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 also the 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 the fact that the image of the substance of the Father

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 Fathers and to all the byzantine tradition. .-wich was

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 socalled, 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 be elevated 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 OnlyBegotten, 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 the Holy 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 PseudoDionysius, or towards the monarchy of the Father, according to the expression of St. Basil and other Greek Fathers of the fourth century.

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 AnteNicene 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 be disengaged from cosmological implications in order to be able to ascribe some of its notions to the beyond, to God-inHimself, 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 to different types of Christian apophasis. I hope to be able to

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 to God, 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 selfsufficiency 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

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.