Brian Hamilton-Vise

What is apophatic theology?

The last half of last week was my school’s fall break, thus the silence here. A few days of respite from any pressing work requirements and a bit of spare airplane time meant that I could finally dig into a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while now: Denys Turner’s The Darkness of God. I’ll have more to say about this book, I’m sure, but first, a short note on the relation between the apophatic and the cataphatic in theology.

As commonly understood, negative theology is simply a matter of endlessly repeating “God is not x“–where x equals whatever it is that those arrogant theologians decided God actually is. Apophatic theology is the humility that counteracts cataphatic arrogance. But on the contrary, Turner argues that for the whole Christian mystical tradition “the apophatic in theology is simply the product of a properly understood cataphaticism” (p. 33). Those crass, popular attempts at negative theology that think it better only to speak about God in the negative fail to understand that

bq. there is a very great different between the strategy of negative propositions and the strategy of negating the propositional; between that of the negative image [e.g., darkness, formlessness, abyss] and that of the negation of imagery. The first of each of these pairs belongs to the cataphatic in theology, and only the second is the strategy of the apophatic. (p. 35)

Apophatic theology can therefore use language that’s either positive or negative, or both. What makes theology apophatic–and all theology ought to be apophatic, all the time–is the ability of its language to subvert itself. Theology is properly apophatic whenever it is self-consciously inadequate to its object. The repetition of what God is not only attains to the genuinely apophatic when it becomes aware, as Denys never tires of repeating, that God is beyond every affirmation and beyond every denial.

14 October 2008 | Comments (2)
Tags: Denys Turner, Negative Theology