Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology

8/2/2019 Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology

1/6

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


2/6

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


3/6

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.


4/6

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


5/6

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


6/6

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.

Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology

Documents

Transcript of Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology