ETHICS:
INTRO: The course traced the outline of ethics, also known as moral philosophy, as a branch of philosophy whose prime concern is with understanding and delineating right and wrong, good and bad. It decoded the usage of the term ethics as a system or theory of moral values and principles. The word 'ethics' in English is a derivative of the Greek word 'ethikos.' The word 'ethikos' in Greek' literally means relating to one's character.
The field of ethics concerns itself with the systematization of the concepts of right and wrong behavior. Ethical questions proliferate at all kinds of levels. What is good and what is bad? What is the ideal way to live? What is a good life? Is good life defined by happiness or knowledge, virtue or aesthetics? If happiness is the aim of life, then is it just my happiness and the happiness of all? And how does one attain to that happiness?
Happiness is a broad category. It encompasses many particular questions. There are moral conundrums such as whether it's right to be dishonest if it helps a good cause. How much wealth is it appropriate to amass in a world full of poverty? Can there ever such a thing be as a just war when it is likely that many innocent people will be killed?
Then there are issues in bioethics such as eugenics. Is human cloning ethical? Is it moral to use human embryos for medical research? Do we have any duties toward the non-human forms of life on earth? What are our moral obligations to posterity - the generations still to come? How do we respond to the problems of global warming and climate change?
COURSE: This course traced the history of ethics from Ancient Greece to present day America and Europe in a two pronged approach targeting thinkers and theories. Apart from secular ethics, the ethical systems of some of the major religious traditions were also introduced in the course. The following is a cursory summary of some of the more important ethical thinkers and frameworks introduced in the class.
THINKERS:
The origins of Western ethics to their Greek roots were traced. The ethical works od the three influential Greek philosophers -Socrates, Plato and Aristotle - were considered. It was elucidated in the course how Socrates' codification of philosophical problems into empirical and moral ones has been an originary one and has profoundly influenced the Western ethical tradition. So, does his investigation of what amkes an act good. (Is it good because it pleases the Gods or it pleases the gods because it is good?)
The course also demonstrated how Plato's theory of forms demonstrated his concept of morality. It delineated how for Plato justice is intuitive and originates in personal perceptions of forms and how evil is a result of ignorance. The course followed Plato up with an introduction to Aristotelian ethics. The course shed light on how for Aristotle moral actions and choices are guided by reason and on his cocepts of eudaimonia and the golden middle (a balance between emotion and rationality).
APOPHATIC THEOLOGY:
Apophatic theology or negative theology is a negative approach (via negativa) to the knowledge of God. Negative theology is a theological methodology that attempts to describe the nature of God by trying to understand what God is not rather than what He is. The primary tenet underlying apophatic theology is that God transcends all human understanding and experience. Therefore, the only approach to any kind of knowledge of God is through postulating what He is not. The genealogy of apophatic theology in Christianity can be treaced back to Greco-Roman philosophy.,Greco-Roman philosophy exterted a tremendous amount of influence -structural and terminological - on Christian apophatic theology.
Pseudo-Dionysius (in the late fifth century) is credited as the originator of negqative theology per se. He wrote under the name of Dionysius of Aeropagite. However, traces of apophatic theology can be found even earlier in the the writings of the Church Fathers of the fourth century whose curious declaration that they believed in God but not in |His existence was apophatic in nthe sense that by disavowing existence as an attribute of God they managed to denude the concept of God of any positive attributes. From their point of view, the cxoncept of existence erroneously attached positive attributes to God.
However, today, with the theological turn in continental thought, philosophy has once more become open to various strains of apophaticism (Franke, William. A Philosophy of the Unsayable, University of Notre Dame Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/britishcouncilonline-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3441157.). The unnameable name of God emanating from the monotheistic traditions, especially the mystical strains of Kabbalah and Sufism, to the negative-theological ventures of the neoplatonists: philosophical thought today has become receptive to all these currents.The age of the divine onto-theological seems to be over. God cannot be viewed from the prism of being or the highest being anymore.Mysticism and apophatic theology seem to have acquired a new lease of life in the post modern age.
These negative theologies have been loosened from the foundations of rationalist positive statements that have guiuded the traditional theological cataphatic thought. One of the reasons for the reemergence of negative theology is that the rationalist project originating from Descartes has been abandoned in a twentieth century full of irrational and tragic cataclysms. Even though God is still acknowledged as the transcendent ground of all that there is,a certain foundationalism grounding that absolute ground has been abandoned. this is in a large measure the reason for the 'theological turn' in our time.
The primary methodology of negative theology is that by which positive attributes that describe what God is are substituted by negative assertions about what God is not. The articulation of the attributes of God must be in negative terms. So, instead of averring that God is one, it ought to be stated that God does not exist as multiple entities. Instead of asserting that God is good, it ought to be postulated that God does not create or permit evil. When we describe God in terms of negative adjectives such as ineffable, indivisible, infinite, invisible, uncreated etc., we are indulging in apophatic theology.
This movement of thought repeats the neoplatonist movement in the ancient times which in its turn emerged from a foundational crisis in Greek philosophy. Notwithstanding its ornately designed metaphysical systems, Neoplatonism, in the final analysis, denies the possibility of a rational foundational undergirding thought and discourse. It denies the possibility of any first principles from which any sort of metaphysics can emerge. The inherent nature of all discourse and knowledge is multiplicity whereas the ultimate reality is understood to be One.
Apophatic theology encompasses all those theologies whose primary way of expressing the knowledge of God is through negative statements as contrsasted with cataphatic theologies which primarily rely on positive statements about the nature of God.This distinction was mainly developed within Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions of theism. The negative way or Via Negativa taken to its logical limits culminates in two kinds of inferences: God can just as well be spoken of in impersonal terms as in personal terms (for instance, in the advaita (non-dual) philosophy of Sankara); such a negative theology can potentially culminate in the denial of God as an ultimate being (for instance, in Mahayana Buddhism). However, in the theistic traditions, negative statements alone are not sufficient and must exist in an interrelationship with the positive statements.
The telos of apophatic theology is not knowledge of God but union with God. Theology is the science that treats of God and man in all their known relations to each other. It is, in essence, the science of God. But direct and immediate knowledge of God is impossible. It is impossible to describe the essence of God. He is above and beyond all descriptions. Western theologians have sought to describe God through the analogical method by proposijng that God is like 'Father', God is like 'Love', and so on and so forth. It is an easy though facile way of explaining God. However, it fails to access the essence of God and the mystery of God altogether escapes it due to the innate limitations of language. Analogies can go only so far in breaking open the hidden essences and mysteries of things. For instance God's Fatherhood is much more profound than our experience of a human father. God's love is infinitely deeper than our human experience of love.
Whenever we resort to analogies, we risk confounding the infinite essence of God with our finite human concepts of love, father etc. This culminates in the reverse creation of God in the image of man and is liable to the charge of idolatry. There is a cognitive disjunction between the finite human intellect and the conception of an infinite God. If our limited human intellect could fully comprehend God, then He would not be truly God. Man's pride in his intellectual and creative powers has been his undoing since the Tower of Babel. A more fruitful approach would be to admit that we do jnot truly know or understand |God. This acknowledgment is the origin of apophatic or negative theology. It is "an ascendant undertaking of the mind that progressively eliminates allk 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."(Vladmir LKossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erikson and Thomas Bird, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary's Press, 1974, p. 13.
On the face of it, it seems like a contradiction that one can know God by 'unknowing' Him. This kind of 'unknowing' is a process of purification by purgation through which the normal processes of thought and discourse are gradually eliminated and the true essence of the transcendent is graped and understood. Such a mode of thinking flies in the face of both the rationalist philosophical tradition of the West and the mainstream theological thought. The apophatic method of contemplation has the potential of leading to the breakdown of the relationship between the subject and his language. One outcome of such an approach can be agnosticism and the realization that language can be contradictory in its implications. Such an approach to 'unknowing' the object refuses to exhaust the content of knowledge or reality of things described by language. The apophatic method of contemplation or 'unknowing' takes the subject beyond words or mere verbalizations to the true heart of the object in utter silence and an absence of all logical and rational processes.
The transcendent can only be encountered by first denuding oneself of all intrusive thoughts and subsequently entering a space of allegorical thinking in a kind of 'darkness of ignorance.' The 'Dark Night of the Soul' of St John of Cross is a case in point. It is in this 'darkness' that the ultimate abode of God lies. The ascent to God that abides in 'darkness' is analogous to an ascent to ignorance. Such an approach o the divine seems, at the first glance,, illogical, howerver, it is rendered necessary by the nature of the object. The fundamental assumption ofb the method of unknowing is that God is transcendent )ie, it transcends all human categories of understanding) and ineffable. It is therefore a 'non-object' or 'no-thing' that escapes the categories of logic. The fathers of the Church and the mystics of vqarious faith have long understood this 'no-object' or 'no-thing' as the unfathomable mystery of God. This mystery is not accessible through the conventional methods of investigation and, therefore,they adopted the method of 'unknowing' to know the object.
Mystics across faiths have eschewed logic to embrace the sublime heights of 'transcendent being.' The method of unknowing forms the boundary between human knowledge and utter ignorance, the point where all finiute thought expodes into an excess of thye transcendent infinite.Traditionally the knowledge of God has been defined in terms of positive attributes such as omnipotent, omnnibenevolent, omniscient etc. Through an ever-increasing knowledge by dint of an accunulation of these attributes man was deemed to ascend to the knowledge of God. However, such an approach ends up in a dilemma beyond all resolution. It is, after all, a conundrum, that language (which is a creation) is able to describe something that transcends all creation. therefore, it is by disowning all knowledge through the practise of unknowing that a true knowledgre of 'God' can be achieved. As Pseudo-Dionysius says "One knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing." (Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, a volume of The Classics of Western Spirituality, ed. John Farina, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987)
It is this art of unknowing that came to be known as negative or apophatic theology. The Eastern rerligions are thoroughly steeped in negative theology. The negative theology in the Eastern traditions is not terminological but structural. For instance, the Tao is that which cannot be named. To name is to define and to delimit. But Tao has no limits. Even in Tibetan Buddhism, enlightenment is to reach that non-dual point between knowledge and utter delusion. It is the point at which all the affirmations and denials converge. Buddhism is replete with such apophatic terms as no-thought, no-reflection, no-examination and so on. The 'unknowing' process here is similar to the one prescribed by Pseudo-Dionysius. Even in Eastern and Western Christianity, applying labels and attributes to God delimits our conception of Him. No conceptual representation is adequate to the notion of the infinite God. therefore, the ultimate goal of any apophatic theology is to emphasize the ineffability and transcendence of God that escapes all semantic formulations and ontological conceptions. Even though the latter have symbolic and referential value, they fail to exhaust the full range od depth of the meaning of a transcendent God.
Apophatic theology in Christianity is distinct from its counterpart forms in the Eastern traditions. In this tradition, all thoughts that pertain to God are stated in negative terms. Though such negations the self enters the resplendenbt darkness in which God resides and surrenders itself to the radically transcendent God. It is often vaverrred by many Christian theologians that in the non-Christian religions this method of 'unknowing' ends up in a depersonalization of both God and the human subject that seeks God. Despite the negative language that neoplatonists like Plotinus and Proclus invented in their search of God, these Christian negative theologians assert that the Christian negative theology save the human subject and its sought divine object from being shattered and dissolved, thus saving the seeker from the abyss of despair. However, the telos of both neoplatonism and the Eastern religions is the same, that is, a union with God through the method of 'unknowing.' According to these Christian theologians, the apophatic theological approach in Christianity preempts the possibility og the dissolution of the human subject and its divine object by creating the possibility of a face-to-face encounter and union with God. This, according to these Christian theologians, is the distinguyishing trait of Christian apophatic mysticism. The individual seeker is not annihilated and lost in this mystic union with God, but exists in all his sacrosanct personhood in this union.
The primary assumption underlying apophatic theology is that in seeking to encounter or know the transcendent reality or God the seeking subject is faced with an irresolvable dilemma or aporia. The name God is nothing but as significator of that which is beyond all description. Yet, by the mere act of naming the unnamable, the seeker has already delimited and made finite the lim8itless and infinite God. God is hidden and unknowable and by giving it a name and attributes, we stand to risk losing the essence of this unnamable and indescribable. God remains hidden and unfathomable in the darkness of ignorance and human mental and linguistic infrastructure is adequate to nthe task of piercing that veil and discovering the hidden God.
Just as the term God is limiting and fraught with the risk of obfuscation and loss, so are the adjectives that are attached to the idea of God such as 'all-good', 'almighty', and 'all-knowing' etc. Something that is above and beyond "good and beyond knowing cannot be known or experienced as good. This kind of 'unkowing' approach has the risk of ending up in agnosticism. Kataphatic theology is the antithesis of apophatic theology and the two must used in cvonjunction the prevent this lapse into agnosticism. Kataphasis isb the process or discourse whereby positive or affirmative statements are made about the transcendent. The antithetical role of apophatic discourse consists in 'unsaying' or negating the affirmative statements of kataphasis.This kataphatic process continues until not one affirmative statement can remain valid by itself. It is in that encounter between 'saying' and 'unbsaying', between a statement and its negation, in that ephemeral point of nothingness, that the mind encounters that which is beyond itself. The mind, however, upon the attainment of this state, immediately turns back to the mundane. Thus, the divine is accessed only momentarily. To renew the encounters, the process of saying and 'unsaying'must be repeated every moment.
In the mystic traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, negative theology always exists in a state mixed with positive theology in which negations and affirmations are played against one another. Apophatic theology plays the role of a corrective to kataphatic discourse. Positive and negative theology in these traditions run in a spectrum.
The human knowledge of the transcendent has its limits. Ancient Christianity, influenced by Pseudo-Dionysiuys, leaned towards apophaticism. However, post Thomas Aquinas, the cataphatic impulse started gaining the upper hand. Apophatic theology began to be replaced by a kind of cataphatic systematic theology originated by Aquinas. Apophatic theology became a mere prolegomena to cataphatic theology. The current age has oncfe again seen the rise of apophatic theology. With vthe advent of science, it was declared that the human science has its own proper objects and realkm of enquiry. The inquiry into the question of God is beyond its purview. In fact, God resides beyond the ken of human intellect. Science can offer only materialistic or naturalistic explanations. The inquiry into the nature of God constitutes a field divorced f5rom the field of science. This theological agnosticism of modern science has brought about a shift in theological thinking.
In modern scientific thought, the universe has become a self-enclosed chain of cause and effect and the knowledge of the transcendent lies outside its ken. The metaphysical is an untouchable to modern science and it restricts itself within the confines of empiricism. Howevger, science, especially physics, underwent a radical apophasis at the beginning of the twentieth-century. With Einstein's theory of reloativity and other consequent developments, the certainty of Newtonian physics wasb gone. However, there existed a certain positive theology that maintained an incomprehensibiklity of God that could not be resolved by the use of negative apophatic formulations. However, it did not rule out all possibility of experience of God. The positive dogmatic statements formed the markers and boundaries of an apophatic theological experience that led to an experience of God. The dogmas do not exhaust theological knowledge but are stepping stones to it. This knowledge of God remains structural, experiential and practical as opposed to theoretical and terminological. It is a progressive path known in the Eastern Orthodox Church as theosis.In theosis one can progress towards the truth but never fully attain it. It is like a mathematical limit that can be approached but never fully realized. The process, in consonance with its object, is limitless.
Apophatic theology is a product of the convergence of Christianity with neo-Platonism. Apophatic thought across traditions is marked by the imagery of overflowing or emanation. For instance, the Sufi mystics often use the metaphor of the overflowing ocean. (Martin Lings, What is Sufism?, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975) The ocean stands for the medium through which the divine and the human merge. If apophatic theology has a buzzword, it is inefrfablity. The same theologians who articulated the positive formulations of the dogma, maintained the inconceivability, the ineffability and incomprehensibility of God. On the face of it, the cataphatic and apophatic formulations are mutually contradictory. In fqact, ineffability of God is a contradiction in terms. If God is ineffable, then one cannot correctly say that He is ineffable. For to say so renders His ineffability effable. The same applies to other claims in apophatic theology. In fact such apophatic claims as the ineffability of God render the dogmatic affirmations of Christianity meaningless.
However, for apophatic claims to be tenable, they must be coonsistent with the Orthodox truths of Christianity in some sense. For instance, if God is literally ineffable then we cannot postulate divine hypostased
Other major world religions have their own version of apophatic theology. Islam very emphatically points out that God is unbegotten (in response to the Christian idea of an incarnate God in the person of Jesus). There are a plethora of Jewish writings on apophatic theology by philosophers such as Maimonides. Some of the Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism have taken apophatic theology to their furthest limits by stating that nothing positive can be said about God or the nature of the highest reality. For instance, in the Daoist religion, the fundamental principle is that.Dao by nature is fundamentally indescribable and that which can be described is not Dao. This is an ideal example of the negative way or Via Negativa. Even though the Dao is discussed in a great deal of detail, the descriptions remain primarily negative. One drawback of negative theology is that the hosts of negative descriptions can become trite and repetitive.
The influence of negative theology remains far greater in the Eastern religions than in the Abrahamaic ones. Also, it is far more prominent in the Eastern Church than in the Western Church. One reason for the latter could be that some of the more important figures in apophatic theology such as Basil the Great, John of Damascus, and ||John Chrysostom were in the Eastern Church (Austin Cline: Feb 04, 2019). It is more than mere coincidence that both Eastern religion and Eastern Christianity are apophatic to varying degrees.
Apophatic theology stands in contrast to cataphaticx theology. Cataphatic theology is the dominant mode of theology in the Western Church and plays a much greater role in the religious writings of the Church. The methodology of cataphatic theology is known as analogia entis (analogy of being) where attributes are carried over from the human realm to the divine. This kind of analogical theology takes attributes of human nature and magnifies them to describe God as perfect, omnipreesent, good, omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent and so on. The reference point of this kind of analogical thinking is things is starting from things that are more amenable to human understanding and applying them to God. Hence, for example, God is described as Father in analogical terms.
INTRO: The course traced the outline of ethics, also known as moral philosophy, as a branch of philosophy whose prime concern is with understanding and delineating right and wrong, good and bad. It decoded the usage of the term ethics as a system or theory of moral values and principles. The word 'ethics' in English is a derivative of the Greek word 'ethikos.' The word 'ethikos' in Greek' literally means relating to one's character.
The field of ethics concerns itself with the systematization of the concepts of right and wrong behavior. Ethical questions proliferate at all kinds of levels. What is good and what is bad? What is the ideal way to live? What is a good life? Is good life defined by happiness or knowledge, virtue or aesthetics? If happiness is the aim of life, then is it just my happiness and the happiness of all? And how does one attain to that happiness?
Happiness is a broad category. It encompasses many particular questions. There are moral conundrums such as whether it's right to be dishonest if it helps a good cause. How much wealth is it appropriate to amass in a world full of poverty? Can there ever such a thing be as a just war when it is likely that many innocent people will be killed?
Then there are issues in bioethics such as eugenics. Is human cloning ethical? Is it moral to use human embryos for medical research? Do we have any duties toward the non-human forms of life on earth? What are our moral obligations to posterity - the generations still to come? How do we respond to the problems of global warming and climate change?
COURSE: This course traced the history of ethics from Ancient Greece to present day America and Europe in a two pronged approach targeting thinkers and theories. Apart from secular ethics, the ethical systems of some of the major religious traditions were also introduced in the course. The following is a cursory summary of some of the more important ethical thinkers and frameworks introduced in the class.
THINKERS:
The origins of Western ethics to their Greek roots were traced. The ethical works od the three influential Greek philosophers -Socrates, Plato and Aristotle - were considered. It was elucidated in the course how Socrates' codification of philosophical problems into empirical and moral ones has been an originary one and has profoundly influenced the Western ethical tradition. So, does his investigation of what amkes an act good. (Is it good because it pleases the Gods or it pleases the gods because it is good?)
The course also demonstrated how Plato's theory of forms demonstrated his concept of morality. It delineated how for Plato justice is intuitive and originates in personal perceptions of forms and how evil is a result of ignorance. The course followed Plato up with an introduction to Aristotelian ethics. The course shed light on how for Aristotle moral actions and choices are guided by reason and on his cocepts of eudaimonia and the golden middle (a balance between emotion and rationality).
APOPHATIC THEOLOGY:
Apophatic theology or negative theology is a negative approach (via negativa) to the knowledge of God. Negative theology is a theological methodology that attempts to describe the nature of God by trying to understand what God is not rather than what He is. The primary tenet underlying apophatic theology is that God transcends all human understanding and experience. Therefore, the only approach to any kind of knowledge of God is through postulating what He is not. The genealogy of apophatic theology in Christianity can be treaced back to Greco-Roman philosophy.,Greco-Roman philosophy exterted a tremendous amount of influence -structural and terminological - on Christian apophatic theology.
Pseudo-Dionysius (in the late fifth century) is credited as the originator of negqative theology per se. He wrote under the name of Dionysius of Aeropagite. However, traces of apophatic theology can be found even earlier in the the writings of the Church Fathers of the fourth century whose curious declaration that they believed in God but not in |His existence was apophatic in nthe sense that by disavowing existence as an attribute of God they managed to denude the concept of God of any positive attributes. From their point of view, the cxoncept of existence erroneously attached positive attributes to God.
However, today, with the theological turn in continental thought, philosophy has once more become open to various strains of apophaticism (Franke, William. A Philosophy of the Unsayable, University of Notre Dame Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/britishcouncilonline-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3441157.). The unnameable name of God emanating from the monotheistic traditions, especially the mystical strains of Kabbalah and Sufism, to the negative-theological ventures of the neoplatonists: philosophical thought today has become receptive to all these currents.The age of the divine onto-theological seems to be over. God cannot be viewed from the prism of being or the highest being anymore.Mysticism and apophatic theology seem to have acquired a new lease of life in the post modern age.
These negative theologies have been loosened from the foundations of rationalist positive statements that have guiuded the traditional theological cataphatic thought. One of the reasons for the reemergence of negative theology is that the rationalist project originating from Descartes has been abandoned in a twentieth century full of irrational and tragic cataclysms. Even though God is still acknowledged as the transcendent ground of all that there is,a certain foundationalism grounding that absolute ground has been abandoned. this is in a large measure the reason for the 'theological turn' in our time.
The primary methodology of negative theology is that by which positive attributes that describe what God is are substituted by negative assertions about what God is not. The articulation of the attributes of God must be in negative terms. So, instead of averring that God is one, it ought to be stated that God does not exist as multiple entities. Instead of asserting that God is good, it ought to be postulated that God does not create or permit evil. When we describe God in terms of negative adjectives such as ineffable, indivisible, infinite, invisible, uncreated etc., we are indulging in apophatic theology.
This movement of thought repeats the neoplatonist movement in the ancient times which in its turn emerged from a foundational crisis in Greek philosophy. Notwithstanding its ornately designed metaphysical systems, Neoplatonism, in the final analysis, denies the possibility of a rational foundational undergirding thought and discourse. It denies the possibility of any first principles from which any sort of metaphysics can emerge. The inherent nature of all discourse and knowledge is multiplicity whereas the ultimate reality is understood to be One.
Apophatic theology encompasses all those theologies whose primary way of expressing the knowledge of God is through negative statements as contrsasted with cataphatic theologies which primarily rely on positive statements about the nature of God.This distinction was mainly developed within Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions of theism. The negative way or Via Negativa taken to its logical limits culminates in two kinds of inferences: God can just as well be spoken of in impersonal terms as in personal terms (for instance, in the advaita (non-dual) philosophy of Sankara); such a negative theology can potentially culminate in the denial of God as an ultimate being (for instance, in Mahayana Buddhism). However, in the theistic traditions, negative statements alone are not sufficient and must exist in an interrelationship with the positive statements.
The telos of apophatic theology is not knowledge of God but union with God. Theology is the science that treats of God and man in all their known relations to each other. It is, in essence, the science of God. But direct and immediate knowledge of God is impossible. It is impossible to describe the essence of God. He is above and beyond all descriptions. Western theologians have sought to describe God through the analogical method by proposijng that God is like 'Father', God is like 'Love', and so on and so forth. It is an easy though facile way of explaining God. However, it fails to access the essence of God and the mystery of God altogether escapes it due to the innate limitations of language. Analogies can go only so far in breaking open the hidden essences and mysteries of things. For instance God's Fatherhood is much more profound than our experience of a human father. God's love is infinitely deeper than our human experience of love.
Whenever we resort to analogies, we risk confounding the infinite essence of God with our finite human concepts of love, father etc. This culminates in the reverse creation of God in the image of man and is liable to the charge of idolatry. There is a cognitive disjunction between the finite human intellect and the conception of an infinite God. If our limited human intellect could fully comprehend God, then He would not be truly God. Man's pride in his intellectual and creative powers has been his undoing since the Tower of Babel. A more fruitful approach would be to admit that we do jnot truly know or understand |God. This acknowledgment is the origin of apophatic or negative theology. It is "an ascendant undertaking of the mind that progressively eliminates allk 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."(Vladmir LKossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erikson and Thomas Bird, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary's Press, 1974, p. 13.
On the face of it, it seems like a contradiction that one can know God by 'unknowing' Him. This kind of 'unknowing' is a process of purification by purgation through which the normal processes of thought and discourse are gradually eliminated and the true essence of the transcendent is graped and understood. Such a mode of thinking flies in the face of both the rationalist philosophical tradition of the West and the mainstream theological thought. The apophatic method of contemplation has the potential of leading to the breakdown of the relationship between the subject and his language. One outcome of such an approach can be agnosticism and the realization that language can be contradictory in its implications. Such an approach to 'unknowing' the object refuses to exhaust the content of knowledge or reality of things described by language. The apophatic method of contemplation or 'unknowing' takes the subject beyond words or mere verbalizations to the true heart of the object in utter silence and an absence of all logical and rational processes.
The transcendent can only be encountered by first denuding oneself of all intrusive thoughts and subsequently entering a space of allegorical thinking in a kind of 'darkness of ignorance.' The 'Dark Night of the Soul' of St John of Cross is a case in point. It is in this 'darkness' that the ultimate abode of God lies. The ascent to God that abides in 'darkness' is analogous to an ascent to ignorance. Such an approach o the divine seems, at the first glance,, illogical, howerver, it is rendered necessary by the nature of the object. The fundamental assumption ofb the method of unknowing is that God is transcendent )ie, it transcends all human categories of understanding) and ineffable. It is therefore a 'non-object' or 'no-thing' that escapes the categories of logic. The fathers of the Church and the mystics of vqarious faith have long understood this 'no-object' or 'no-thing' as the unfathomable mystery of God. This mystery is not accessible through the conventional methods of investigation and, therefore,they adopted the method of 'unknowing' to know the object.
Mystics across faiths have eschewed logic to embrace the sublime heights of 'transcendent being.' The method of unknowing forms the boundary between human knowledge and utter ignorance, the point where all finiute thought expodes into an excess of thye transcendent infinite.Traditionally the knowledge of God has been defined in terms of positive attributes such as omnipotent, omnnibenevolent, omniscient etc. Through an ever-increasing knowledge by dint of an accunulation of these attributes man was deemed to ascend to the knowledge of God. However, such an approach ends up in a dilemma beyond all resolution. It is, after all, a conundrum, that language (which is a creation) is able to describe something that transcends all creation. therefore, it is by disowning all knowledge through the practise of unknowing that a true knowledgre of 'God' can be achieved. As Pseudo-Dionysius says "One knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing." (Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, a volume of The Classics of Western Spirituality, ed. John Farina, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987)
It is this art of unknowing that came to be known as negative or apophatic theology. The Eastern rerligions are thoroughly steeped in negative theology. The negative theology in the Eastern traditions is not terminological but structural. For instance, the Tao is that which cannot be named. To name is to define and to delimit. But Tao has no limits. Even in Tibetan Buddhism, enlightenment is to reach that non-dual point between knowledge and utter delusion. It is the point at which all the affirmations and denials converge. Buddhism is replete with such apophatic terms as no-thought, no-reflection, no-examination and so on. The 'unknowing' process here is similar to the one prescribed by Pseudo-Dionysius. Even in Eastern and Western Christianity, applying labels and attributes to God delimits our conception of Him. No conceptual representation is adequate to the notion of the infinite God. therefore, the ultimate goal of any apophatic theology is to emphasize the ineffability and transcendence of God that escapes all semantic formulations and ontological conceptions. Even though the latter have symbolic and referential value, they fail to exhaust the full range od depth of the meaning of a transcendent God.
Apophatic theology in Christianity is distinct from its counterpart forms in the Eastern traditions. In this tradition, all thoughts that pertain to God are stated in negative terms. Though such negations the self enters the resplendenbt darkness in which God resides and surrenders itself to the radically transcendent God. It is often vaverrred by many Christian theologians that in the non-Christian religions this method of 'unknowing' ends up in a depersonalization of both God and the human subject that seeks God. Despite the negative language that neoplatonists like Plotinus and Proclus invented in their search of God, these Christian negative theologians assert that the Christian negative theology save the human subject and its sought divine object from being shattered and dissolved, thus saving the seeker from the abyss of despair. However, the telos of both neoplatonism and the Eastern religions is the same, that is, a union with God through the method of 'unknowing.' According to these Christian theologians, the apophatic theological approach in Christianity preempts the possibility og the dissolution of the human subject and its divine object by creating the possibility of a face-to-face encounter and union with God. This, according to these Christian theologians, is the distinguyishing trait of Christian apophatic mysticism. The individual seeker is not annihilated and lost in this mystic union with God, but exists in all his sacrosanct personhood in this union.
The primary assumption underlying apophatic theology is that in seeking to encounter or know the transcendent reality or God the seeking subject is faced with an irresolvable dilemma or aporia. The name God is nothing but as significator of that which is beyond all description. Yet, by the mere act of naming the unnamable, the seeker has already delimited and made finite the lim8itless and infinite God. God is hidden and unknowable and by giving it a name and attributes, we stand to risk losing the essence of this unnamable and indescribable. God remains hidden and unfathomable in the darkness of ignorance and human mental and linguistic infrastructure is adequate to nthe task of piercing that veil and discovering the hidden God.
Just as the term God is limiting and fraught with the risk of obfuscation and loss, so are the adjectives that are attached to the idea of God such as 'all-good', 'almighty', and 'all-knowing' etc. Something that is above and beyond "good and beyond knowing cannot be known or experienced as good. This kind of 'unkowing' approach has the risk of ending up in agnosticism. Kataphatic theology is the antithesis of apophatic theology and the two must used in cvonjunction the prevent this lapse into agnosticism. Kataphasis isb the process or discourse whereby positive or affirmative statements are made about the transcendent. The antithetical role of apophatic discourse consists in 'unsaying' or negating the affirmative statements of kataphasis.This kataphatic process continues until not one affirmative statement can remain valid by itself. It is in that encounter between 'saying' and 'unbsaying', between a statement and its negation, in that ephemeral point of nothingness, that the mind encounters that which is beyond itself. The mind, however, upon the attainment of this state, immediately turns back to the mundane. Thus, the divine is accessed only momentarily. To renew the encounters, the process of saying and 'unsaying'must be repeated every moment.
In the mystic traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, negative theology always exists in a state mixed with positive theology in which negations and affirmations are played against one another. Apophatic theology plays the role of a corrective to kataphatic discourse. Positive and negative theology in these traditions run in a spectrum.
The human knowledge of the transcendent has its limits. Ancient Christianity, influenced by Pseudo-Dionysiuys, leaned towards apophaticism. However, post Thomas Aquinas, the cataphatic impulse started gaining the upper hand. Apophatic theology began to be replaced by a kind of cataphatic systematic theology originated by Aquinas. Apophatic theology became a mere prolegomena to cataphatic theology. The current age has oncfe again seen the rise of apophatic theology. With vthe advent of science, it was declared that the human science has its own proper objects and realkm of enquiry. The inquiry into the question of God is beyond its purview. In fact, God resides beyond the ken of human intellect. Science can offer only materialistic or naturalistic explanations. The inquiry into the nature of God constitutes a field divorced f5rom the field of science. This theological agnosticism of modern science has brought about a shift in theological thinking.
In modern scientific thought, the universe has become a self-enclosed chain of cause and effect and the knowledge of the transcendent lies outside its ken. The metaphysical is an untouchable to modern science and it restricts itself within the confines of empiricism. Howevger, science, especially physics, underwent a radical apophasis at the beginning of the twentieth-century. With Einstein's theory of reloativity and other consequent developments, the certainty of Newtonian physics wasb gone. However, there existed a certain positive theology that maintained an incomprehensibiklity of God that could not be resolved by the use of negative apophatic formulations. However, it did not rule out all possibility of experience of God. The positive dogmatic statements formed the markers and boundaries of an apophatic theological experience that led to an experience of God. The dogmas do not exhaust theological knowledge but are stepping stones to it. This knowledge of God remains structural, experiential and practical as opposed to theoretical and terminological. It is a progressive path known in the Eastern Orthodox Church as theosis.In theosis one can progress towards the truth but never fully attain it. It is like a mathematical limit that can be approached but never fully realized. The process, in consonance with its object, is limitless.
Apophatic theology is a product of the convergence of Christianity with neo-Platonism. Apophatic thought across traditions is marked by the imagery of overflowing or emanation. For instance, the Sufi mystics often use the metaphor of the overflowing ocean. (Martin Lings, What is Sufism?, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975) The ocean stands for the medium through which the divine and the human merge. If apophatic theology has a buzzword, it is inefrfablity. The same theologians who articulated the positive formulations of the dogma, maintained the inconceivability, the ineffability and incomprehensibility of God. On the face of it, the cataphatic and apophatic formulations are mutually contradictory. In fqact, ineffability of God is a contradiction in terms. If God is ineffable, then one cannot correctly say that He is ineffable. For to say so renders His ineffability effable. The same applies to other claims in apophatic theology. In fact such apophatic claims as the ineffability of God render the dogmatic affirmations of Christianity meaningless.
However, for apophatic claims to be tenable, they must be coonsistent with the Orthodox truths of Christianity in some sense. For instance, if God is literally ineffable then we cannot postulate divine hypostased
Other major world religions have their own version of apophatic theology. Islam very emphatically points out that God is unbegotten (in response to the Christian idea of an incarnate God in the person of Jesus). There are a plethora of Jewish writings on apophatic theology by philosophers such as Maimonides. Some of the Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism have taken apophatic theology to their furthest limits by stating that nothing positive can be said about God or the nature of the highest reality. For instance, in the Daoist religion, the fundamental principle is that.Dao by nature is fundamentally indescribable and that which can be described is not Dao. This is an ideal example of the negative way or Via Negativa. Even though the Dao is discussed in a great deal of detail, the descriptions remain primarily negative. One drawback of negative theology is that the hosts of negative descriptions can become trite and repetitive.
The influence of negative theology remains far greater in the Eastern religions than in the Abrahamaic ones. Also, it is far more prominent in the Eastern Church than in the Western Church. One reason for the latter could be that some of the more important figures in apophatic theology such as Basil the Great, John of Damascus, and ||John Chrysostom were in the Eastern Church (Austin Cline: Feb 04, 2019). It is more than mere coincidence that both Eastern religion and Eastern Christianity are apophatic to varying degrees.
Apophatic theology stands in contrast to cataphaticx theology. Cataphatic theology is the dominant mode of theology in the Western Church and plays a much greater role in the religious writings of the Church. The methodology of cataphatic theology is known as analogia entis (analogy of being) where attributes are carried over from the human realm to the divine. This kind of analogical theology takes attributes of human nature and magnifies them to describe God as perfect, omnipreesent, good, omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent and so on. The reference point of this kind of analogical thinking is things is starting from things that are more amenable to human understanding and applying them to God. Hence, for example, God is described as Father in analogical terms.
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