Christian Cataphaticism

“For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To The Unknown God. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.”
Acts 17:23

“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”
John 1:18

For decades, theological reflection on language has been haunted by what Martin Laird has called an “apophatic rage.”^[1] The emerging consensus: God is everywhere in danger of being turned into an “object,” reduced to a “concept,” “comprehended,” and generally “exhausted” by an omnipresent onto-theological rationalism. Apparently, today’s common invocations of the “radical transcendence” of the “wholly other” have not been enough to neutralize the threat. As Denys Turner put it, in the academy, “we are all apophatic theologians now.”^[2]

Perhaps it is time to consider whether the pendulum has swung too far the other way. I share Fr. Olivier-Thomas Venard’s lament that, in light of a modern crisis of language and “generalized agnosticism,” “there are not very many theologians today who are attempting to rebuild confidence in language.”^[3]

Two dominant theological trajectories illustrate this lack of confidence. “Grammatical Thomists” such as Herbert McCabe or Stephen Mulhall offer an austere reading of the first questions of Aquinas’ Summa in the vein of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.^[4] Meanwhile, a looser constellation, ranging from Jean-Luc Marion to Jack Caputo, privilege Heidegger, Levinas, and above all Derrida. Through these continental figures they interpret an apophatic canon: Dionysius, Nyssa, and a smattering of mystics.^[5] Behind both trajectories lurks my ultimate target: Immanuel Kant and what I call “modern apophaticism.”

My concern is not that contemporary theology has become “too apophatic,” as though apophaticism and kataphaticism were fixed identities that must be quantitatively balanced. Nor do I indict the apophatic tradition in toto; its best representatives followed St. Paul in revealing the “Unknown God” of the Areopagus as the crucified Christ. Rather, I delineate a particular modern, or post-Kantian, apophaticism which threatens to silence the Word, leaving the extent of its instantiation in the pre-modern apophatic tradition an open (if pressing) question.

This essay will take the form of five theses:

1. Modern apophaticism is systematic, total, and regulative of Christian doctrine. It risks emptying speech about God of any intelligible content and endangers the very possibility of revelation and Christology.
2. This modern transformation of the apophatic impulse reflects Kant, but exposes ambiguities (and perhaps even precursors) in the tradition. Reclaiming negative theology requires an alternative speculative resolution.
3. Prevailing theological narratives have obscured the nature of this crisis, misidentifying German idealism, neo-scholastic “rationalism,” or “univocity” as modernity’s defining sins.
4. Christian thinking must insist that negative theology be set within a robust “theology of language” and given a distinctively Christological “shape.”
5. A series of speculative positions developed in Neochalcedonian theology prove the basis for a renovated apophaticism compatible with faith in the Word.

These theses feature four sets of influences: a) the French Catholic thinkers Claude Bruaire, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Olivier-Thomas Venard, b) the Barthian Lutherans Robert Jenson and Eberhard Jüngel, c) Maximus the Confessor, and d) Hegel.^[6]

Thesis #1: Modern apophaticism is systematic, total, and regulative of Christian doctrine. It risks emptying speech about God of any intelligible content, and endangers the very possibility of revelation and Christology.

Three features characterize modern apophaticism. First, it is systematic rather than open-ended. The best pre-modern apophaticism attempted no overarching theory or method. Rather, negation operated within the determinate context of spiritual exercises, facilitating the destruction of idols and ascetic transformation. But apophaticism can morph into the limits of a self-conscious and unsurpassable epistemology. As Claude Bruaire explains this transformation: “the mystical regime is inverted in the case of a rigorous negative theology. Negation does not operate for the religious relation of the believer to her God, but against it, subsequent to it… [it] systematically ruins the understanding of the things of God, rejecting apophatically everything that one can say of him, to the zero degree of knowledge.”^[7] These boundaries are set by: a) a priori characteristics of human linguistic and cognitive functioning and b) definitional truths about God (simplicity, transcendence, absoluteness).

Among the Grammatical Thomists and their more continental peers, various formulations of these limits circulate: 1) all our naming draws its significance from creatures and thus cannot be intelligibly extended beyond them to the Creator, 2) due to the unique nature of the “causality” involved in creation, we can have cognitive access only to God’s effects and not what God is like in himself, 3) the human mind, like human language, knows things only by composition and division and God is simple, 4) the human intellect, operating through concepts, knows things only by turning them into objects and God is not an object, and 5) human cognition is tied to the postulates of space and time, which God entirely transcends. Each emphasizes that the human intellect only knows things that submit to its categories—and God does not.^[8]

Second, these formulations are total. They do not merely exclude comprehension of the divine (St. Augustine’s si enim comprehendis non est Deus), but actually bar any knowledge of God whatsoever. Preller states baldly that “All that man ‘sees’ (or understands) in this life is the world.”^[9] As Mulhall put it, “language [is] essentially incapable of putting us in touch with the reality of God… [since] he is utterly transcendent with respect to the world we users of language inhabit, and in relation to which our words attain and maintain whatever meaning or sense they possess.”^[10] Modern apophaticism often allows us to continue making statements about God (in keeping with God-talk’s “grammar”) provided that we recognize that they are wholly unintelligible to us. McCabe: “when we speak of God we do not know what we are talking about.”^[11]

Third, there are no exception clauses for divine revelation or Christology: modern apophaticism is regulative of Christian doctrine rather than vice versa. Limits set by human epistemic (in)capacities and definitional truths about God cannot be revised.  Neither Scripture, nor the confession of the Trinity, nor the coming of Christ offer us any new knowledge or alleviate God’s mysteriousness.^[12] As Simon Hewitt insists regarding these apparent disclosures, “the God who is revealed is still the Creator, and all the [apophatic] considerations… remain operative.”^[13] “The grammatical constraints attaching to God-talk,” he adds, “are operative over scriptural language and subsequent doctrine.”^[14]

These modern formulations threaten the very possibility of divine revelation. Why? It is a widely accepted axiom that to count as a genuine revelation, an alleged communication must be received by its addressee.^[15] If even the claims of revelation must be apophatically emptied of intelligible content, then in what sense have they been received?  Jean-Luc Marion merely draws the logical conclusion: “Revelation, in the sense of the irruption of God into that which is finite, limited, and without holiness, by definition cannot make itself received, conceived, or seen there. It cannot and must never find a dwelling place... in the world.”^[16]

Similar problems emerge in Christology. In being so insistent that God cannot be a “being among beings” or interact on the same plane as creatures, the Incarnation itself becomes problematic. Even the formulation of apophatic limits by a thinker as eminent as Rowan Williams can seem on the face of it inadequate to basic Christological claims: “to be recognisably about the God who is worthy of worship, any theological speech must avoid speaking of God as an agent with a context and a history, as a presence alongside other presences… what is true of God is never what has come to be true as a result of processes within the cosmos.”^[17] Or as McCabe put it more starkly, “God cannot interfere in the universe”; “God cannot share a world with us.”^[18] And thus when it comes to the hypostatic union of humanity and divinity in Christ, modern apophaticism is unable to get beyond the claim that Christ has a divine nature to describe its concrete interpenetration with or deifying influence on his (or our) humanity. Its radical interpretations of divine transcendence and creaturely (in)capacities—essentially a denial that human being is capax dei—erect a Nestorian barrier within Christ’s own person.^[19]

Thesis #2: This modern transformation of the apophatic impulse reflects Kant, but exposes ambiguities (and perhaps even precursors) in the tradition. Reclaiming negative theology requires an alternative speculative resolution.

In describing modern apophaticism, I have drawn from contemporary texts which claim to represent the thought of Aquinas, Dionyius, or some other figure from the apophatic tradition. Yet the profile its central features most clearly reflect is neither ancient nor contemporary. It is the signature of none other than Immanuel Kant. Occasionally, as in David Burrell, Victor Preller, and Merold Westphal, the proximity to Kantian strictures is openly acknowledged.^[20]

At each point, Kant’s apophaticism had the same structure. Was it not: 1) systematic: our cognitive and linguistic faculties only operate reliably within the scope of sensible intuition, from which a transcendent God is definitionally excluded; 2) total: our concept of God, to which no intuition can correspond, is “empty” and entirely lacks any content; and 3) regulative: famously restricting religious knowledge, against claims of special revelation, to this apophatic yield of reason alone. In the course of Kant’s reduction of religion to morality, modern apophaticism emerges fully formed.^[21]

Kant had a motive for expressing the apophatic impulse as a systematic epistemology. He was faced with a skeptical Enlightenment reason which threatened to undercut all knowledge (even the laws of science) and potentially even challenge God’s existence. His strategy was to limit the scope of speculative reason, short of God (relegating to noumenal unknowability along with free will and things-in-themselves), but able to recognize the reliability of our language and concepts within the postulates of space and time. Empirical science was vindicated, while God’s existence was established on moral or practical rather speculative grounds. Religion was now safe from the predations of skeptical reason. As he piously remarked, “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”^[22] Kant was open about the deflationary consequences of his epistemology for “revealed religion.”

Subsequent philosophy has been preoccupied with the limits of language. In what has been labeled a “linguistic turn” in analytic (and to a lesser degree also continental) thought, figures from Wittgenstein to Heidegger and Derrida have sought to demonstrate that neither metaphysics, classically understood, nor certain allegedly traditional conceptions of God (“onto-theology”) survive careful scrutiny of these limits.

If modern apophaticism’s dialogue with Kant remains largely implicit (with revealing exceptions), its engagement with these latter figures is open. Negative theologians today seek to demonstrate that Christianity, rightly understood, never intended to transgress linguistic and cognitive limits as formulated by contemporary thought. Faith offers no knowledge that transcends the immanent frame (beyond this frame’s dependence on an unknown X): it was never in the business of onto-theology.

And when modern apophaticists, more invested in the archive than was Kant, turn to the tradition to support these apologetic overtures, they certainly discover texts that invite being read as systematic strictures barring access to God in himself. Did not Dionysius’ Mystical Theology enjoin “absolute silence of thoughts and of words” regarding the God beyond being?^[23] Do not questions 12 and 13 of the Summa emphasize that all our knowledge is drawn from creatures, that we only have access to God’s effects, and that we do not know the “mode of signification” of even those few cross-categorical terms which are properly predicated of God?^[24]

On the one hand, as Maximus shows, it is possible to give Dionysius a more Christological and positive gloss; Venard attempts something similar with his “Gothic,” linguistically confident Aquinas.^[25] And it’s true that modern apophaticists tend to read both as if their most austere statements were regulative of their entire corpus. On the other hand, how one can transcend the far-reaching restrictions such passages seem to erect remains somewhat unclear.^[26] And if Thomistic and Dionysian apophaticism leave room for Kantian readings which would undermine revelation and Christology, the negative theologies of the fifth- and sixth-century neoplatonist Damascius, Maimonides, and anti-Palamites like Barlaam of Calabria seem even clearer precursors of the sage of Königsberg.^[27] Perhaps there is little distinctively modern about “modern apophaticism”; systematic, total, and regulative strictures on theological speech may prove instantiated with regrettable frequency in the tradition’s archive, rather than the dénouement of one’s favorite decline narrative.

The fact that texts like these can all too plausibly be given a Kantian gloss should give us pause. At the very least, Kant (unwittingly) exposed ambiguities in the tradition; perhaps his resolution of them typifies what Jenson might call negative theology’s “unbaptized” remainder.^[28] The precise relationship between the via negativa and the advent of divine revelation remains rather underdeveloped, in the tradition, as does the significance of the fact that it is the crucified Christ that one encounters at the end of Bonaventure’s Itinerarium.^[29] Famously, the relationship between Trinitarian determination and the soul’s Grund becomes ambiguous in certain mystics, and comments seemingly wholly denying our knowledge of God-talk’s modus significandi or limiting our access to God’s effects seem difficult to subsequently qualify.

All this demonstrates the impossibility of simply returning, after modern apophaticism, to pre-modern negative theology. We bring questions of linguistic theory and epistemology, inspired by Kant and his successors, which many of these texts did not intend to answer; those that do hazard something like a comprehensive “theory” frequently prove easily turned against Christian dogmatic commitments. While retrieval of the classic texts of apophaticism is indispensable (my own project features Maximus), the work of speculative and theoretical innovation is now unavoidable.

Thesis #3: Prevailing theological narratives have obscured the nature of this crisis, misidentifying German idealism, neo-scholastic “rationalism,” or “univocity” as modernity’s defining sins.

Why have the dangers posed by a metastasized apophaticism largely been overlooked? Three popular theological narratives, I suggest, direct our attention elsewhere, training us to see the theological dangers of modernity as anything but apophatic.

The first concerns German Idealism, widely disparaged for its totalizing “will to system” and philosophical absorption of faith and mystery. One is trained, given Hegel’s long shadow, to welcome uncritically any apophatic impulse as a helpful corrective to modernity’s faults, overlooking the possibility of an opposite error. A lack of engagement with the relevant texts, for fear of being pulled into the Hegelian orbit, leaves us almost totally ignorant of the historical situation Hegel and Schelling sought to address: an emerging consensus in Kant, Jacobi, and Schleiermacher that knowledge of God is strictly impossible, rendering revealed religion suspect and reducing God to a moral postulate or the target of pious feelings of dependence.^[30]

For Hegel, this agnosticism, which characterizes Enlightenment critique and pietism alike, is the defining feature of theological modernity and a betrayal of Christianity’s very essence.^[31] If this diagnosis is remotely accurate, then Hegel’s emphasis on reason and the concept appear in a new light: as tribute to how profoundly seriously he took the Christian claim to make God known, in the teeth of its widespread abandonment. Thus widening our historical lens also exposes the limitations of contemporary theology’s neo-Romantic wager, which hopes to bypass the conceptual order (and the perils of German idealism) by placing all its chips on metaphor and symbol. This gambit overlooks what both Kant and Hegel knew: a theological disqualification of the former quickly undercuts the theophanic capacities of the latter as well.^[32] Numerous pitfalls attend the reading of Hegel, but neglect of his texts deprives us of the tools to identify and challenge an agnosticism which has become the very air we breathe.^[33] For fear of German Idealism without, we are left defenseless against the Kantian within.

A second narrative warns us against the neo-scholastic “rationalism” against which so much of post-conciliar theology (Catholic and otherwise) still often defines itself. The rigor of the manual is supposed to attest to its allergy to mystery and reduction of revelation to a series of conceptual propositions.^[34] Yet theology’s long search for absolution for the guilt of its fathers deserves critical examination. First, is neo-scholasticism still a pressing danger, or is this a case of belaboring the point? Theologians have a penchant for fighting battles long after they have been won. Second, is it even true that apophaticism and this sort of rationalism are opposed, or even in tension? Claude Bruaire, following Hegel’s critique, has argued that a systematic elaboration of the divine attributes and a thoroughgoing apophaticism, far from being incompatible, are flip sides of the same coin. The “multiple definitions of God” so methodically constructed could be (and were) followed by negations, reducing “to lists predicates circling around an empty subject.”^[35] And the two-tier distinction sharply delimiting the scope of unaided reason to make room for the claims of revelation can quite easily lead to an apophatic denial of revelation’s intelligibility for even graced reason, terminating in a doctrinal positivism which conceals an apophatic core.

Finally, there is univocity, the bête noire of a set of incisive thinkers with a penchant for hasty genealogies.^[36] Tracing Scotus’ influence, they portray modernity as a rational and linguistic “capture” of God and reality, aided by the application of a single concept—“being”—to both. Given this diagnosis, negative theology is viewed largely as an ally. Yet primed to see univocity everywhere, were they perhaps unable to recognize a creeping “equivocity”? Having quibbled with the Scotist solution, were they unable to heed his fear: of a potential eclipse of theological affirmation? Despite rich contributions to a “metaphysics of participation” and trust in cultural mediation, a narrative organized around univocity proves unable to grasp the degree to which apophaticism (along with analogy) proved easily co-opted.

Old battle lines are shifting, however; one now finds Protestants (even Barthians!) arguing not as they once did that the analogy of being places idolatrous confidence in human speech, but that, if anything, the strictures of the semper maior (ever greater) actually undermine confidence in theological language.  Most famously, Eberhard Jüngel criticized analogy on these very grounds, and his concerns have recently been echoed by Ephraim Radner and Rory Misiewicz.^[37] If even Kant could consider himself a thinker of “analogy,” does pointing to it reach the heart of the problem?^[38] Meanwhile, with Barthian anxieties waning at last, one increasingly finds advocates of analogy (at least those most sensitive to the apophatic threat) joining those more friendly to univocity in focusing on the threat posed by equivocity.^[39] Venard, to cite just one example, now ventures in the name of “analogy” formulas which would once have had a distinctly “univocal” ring—such as “a semantic and linguistic community between divine and human being” and of a sort of “identity” between words and the Word.^[40]

Modern apophaticism, in short, is not easily shoehorned into existing narratives; struggling against it and for the w/Word calls into question old grudges and leads us to ponder new alliances.

Thesis #4: Christian thinking must insist that negative theology be “shaped” or “regulated” by its doctrinal horizons, rather than vice versa.

Modern apophaticism’s advocates, as we saw in #1, have set ultimate and total limits on our linguistic and cognitive access to God, derived from a vision of human (in)capacities and the nature of the Absolute which has been fixed a priori. By the time that revelation enters the picture, a negative “natural theology” has already been assigned the regulative status of a superdoctrine, which substantive Christian commitments can neither qualify nor shape. No “salvation history” of language is possible.^[41] Specifically, modern apophaticism insists that Incarnation cannot challenge its notions of transcendence and incomprehensibility.

Contemporary Christian thinking must refuse this constriction. Negative theology must itself be doubly “regulated.” First, it must be set within a robust theology of language unfurling within expansive Trinitarian, Christological, cosmic, and Scriptural horizons. Second, it must itself be given a specifically Christological shape: the logic of Incarnation.

The theology of language, sketched in brief: the Trinitarian God is a speech event, articulated around the eternal utterance of Word as the Father’s expression.^[42] All creatures are spoken into existence and thus are themselves, fundamentally, speech, flowing forth from this “lively talkative God.”^[43] Language proper merely brings to luminosity the linguistic character of created being, patterned after Trinitarian logic, and offers it back to God in proclamation and doxology, catching us back up into God’s life.

Human language facilitates this return to the Father once it (with the entirety of our nature) has been assumed and mobilized by the Word and pentecostally liberated by the Spirit from what John Zizioulas calls “the limitations of its createdness.”^[44] Although we are naturally “of a slow tongue” and “unclean lips,” the LORD has thus fulfilled his promise to “touch [our] lips” and “be with our mouth” (Ex. 4, Is. 6). In being empowered to utter the Divine Name—the “name which is above every name” veiled to Moses but bestowed on and as Jesus Christ (Ex. 3, Phil. 2)— human speech becomes an extension of God’s self-determination as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Through this participation in the economy of salvation, language realizes its implicit Trinitarian stamp.^[45]

Or to say the same thing again, language becomes an extension of the Word’s incarnation, what Maximus the Confessor called his threefold “thickening”: “for the sake of our thick minds, the Logos consented to be embodied and expressed through letters, symbols, and sounds.”^[46] Paradigmatically, this incarnation has taken place in the writings of Sacred Scripture, and continues to take place wherever the Spirit accompanies the proclamation of the Gospel. Eschatologically, it culminates in the Mystical Body, the polyphonic hymn of a deified cosmos (Rev. 5:11-14).^[47]

A chastened negative theology must find its place within—rather than undercutting or “unsaying”—this account of language’s Incarnational assumption, Pentecostal empowerment, and Trinitarian insertion.

Secondly, a negative theology so contextualized has a specifically Christological shape. Its ultimate reduction is not to divinity “as such,” but the person of the Word, or the Incarnation as the event of God’s identification with a nature absolutely different from God’s own. As a result, we are confronted with the coinherence in a single subject of opposite properties: among them 1) divine ineffability and human “speakability,” 2) divine incomprehensibility and human “thinkability,” and 3) divine transcendence and the human state of being “a being among beings.”^[48] The divine nature cannot be spoken, thought, or objectified. Yet without the loss of his divine properties, the Word can, and thus he inspires in us a new form of apophatic wonder which is deeper than that which corresponds to the divine nature alone. The transcendence and ineffability we encounter in him are indexed to, and “unleashed” by, the affirmation of their opposites.^[49]

As Maximus put it: “As much as he became comprehensible through the fact of his birth, by so much more do we now know him to be incomprehensible precisely because of that birth… What could be a more compelling demonstration of the Divinity’s transcendence of being? For it discloses its concealment by means of a manifestation, its ineffability through speech, and its transcendent unknowability through the mind, and, to say what is greatest of all, it shows itself beyond being by entering essentially into being.”^[50] As Jordan Wood explains, “Since he is both knowable and unknowable, then he is supremely unknowable – that is the logic of Incarnation.”^[51] A similar incarnational pivot is made by numerous other figures in the apophatic archive, from Theodore the Studite to Bernard of Clairvaux.^[52]

Thesis #5: A series of speculative positions developed in Neochalcedonian theology prove the basis for a renovated apophaticism compatible with faith in the w/Word.

An apophaticism which focuses on the union of divinity and humanity in the hypostatic union thus proves capable of incorporating, rather than merely negating, a kataphatic moment. It parts ways with modern apophaticism in refusing to simply unsay God’s speakability and thinkability, established in Christ, and thus is compatible with a project of restoring confidence in language as a site of divine-human communion.

Yet as the reference to Maximus above suggests, it is not just any Christology, but a specifically Neochalcedonian Christology which suffices for this reconfiguration of apophaticism.^[53] (Neochalcedonianism was a theological movement subsequent to Chalcedon which sought to interpret the council’s profession of Christ’s two natures in line with Cyril of Alexandria’s heavy emphasis on the unity of his person. It has been recently revived by Sergius Bulgakov and Robert Jenson, among others).^[54] The solution proposed above collapses if one holds the widespread belief that the hypostasis of the Word, “as such,” is merely divine (rather than professing a composite divine and human hypostasis, as taught by Justinian in connection with Constantinople II, followed by Maximus).^[55] Similarly, it requires that one reject the merely grammatical interpretation of the communicatio idiomatum (in which a sufficient explanation for predicating comprehensibility etc. of the Word is its predication of the human nature he has, leaving this humanity’s metaphysical subsistence in the person he is unspecified).^[56] Either move limits the comprehensibility, speakability etc. wrought by the Incarnation to the human nature alone, irrelevant to God or the Word “properly speaking”; one is freed (in suspiciously Nestorian fashion) from having to think the coincidence of knowability and unknowability in a single subject.

Instead, this renovated apophaticism follows Maximus (and Martin Luther!) in taking a realist interpretation of the communicatio idiomatum.^[57] Here, although the natures remain without “mixture” or “confusion,” the properties of the one come to characterize the concrete existence of the other. (Maximus characterizes this as a perichoretic interpenetration or innovation of his natures’ “modes”). 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.^[58]

What makes this possible, as Wood has shown, is the central distinction of Neochalcedonian theology: between nature and hypostasis, to which correspond quite different logics. The divine nature, taken abstractly, is strictly unknowable and absolutely different from our own. No natural relation between the two is conceivable; the “logic of natures” is disjunctive. But the Incarnation reveals the unforeseen existence of a “logic of hypostasis” which transcends natural limits and barriers. Since a hypostasis, although not without its positivity, has no natural content, it enables the hypostatic union (even identity) and perichoretic interpretation of quiddities which remain absolutely (naturally) different.^[59]

In short, if the divine nature were all that God is (in Hegelian terms, if God were substance and not also subject), then something like modern apophaticism would be true.^[60] The divine nature, considered abstractly, proves indistinguishable from the empty void, and culminates in the purest form of negative theology.^[61] Its inaccessibility constitutes its mystery. (Hegel calls this “bad infinity,” linked to the “unhappy consciousness” which the Incarnation is meant to dispel).^[62] Persons, by contrast, as we recognize from experience, remain mysterious even when genuinely known in the actions and words through which they manifest and define themselves.^[63]

So with God. If the divine nature eternally exists only as hypostasized in the eternal exchange of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (“not only as substance, but also as subject”), it is not all that God is (as Dionysius insists, God is “hyperessential”).^[64] The divine life has the shape and positive content of Trinitarian self-definition. Furthermore, this eternal self-definition has a finite focal point in the life of a crucified and resurrected human being and the community into which He breathed his life-giving Spirit. Trinitarian utterance is articulated around the words and flesh of Jesus Christ, the Word into whom our words are incorporated. He just is the second person of the Trinity (there is no logos asarkos).^[65]

To invoke Jüngel once more: “Christian theology today must make a decision… will [it] follow [Kant] and his theological heirs and renounce the thinkability of God” or will it follow Luther and Maximus in speaking “of no other God than the ‘incarnate God’ and the ‘human God’ (deus incarnatus, deus humanus)”?^[66] Christ’s eternal humanity forms the foundation of God’s speakability. And it is He, whose Person remains, in His very circumscription, the most ineffable of divine mysteries and the ultimate source of apophatic wonder.^[67]

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^[1] I wish to acknowledge the contributions of Justin Coyle, Sarah Griffin, Hogan Herritage, and Jordan Wood who read through and discussed this essay at various stages in its development. Their suggestions improved the argument at crucial points. Remaining faults are my own.

Martin Laird, “‘Whereof We Speak’: Gregory of Nyssa, Jean-Luc Marion and the Current Apophatic Rage,” Heythrop Journal 42 no. 1: 1-12.

^[2] Denys Turner, “The Darkness of God and the Light of Christ: Negative Theology and Eucharistic Presence,” Modern Theology 15 no. 2: 143-158.

^[3] Olivier-Thomas Venard, La langue de l’ineffable (Paris: Ad Solem, 2005), 25, translation mine; A Poetic Christ (London: T&T Clark, 2019), 440. For an introduction to Venard’s thought, see J. Columcille Dever and Matthew Vale, “The Gospels Manifest a Poetic Christ,” Church Life Journal, March 29, 2019. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-gospels-manifest-a-poetic-christ/. See also Eberhard Jüngel: “Both the atheism and the theology of the modern day stand equally overshadowed by the dark clouds of the unthinkability of God. Both faith and unbelief seem to regard these shadows as their destiny”; “it would seem to be agreed that we are living in an age of the verbal placelessness of God. This placelessness finds its counterpart in the increasing inability to think God and the speechlessness of theology, which is only poorly concealed in its opposite.” God as the Mystery of the World (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), vii, 3-4.

^[4] These figures are often referred to as Grammatical Thomists (perhaps extending back to Victor Preller but including Herbert McCabe, the early David Burrell, Brian Davies, Stephen Mulhall, and Simon Hewitt). Their work is echoed at many points by the more eclectic—and often more cautious—scholarship of Denys Turner and Rowan Williams. Key works: Preller, Divine Science and the Science of God; McCabe God Matters; Burrell, Aquinas: Faith and Action; Mulhall, The Great Riddle; Hewitt, Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis: Only the Splendour of Light; Turner, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God, The Darkness of God; Williams, The Edge of Words.

^[5] See especially the work of Jean-Luc Marion, Merold Westphal, and Jack Caputo, despite their differences. Key works: Marion, The Idol and Distance, God Without Being; Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology; Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. For an example of the use of Nyssa, see Scot Douglass, Theology of the Gap. Slightly less radical is Christos Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite.

^[6] See especially: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic I, A Theological Anthropology; John Betz, After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J.G. Hamann; David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite; John Milbank, The Word Made Strange; Ephraim Radner, Time and the Word; Bruaire, Le droit de dieu; Chrétien, The Ark of Speech; Venard, A Poetic Christ; Jenson, Systematic Theology (2 vol.); Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World; Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ; Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ, “Both Mere Man and Naked God: The Incarnational Logic of Apophasis in St. Maximus the Confessor,” in Maximus the Confessor as European Philosopher; Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being With God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion; Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, prefaces to Faith and Knowledge and Hinrich’s Religion.

^[7] Claude Bruaire, Le droit de dieu (Paris: Ed. Aubier-Montaigne, 1973), 18-19, translation mine, emphasis added.

^[8]  For 1), see Victor White, God the Unknown (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), 21: “Our language about God can have no greater range and validity than our knowledge of him; hence we can speak of him only in words derived from his creatures, and no name we use to ‘mean’ God can express the divine essence (I. xiii. 1). All human words originally signify some creature or effect of God, and therefore, at best, some reflection or refraction of the boundless Light of God – which remains darkness to us. They can therefore only be applied to God, and as applied to him have a meaning with which we are familiar from our experience of creatures. Even the name ‘God’ or ‘Deus’ itself can be derived only, St Thomas insists, from some created effect or work of God (I. xiii. 8).” See also Preller, Divine Science and the Science of God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 183-184; Stephen Mulhall, The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 5, 81; David Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action, (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 64. For 2), see God the Unknown, 22: “whatever we say affirmatively about God does not make him any less unknown to us in himself, for all our words must be derived from our knowledge of his effects, not from our knowledge (or ignorance) of himself.” See also Aquinas: God and Action, 51-54 on the incommensurability of God with what he causes; Knowing and Naming God, Appendix 2, “Causes,” 102; Mulhall, 44-45. For 3) see Aquinas: God and Action, 15-19. Burrell notes that “God’s lack of structure leaves us nothing to articulate.” Ibid., 19. See also Mulhall, 82; Davies, Aquinas (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 68. This third way of determining language’s limits when it comes to a simple God can be directly tied to the role division plays in language, or traced back further to the necessity of division and composition for the intellect. 4) can be articulated in several different registers. Sometimes it has to do with the fact that human knowledge is articulated in terms of genus and species, and thus “objectifies” God as a “thing” or “kind of thing.” See Herbert McCabe, God Matters, (London: Continuum, 1987), 6-7; Davies, Aquinas, 68. Sometimes it is traced back to the intentional structure of the human mind. Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action, 18. Among the continental figures, the fact that the human intellect objectifies God is frequently tied to the fact that we know and predicate through concepts. See Jean-Luc The Idol and Distance, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 183-4; Christos Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 71. For 5), see Aquinas: God and Action, 53. While he does not use the phrase “space and time,” Burrell refers explicitly to Kant and notes that “things as we know them bear traces of the manner in which we know them.” See also Preller, 75-78. Marion’s discussion about God exceeding our “conditions of experience” also points in this direction. Givenness and Revelation, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 57-59.

^[9] Preller, 28.

^[10] Mulhall, 5.

^[11] McCabe, God Still Matters (London: Continuum, 2002), 27

^[12] Victor White: “God is thus no less of an unknown God to the believer than to the unbeliever, to St John of the Cross than to Shankara or Plotinus.” God the Unknown, 22; Mulhall: “If the solution is God Incarnate, it is no less intrinsically enigmatic than the riddle it claims to have solved,” 120. Again, Victor White writes that “to the Christian believer [God] is more, rather than less, mysterious… Paradoxically, we are most in his light when we are most in the dark about him,” 22-23. Denys Turner concurs: “The believer has a stronger sense of mystery than the philosopher, not a weaker. For even if in truth Christians do know by grace and revelation what the philosopher can never know – and they do – such knowledge as faith teaches us can serve only to draw us into a darkness of God which is deeper than it could possibly be for the pagan; it is deepened, not relieved, by the Trinity, intensified by the incarnation, not dispelled”; “the light of Christian faith proper, through which is revealed to us the inner nature of God as a Trinity of persons, does nothing to remedy this apophatic deficiency; rather the emphasis on the divine unknowability is intensified by this revelation.” Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 43, 58. For revelation shows that reason does not even know the depth of its ignorance: “through revelation we know that there is more to the unknowability of God than reason could ever have suspected: after all, reason does not know that it knows nothing of the inner trinitarian life of God, or of the incarnation of the Word in Jesus” Ibid., 76.

^[13]  Simon Hewitt, Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2020), 109.

^[14] Ibid. Emphasis added..

^[15] “For revelation to be revelation, there must be communication, and this requires human awareness and response”; “if the object of revelation is never recognized or responded to, it is difficult to speak of a process of revelation having occurred.” Roger Haight, Dynamics of Theology (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 2001), 69, 52. See also: Frances Henderson, “The Logic of Belief and the Content of God: Hans Frei’s Theological Grammar,” PhD dissertation (University of Edinburgh, 2010), 20; John B. Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason, Paperback ed, T & T Clark Theology (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013)., ix.

^[16] Givenness and Revelation, 57.

^[17] Rowan Williams, “Negative Theology: Some Misunderstandings,” Modern Theology, March 6, 2023, 2.

^[18] God Matters, 6.

^[19] For a critique of the Nestorian tendency of grammatical Christologies, see Christopher A. Beeley, “Christological Non‐Competition and the Return to Chalcedon: A Response to Rowan Williams and Ian McFarland,” Modern Theology, January 4, 2022, 19. Jordan Daniel Wood, “Against Asymmetrical Christology: A Critical Review of Rowan Williams’s ‘Christ the Heart of Creation,’” Eclectic Orthodoxy (blog), January 4, 2019. For the Nestorian tendencies of modern apophaticism more generally, see Bruaire, Le droit de dieu, 15, 100; Pour la metaphysique (Paris: Fayard, 1980), 75-76, 82; Venard, La langue de l’ineffable, 146; A Poetic Christ, 428.

^[20] Burrell writes of “an interpretation of Aquinas that is inspired by Kant.” Analogy and Philosophical Language, 134. He argues that although he is writing before Kant, “Aquinas deserves to be placed among the ‘critical’ philosophers.” Aquinas: God and Action, 79. “Like Kant, Aquinas’ method is concerned with becoming aware of how things as we know them bear traces of the manner in which we know them.” Ibid., 53. As for Preller, he himself admits that “it might be objected that the tentative epistemology thus far adopted treats the categories of human understanding in too Kantian a fashion.” Preller, 75. He argues that a “Kantian (or Neo-Kantian) interpretation of the ‘first principles’ is inevitable.” Ibid., 78. Westphal openly adopts this post-Kantian assessment of the limits of the finite, together with an explicitly “Kantian anti-realism.” Overcoming Onto-theology, xviii, 8.

^[21] These ideas are expounded in the Critique of Pure Reason and Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. For a summary, see James DiCenso, “Practical Cognition of God,” in Kant and the Question of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 13-34.

^[22] Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.

^[23] Chapter III.

^[24] Aquinas believes our knowledge is drawn from creatures: question 13, article 1, co. et al. On knowledge through God’s effects, see question 13, article 8, co. Regarding the mode of signification, see question 13, article 3, co.

^[25] Maximus famously inverts the Dionysian order of affirmation and negation in the Ambigua and, as we will see, takes the Incarnation as a paradigm for the relation of the two. For Venard’s mobilization of Aquinas, see A Poetic Christ. Venard comments at length on the Gothic universe Aquinas could assume without making explicit, and the absence of a theory of language in his texts. A Poetic Christ, 236-237, 250, 252, 275, 322.

^[26] For example, it is unclear how Aquinas can get beyond his circumscription of our knowledge of God to God’s effects. He seems at one point to suggest that in this life we have knowledge not just of more and better effects, but that we also “attribute to him some things known by divine revelation.” Question 12, article 13, ad. 1. But how, absent the beatific vision of the divine essence, we know by this attribution anything more than more and better effects is not specified in that passage. Victor White and simply state outright that revelation only gives us access to more and better effects. God the Unknown, 23.

^[27] Examples suggested by an astute reader.

^[28] The phrase references Jenson, Unbaptized God.

^[29] Chapter VI.7.

^[30] If such were the case, Hegel replied, then “a dog would be the best Christian.” Preface to Hinrich’s Religion.

^[31] On this context, see Peter Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology, chapter 3 and God as the Mystery of the World, 126-151.  “It is the quite distinctive phenomenon of our time to have reverted at the pinnacle of its culture to the ancient notion that God is uncommunicative and does not reveal the divine nature to the human spirit… All the more striking in that [the Christian] religion is and seeks to be nothing other than the revelation of what God is, and the Christian community is supposed to be nothing other than the community into which the Spirit of God is sent.” Foreword to Hinrich’s Religion, in G.W.F. Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit, ed. Peter Hodgson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 170. See also Hegel’s characterization in the preface to Faith and Knowledge.

^[32] As Kant famously wrote in the Critique of Pure Reason (and Hegel agreed), “intuitions without concepts are blind.”

^[33] ​​"Without immersing oneself long and seriously in Hegel, one greatly risks becoming prisoner to presuppositions and errors that the German philosopher, alone, was able to trace to their roots; and one takes for new and fecund paths of thought which are, in truth, old impasses." Gildas Richard, “Le don de l’être: Aperçu de la pensée de Claude Bruaire,” L’enseignment philosophique 28 no. 4: 27-34, 27, translation mine.

^[34] The familiar tale retold in chapter 1 of Jean-Luc Marion’s Givenness and Revelation.

^[35] Pour la metaphysique, 24.

^[36] See narratives by Amos Funkenstein, John Milbank, and Catherine Pickstock.

^[37] See Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, especially the section “On the Problem of Analogous Talk about God”; Radner, Time and the Word, especially 184-189; Misiewicz, The Analogy of Signs, especially 92 and 112-124. See also Stephen H. Webb, “The End of the Analogy of Being,” First Things, January 27, 2015. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/01/the-end-of-the-analogy-of-being.

^[38] See especially his use of the analogy of proportionality in the first Critique and Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason.

^[39] See the work of John Betz and David Bentley Hart, which has long targeted a postmodern “sublime” which I read as apophatic and equivocal in tendency.

^[40] Venard, La langue de l’ineffable, 146. The phrase originally derives from Léon Brunschvicg. Venard, Thomas d’Aquin Poète Théologien (Paris: Ad Solem, 2002), 471. Translations mine.

^[41] Hans Urs von Balthasar spoke in his Theological Anthropology of the need for a theological history of language, an unfinished task begun by Hamann, Franz von Baader, Max Picard, Heidegger, and Gustav Siewerth. A Theological Anthropology, 228.

^[42] Here Bonaventure meets Luther and Barth.

^[43] Robert Jenson, A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live?, 15.

^[44] John Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, 133.

^[45] There is some relationship between the logic of the Trinity and ours, as Balthasar sought to think after Hegel.

^[46] Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 33.

^[47] See Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Offering of the World,” in The Ark of Speech.

^[48] The terms “thinkability” and “speakability” are Jüngel’s.

^[49] I am indebted throughout this paragraph to Jordan Wood, “Both Mere Man and Naked God: The Incarnational Logic of Apophasis in St. Maximus the Confessor.”

^[50] Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 5.5, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Nicholas Costas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 37.

^[51] “Both Mere Man and Naked God: The Incarnational Logic of Apophasis in St. Maximus the Confessor,” 117.

^[52] “The same hypostasis of the Word (τὴν αὐτὴν τοῦ λόγου ὑποστασιν) is uncircumscribable according to the nature of his divinity but circumscribed according to his essence like ours”; “According to the wordplay which [iconoclasts] call an argument, neither could divinity (τὸ Θεῖον) remain incomprehensible in being comprehended—but it was wrapped in swaddling clothes! Nor could it remain invisible in being touched—but it was touched! Nor could it remain impassible in suffering—but it was crucified! Nor could it remain immortal in dying—but it was put to death! In the same way you should understand that divinity has also remained uncircumscribed in being circumscribed.” Theodore the Studite, Antirrheticus III.1.22, 1.3. My attention was directed to these texts via unpublished work by Taylor Ross. “Once God was incomprehensible and inaccessible, invisible and entirely unthinkable. But now he wanted to be seen, he wanted to be understood, he wanted to be known. How was this done, you ask? God lay in a manger and rested on the Virgin’s breast. He preached on a mountain, prayed through the night, and hung on a cross. He lay pale in death, was free among the dead, and was master of hell. He rose on the third day, showed the apostles the signs of victory where nails once were, and ascended before their eyes to the inner recesses of heaven… When I think on any of these things, I am thinking of God, and in all these things he is now my God.” Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo in nativitate B. Mariae, as cited by Thomas Joseph White, The Analogy of Being (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2011), 313.

^[53] A specifically Neochalcedonian apophaticism emerges in Maximus’ Ambiguum 5 and Theodore the Studite’s On the Holy Icons. Among contemporary figures, Jordan Wood joins John Zizioulas and J.P. Manoussakis.

^[54] See Robert Jenson, “Jesus in the Trinity,” Pro Ecclesia 8 no. 3: 308-318; Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God. On the metaphysical debates animating Neochalcedonian Christology, see Jordan Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ, and Johannes Zachhuber, The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics.

^[55] See anathemas 4 and 8 of Justinian’s edict, appended to Constantinople II. “Emperor Justinian, Edict on the Orthodox Faith (Selection).” In The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings, edited by Mark DelCogliano (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 4:317–40. For Maximus: Madden, Nicholas, O.C.D. “Composite Hypostasis in Maximus Confessor.” Studia Patristica 28 (1993): 175–97.

^[56] See Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ (especially 36-37, 102) and Creator est Creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation, ed. Oswald Bayer and Benjamin Gleede.

^[57] “This version of the doctrine of the exchange of properties is a specifically Lutheran doctrine…. Hegel… agrees with Lutheranism in disputing a concept of the unity of the two natures in the person of Jesus Christ which remains abstract and rules out a real event happening between the divine and human nature. If God has become man, then the divine and human nature in the person of Jesus Christ must be thought of as in communication with each other so that their personal unity (unio personalis) is to be understood as the differentiated unity of one event.” God as the Mystery of the World, 96. On Luther’s Christology, see Johannes Zachhuber, Luther’s Christological Legacy and Bayer and Gleede’s Creator est Creatura.

^[58] The tantum/quantum formulation characteristic of Maximus. See The Whole Mystery of Christ, 101. As put in 126: “he indexes the degree of God’s self-revelation (descent) directly to the degree that we—as individual persons—penetrate God (ascent).”

^[59] Again, I rely on Wood’s “Both Mere Man and Naked God: The Incarnational Logic of Apophasis in St. Maximus the Confessor.”

^[60] Setting aside for the sake of argument the impossibility of a nature existing without a hypostasis in which to subsist.

^[61] See Hegel on the convertibility of being and nothingness in The Science of Logic and the Phenomenology. And Bruaire, Le droit de dieu, 17-22 on the emptiness of pure negative theology.

^[62] See The Phenomenology of Spirit, §204-216 and the Encyclopedia §94.

^[63] “Because he communicates and discloses himself in the word event,just as persons can communicate and disclose themselves in their words, God becomes thinkable on the basis of his speakability.” God as the Mystery of the World, 12.

^[64] See the theology of Sergius Bulgakov on the hypostasization of the divine nature and Hegel’s Phenemenology of Spirit §17. Dionyius states that God is beyond essence immediately following the recognition of God as Trinity. Dionysian hyperessentiality, to avoid Kantianism, must be interpreted as hypostatic.

^[65] See Karl Barth’s comments in Church Dogmatics IV/2; Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 141-144, “Once more the Logos asarkos.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 13: 130-133; Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the Word, 77-78.

^[66] God as the Mystery of the World, 187, 37. I have taken the liberty of substituting Kant for Jüngel’s reference to Fichte, as Jüngel earlier traces Fichte back to Kant’s influence: see 129. Nevertheless, there are differences between the thinkers which deserve further scrutiny.

^[67] The notion of “eternal humanity” can be traced through Schelling, Soloviev, Bulgakov, Barth, Jüngel, and Jenson, although it flows logically (although this is not always appreciated) from traditional affirmations regarding the unity of God’s acts and God’s being and the indivisibility of the hypostasis of the Son. For an insightful treatment of the “eternal humanity” as the ground of God’s speakability, see Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World.

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