Williams, on Williams

Rowan Williams gives a nice, almost lucid summary of his own thought:

...the tradition of 'negative theology' in Christian thinking needs to be be understood not just as a corrective but as something of definitive importance in itseld. It is not just that theologians make positive statemenst and then add 'Mind you, this only applies in a rather extended sense, not too literally.' It is rather that both the subject matter and (for lack of a better word) the style of good theology insist upon a radical change of attitude. A doctrine like that of the Trinity tells us that the very life of God is a yielding or giving-over into the life of an Other, a 'negation' in the sense of refusing to settle for the idea that normative life or personal identity is to be conceived in terms of self-enclosed and self-sufficient unities. The negative is associated with the 'ek-static', the discovery of identity in self-transcending relation. And accordingly, theology itself has to speak in a mode that encourages us to question ourselves, to deny oursleves, in the sense of denying sustems and concepts that are the comfortable possession of individual minds. This means both that theological language has to open out on to a sort of darkness - not the darkness of obscurity or confused ignorance, but the darkness of sheer resistance to the finite mind on the part of the divine. And at the same time, theological language must be the language of a community of persons actively engaged in the common life of building the Body of Christ. (Wrestling with Angels p. xiii)

So: apophatic theology is not an addendum: the whole of theology is shot-through with apophaticism.

What Paul knows, and what he doesn't...

The gospel of Jesus Christ is the noetic point on which a belief in providence has its entire basis. Belief in providence is not an inference from history; nor is it a claim to know the pattern of the times. It is not augury or cloud-reading. Belief in providence is not a claim to special knowledge of the providential plan, but merely a claim to knowledge that there is such a plan and that has been made by one with the power and the will to accomplish it. From the covenant history which culminates in the Son of God’s action for salvation of the world we learn of the purpose and character of God to which all other history is ordered. When Paul exclaims, at the end of his troubling discussion of the election of Israel in Romans 9-11 –

O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! 34 “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” 35 “Or who has given a gift to him, to receive a gift in return?” 36 For from him and through him and to him are all things.

– he is not expressing in apophatic terms a despair of ever knowing the ineffable deity who must himself remain ever discreetly hidden behind a cloud of unknowing, but rather his joy in the righteous and loving character of God revealed in the gospel of his power (Rom 1:16). Though the plan of God is a yet concealed from view, his character has in fact been made known in gospel. This thought is Paul’s consolation.

Pseudo-Dionysius II

Reading on into The Mystical Theology, which is described as the key text for Pseudo-Dionysius's thought, I read -

The fact is that the more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming; so that now as we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing. [MT 3]

Now, to me a crucial observation about all of this is simply that Pseudo-D seems quite happy to talk about it. Which is to say, he is quite far from speechless. He is quite confident to circumscribe the unknown by his knowledgeable words... this seems problematic to me. If this is so, then his humility is more than a little false.

It is interesting how much the theophany at Sinai is for Pseudo-D a paradigmatic encounter with the divine, in the dark cloud or shadow of the unknowing. And so it might have been if it were not for the incarnation of the Word. In Hebrews 12 we read:

18 You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm; 19 to a trumpet blast or to such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them, 20 because they could not bear what was commanded: "If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned." 21 The sight was so terrifying that Moses said, "I am trembling with fear." 22 But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, 23 to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, 24 to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel...

Pseudo-Dionysius, scriptural theologian

I am reading Pseudo-Dionysius - the darling of apophatic theology - for the first time. I was rather surprised to read him affirming quite strongly a very orthodox view of the scriptures as revelation of the divine (shows what my prejudices were I guess):

...we must not dare to resort to words or conceptions concerning that hidden divinity which transcends being, apart from what the sacred scriptures have divinely revealed. (The Divine Names 588A).

Which is to say: philosophy ought to be silent concerning God; but there is a given language for God in the Scriptures that we are bound to employ.

Perhaps he was a Barthian?

Atheism in vestments

Despite the overt atheism of most of the leading postmodern thinkers, their concern for explicitly theological themes is obvious. Indeed, “fascination” would not be an inappropriate word to use.[1] Several theologians, for their part, have responded by a complete embrace of postmodern anti-logocentricism and espoused a postmodern via negativa, drawing on an aspect of the Christian tradition represented by Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart and others. Daniel Bulzan agrees that the postmodern and the apophatic are very similar.[2] Kevin Hart (an Australian!) ignores the protestations of Derrida himself and argues that negative theology is a form of deconstruction.[3] For him, only negative theology resists deconstruction. He writes:
Negative theology, properly understood, is that theology...which works at once inside and outside onto-theology, submitting its images of God to deconstruction.[4]

However, negative theology has been baptised via Greek thought about God in terms of attributes; and postmodernity has not freed itself from this mode of discourse. As Ingraffia points out, negative theology remains part of a Hellenist dialiectic with positive theology; and remains far from the biblical God who has revealed himself.[5] Bulzan, in response to Don Cupitt and Mark C. Taylor, points to the collapse of personal identity in the mystic and the postmodern; and the need for a properly biblical theology of language that would clarify its link with creation and ontology. Indeed, those theologians for whom postmodernity is a given are little more than Feuerbachian anthropologists for whom God is not even absconditus, but mortuus. Ward rightly complains that
The theological, stripped of any transcendence, becomes the incarnational to the point at which a Christian atheism emerges.[6]
It is merely an “atheism in vestments.”[7]


[1] G. Ward, “Theology and Postmodernism”, 435
[2] D.Bulzan, “Apophaticism, Postmodernism and Language: Two Similar Cases of Theological Imbalance” in Scottish Journal of Theology 50/3 (1997) 261-287
[3] K.Hart, op.cit., p.186
[4] ibid.
[5] B. Ingraffia, op.cit., p.226-7
[6] G.Ward, “Postmodern Theology” in D.F. Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd ed. 1997), p.591
[7] F.C.Bauerschmidt, “Aesthetics - The Theological Sublime” in J. Milbank et al (eds.), Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999), p.217