Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology
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Transcript of Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology
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Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology
The negative way of the knowledge of God is an
ascendant undertaking of the mind that progressively
eliminates all positive attributes of the object it wishes to
attain, in order to culminate finally in a kind of
apprehension by supreme ignorance of Him who cannot be
an object of knowledge. We can say that it is an intellectual
experience of the minds failure when confronted with
something beyond the conceivable. In fact, consciousness
of the failure of human understanding constitutes an
element common to all that we can call apophasis, or
negative theology, whether this apophasis remains within
the limits of intellection, simply declaring the radical lack of
correspondence between our mind and the reality it wishes
to attain, or whether it wishes to surpass the limits of
understanding, imparting to the ignorance of what God is in
His inaccessible nature the value or a mystical knowledge
superior to the intellect.
The apophatic element, as the consciousness of
intellectual failure, is present in various forms in most
Christian theologians (exceptions are rare). We can say as
well that ii is not foreign to sacred art, where failure of
artistic means of expression, deliberately conspicuous in
the very art of the iconographer, corresponds to the learned
ignorance of the theologian. However just as iconographic
antinaturalistic apophaticism is not iconoclasm, so alsothe antirationalistic negative way is not gnosimachian: it
cannot result in the suppression of theological thought
without detriment to the essential fact of Christianity: the
incarnation of the Word, the central event of revelation,
which makes iconography as well as theology possible.
The apophasis of the Old Testament, which expressed
itself in the prohibition of all images, was suppressed by thefact that the image of the substance of the Father
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revealed Himself, having assumed human nature. But at
the same time a new negative element entered into the
canon of the art of icons, whose sacred schematism is a call
to detachment, to purification of the senses, in order to
contemplate the divine Person who has come in the flesh.
So also for New Testament thought, that which was
negative and exclusive in Judaic monotheism vanishes
before the necessity of recognizing in Christ a divine
Persona, consubstantial with the Father. But at the same
time, in order for Trinitarian theology to become possible, it
was necessary for apophasis to preside at a divesting of the
mind-for the mind among Christian theologians are in
general kinked, in their elaboration, with the speculative
technique of Middle an Neo-Platonism, it would be unfair
necessarily to see in Christian apophasis a sign of the
Hellenization o Christian thought. The existence of an
apophatic attitude-of a going beyond everything that has a
connection with created finitude- is implied in the paradox
of the Christian revelation: the transcendent God becomes
immanent in the world, but in the very immanence of His
economy, which leads to the incarnation and to death on
the cross, He reveals Himself as transcendent, as
ontologically independent of all created being. This is a
condition without which one could not imagine the
voluntary and absolutely gratuitous character of Christs
redemptive work and, in general, of all that is the divine
economy beginning with the creation of the world, where
the expression ex nihilo must indicate precisely the
absence of all necessity ex parte Dei- a certain divine
contingency, if one dares to put it so, in the act of the
creative will. Economy is the work of the will, while
Trinitarian being belongs to the transcendent nature of God.
This is the basis of the distinction between
and ., which goes
back to the fourth and perhaps even to the third century
and which remains common to most of the Greek Fathersand to all the byzantine tradition. .-wich was
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for Origin a knowledge, a gnosis of God in the .
.-means in the fourth century, everything which concerns
Trinitarian doctrine, everything which can be said of God
considered in Himself, outside of His creative an redemptive
economy. In order to reach this theology properly so-
called, one therefore must go beyond the aspect under
which we know God as creator of the universe, in order to
be able to extricate the notion of the Trinity from the
cosmological implications proper to the economy. To the
economy in which God reveals Himself in creating the world
and in becoming incarnate, we must respond by theology,
confessing the transcendent nature of the Trinity in an
ascent of thought which necessarily has an apophatic
thrust.
Now, we cannot know God outside of the economy in
which He reveals Himself. The father reveals Himself
through the Son in the Holy Spirit; and this revelation of the
Trinity always remains economic, inasmuch as outside of
the grace received in the Holy Spirit, no one could
recognize in Christ the Son of God and in this way beelevated to knowledge of the Father. This is the classical via
of theognosis traced by St. Basil. The way of knowing God
goes from the one Spirit, through the one Son, to the one
Father; and inversely, essential goodness, natural sanctity,
and royal dignity flow from the Father, through the Only-
Begotten, to the Spirit, he says in his Treatise on the Holy
Spirit. So also, every act of the divine economy follows this
descending line: from the Father, through the Son, in theHoly Spirit. Accordingly, the way of the knowledge of God,
contrary to that of the manifestation of God, will be not a
katabasis, a descent, but an anabasis, an ascent-an ascent
towards the source of all manifesting energy, towards the
thearchy, according to the vocabulary of Pseudo-
Dionysius, or towards the monarchy of the Father,
according to the expression of St. Basil and other Greek
Fathers of the fourth century.
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But on this level one must abandon the descending
line of revelation of the nature of the Father through the
Son in the Spirit, in order to be able to recognize the
consubstantiality of the three hypostases beyond all
manifesting economy. It is an exclusive attachment to the
economic aspect of the Trinity, with stress on the
cosmological significance of the Logos, which renders Ante-
Nicene Trinitarian theology suspect of subordinationism. To
speak of God in Himself, outside of any cosmological link,
outside of any engagement in the .. vis a vis
the created world, it is necessary for theology-the
knowledge which one can habe of the consubstantial
Trinity- to be the result of a way of abstraction, of an
apophatica decanting by negation of all the attributes
(Goodness, Wisdom, Life, Love etc) which in the plane of
economy can be attached to notions of the divine
hypostases-of all the attributes ehich manifest the divine
nature in creation. What will subsist beyond all negating or
positing, is the notion of the absolute hypostatic difference
and of the equally absolute essential identity of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And at the same time
triadological terms and distinctions-natures, essence,
person, hypostasis-still will remain inaccurate, despite their
mathematical purity (or perhaps of this purity) expressing
above all the deficiency of language and the failure of the
mind before the mystery of the personal God who reveals
Himself as transcending every relation with the created.
Every Trinitarian theology which wishes to bedisengaged from cosmological implications in order to be
able to ascribe some of its notions to the beyond, to God-in-
Himself, ought to have recourse to apophasis. But one could
ask by the same token whether all the apophasis which can
be found in Christian thinkers necessarily results in a
Trinitarian theology. To reply to this question, it would be
necessary to examine a number of cases of the use of the
negative method in theology, classifying them according todifferent types of Christian apophasis. I hope to be able to
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do this one day, but for the moment I must limit myself to
two cases of the use of the negative way by Christian
theologians: I shall speak here of Clement of Alexandria an
the Pseudo-Dionysius.
.
Darkness and Light in the knowledge of God
In dealing with the knowledge of God, it is impossible
to talk about darkness without talking about light
simultaneously. But in most religions, and also in all
philosophical systems animated by a religious spirit, the
place attributed to light is so important that it is almost
possible to identify knowledge of God with light, though
light sometimes is to be taken in the sense of a metaphor
and sometimes is understood in a real sense as a datum of
religious experience. Thus as we consider the question of
darkness in relation to knowledge of God in the thought of
the patristic age, we shall be dealing with darkness in
connection with light; we shall be raising the question as to
the sense in which the two contradictory terms, darkness
and light, could refer to God in the works of some of the
theologian and spiritual writers of the first centuries of
Christianity.
First of all, how could a Christian thinker ascribe to
God anything that might be darkness when all the writers
of Holy Scripture agree in opposing all that is darkness toGod, who is light? St. John announces as a revelation
received from Christ Himself that God is Light and in Him is
no Darkness at all (I John 1;5). The world which refuses to
receive the divine revelation and is enclosed in its own self-
sufficiency is opposed to the light and is seen as
darkness; and all that will be definitively separated from
God is destined for the outer darkness where no
communion with God is possible any longer. If God is known
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as Light, the loss of his knowledge is darkness; and, since
eternal life consists in knowing the Father and His Son
Jesus Christ, absence of knowledge of God end in the
darkness of Hell. Light, whether interpreted in an allegorical
or in a real sense, will then always accompany communion
with God, whereas the dark reality can overrun human
consciousness only when human consciousness dwells on
the borders of eternal death and final separation from all,
pejorative.