For some time now, there has been a definite revival of interest in apophatic theology within religious thinking as well as at its antipodes. It often takes the form of criticism of religion, ...including Christian Revelation, and thus the theology based on it. From a Christian perspective, this provides an invitation to reflect on the rich heritage of apophaticism and to show its specificity as a consequence of what constitutes the specificum christianorum, i.e. the Trinitatis mystery. Important clues in this regard can be found in the thought of Vladimir N. Lossky, a prominent 20th century Orthodox theologian, a radical defender of the specific apophatic nature of Christianity and a theologian faithful to Trinitarian orthodoxy. Looking at the most important issues related to the Trinitarian dogma, we will point out that in the Russian’s view, the Trinitarian antinomy is the source and foundation of Christian apophaticism and its hermeneutics. This conclusion will be based on revealing the Trinitarian antinomy as what is primordial, unconditioned by nothing, non-derivable from anything and therefore as a purely religious given and truth par excellence, accessible to man through Its free Revelation, which It also infinitely transcends.
This paper considers three recent studies on the negative theology of the Neoplatonists and Dionysius the Areopagite. The first is that of Lloyd Gerson, who argues that the One in Plotinus does not ...lack transcend existence but only definite existence; the second is the contrary thesis of Eric D. Perl that not only the One of Plotinus but the God of Dionysius transcend all being in such a way that they cannot be credited with existence. After some criticism of both the paper turns to the argument of Timothy D. Knepper that even the ineffability of the divine cannot be stated on our present plane of knowledge; it concludes with some reflections on the appeal to present or future experience as alternatives to epistemology as this is commonly understood in the analytical tradition of philosophy.
The article synthetically presents positive aspects of apophaticism. It discusses its apologetic role, its importance in defending against magical thinking, its focus on experience, its openness to ...pluralism, and its inspirational role for a variety of disciplines in delimiting their cognitive boundaries. Some of the most important conclusions are: a) apophaticism played an important role in the early days of Christianity in polemics against both pagan cults and magical tendencies; b) already in ancient Greece apophaticism influenced the search not only for symbolic interpretations of Homer’s poems but also for religious experience; c) the limits of cognition discovered by theology are becoming a contemporary experience of other sciences (mathematics, physics).
The article analyzes the anti-Western and radically anti-ecumenical theology of the Greek Orthodox thinker Christos Yannaras and his idea of gradual centuries-old deviation of Western theology from ...the authentic tradition of the early Church Fathers. The study touches upon such subjects as intellectual influences on the process of formation of Yannaras’s thought, the role of the apophatic mystical tradition in Christian theology, and the basic roots of his radical anti-Scholasticism. The article also contains the detailed survey of Yannaras’s analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’-concept as the natural final point of the Western intellectual discourse’s degradation and dechristianization. There’s also a set of counterarguments from Yannaras’s opponents – Eastern Orthodox theologians Pantelis Kalaitzidis and Vasilios Makrides – who stand for dialogue, openness, ecumenical activity and inclusiveness of the modern Orthodox Church and reject any attempts of its intellectual self-isolation and solipsization.
Despite his core theological convictions that God is incorporeal, formless, invisible, and unchangeable, in some of his most carefully crafted visio Dei texts Philo portrays God “changing shape” and ...temporarily adopting a human form. However, these are only “seeming appearances” and actually involve God projecting a human-shaped “impression,” or “appearance” (φαντασία) from his shapeless, immaterial being. By accommodating the overwhelming reality of God’s being to the perceptual and conceptual limitations of the human percipient, these docetic theophanies allow humans to more confidently relate to the deity, while at the same time preserving God’s absolute transcendence and apophatic otherness.
In this article, I investigate Jean-Luc Marion’s early interpretation of Christian apophaticism with special reference to his reading of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. I observe that the most ...remarkable, but rarely noted, aspect of this interpretation is Marion’s avoidance of the typical derivation of Dionysius’ negative theology from the Platonic tradition. Instead, he places him in the tradition of the critique of idols in the Old Testament. I argue that this intuition should not be lightly dismissed as early Christian apophaticism was at least partly developed in the context of Christian polemic against pagan idolatry. If Christian apophaticism is understood against this background, Marion’s claim that it foreshadows the modern and postmodern critique of theism appears more plausible than his detractors have been willing to admit.
The landscape of current trinitarian theology seems to be settling into three chief domains: Latin (or classical) trinitarianism, social trinitarianism, and apophatic (or mysterian) trinitarianism. ...In this article I look at three main objections to social trinitarianism. The first objection, voiced most forcefully by Karen Kilby, is that the social view follows a vicious pattern of projection. The second objection, related to the first, is raised on grounds of anthropomorphism. According to this objection, social trinitarians employ the notion of mutual love, a notion which raises big concerns among cotemporary Thomists. The third objection is grounded in the inability of humans to know much about the divine being, or for our language to make true statements about God. If we do not know about God’s essence, then social trinitarians do not know most (or all) of what they claim to know. This line of thinking is very recently proposed by Katherine Sonderegger. I detail the main contours of each of the three objections and argue that none of them are strong enough to warrant the rejection of social trinitarianism. However, if apophaticism ultimately forces trinitarians to reject the social theory, there is still some room for a mysterian social trinitarianism. I outline the contours of such a view and explain its motivations and limits.
This article investigates two fundamental dimensions of André Scrima’s anthropology: his emphasis on the incomprehensibility of the human being, and his interest for the mystical life in spiritual ...experience. The author intertwines these aspects in a range of topics with the aim of approaching the nature of the human being, such as the access to God as presence, the deification or transfiguration of the human being, and the iconic character of human existence. I analyze the use of such terms like “participation” and “mixture,” as well as the imagery that depicts the union of the human and the divine. Finally, I underline the spiritual importance of the nomad as figure and hospitality as virtue, and interpret them in terms of human itinerancy and God’s mystical dwelling in the human person.
Personhood theism is the view that God exists and is a person. It is often claimed that, whatever conclusions might be reached abstractly by philosophers and theologians, Christianity as lived out ...practically embodies belief in personhood theism. In this article, I critically examine this claim and argue that Christian prayer and liturgical practice does not in fact embody this belief and that the claim that it does begs the questions against the non-personhood theist.
This paper explores Christianity's ambiguous relationship to capitalism by engaging Marx's notion of the fetishism of commodities as a way of rethinking Marxism's critique of religion from the ...standpoint of political economy. Following Etienne Balibar's distinction between the theory of ideology and Capital's theory of fetishism, I examine how the later Marx conceived of religion as socially conditioned by the society of commodity production, which takes on religious dimensions. Commodities are the basis for a concept of fetishism which commands total subjection, alienating human beings under capitalism. This critical focus also reveals Christianity in its totalizing role as a symbolic structure shaped by the inescapable logic of exchange‐value, money, and universal equivalents.
Nonetheless, Christianity retains the impetus to anti‐fetishism, provided it unites with the Marxist science of critical perception. This anti‐fetishistic union focuses on the transparent and revolutionized social relations of real presence as the nonalienated reverse of fetishism's false presence. A critical apophaticism, tempered by the materialist amendments of Marika Rose and Slavoj Žižek, offers the bridge to such a union and highlights the anti‐fetishistic avenues of failure and utopia.
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