In this light, Troutner’s five theses propose a systematic and speculative answer to the anti-theological trajectory of post-Kantian apophaticism. For Kant and his heirs, judgments can only be verifiable "within the scope of sensible intuitions"; "no intuition can correspond" to a God beyond the world who is "empty" of content"; and no appeal to "special revelation" can be corroborated by critical reason. After the waning of Neo-Kantian apriorism, Analytical and Continental philosophers of religion have continued to uphold a residual Kantian suspension of the transcendent. In post-Kantian apophaticism, this negative "natural theology"" has assumed "the regulative status of a superdoctrine", in which "substantive Christian [doctrinal] commitments" are judged according to the tribunal of secular reason, which insists that the "Incarnation cannot challenge its notions of transcendence and incomprehensibility." Yet as critics of Liberal Theology from Karl Barth to George Lindbeck have argued, this secular correspondence of theology to the wisdom of the world surrenders the Christian way of coming to know of God.[5] For, as Troutner argues, once all positive judgments have been "emptied of intelligible contents", there can remain no credible sense in which it would be possible to receive, interpret, and answer to the call of revelation at all.
In answer to post-Kantian apophaticism, Troutner calls for a Neochalcedonian apophaticism. He reads the tradition of negative or apophatic theology from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to Maximus the Confessor in a reciprocating hermeneutic loop that unreservedly draws from the resources of Hegelian dialectics for readings of the Church Fathers. The dialectic of Hegel’s Logic provides a conceptual engine for sublating the pure oppositions that arise from regimes of artificial and a priori restrictions upon reason. Although there is "no [conceivable] natural relation between the two [natures]", nevertheless, Troutner claims, "the "logic of natures" to be disjunctive", in a disjunctive syllogism that proceeds as it is communicated in and from the self-dirempting ground of the divine hypostases. "The [two] natures” can thus “remain without "mixture" or "confusion", as "the properties of the one come to characterize the concrete existence of the other", in a "perichoretic interpenetration" of natures or modes. From this hypostatic union, "our speech becomes modally divine (deification) precisely to the degree that God’s becomes modally human (kenosis), and the ground and realization of this linguistic communion is the single existence of the incarnate Word." The activity of becoming human (kenosis) thus mirrors that of becoming divine (deification). For "the Incarnation reveals the unforeseen existence of a “logic of hypostasis”, in which the simulated arguments of logic are grounded in the divine Logos, the Logos and its logic are communicated by the Son, and, in its trinitarian dynamics, logic, grammar, and every speech of the negative can be said to “transcend natural limits and barriers."
Has Troutner thus conceded Neochalcedonian apophaticism to the spectral influence of Hegel? In his defence, I believe Troutner can be argued to have made two decisive advances: first, a sharp distinction of Sacra Doctrina from natural or secular logic; and finally, an immanent critique of secular reason, in which, as arguably still for Hegel, the concept of speculative reason (Vernuft) is held apart in a transcendental register from the revelatory and sacramental images of saturated representations (Verstand). Crucially, Troutner has not naïvely asserted the Christological identity of two natures in one hypostasis to be a natural product of a Hegelian dialectic of difference that would simply be resolved into the identity of the concept. Rather, in critically distinguishing sacred from secular logic, he elevates this Christological identity to act as the concrete exemplar for the unity of opposites in any concept, including the inner unity of analogy. There can, for Troutner, be no unsurpassable opposition between the dialectic of the Logos and the grammar of analogy: for, in Christ, the simulation of argument for and against the distinct modes of signification are principally grounded, eternally consummated, and sacramentally performed. Once, therefore, the order of signification has been centred on Christ, the negative way to knowledge of God can be reconceived as an ascent of hyper-negations, in which this infinite negativity is immanently reversed by the kenotic descent of Christ.
With this speculative advance, he passes beyond the signature aporiae of Kantian philosophy. He "parts ways with modern [post-Kantian] apophaticism in refusing to simply unsay", negate the saying, and negate the judgments of "God's speakability and thinkability." Rather, he proposes that "negative theology must itself be doubly regulated": first, as apophatic theology is "set within a robust theology of language", which is "unfurling within expansive Trinitarian, Christological" and "Scriptural horizons"; and second, as apophatic theology is "given a specifically Christological shape", in the Neo-Chalcedonian "logic of Incarnation." In this incarnational logic, "negative theology" "has a specifically Christological shape", as "its ultimate reduction is not to divinity", but rather to "the person of the Word", in whom "the event of God's identification with a nature absolutely different from God's own" is the christological identity of every difference – even the ever-greater difference of analogy.
This Neochalcedonian apophaticism further invites a trinitarian reconsideration of dialectic and analogy. Philip Gonzales has argued that, in the absence of the analogia entis, the ever-greater difference of creatio ex nihilo must collapse into the empty identity of the identitatis entis, univocity, and nihilism. As I have argued elsewhere[6], this reductio ad nihilo argument neglects the essential role of dialectic in dividing the elements of analogy, reversing the infinite negativity of ascending hyper-negations, and analysing these grammatical notes of speech in and for a dialectical analogy. When Gonzales writes "this [Neochalcedonian apophaticism] misses the analogical unity-in-difference that Christ Is as the concrete analogia entis, he is not just the second Person”, he calls upon this Christological centre of analogy to insist upon an unargued for conflict between the dialectical identity of two divine natures in one hypostasis and the analogical unity-in-difference of the intra-divine life of the Trinity. Since, however, this incarnational consummation of the logic of the Logos renders such a dialectical identity of each and every concept as an analogical participation in the concrete analogia entis of Christ, nothing should prevent Troutner from affirming this most originary difference of the divine hypostases, the creatio ex nihilo difference of creation from its creator, and the analogia entis as an essentially proportioned grammatical formula of these trinitarian differences concentrated in a christological identity.
As Christ teaches us how to speak of the Father, Troutner’s Neochalcedonian apophaticism could serve as a model to instruct us in how we too could speak of God in an ascending series of hyper-negations, in which this infinite negativity is immanently reversed and yet sustained by the kenotic descent of the Son into the most abyssal depths of the sign. The "trinitarian utterance" is, he writes, " articulated around the words and flesh of Jesus Christ", in whom, "the second person of the Trinity", who is never 'without flesh' (logos asarkos), is "incorporated" in the hypostatic union that eternally holds together the perichoretic exchange of the divine hypostases. Yet where the previous respondents would urge caution, I would, like Hegel, ask Troutner to stare this hyper-negative in the face, and even “tarry with it.”[7] For the decisive question must, I suggest, be that of how the infinite negativity of ascending negations can be immanently reversed and yet sustained by Christ in the hierarchical order of analogy. If the negative is neither simply nothing nor something, but rather a sheer difference that cannot be affirmed, and even this sheer difference reflects the most originary difference of God from God, and radiates through the scalar differentiation of spiritual intelligences and ideas, then such expressions of the hyper-negative can be heard to echo like the Psalmist ringing in a cold desert night with a Christian and Trinitarian voice. This voice can be heard as much in Plato’s Symposium, as in responses to an unwritten dissertation. To stare its denials in the face is to wrestle with the spirits of all that awaits to be said again.
Dr. Ryan Haecker is a Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and Lecturer at the London Jesuit Centre.
[1] Plato, Symposium, 185c.
[2] Plato, Symposium, 212d.
[3] Matthew 6:9-13; Luke 11:2-4.
[4] Matthew 5:5.
[5] 1 Corinthians 3:19.
[6] Ryan Haecker, Review of Philip John Paul Gonzales, Reimagining the Analogia Entis: The Future of Erich Przywara's Christian Vision [Reviews in Religion and Theology, Vol. 26, Issue 3, July 2019, pp. 426-429] doi.org/10.1111/rirt.13596
[7] George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) par. 32, p. 19.
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