Dr Raymond Pelly MA (Oxon.), DTheol (Geneva) is an Anglican priest (1964). Formally he was warden of St. John’s Theological College Auckland and Chaplain at VUW from 1990 to 94. He now divides his time between prayer, spiritual direction and counselling, writing and research. Raymond is Resident Theologian at St. Peter’s, Willis Street. His recent writing includes Auschwitz – Resurrection (St. Peter’s Publications: Wellington, 2000).

Atheistic Christianity?

AFFIRMATION – NEGATION

The Double Helix of Language about God
(The Mind’s Ascent to Love)
Presented by Raymond Pelly, to the X-Nous Study Group
3rd June 2003


Is Christianity necessarily atheistic? No; nor is it necessarily theistic – in so far, that is, as ‘theism’ has become a code-word for crude fundamentalist understandings of God. For atheism, as the word suggests (‘a-theism’), is relative to (or parasitical on) the type of theism that it denies. Bear this in mind in what follows. For in considering how the language of faith both affirms and negates, there is always the question of what the language in question refers to (whether by affirmation or negation). Thus, in relation to atheism, what content is being given to the word ‘God’ in relation to which the ‘a-theism’ in question becomes meaningful by its denial?

To give an example. The current crop of New Zealand atheists – Lloyd Geering, Ian Harris et al. – have decided that because of a scientific world-view they hold, and because (principally) of the existence of evil and suffering, there is no kind of agency or power that any putative ‘god’ can exercise over and above what human beings do anyway. There has been a drive, then, to move from talking about the omnipotence of God to a dogmatic belief in the impotence of God. Here we can see how a particular atheism is symbiotically related to the theism it denies – in this case around a shared notion of ‘power’ as akin to the ability to move objects (the so-called ‘scientific’ world-view presupposed). Here we have a classic example of the Aristotelian principle that in the denial of a proposition, denier and affirmer share the same knowledge or assumptions (eadem est scientia oppositorum – see below). It’s not that ‘theism’ and ‘atheism’ (in this case) argue from different premises; rather they are both arguing from the same inadequate premise. ‘A plague on both your houses’, we might say! A good question to ask, then, in respect of any fundamentally affirmative theology is, What kind of agency (or power) is it possible for God to exercise in this scenario?

One thing further by way of introduction. The model of theological language I shall be using in this paper is of a ‘double helix’, that is of two ascending and inter-spiralling lines, the one representing affirmation, the other negation. Thus in the mind’s ascent to God – which is also an ascent to love – there is always an affirmation followed by a corresponding negation. There is thus a dynamic interaction of affirmation and negation at the heart of authentic theology which cannot be resolved this side of the Visio Beatifica – and even then perhaps not, so great or deep is the mystery. This dialectical method guards, on the one hand, against fundamentalism where all is uncritical affirmation and, on the other, atheisms of various sorts where we have negations of God with no corresponding affirmations.

I begin, then, with a statement of principle by Oliver Davies, one of the rising stars of the current renaissance of Anglican theology. (2)

The need to negate in Christian apophatic discourse is not grounded in a recognition of the limits of language and expression as such, or rather at least not in that alone. Rather it is shaped within particular liturgical communities who are called to give verbal expression to a specific intervention of God in history. Apophasis in this sense articulates the human response to a divine communicative presence, and it is burdened as much by an excess of presence as it is by an endemic sense of absence. If the latter is in a way the ‘shadow’ of expressivity, where language meets its natural limits, then the former is the density of meaning and expression, conceivable as darkness, which is the measure of a truly divine act of communication. Christian apophasis then is about divine-human communication and relation, and is foundationally celebratory. (3)

To take this a little further, we could say (following Thomas Aquinas) that theological language is ordinary language, yet put to an extraordinary use. It starts (as Davies insists) as a kind of linguistic excess, a faith-driven, pentecostal riot of language. But in the threatened anarchy of linguistic excess, theological language is discovered to be a ‘broken language’ (Nicholas Lash). Now theological language becomes self-critical, embarrassed by its own verbosity (unqualified superlatives and the like); and through this embarrassment and salutary mood of self-criticism, is transformed into awe, wonder, astonishment, adoration. Now silence takes on from word. Theologically we could put it like this: that the language of faith is as affirmative as resurrection; as empowering of speech as Pentecost; yet as broken as the crucified Christ.

How does this work out in the history of theology? I shall take three theologians all of whom have been concerned with the questions I have raised: Dionysios the Areopagite (sometimes know as Pseudo-Denys), St.Bonaventure, the Franciscan saint and theologian, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Let’s look at each in turn.

In his discussion of Pseudo-Denys (c.500 CE), Turner asks, How is apophatic theology distinguished from deconstruction? Is the via negativa, then, just another example of language in a vacuum chasing its own tail in a fundamentally self-destructive way? Is it post-modernism under another name? Here, then, is his summary of the Pseudo-Denys’ theological method:
In the final two chapters of his Mystical Theology the pseudo-Denys describes a hierarchy of denials, denials, that is, of all the names of God. These names, he says, form a ladder, ascending from the lowest ‘perceptual’ names – ‘God is a rock, is immense, is light, is darkness…’ – derived as metaphors from material objects – to the very highest, ‘proper’ or ‘conceptual’ names of God – ‘God is wise and wisdom, good and goodness, beautiful and beauty, exists and existence’ – and all these names the pseudo-Denys negates one by one as he progresses up the scale of language until at the end of the work the last word is that all words are left behind in the silence of the apophatic.

But lest this be misunderstood, Turner adds:

This ascending hierarchy of negations is, however, systematic, not just a sort of gung-ho scatter of negative shot: it is governed by a general theological principle and is regulated by a mechanism.

What is this general principle? It is,

… that all these descriptions [of God] denied are legitimate names of God, they give some positive idea of God. For being the cause of all God may be described in consequence by the names of all the things he has caused. Theological language, for the Pseudo-Denys, therefore consists in a clamour of metaphor and descriptions and if we must also deny all that speech then we must remember that those denials are themselves forms of speech; hence, if the divine reality transcends all our speech, then, … ‘the cause of all … is both beyond every assertion and beyond every denial’.(4)

Turner’s comment is instructive:

The point of the serial negations … is not to demonstrate, as some have supposed, that negative language is somehow superior to affirmative in the mind’s ascent to God; rather it is to demonstrate that our language leads us to the reality of God when, by a process simultaneously of affirming and denying all things of God, by, as it were in one breath, both affirming what God is and denying, as he puts it, ‘that there is any kind of thing that God is’, we step off the very boundary of language itself, beyond every assertion and every denial, into the ‘negation of the negation’ and the ‘brilliant darkness’ of God.

We see here what I have called ‘the double helix’ effect: that for every speech- or creation-based affirmation of God – from the most ‘thingy’ to the most spiritual – there is a corresponding negation. At the root of this is the denial that there is any ‘thing’ – including words! – that God is. In this way the mind’s ascent to God necessarily exits language; it negates, in other words, its own negations; and in so doing finds itself in the ‘brilliant darkness’ of God’s love. The problem, then, with the ‘double helix’ model – and this is where it breaks down – is that it presupposes that both affirmations and negations are an endless linguistic game (shades of post-modernism).

Here Turner introduces the Aristotelian principle ‘eadem est scientia oppositorum’ [Peri Hermeneias, 17a 31-3] – for our purposes that ‘affirmations and their corresponding negations are one and the same kind of knowledge’ [Turner, Inaugural, p.5]. Thus, if God is no kind of thing – ‘no-thing’ not being the same as ‘nothing’ – then not even language (no matter how refined), itself a kind of thing, can qualify as containing adequate descriptions of the God who is by definition not any kind of thing or stuff. God is therefore beyond language altogether. Very soon – on the ‘double helix’ model – we exhaust the resources of language. Here we move from language to silence, a silence which is not just nothing or sheer absence, but an ever greater or deeper experience of the love of God.

These reflections of the Pseudo-Denys were taken up and elaborated by St.Bonaventure (c.1217-1274). St.Bonaventure wants to find models of how apophatic (negative) and cataphatic (affirmative) relate in theological speech. His chosen model is christological or Christ-centred and encompasses the doctrines of the incarnation and passion of Christ. It works in three stages, each one providing a transition (or transitus) to the next.

First, there is the ‘given’ model of Christ’s human nature and especially his passion. Bonaventure, remember, was a medieval theologian! In relation to the Christ so understood we can talk endlessly, affirmatively, descriptively of what essentially is a man in the realm of creation. Turner calls this ‘a rampant exemplarism’ i.e. a somewhat tear-jerking account of Christ as the supreme moral example.

Second, Bonaventure moves from ‘the book of creation’ to the ‘Book of Life’ – i.e. from creation to redemption - in which Christ modulates from being passively observed by us to being active in working our redemption and salvation. This enables Bonaventure to adopt a more contemplative (or receptive) style. Turner describes it thus:

… in classically medieval dionysian style, he constructs a hierarchy of ‘contemplations’ of God, beginning from the lowest vestigia in material objects, upwards and inwards to our perception of them, through the imagines of God in the human soul, especially in its highest powers, further ‘upwards’ and beyond them to ‘contemplations’ through the highest concepts of God, ‘existence’ and ‘goodness’. (5)

In this itinerary (or journey) of the mind, Christ has changed from being one thing (or person) among many in the creation – inviting a variety of descriptions - to the one in whom, in virtue of his self-offering to God, includes or sums up in his person all language that would affirm anything of God. The journey of the mind ‘upwards and inwards’ thus corresponds to Christ’s own ascent to God, from creation to redemption, from humanity to divinity.

Thirdly, Bonaventure makes a final transition to a negative theology where all knowing, all affirmation, must lead to unknowing. This powerfully subversive negative theology is effected through the crucified Christ. In Turner’s words:

For in that catastrophe of destruction, in which the humanity of Christ is brought low, is all the affirmative capacity of speech subverted: thus it is that through the drama of Christ’s life on the one hand and death on the other, through the recapitulation of the symbolic weight and density of creation in his human nature on the one hand, and its destruction on the Cross on the other, is the complex interplay of affirmative and negative fused and concretely realized. In Christ, therefore, is there not only the visibility of the Godhead, but also the invisibility: if Christ is the Way, Christ is, in short, our access to the unknowability of God, not so as ultimately to know it, but so as to be brought into participation with the Deus absconditus precisely as unknown. (6)

Once again the ‘double helix’ model breaks down because in Christ, in his humanity and divinity, his createdness and status as redeemer, the distinction between affirmation and negation break down. For in his crucified persona language (including his own) collapses only to function as paradoxically affirming (through negation) the very unknowability of God so central to the mystery of the abyss of love that God is. Here we might think particularly of Christ’s reported words from the cross as a striking dialectic – a ‘cross’-movement - of affirmation and negation. (7)

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 – an almost exact contemporary of St.Bonaventure) offers – for example in his so-called proofs of the existence of God – what is in effect a complex and many-layered approach to the business of speaking about God. Here Aquinas wishes not so much to ‘prove’ the existence of God so much as to affirm:

# that there is no special privileged or religious language. In theology – witness Thomas’ Five Ways (8) – we must perforce use ordinary human- and creation-based language in our speech about (or our explorations of) God;

# that behind this there is a deeper (often repressed) question as to why there is anything at all rather than nothing. Can it be that we can only say ‘is’ of anything at all if we can first say ‘God is’? (9) (And here as an aside we might note that the phrase ‘God is’ is a much more interesting phrase – one that invites an infinite number of extensions or completions (eg ‘God is love’) - than the statement ‘God is not’ which either ends with a full stop or is parasitical on the affirmation ‘God is …’ in a mindless version of the double helix);

# that God is by definition unknowable. Thus while we have to speak of God in human, creation-based language, God is in principle beyond language. All language can do is take us – especially if it is authentic, revelation-based language – deeper into the ‘dark’ mystery of the unknowability of the incomprehensible love of God.

Aquinas calls this speaking ‘sub ratione Dei’ which means (roughly translated) ‘speaking with the kind of rationality – or method – that is called for (or appropriate) in language that intends to be about God’. Turner’s comments on Thomas’ account of the nature of theological language are:

… Christians - his thought here converging with that of St. Bonaventure – do know better by grace and revelation, but only so as to be inserted participatively into a darkness of God which is deeper than it possibly could be for the pagan, who can only think this unknowability as it were from the outside and cannot be drawn into a sharing of its nature as love, so as to share it in friendship with God. It is a darkness, therefore, which for the Christian is deepened, not relieved by the Trinity, intensified by the Incarnation, not dispelled. For which reason, he says: “… in this life we do not know what God is [even] through the revelation of grace, and so [by grace] we are made one with him as to something unknown”. (10)

The ‘ignorance’ of the believer – a ‘docta ignorantia’ or a ‘sober inebriation’ – is therefore fundamentally different to that of the unbeliever who can’t see his way to participating in the mystery, only to denying it. Here the presence of prayer (or its absence) in the life of the believer (or unbeliever) takes us to the very heart of the matter.

Turner’s second comment highlights Aquinas’ robust confidence in affirmative language about God, yet qualified always by a proper sense of its relativity. He writes of Aquinas’

… fundamental confidence in theological speech, a trust that our ordinary ways of talking about God are fundamentally in order, needing only to be subordinated to a governing apophaticism, expressed as an epistemological principle. Once we know that the very materiality and carnality of our speech about God is that which reveals itself to our created and carnal rationality as created, then we know both that speech of creatures is predicable of the creator and that all such speech about God fails anyway…

Turner then continues:

For Thomas, theological speech is at once incarnated and apophatic speech, speech rooted in our common material condition and yet revelatory of that utterly unknowable reality which sustains that condition as created. To put it in yet other words, you reach down into the depths of creaturely reality precisely insofar as that reality reveals itself to us as created. Indeed, for Thomas, those ultimate, and ultimately mysterious, depths of creaturely reality – what he calls its
esse – consists in its being created: as we might say, the essence of being a creature is to be created [esse creaturae est creari], and knowledge of that is our knowledge of God. (11)

In a kind of ‘concluding unscientific postscript’ I want to sum up the findings of this paper in five theses.

In our day many people have what you might call ‘primal experiences of God’ yet are at a loss as to how to name them. This may have to do with the sense of living in the creation, and not in any old world.

We can find language to describe these experiences i.e. language is about something real – in this case, primal experiences of God. [Contrast Don Cupitt: the meaning of language is internal to itself i.e. it doesn’t refer to anything outside or beyond itself].

This affirming language is frequently metaphorical in character, truth-telling yet in a non-standard mode. Here we have to ask ourselves, Who says that rational/scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, the only truth-bearing language? Isn’t it, further, just this prizing apart of knowledge and wisdom that is at the heart of the brokenness of western civilization?
Authentic theological language is grounded in prayer – the kind of experience of God that can recognize (or make the connections between) the truths that are being articulated in such doctrines as creation, incarnation, redemption, trinity and what is ‘known’ or experienced in prayer – on the principle of ‘like with like’.

Prayer further teaches us (i) that we can’t construct the authentically holy or sacred for ourselves – otherwise it ceases to be transcendent, given; and gives rise to the idea either that we are ‘God’ or that we construct ‘God’; (ii) that authentic prayer is ruthlessly deconstructive or iconoclastic – as well as warmly affirmative!

---

Bibliography
This paper is indebted to the work of Denys Turner, in 2001 elected Norris-Hulse Professor of Theology in the University of Cambridge. In particular: The Darkness of God. Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge, 1995; “Apophaticism, idolatry and the claims of reason”. In: Silence and the Word. Negative Theology and Incarnation, ed. Oliver Davies & Denys Turner, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 11-34; How to be an Atheist, Cambridge, 2002 (Turner’s Inaugural).
Glossary: Apophatic: negative; hence, knowledge of God obtained by negation (Gk. Apophasis, denial); apophaticism: an apophatic (or negative) approach to knowledge of God. Cataphatic: affirmative; hence, defining God positively or by positive statements.


Notes
(1) “By ‘mind’ I mean ‘the whole person’ as turned to God. Compare Ewart Cousins on St.Bonaventure, “For Bonaventure and medieval usage in general, as influenced by Augustine, the term mens was not limited to the intellectualist connotations of the English term ‘mind’. Among the medieval spiritual writers mens encompassed the soul in its three faculties of memory, intelligence and will, which constitute the soul in the image of God. Although … no … English term … captures this precise meaning, I have chosen ‘soul’ in preference to ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’. However ‘soul’ must not be taken in its Aristotelian sense of the animating principle of the body, but rather as the image of God in the depths of the person.” Bonaventure. Classics of Western Spirituality, SPCK, London, Introduction, p.21.
(2) Names like Sarah Coakley, David Ford, Rowan Williams, Denys Turner, Oliver Davies, Keith Ward, Gareth Jones, Stephen Sykes, Dan Hardy … spring to mind.
(3) Soundings: towards a theological poetics of silence. In: Silence & the Word, p.201.
(4) Silence & the Word, pp. 19-20.
(5) Silence & the Word, p.22.
(6) Silence & the Word, p.23.
(7) Here we might compare the way the ‘uprightness’ (betokening righteousness) of the figure on the cross modulates into (or elides with) the ‘standing’ (or ‘upstanding’ (Gk. Anastasis) of the abundant new life of the risen one.
(8) In his Five Ways, St. Thomas uses the language (respectively) of motion or change, causation, necessary being, gradations of being, directedness or purpose. See, Anthony Kenny. The Five Ways. St. Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence. London, 1969.
(9) For example, proper respect for the dignity of the human person (or the integrity of the environment) can only finally be had on the basis of the affirmation that they are the creation of God.
(10) Summa Theologiae, 1a q12 a13 ad1.
(11) Silence & the Word, pp. 32, 33.

Back to Top