Apophaticism as Epistemological Strategy — Epoche C1
The claim, and a citation that has to be corrected first At the end of the fifth chapter of The Mystical Theology , a short treatise written around the year 500 by an anonymous Syrian author who presented himself as Dionysius the Areopagite, the reader is told that of the divine cause there is "neither assertion nor denial" — that it lies beyond both the things we affirm of it and the things we deny of it. That single clause is the pivot of this essay. It is the reason why apophaticism, the practice of approaching God by denial rather than description, cannot be what its critics have taken it to be: an elaborate way of admitting that our words have run out. The thesis of the original version of this essay was that apophatic "unspeakability" is a positive epistemological strategy rather than a linguistic failure, and that thesis is correct and defensible. But it was defended by appeal to a book that does not exist. The work cited as John D. Caputo's The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion, Philosophy, and the Limit-Apophaticism is a garbled version of a real book, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion , published by Indiana University Press in 1997; the subtitle in the original citation is invented, and "limit-apophaticism" is not a term Caputo uses. Nor is that book a Heideggerian reading. Caputo is a Heidegger scholar, but Prayers and Tears is a book about Derrida, and it argues a case that is set out below in its own terms. This matters beyond bibliography. Attributing the argument to a single modern author makes it look like a recent revision of the tradition. It is not: the materials for it are in Dionysius himself, in Maimonides and in Aquinas, and the modern scholarly work that recovers them is by Michael Sells and Denys Turner rather than by Caputo. What the Dionysian procedure actually contains: three moments, not two The original essay described two classical readings of apophaticism: the via negativa as a ladder of denials, and the ineffability of ultimate reality as a fact about the divine nature. Both are recognisable, and both are incomplete in the same way — they stop at the second of the three moments the Dionysian corpus actually sets out. The first moment is kataphasis , affirmation: God is called good, wise, one, light, life. Dionysius takes these names from scripture and treats them as genuinely given, not as human guesses. The second is apophasis , denial: each of those names is then withdrawn, on the ground that what we mean by "good" or "one" is drawn from creatures and cannot be what God is. Chapters four and five of The Mystical Theology perform this withdrawal at length, first denying the perceptible attributes — God is not body, has no shape, no quality, no quantity — and then denying the intelligible ones, including the ones a reader would expect to survive: not soul, not mind, not one, not oneness, not goodness, not divinity. The third moment is the one the two classical readings omit, and it is where the argument lives. Having denied the names, Dionysius denies the denials. The divine cause is not merely "not good"; it is beyond both "good" and "not good", which he marks with terms formed on the prefix hyper- : hyperousios , beyond being; beyond goodness; beyond divinity. The point is not to leave the mind with a blank where an attribute stood. A blank would be a determinate result — it would mean the attribute genuinely fails to apply, as "not blue" genuinely applies to a red thing. Dionysius blocks that reading by negating a second time. Once this third moment is in view, the "ladder" reading of the original essay can be seen to have described the ascent while leaving out what happens at the top. The ladder does not end where language "simply gives out". It ends with an operation performed on the negations themselves. The charge of scepticism, stated precisely enough to be answered The original essay worried that apophaticism "risks reducing to a form of theological scepticism". That worry deserves a sharper formulation, because as stated it cannot be settled either way. Scepticism, in the sense relevant here, is the withholding of assent: the sceptic about God's nature holds that no proposition about it is warranted and therefore commits to none. Two distinct objections lurk in the vicinity. The first is the self-refutation objection. If nothing can truly be said of God, then the sentence "nothing can truly be said of God" cannot be true either, since it says something. This is a real objection and it is old. The second is the vacuity objection: even granting the coherence of the position, a series of denials leaves the mind with no content, and a strategy that yields no content is not a strategy for knowing. Aquinas's response to both is instructive because it is not a defence of apophaticism from outside but a statement from within it. The prologue to question three of the first part of the Summa Theologiae , written in the late 1260s, announces the method of the whole treatise on God in a single sentence: we cannot know what God is, but rather what he is not, and so we must consider the ways in which he does not exist rather than the ways in which he does. That is as strong an apophatic commitment as any in the tradition, and Aquinas nonetheless goes on, at question thirteen, to argue that names such as "good" and "wise" are said of God substantially and not merely negatively. His device is the distinction between what a word signifies and the manner in which it signifies: "good" signifies a perfection that is in God more truly than in creatures, but our manner of signifying it — as a quality possessed by a subject — does not fit him. The names are therefore neither univocal with their creaturely use nor merely equivocal; they are analogical. This dissolves the self-refutation objection cleanly. The apophatic claim is not the first-order claim that every predication of God is false. It is the second-order claim t