On Mystery

Part 2, The Apophatic Tradition

I have used the word "apophatic" from time to time on this blog/newsletter. But readers come and readers go, and "apophatic" isn't a word a lot of people know. So, we should start by getting everyone on the same page. Any conversation about mystery needs to begin with the apophatic tradition in Christian thought.

To start, theologians make a contrast between cataphatic and apophatic theology. Cataphatic theology, also called "positive theology," concerns what can be properly said, claimed, or asserted about God. Basically, cataphatic theology concerns our "God talk," verbal statements that express our ideas and beliefs about God. Cataphatic theology contains creeds, beliefs, doctrines, dogmas, and Biblical teachings. A lot of cataphatic theology involves policing all these words and ideas, drawing boundaries between the licit and illicit, between orthodoxy and heresy. Most of our spiritual lives are spent swimming in cataphatic waters--from books to podcasts to sermons to blogs/newsletters--we share, talk, and debate about ideas and beliefs about God and the life of faith. Some of us gravitate toward abstract, theological cataphatic expressions, others like to keep things literal and Biblical. Either way, we're expressing beliefs about God.

The apophatic tradition, by contrast, is called "negative theology." Apophatic theology is the Via Negativa, the "way of negation."

There are a couple of different ways to think about this. First, in contrast to positive theology, what we can properly say about God, negative theology concerns what cannot be said about God. Apophatic theology marks the point where words and mental representations about God falter and fail. A different way of thinking about negative theology is approaching God through a series of negations. Through negations--God is not this, God is not that--we chip away at the mystery of God. Thomas Aquinas deploys this strategy in the Summa Theologica. Critically, for Thomas, this "chipping away" doesn't reveal God at the end of the process in any clear, positive way. As Thomas said, we can know God's existence but not God's essence. That is to say, from a cataphatic perspective, we can assert that God exists. We know this by observing God's effects upon the world. These are Thomas' famous five "proofs" for the existence of God. That said, while we can assert, positively, that God exists (if you find Thomas' proofs convincing), we do not know what God "is." God's essence is beyond human conception. To peer into God's very being is to look into an impenetrable darkness. Following Thomas, we can use negations to narrow in on God, sort of like approaching the event horizon of a black hole. Our knowledge is a boundary encircling a mystery rather than the grasping of something definite.

The critical point here is how apophatic theology chastens our verbal claims and mental representations of God. There is a literalness in speaking about God that must be mortified. True, our words can help us climb toward God, our thoughts can seek him, but at some point we reach the top of the cataphatic ladder. Words and ideas can only take us so far. At the top cataphatic ladder is a step into the mystical and contemplative. Silence is emphasized over verbalization. Thomas Aquinas reached the top of his cataphatic ladder in a mystical experience, late in his life, during the celebration of the Eucharist. He stopped writing the Summa because after his vision all his words seemed to him as straw.

While all the church fathers and early theologians recognized the apophatic aspect of the theological task, along with the mystical approach toward God, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. late 5th to early 6th century) and Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 662) are considered seminal figures in the apophatic tradition. After Aquinas, Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 – c. 1328) and Nicholas of Cusa (1401 – 1464) are also a major figures, along with the author of the mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing (14th century). But again, pretty much every significant Christian theologian, early and late, has recognized the apophatic aspect of theological reflection. The role apophaticism plays in emphasis and centrality varies considerably across theologians and through the tradition as a whole, but it's always there.

The point of this post, beyond introducing readers to apophatic theology so I can freely use the word "apophatic" going forward, is simply to state that, due to God being God, mystery is baked deeply into the pie. Any speech or reflection about God is inherently haunted by mystery. All God talk is mysterious, has an apophatic aspect. To be sure, apophaticism isn't what I was describing in my last post, the way "mystery" can get used to short-circuit a theological conversation or wave away a hard question. But as I'll argue in the posts to come, mystery must be regularly invoked at the God/creation point of contact. Necessarily so, because, as we've seen in this post, there is a persisting apophatic aspect to one side of this relationship.