"And here also let us set before our minds the scriptural rule that in speaking about God we should declare the Truth, not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the power which the Spirit stirred up in the Sacred Writers, whereby, in a manner surpassing speech and knowledge, we embrace those truths which, in like manner, surpass them, in that Union which exceeds our faculty, and exercise of discursive, and of intuitive reason.D"
" ... not with enticing words of man's wisdom ..." Even the profoundest and highest human wisdom is utterly and qualitatively incapable of approaching any where close to a real and true conception of God. The path to the Godhead is apophatic (Reference apophatic) rather than cataphatic (Reference cataphatic). (Reference and eluidate apophatic and ataphatic theologies in detail below) The sole means available to the seeker of the transcendental truth is through revelation effected by the work and power of the (Holy) Spirit. Without the Spirit there is no revelation and without the revelation there is no knowledge of God. This knowledge is infinitely superior to the one acquired by a seeker unaided by revelation. The Spirit inspires or pours itself out upon or fills the chosen one with a power that transcends all human speech and knowledge, language and discourse. It culminates into the self-emptying of the soul and ultimately ripens and prepares it for a reception, a filling out and embracing of truths that likewise surpass and exceed all our intellectual faculties and all the powers of discursive and intuitive reason. Before this greater truth there must be a self-effacement of the mind and the heart. There must, in fact, be a holy fear. "For a super-essential understanding of It is proper to Unknowing, which lieth in the Super-Essence Thereof surpassing Discourse, Intuition and Being; acknowledging which truth let us lift up our eyes towards the steep height, so far as the effluent light of the Divine Scriptures grants its aid, and, as we strive to ascend unto those Supernal Rays, let us gird ourselves for the task with holiness and the reverent fear of God ... We must not then dare to speak, or indeed to form any conception, of the hidden super-essential Godhead, except those things that are revealed to us from the holy scriptures. (D)" It speaks of a spiritual reticence. It is the essential nature of the Godhead to be hidden and the encounter of the human and the divine is structured and conditioned by this hiddenness. No one has ever seen the face of God and lived. Pseudo-Dionysius (Briefly elucidate and Reference Pseudo-Dionysius) is here delineating the negative or apophatic path of unknowing as opposed to the affirmative or cataphatic path of knowing. The affirmative path serves as a preparatory prelude to the negative path and can be delineated only within the bounds of the scripture. The scriptural revelations eke out, or rather indicate, an image of God. Their primary task is to negate any false conceptions of God. The apophatic and cataphatic are hence closely intertwined and function together. The primary task of the scriptural (revelatory) cataphatic descriptions is also apophatic or negative in the sense that they tell us what or who God is not. Even when the theological descriptions are positive the scriptural conceptions of God, in the last analysis, must transcend their literal meaning.
"For a super-essential understanding of It is proper to Unknowing, which lieth in the Super-Essence Thereof surpassing Discourse, Intuition and Being; acknowledging which truth let us lift up our eyes towards the steep height, so far as the effluent light of the Divine Scriptures grants its aid, and, as we strive to ascend unto those Supernal Rays, let us gird ourselves for the task with holiness and the reverent fear of God. (D)" Not only is the super-essence of the Godhead beyond all discursive, linguistic and, even, intuitive grasping, it is also something beyond being and non-being. The unaided human intellect is utterly incapable of grasping it through its own powers. Only a negative method (theology) can, to a limited extent, prepare us for a reception of this Super-Essence. This negative method is founded upon the technique of Unknowing that divests and denudes us of all self-conceived knowledge of the Godhead by engulfing the seeker in a 'Dark Night of the Soul.' " ... this blessed night, though it darkens the mind, does so only to give it light in everything; and though it humbles it and makes it miserable, does so only to raise it up and set it free; and though it impoverishes it and empties it of all its natural self and liking, it does so only to enable it to reach forward divinely to the possession and fruition of all things, both of heaven and earth, in perfect liberty of spirit.J" The 'Dark Night of the Soul' (Reference) is an account of the passage and progress of the soul to a mystical union with God. It is a remarkable account of the apophatic/negative path wherein the beloved object of the seeker - God - is shrouded in an absolute unknowability. A similar work of such mystical theology is the anonymous Middle English 'The Cloud of Unkowing' (Reference) from the 14th century which teaches a total abandonment of the contemplation of God's particular activities and attributes in favor of a total surrender of one's self to the realm of 'unkowing.' Both these works hark back to Pseudo_Dionysius's mystical thought. The apophatic path is an unknowable one. "... the Divine Goodness ... in just care for our preservation divinely tempereth (reveals) unto finite measure the infinitude of things which pass man's understanding.(D)" There is a fundamental dissonance between an infinite God and the finite human understanding which is absolutely dependent on divine grace and revelation for even the most infinitesimal understanding of its beloved divine 'object.'
"For even as things which are intellectually discerned cannot be comprehended or perceived by means of those things which belong to the senses, nor simple and imageless things by means of types and images, nor the formless and intangible essence of unembodied things by means of those which have bodily form, by the same law of truth the boundless Super-Essence surpasses Essences, the Super-Intellectual Unity surpasses Intelligences, the One which is beyond thought surpasses the apprehension of thought, and the Good which is beyond utterance surpasses the reach of words.(D)" The tanscendent truths are thus beyond ordinary knowledge. The Platonic idea of the formless essence refers to a thing which is imageless and simple and is beyond the conception of types and symbols generated by the senses. " ... the soul ... departs, as to its affection, from itself and from all things, dying through a true mortification to all of them and to itself, to arrive at a sweet and delicious life with God." It is in the relation to this total incapacity and inconsonance of the senses to the beholding of the transcendent Truth that St John of Cross depicts the purgation of the senses as one among the two necessary purgations of the soul; the other being the purgation of the spirit. "For even as things which are intellectually discerned cannot be comprehended or perceived by means of those things which belong to the senses ...." Just as the senses are not merely inconsonant but entirely powerless to comprehend the transcendental so is the human intelligence not merely unsuited or inadequate but absolutely futile in its attempts to reach or access the Godhead. The negative or apophatic method eschews ascribing any definite and positive content to the Godhead. The godhead cannot be conceived as a visible and manifest deity. Even the appropriation of the most sublime powers of nature and the most aesthetically satisfying of the symbols are inadequate to the task of approaching the immanent-transcendent Godhead. " ... far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. (Ephesians 1:21)" It is above all powers and all names. The absolute unnameability and hiddenness of this Godhead renders it untranslatable into language. It is higher than the highest which is utterable. All positive and definite accounts of the ultimate reality are doomed to failure. Positive definitions of the Godhead are impossible. In the face of this unutterable one can only say that it is not like anything that man has or can experience. The Indian Upanisads (Reference) are such a narrative of utterances iterating the unutterability of the Brahman or the highest truth. Yajnavalkya (Reference), the Hindu Vedic sage and one of the earliest philosophers in recorded history (mentioned in the Upanisads) says: "He the atman is not this, nor this (neti neti). He is inconceivable for he cannot be conceived, unchangeable, for he is not changed, untouched, for nothing touches him; he cannot suffer by a stroke of the sword, he cannot suffer any injury. (Reference)" He is both being (sat) and non-being (asat). The being of Brahman is distinct, different and separate from the being of ordinary experience. It cannot be inferred or understood by the being known to us from mundane experience. Notwithstanding its radical otherness from the being of experience, Brahman is nevertheless being by dint of being the One which alone is supremely real and in whom and by whom the whole realm of being subsists. All is Brahman yet we know not what Brahman is in itself. It is the Super-Essence of the Godhead that escapes all cognition. The finite capacity of man is powerless to comprehend the infinite Godhead. Our expressions are limited but the Brahman is unlimited and the basis of all thins limited. "That which is inaudible, intangible, invisible, indestructible, which cannot be tasted, nor smelt, eternal, without beginning or end, greater than the great (mahat), the fixed. He who knows it is released from the jaws of death. (Kathopanisad Reference)" It is beyond such physical and epistemological properties as space, time and causality. It constitutes, in fact, their very essence and, ultimately, transcends them. The Upanisadic expressions of the Brahman often employ such paradoxical poeticized descriptions that declare the Brahman to be vast and infinite and also, simultaneously, smaller (more infinitesimal) than the smallest (infinitesimal); "at once here as there, there as here. (Dasgupta Reference)" It is impossible to 'portray' the Brahman; it is beyond all characterizations and empirical relations, attributes and definitions. It transcends the empirical universe and the limitations of space, time and causality. It is independent and self-willed. It is beyond the world objectively presented to us. In another memorable dialogue from the Kathopanisad, Bahva, when questioned by Vaskali, "expounds the nature of Brahman to him by maintaining silence (Dasgupta)." "Teach me," said Vaskali , "most reverent sir, the nature of Brahman." Bahva maintained his silence in response to the question. When Vaskali persists repeatedly with the same question Bahva answers,"I teach you indeed but you do not understand; the atman is silence. (Reference)" Hence it is that in the face of the unutterable Brahman all speech falls silent as language is utterly incapable of grasping it. It is in this context that the famous Upanisadic dictum of 'neti, neti' (it is not this, it is not this) is enjoined.
The Godhead is a Super-Essence that transcends all essences and the Transcendent Truths are beyond ordinary knowledge. "Yea, it is an unity which is the unifying Source of all unity and a Super-Essential Essence , a Mind beyond the reach of mind and a Word beyond utterance, eluding Discourse, Intuition, Name, and every kind of being. (Dionysius Divine Names)" Negative theology is often associated with mysticism. It is, however, often overlooked that this negative theology is the result of rigorous philosophical argumentation. Dionysius argues that God or One is the first principle of reality and this One lies beyond being and beyond thought and the whole of creation is a superfluent overflowing of this One. Dionysius stands at the culmination of a long tradition of negative theology beginning with the Philo of Alexandria through Plotinus and Proclus. The renaissance neoplatonist theologian Marsilio Ficino (Reference) inherited this tradition of philosophical knowledge. This First Principle is not simply an article of faith or an axiomatic premise or an ungrounded point of departure with these philosopher-theologians. It is rather the conclusion of a rigorous sequence of philosophical reasoning. The statement that the One is beyond being and beyond thought is a rationally worked out inference. It is the product of a rational metaphysics. The origins and development of this form of argumentation harks back to the ancient Greek philosophical tradition. It is there that one can find the seed and historical development of negative theology. That being is intelligibility is the foundational principle of Neoplatonic thought. The Middle Platonist philosopher Alcinous (reference) characterizes the supreme God as the 'self-contemplating nous.(Reference Deirdre Carabine)'
The linguistic aspect of negative theology is significant but limited in its scope. It is concerned with the linguistic manifestation of the way of negation. It refers to the "method of speaking about God. (Theophany)" However, the holistic meaning of negative theology comprehends not just the method of speaking about God but the whole paradoxical approach to the One that enables the seeker to 'know' the unknowable God. Negative theology is at heart a paradox. It is a way to know the ineffable God; to speak about the unspeakable. Also, the method of negative theology is, essentially, a philosophical one. It tries to conceive God as a philosophical absolute (such as the One). The apophatic method seeks to continue moving further afield notwithstanding the seeker's realization that all that can be said of the Highest Reality has already been exhausted. In fact, apophatic theology begins at the point where it's realized that there is nothing more to be said of the Divine. The soul at this instant, thus purified of all positive judgments, has become a blinded intellect in the sense that the process of intellection vis-a-vis the Divine 'object' has been utterly negated. The soul then, as this blinded intellect, throws itself ceaselessly in this 'dark night of the soul' into the divine darkness in its search for unity with the Godhead. "And without this purgation it is altogether impossible to taste of the abundance of these spiritual delights. (J)” The exemplar of this purgation of spirit which prepares the seeker for the reception of the Spirit, of this self-emptying or kenosis (Reference), is Christ (on the cross) himself. Kenosis is the unwavering and relentless divesting of the self of all self-interest. Christian negative theology is saturated through and through with Neoplatonism. Notwithstanding the famous distinction between 'Christian God' and the 'God of Neoplatonists,' the one between a personal God and a philosophical abstract, the Christian and Jewish (Philo of Alexandria) (Reference) Neoplatoniosts were indeed talking about a thoroughly, respectively, Christian or Judaic God. A good example is Plotinus' Enneads (Reference) where it is lucidly apparent to anyone that the author is talking about the Christian God. It would be helpful here to establish the discussion a little bit in its historical and philosophical context. "... Christian thought, constrained to express itself in a coherent system, attempted to adopt Greek thought forms and to express itself in the metaphysical formulas that it found ready-made." (Camus, Albert. Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, University of Missouri Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/britishcouncilonline-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3570985.) However, even as it adopted Greek philosophy it transformed it into a genuinely Christian theology. It would, however, not be erroneous to assert that the roots of much Christian theology, beginning with Augustine (Reference) and the neoplatonists and through to the Scholastics (Reference) and even much of modern Christian theology can be traced back to classical Greek philosophy. To understand Christian theology, therefore, it is necessary that we go back to the original sources. In addition to the similarities and the common themes, however, one must be alert to the differences as well. Neoplatonism is the way of negation. It is also a way of faith. The Neoplatonists were not mystic atheist. They were Christian mystics deeply engaged with God whom they sought to approach through Neoplatonic conceptualizations. "Now concerning this hidden Super-Essential Godhead we must not dare, as I have said, to speak, or even to form any conception Thereof, except those things which are divinely revealed to us from the Holy Scriptures.(J)" Christian theology, in the last analysis, is guided by faith, rather than the other way around. It is in this context that one argues that Neoplatonism is more than a mere philosophical system. The works of Neoplatonic theologians are guided by genuine faith. The Neoplatonists posited the divine reality as unnameable, ineffable and unknowable. Negative theology, ultimately, directs itself to the goal of unity with God. This unity is impossible of achievement except the seeker first undergo a thorough purification or purgation. "The reason is this: the affections, feelings, and apprehensions of the perfect spirit, being of so high an order and specially divine, are of another kind and different from those which are natural; and in order to be actually and habitually enjoyed, require the annihilation of the latter. (J)" It entails a kind of self-destruction, an annihilation not just of all one's concepts, but an obliteration of one's very own self. "You should totally sink away from your youness and dissolve into his hisness and your 'yours' and his 'his' should become so completely one Mine' that with him you understand his unbecome Isness and his naked nothingness.' (Meister Eckhart Sermon, 'Renovamini spiritu') (Meister Eckhart Sermon, 'Renovamini spiritu') Christ, the exemplar of kenosis, emptied himself of his divinity to become an earthly slave on the cross. It is this kenosis of the self that is sought to be imitated and enacted out by the suppliants of the negative path.
To simplify the terms of comparison a little, there exists an inner tension within theology between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. As the similarities exert a joining force between the two, the differences exert a counter-pressure that tends to pull them apart. Let us identify the differences first. Neither Neoplatonism nor Christianity can be understood without reference to the classical epoch of Greek philosophy. To begin with, the reeks were more this-worldly than what the Christian worldview could suffer. Greek thought enshrined reason above everything else. The stoics, for instance, understood the world to be guided by a rational spirit. The Greeks accepted an aesthetic justification of existence. The strong athlete was their supreme ideal of man. For the ancient Greeks, man himself was the measure of all things and at the centre of the universe. Their arts, sculptures, architecture, and philosophy reflected this anthropocentric worldview. Most importantly, the Platonic spirit of Greek philosophy elevated the Idea to the highest pedestal of a philosophy-inspired theology. There was no room for sin, redemption and a personal deity in the Greek order of things. Their eternal universe was at a complete variance from a world that ends teleologically with apocalypse and judgment day.
Apophatic theology proper begins in the West with the works of the first century Jewish philosopher-theologian Philo of Alexandria (Reference). His philosophical thought was a synthesis of Hebraic and Platonic ideas. His thought was highly influential in the early church. It can be understood to have reached its zenith with the Neoplatonist theologian Proclus. For instance, the radical negative theology of Gregory of Nyssa (Reference) was deeply influenced by this fusion of Hebraism and Platonism in Philo of Alexandria and by the Neoplatonic thought of Plotinus. The works of Pseudo-Dionysius bore a formative influence on the Chistian Scholasticism of the Middle Ages. The roots of the apophatic tradiotion have to be sought in Greek and medieval Christian philosophies, especially, in thinkers like Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa. Plato and the Middle Platonists speak of the transcendence of the First Principle. It is a significant point in Neoplatonic theology that even the first principle, which is at the origin of all things, is transcended. It is after and beyond this transcendence that the Godhead truly lies. Gregory of Nyssa and Pseudo-Dionysius are two of the more important apophatic theologians in Eastern Christianity and Augustine and John Scottus Eriugena in Western Christianity.
God "has to act , to overflow into you, just as when the air is clear and pure the sun has to burst forth and cannot refrain. It would surely be a great defect in God if He performed no great works in you and did not pour great goodness into you whenever He found you thus empty and bare. (Eckhart) A moot theme running through all these Christian negative theologians is the 'dark night of ther soul; a self-emptying kenosis. "And what it profits you to pursue this possibility, to keep yourself empty and bare, just following and tracking this darkness and unknowing without turning back - it contains the chance to gain Him who is all things (Eckhart)." This theme of divine darkess and unknowing was first conceived by Pseudo-Dionysius who also was also the first to classify theology into its two streams of positive (kataphatike - towards speech) and negative (apophatike -away from speech). The cataphatic approach works through a transference of qualities, usually the perfect ones such as omniscience, omnipotence etc. from the created order (animate and inanimate) to the creator. This approach traces all the perfections of the created order to God as its source and allows for a limited knowledge of the Godhead. It depends on revelation for all its knowledge of God. It functions from within an economy of revelation. The apophatic way, whereas affirms the absolute transcendence and unknowability of God. Some of the more radical negative theologians even disallow even the attribute of existence to God. "It is the Universal Cause of existence while Itself existing not, for It is beyond all Being and such that It alone could give, with proper understanding thereof, a revelation of Itself.(Dionysius)" This assertion of Dionysius intertwines the two themes of revelation and existence. God cannot be known outside this economy of revelation. God's limitless transcendence only suffers diminution at the attribution of creaturely qualities to itself as whatever is creaturely is hemmed in by the its aspect of finiteness. Cataphatic theology, on the other hand, makes use of the finite forms, types, symbols and images to infer the nature of the Godhead. Negative theology, whereas, resists all formal expression of then Infinite and formless Godhead. Since the Godhead transcends human reason, therefore, any formal operation amenable and accessible to this reason necessarily falls short of an equable conception of the Godhead. Any formal expression of the transcendent God can make use of only such terms as are accessible to the limited human reason. "For as It hath lovingly taught us in the Scriptures concerning Itself the understanding and contemplation of Its actual nature is not accessible to any being; for such knowledge is super-essentially exalted above them all. And many of the Sacred writers thou wilt find who have declared that It is not only invisible and incomprehensible, but also unsearchable and past finding out, since there is no trace of any that have penetrated the hidden depths of its Infinitude. (Dionysius)"
Cataphatic and apophatic theologies differ in their attitudes toward the created order. Whereas the positive theologians assert that something of the Creator can be inferred from its creation beginning with the latter as a starting point, the negative theologians aver that God is wholly beyond His creation and cannot be known on the basis of the latter. However, both the approaches agree that God does make himself known Himself to us, adapting the knowledge to the limited human capacity, through the revelations of the scriptures. "Not that the Good is wholly incommunicable to anything; nay, rather, while dwelling alone by itself, and having there firmly fixedIts super-essential Ray, It lovingly reveals Itself by illuminations corresponding to each separate creature's powers, and thus draws upwards holy minds into such contemplation, participation and resemblance of Itself as they can attain - even them that holily and duly strive thereafter and do not seek with impotent presumption the Mystery beyond that heavenly revelation which is so granted as to fit their powers.(Dionysius)" Meister Eckhart makes a similar and forceful argument for negative theology when he points out radically transcendent nature of God when he says that, before creation, God existed supreme in Himself (dwelling alone by itself). God, he argues, has to be sought beyond and before creation, truly transcendent. The knowledge of God resides in the realm beyond all causal knowledge. It is in this context that Eckhart's apparently heretical remark "I pray to God to make me free of God" can be understood, instead, as deeply faithful. This statement is the very essence of apophasis and takes it to its logical conclusion. This freedom from God is the last step in apophasis - the final negation.
The orientations of cataphasis and apophasis are contrary to each other with respect to their goals. One takes God as its origin and the other as its culmination. Cataphasis is the pouring forth from God, who always remains in Himself, into creation. God cannot be understood simply as creator. Apophasis, therefore, is a "return of all things to their source.(Deirdre Carabine) "This characterization of apophatic theology and cataphatic theology is evident in all the prominent Neoplatonic theologians - Plotinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena. The apophatic path also sees a reversal of metaphors. The earthly life, in apophasis, is a descent from the original darkness of God to the light of creatures. The mystic path, whereas, is an ascent from the light of creatures to the Darkness of God. The traditional metaphors of light and darkness are upended here. The latter is a path of theophanies. The darkness here symbolizes the invisibility of God in the mundane light of day. This mundane light illuminates worldly beings but fails to penetrate the dark depths of God. But this darkness is darkness only to the eyes of earthly light and can be illuminated by the radical divine light.
A typical example of a positive theological affirmation and its negative theological antithesis pertains to the category of being. The former posits God as the fullness of being whereas the latter prefers to imagine the divine as non-being. Apart from the theoretical and its concomitant practical differences between the two theological approaches, there also seems to be a geographical divide existent in the theological realm. The Eastern church seems to be more influenced by the negative way. However, it appears that the distinction between the two approaches is overemphasized and oversimplified at times. Part of the responsibility for this lay with the theological articulations of Pseudo-Dionysius who was the first to formally state the distinction in unambiguous terms. Cataphatic theology has been the dominant approach in the Western church and has made use of the analogical method to imagine and conceptualize God. There have, however, been some exceptions to this dominant stream in the Western church like Eriugena, Nicholas of Cusa and Meister Eckhart. The various ecumenical councils served as authoritative institution that articulated the cataphatic affirmations and visions of the church through their credal formulae (Deirdre Carabine). Negative theology has generally viewed positive attributions of the divine skeptically and interpreted such endeavours as works of human conceit. It tends to reduce the divine mystery, in the eyes of negative theologians, to frozen conceptualizations and articulations. "In obedience to these divine behests which guide all the holy dispositions of the heavenly hosts, we worship with reverent silence the unutterable Truths and, with the unfathomable and holy veneration of our mind, approach that Mystery of Godhead which exceeds all Mind and Being." The negative theologians impress upon the silent, unfathomable, unutterable and mysterious aspects of the Godhead. Negative theology is frequently associated with mysticism. The practitioners of the negative way are also often hailed as mystic theologians. However, the mystics have mainly populated the margins of the western theological mainstream which has stayed predominantly cataphatic. It would, nevertheless, be erroneous to claim that cataphatic concepts are dry and abstract. They, rather, overflow from the divine Seat into the created world and the human soul. Cataphatic theologyu has, indeed, catered to the spiritual needs of the western church. Part of the suspicion of apophasis in the traditional and, even, the contemporary western church owes itself to the association of apophatic theology with mysticism. The object of the mystic has always been unity with the Godhead; surpassing anf transcending all intellectual categories as it does so. The visions of the mystics are assumed to lie in a realm beyond human reason. The immediate knowledge of God that mystics have claimed made the authorities suspicious of them. "And we press upwards to those beams which in the Holy Scripture shine upon us; wherefrom we gain the light which leads us unto the Divine praises, being supernaturally enlightened by them and conformed unto that sacred hymnody, even so as to behold the Divine enlightenments the which through them are given in such wise as fits our powers, and so as to praise the bounteous Origin of all holy illumination in accordance with that Doctrine, as concerning Itself, wherewith it hath instructed us in the Holy Scriptures." This claim to 'supernatural enlightenment' has not sat well with the ecclesiastical authorities and they have vehemently contested it to the point of ostracizing and martyring some mystics as heretics. The illumination that Dionysius refers to here can be said to consist of the two stages that St. John of Cross lays out for the soul's journey to union with the Godhead: purgation and illumination. " ... this blessed night, though it darkens the mind, does so only to give it light in everything; and though it humbles it and makes it miserable , does so only to raise it up and set it free; and though it impoverishes it and empties it of all its natural self and liking, it does so only to enable it to reach forward divinely to the possession and fruition of all things, both of heaven and earth, in perfect liberty of spirit ... And without this purgation it is altogether impossible to taste of the abundance of these spiritual delights."Notwithstanding their classification as affirmative theologians, both St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas reiterated the fundamental unknowability of God.
APOPHASIS AND LANGUAGE
Apophasis struggles against the limits of language and transcends it. An utter silence rules in this realm. It belies all descriptions, depictions and characterizations of the Godhead. It is negative in the sense that it eschews saying what God it and concentrates its powers on delineating what God is not. The object of its attention is the unsayability of the Divine essence. Sankaracarya's (reference) statement 'neti neti' (not this, nor this) epitomizes this theological method. There is a paradox at the heart of apophasy in its attempt to articulate a theophany and at the same time to unsay it. God as the ultimate reality is, in the final analysis, unsayable. It is simply beyond the reach of language. Nevertheless the struggle to reach out to God at the limits of language is a real and desired challenge for all negative theology. However, all linguistic overtures are, quintessentially, stilted in their movement toward comprehending and expressing the divine ground. Philosophical meditations are mediated by language. Language, therefore, at least, in the initial and intermediate stages cannot be dispensed with and consists a 'necessary evil.' Logos or Sruti (Reference), we must remeber, is, after all, at the heart of all revelation. Revelation is saturated with poetics and metaphoricity. In its search for the ineffable, linguistic play at the limits may oftentimes stretch into the beyond. Apophatic discourses operate by cancelling and unsaying themselves. This self-negation is at the heart of all apophasis.
"These mysteries we learn from the Divine Scriptures, and thou wilt find that in well-nigh all the utterances of the Sacred Writers the Divine Names refer in a Symbolical Revelation to Its beneficent emanations. (J)" The emanations or revelations are symbolical. They cannot help but be symbolical as the reality that the symbols refer to are transcendent and beyond all mediated apprehension. It is pertinent to remember here that symbols appear in discourse when the referent itself is unsayable. The goal of all apophatic discourse is end of discourse. The purest form of apophasis is in the lack of all discourse, that is, in a complete silence. This apophasis is effected through the weakening and self-annihilation of discourse. Silence, as the antithesis of language, is achievable only in conjunction with language. Apophasis, therefore, is apprehended only with respect to language. The self-negation of language, when drawn to its logical conclusion, witnesses the very disappearance of language. This form of discourse can generically be termed as apophatic discourse. The original meaning of the Greek word 'apophasis' is simply negation. Plato and Aristotle understood the term to mean a negative proposition or denial. Neoplatonists, especially the monotheistic Neoplatonists, extended the connotative range of the word to mean a negation of speech in the face of that which exceeds all speech.
On the face of it, both these methods, apophatic and cataphatic, appear strictly opposed to each other. Also, the apophatic way has a mystical aspect to it. However, it would not be really accurate to assert that the negative way and the mystical way are the one and the same. Both, however, aim at a mystical union with God. Philosophical discourse and theological discourse unite organically in man's search for the highest because the object of this search, God, is both known and unknown, hidden and present and transcendent and immanent. All these are the dual aspects of the same divine reality. And one must approach God in His divine fullness by taking into account these simultaneous truths about Him. There is scope here, in the attempt to strike a balance between the two approaches, of being trapped in a potential dilemma. An overemphasis on the affirmative aspect of things may render the conception of God too anthropomorphic to be a soulful reflection of the divine reality. An excessive insistence on the negative aspect of the Godhead might render the conception too abstract to be true reflection of the Godhead. The two theological streams merge and complement each other to realize a true and adequate reflection of the Godhead. They do not exist in an 'either/or' relationship and are non-exclusive with respect to each other. There "are a variety of positions lying between the two extremes of apophasis and Kataphasis. (Deirdre Carabine)" The two approaches are the two aspects of the one divine truth because God is as much present as hidden. A balanced view has to take both the aspects into account to prevent a distortion of the truth. Plotinus' pronouncement "All these things are the One and not the One: they are he simply because they come from him; they are not he, because it is in abiding by himself that he gives them (Reference)" synthesizes God's immanence with His transcendence. This fusion of immanence and transcendence finds its expressive parallel in the coalescence of the apopahatic and cataphatic theologies. This composite approach makes for a fully integrated theology. The predominance of one approach to the exclusion of the other results in a perversion of the theological balance and symmetry. "One is all things yet not a single one of them. (Deirdre Carabine)" The first half of this statement "One is all things" is an enunciation of the cataphatic process of theological attribution whereas the second half of the statement "yet not a single one of them" is the simultaneous negation of this cataphatic ascription. Just as in Hindu Vedantism, in Christian terms too, God is affirmed as both transcendent and immanent. The locus of the cataphatic is the human whereas that of apophatic is the divine. The cataphatic method operates by attributing the human to the divine, that is, through a transference of attributes, e.g. knowledge, power, mercy, etc., from the human realm to the divine. The apohatic whereas seeks to move toward the purely divine by shedding and negating all wordly and human attributes. The two theologies, apophatic and cataphatic, accentuate "one or other side of this divine truth. (Deirdre Carabine)" and their amalgamation is a reflection of the composition of the divine reality.
"Wherefore, in almost all consideration of Divine things we see the Supreme Godhead celebrated with holy praises as One and an Unity, through the simplicity and unity of Its supernatural indivisibility, from whence (as from an unifying power) we attain to unity, and through the supernal conjunction of our diverse and separate qualities are knit together each into a Godlike Oneness, and all together into a mutual Godly union. (Dionysius)" Indivisibility, unity, and simplicity are positive attributes of the Godhead. The cataphatic method works through a 'conjunction and knitting together of our diverse and separate qualities' which are extrapolated qualities of the human intellect and realm. Both the cataphatic and apophatic methods are manifestations of the human endeavour to access the inaccessible. Also, both the methods suffer from an innate tension, especially when expressed in language, which partakes of the dialectical tension between the cataphatic and the apophatic approach. The apophatic, but naturally, is prone to the cataphatic temptation of falling back on cataphatic attributes and ascriptions and labors under a resistance to this temptation. The cataphatic movement, on the other hand, struggles against the profound inclination to fall silent in the face of the trasnscendent divine. This is a reflection of the dialectic between the transcendent and the immanent. Augustine understood God as both secret and present (Reference). Thomas, an adept at the analogical method, acceded to the fundamental unknowability of God. The old dichotomy of existence and essence is at play here. We can know that God is but not what he is. That is, we can only know what God is not. This distinction between the essence and existence of God was first enunciated by Philo of Alexandria (S T 1a, 3, Prologue and 1a , qu. 2. a 22). This distinction is the fundamental mark of all negative theology.
Apophasis is the negation of language/speech/discourse in the face of that which exceeds all expression. Apophatic words negate themselves in the attempt to reach the referent which lies on the other side of language. The linguistic aspects, content and style, are affected by the theological burden that the expression bears. There are two levels of negation at play. The first is the logical level at which the linguistic dimension functions. The second and more significant level communicates and is informed and saturated by the referent - divine transcendence. Language is not equal to the task of bearing the weight of the transcendence and seeks refuge, within the limits of its domain, in negation. Negation, in this form, constitutes the limits of language as it approaches silence. The infinite Godhead infinitely exceeds language. This infinite surpassing of language by the Godhead makes the latter fundamentally unsayable. The literal meaning of apophasis is 'away from speech.' The apophatic passage from 'unsaying' (neti neti) to silence first undergirds and then subverts all discursive articulations. Silence is the logical culmination of apophasis. Apohatic speech is caught in a movement from discourse toward unsayability. The transcendent meaning is conveyed/communicated only in and through this silence. However, there is a paradoxicality at work here. Even though, in the last resort, the divine is 'unsayable', the apophatic movent engenders a tremendous amount of speech. Over the centuries, apophatic thought has produced a rich cumulation of genre and discourses. The history of theology and philosophy is richly interspersed with apophatyic productions from from Philo odf Alexandria in the first century down to Meister Eckhart in the fourteenth century. The manifestations of apophatic thought are of kinds agalore. The types of apophatic speech, and more interestingly, silence, are multitudinous and variegated.
To speak what is essentially silent is a constant temptation for the theologian and even when sought and pursued by it this essential silence constantly evades it. The dialectical relationship between speech and silence constitutes an essential and indomitable impulse of the human soul. But the datum of this experience is fundamentally inaccessible to language. "And in all the other Divine enlightenments which the occult Tradition of our inspired teachers hath, by mystic Interpretation, accordant with the Scriptures, bestowed upon us, we also have been initiated: apprehending these things in the present life (according to our powers), through the sacred veils of that loving kindness which in the Scriptures and the Heirarchical Traditions, enwrappeth spiritual truths in terms drawn from the world of sense, and super-essential truths in terms drawn from Being, clothing with shapes and forms things which are shapeless and formless, and by a variety of separable symbols, fashioning manifold attributes of the imasgeless and supernatural simplicity. (Dionysius)"The sacred is shrouded by a veil that human speech cannot penetrate. Spiritual truths are simultaneously enveloped and revealed by "terms drawn from the world of sense." The cataphatic approach operates by drawing terms from the world or the human realm and by magnifying and ascribing them to the divine. Just as in the Platonic discourse human creations or artefact are at a third remove from from reality, in Neoplatonic theology also the linguistic expression of the divine reality is at a third remove from the transcendent super-essential reality. The emanations from the divine source traverse different levels or realms. At the origin is the transcendent source itself from where it overfows and inundates the realm of human experience. At the third and final remove is the human struggle to contain or express it through language and art. Human discursity or speech regarding the supreme Godhead exists at this tertiary level.
Speech, however, is only a secondary concern of aphasis. The first is the acknowledgement of the absolute unknowability of God in the here and now and with this understanding of the unknowability of God to approach or move, nevertheless, toward this unknowable God. This movement happens through a process of continual negation of all that is 'known' and spoken about God. "In considering the via negativa it is important to distinguish between the apophatic method of intellectual approach to God, or negative theology, and the experience of supreme transcendence ... which impels to and is undergone in the search for ... the Divine mystery beyond speech or thought. (Apophatic-Kataphatic Tensions in Religious Thought from the Third to the Sixth Century, p. 12)" This kind of negative theology stretches language to its radical limits where logic collapses and thought opens out to a direct inflow of an experience of the Godhead. This direct knowledge of the divine is, in reality, an unknowing of all that is 'known' and spoken about God and pierces the veil of darkness that envelopes the latter from from 'human eyes.' It is an experiential knowledge of God. - a 'supernatural' illumination of the soul in its state of radical ignorance. It is the 'ultimate beyond' above all negations and affirmations; a state of the "coincidence of the opposites" where all paradoxes are finally resolved. "But at present we employ (so far as in us lies), appropriate symbols for things Divine; and then from these we press on upwards according to our powers to behold in simple unity the Truth perceived by spiritual contemplations, and leaving behind us all human notions of godlike things, we still the activities of our minds and reach (so far as this may be) into the Super-Essential Ray, wherein all kinds of knowledge so have their pre-existent limits (in a transcendentally inexpressible manner), that we cannot conceive nor utter It, nor in any wise contemplate the same, seeing that It surpasseth all things, and wholly exceeds our knowledge, and super-essentially contains beforehand (all conjoined within Itself ) the bounds of all natural sciences and forces (while yet Its force is not circumscribed by any), and so possesses, beyond the celestial Intelligences, Its firmly fixed abode. For if all the branches of knowledge belong to things that have being, and if their limits have reference to the existing world, then that which is beyond all Being must also be transcendent above all knowledge." Once the symbols of 'God", after having served their initial Kataphatic purpose of describing the divine and having melted away into the 'dark night of the soul' through the sheer force of negation that tresides in apophasis, thought, or rather the absence of it, radically transitions into 'coincidenta oppositorum' (De docta ignorantia, chs. II and IV) where the paradoxes resolve themselves and there is a simple unity of truth. All 'human notions of godlike things' are left behind in the wake of this ceaseless negative movement toward the Godhead. It is important to observe here that the movement toward a comunion with the Godhead begins with a cataphatic prelude that employs human and worldly symbols before submitting the affirmations to a progressive and, ultimately, absolute negation. It is in the radical sicence consequent upon this total negation that the transcendent is 'heard/seen/felt (experienced). It is in this beholding "in simple unity the Truth perceived by spiritual contemplation" that the soul transitions into a state of apophasis. The apprehension of the simplicity and unity of the Godhead is an apophatic event as the the divine is a simple unity. The world or creation, whereas, exists in a state of duality, multiplicity, and plurality. The moment this plurality/duality/multiplicity is transcended or overcome the individual self/soul merges into or achieves (Comm)union with the divine/universal self/Godhead/Brahman (Reference). The direct/immediate "spiritual contemplations" are essentially apophatic in contrast to the cataphatic/discursive/linguistic mediations of the Godhead which occurs in a realm at a second remove from the Highest Reality. In this movement "upwards" whereby all "all human notions of godlike things" are left behind and there is a stilling of "the activities of our minds", the seeker the suppliant moves from 'worldy light' into 'divine darkness.' This 'darkness' is then suddenly and magnificently lit up and illuminated by the supernal ray of the great divine light.This divine light that fills the soul at its union with the Godhead is beyond the human faculties or powers of conception and utterance. The self, unaided by grace, merely through its own powers cannot will and effect any contemplation of this divine light. It is only though the grace of God who out of his own bounteous and infinitely free will pulls the soul into its own essence and brings about the (comm)union of the soul with Itself and as a sign of the soul's nearness/proximity to the Godhead inundates the soul with its own infinite supernal light. The divine is not a passive object of human contemplation. Rather, it is solely through divine activity or grace that the chooses its human suppliant to whom it reveals itself through its supremely magnanimous and free will. "This self cannot be attained by instruction, nor by intellectual power, nor even through much hearing. He is to be attained only by the one whom the (self) chooses. To such a one the self reveals his own nature." (S. Radhakrishnan, Katha Upanisad, Verse 23) In the Romans, Pauline theology revolves around this concept of grace. This grace surpasses the domain of human knowledge and will. The divine will is manifested through grace. The 'preexistent limits' of all human 'knowledge and sciences and forces' thus present and hidden in the divine fail to limit and stain the transcendent which remains all pure and all encompassing, limiting its creation/His world, but itself unlimited. This higher contemplation of God happens through the 'via negativa' when the human has struggled against and exhausted his own limits , when the limits of the individual self, which has its parallel and reflection in language, melt away and language disappears beyond its limits, the soul opens itself to the inundating spirit of the 'supernal ray' and 'experiences' communion with God. Since human language (consequently all human knowledge) pertains to, is born of, reflects and is limited by this the created world, by this existing world and things that have their being in it, and since God transcends this created world (which is His creation and which is immanently permeated by Him) and since God transcends Being in which the world, language and knowledge have their Ground and object, God must necessarily must be undescribable and unknowable since he transcends even Being.
However, the soul must pass through an aporia which is at the heart of apophasis before it can unite with the spiritual substance. "But if it is greater than all Reason and all knowledge, and hath Its firm abode altogether Mind and Being, and circumscribes, compacts, embraces and anticipates all things while Itself is altogether beyond the grasp of them all, and cannot be reached by any perception, imagination, conjecture, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding, how then is our Discourse concerning the Divine Names to be accomplished, since we see that the Super-Essential Godhead is unutterable and nameless? (Dionysius)" One must realize, however, that this aporia is in its essence linguistic or discursive and is operative at the secondary and reflected level at which language functions at a second remove from the Divine Reality or the transcendental. When through the force of negation language is silenced and the soul stands naked (unaided and un-hemmed by the limits of language, intellect and understanding - for limits are intrinsic and essential to language and make it possible in the first place) and open to and before the Godhead, the aporia resolves itself and the impasse in which soul finds itself vis-a-vis the divine is broken. The soul then experiences the unmediated divine. The soul must in its journey toward communion with the Godheal overcome this cognitional crisis. The resolution is achieved solely in the experiential realm un-brokered by intellectual mediations. "We take away everything so that we may know that unknowing without its being veiled.(Dionysius, Mystical Theology)" The aspirant must strip himself of all knowledge and intellection so that he may directly and im-mediately experience the revelation of the Godhead thus not-veiled by language. The true knowledge of the Godhead must pass through the stage of unknowing where the soul unlearns everything it 'knows' about God. The true knowledge of God is a result of radical apophasis; of a "divine ignorance" (Plotinus, Enneads, VI 7).
God is the 'ultimate beyond' from which all originates and to which all returns. It is above all affirmations and negations. It is that to which nothing stands in oppoisition as it is that to which, from which and of which are all things. It is the "coincidentia oppositorum" where all the opposites coincide and resolve themselves. This coincidence of opposites is consummated through the negation of negations. In the quest to express this inexpressible coincidentia oppositorum, mystics and theologians have been constrained to resort to paradoxes which are resolved through this negation of negations. Apart from this paradoxicality, this knowledge is essentially incommunicable. The apophatic discourse is essentially an aporetic one. The irresolvable internal contradictions of apophatic discourse that constitute the limits of language, logic and meaning are a necessary step in the movement toward the Ineffable Godhead. It is in the divine 'coincidentia oppositorum' that all opposites dissolve in the supernal light.
Apophatic theology has tended to burgeon on the fringes of Western mainstream theology as the non-rational modus operandi of the former has not been particularly palatable to the reason-based approach of the mainstream cataphatic theology. Apophasis thrives in the realm beyond and 'opposed to' reason. The apophatic theological method of approaching the Godhead through the process of 'unknowing' runs against the grain of tradition cataphatic theology which founds itself on positive assertions drawn from the conventional process of knowing worked out by reason. Cataphatic theology inclines toward making categorical assertions about the Godhead and bases itself on the traditional modes of ontology and epistemology. However, thius less categorical style of the apophatic approach renders it susceptible to ambiguity, misinterpretation, and misunderstanding. The unambiguous articlulations of cataphatic theology render it more amenable to the conventional processes of reason. God is there understood in terms being, that most foundational category of reason and the apprehensive faculty. However, notwithstanding that, apophatically, God is understood to be ineffable, unnameable and unknowable, the inexorable demand for articulation cannot be gainsaid; even the inexpressible, paradoxically and inexorably, seeks expression even though the latter is possible only in terms of an aporetic language. The paradox of divine knowledge is the quintessential apophatic paradox. Even though posited as essentially unknowable, apophatic theology inevitably and inexorably seeks to 'know' this essentially unknowable God. We must remain aware that apophasis is, in the last analysis, theology or a form of knowledge of God. To know God is its raison d'etre. Divine transcendence is an inviolable and inescaple principle of theological knowledge. The effort to know God, therefore, must not transsgress ahgainst this principle. The transcendent God must be held inviolably sacrosanct even as we strive to know Him. God is transcendent and beyond His creation. The beyond, by definition, is unknowable. To know the unknowable is the very essence of the apophatic approach - God is transcendennt , but nevertheless apophatically knowable. This 'knowledge' is attained through the relentless negation of the very process of knowing. It is in this negative light that God illuminates the soul. Human knowledge is stained by limits and categories, but divine light is stainless and limitless. "Thus, as for the Super-Essence of the Supreme Godhead (if we would define the Transcendence of its Transcendent Goodness) it is not lawful to any lover of that Truth which is above all truth to celebrate It as Reason or Power or Mind or Life or Being, but rather as most utterly surpassing all condition, movement, life, imagination, conjecture, name, discourse, thought, conception, being, rest, dwelling, union, limit, infinity, everything that exists." It is above and beyond all human/philosopohical categories whatsoever. However, it was the body of works effectuated by theologians like Philo of Alexandria, Plotinus, Proclus, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius and Eriugena that constituted the apophatic tradition of the west.
Again, apophatic is not a monolithic/umbrella term or category. The meaning, content, and scope of the term differs when applied to the individual theologians. Kataphatic and apophatic are not mere abstract concepts but living-breathing traditions that enjoy and sustain their own unique and individual context, interpretation and spirit. Howerver, there is a basic premise to which all negative theologians subscribe. This premise has to do with the fundamental unknowability of God. This attitude stands in opposition to the cataphatic belief that God is knowable and can be inferred from the attributes of His creation - human, other animates and the inanimate. Thus the positive attributes of power, knowledge, mercy, love and forgiveness, infinity, being etc. are infinitely amplified and applied to God. Whatever is known and knowable must be negated for apophasis to originate and actualize. This negation creates a void, a dark night of the soul, receptive to the apophatic truth, a vacant negative space within the self that the divine light, supernal ray, can inundate and fill in with illumination emanating from the Godhead. The self and the world inhabit a realm that veers awasy from the face of the divine; whose content originates from a ground that is separated by a veil of ignorance from the great divine ground. Although the real and final telos and ground of the world is the Godhead, yet the divine is hidden from the eyes of this world by a veil that has been drawn over the whole creation. The individual soul is flooded with the divine light and enters the realm of the supernal ray, that is, returns to the Godhead in a mystical union, when this veil is rent through an absolute surrender of the soul to divine grace. This is the real significance of the symbol of the rent veil upon Christ's crucifixion (Matthew 27: 51). The temple veil separated the Holy of Holies - the earthly dwelling place of God's presence - from the rest of the temple where men dwelt (Hebrews 9: 1-9). This submission demands a negation of the individuality and separation causing limits manifested in terms of worldly power and knowledge. The soul must completely annihilate its individuation and separatedness, that is, the limits of the self must be entirely erased before it can become and enter the formless, imageless and limitless. The soul itself must thus be divinized before it can mystically unite with the Godhead. The soul must fulfil its divine likeness, its inherent potential for divinization, before it can immerge into the the Godhead. It is only upon the surmounting, through divine grace, of the essential difference between creation and Creator, between the limited and the limitless, that the mystical union is effectuated. It is only the divine, the Godhead, which partakes of the nature of the Real. Therefore, the union with the highest reality per force necessitates the divination (the Real-ization) of the human rather than the other way round. Man himself must become a part of, at one with, the highest reality, the Godhead, rather than the Godhead descending into humanization. The limiteless cannot be bound with limits. It is rather the limited (man) that is uplifted into the limitless divine ground. The essential unchangeableness and immutability of the Godhead ordains that all originates from God, the limitless, and all must finally return to it. But the Godhead, itself separate and apart from the process of life and creation, remains immutable and changeless. The mutable must, in a final metamorphosis, take on immutability, the changeable changelessness. The Christian narrative pertains to the eventual .divinization of humanity.
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"Now, as we said when setting forth our Outlines of Divinity, the One, the Unknowable, the Super-Essential, the Absolute Good (I mean the Trinal Unity of Persons possessing the same Deity and Goodness), 'tis impossible to describe or to conceive in Its ultimate Nature; nay, even the angelical communions of the heavenly Powers Therewith which we describe as either Impulsions or Derivations from the Unknowable and blinding Goodness are themselves beyond utterance and knowledge, and belong to none but those angels who, in a manner beyond angelic knowledge, have been counted worthy thereof. And godlike Minds angellically entering (according to their powers) unto such states of union and being deified and united, through the ceasing of their natural activities, unto the Light Which surpasseth Deity , can find no more fitting method to celebrate its praises than to deny It every manner of Attribute. For by a true and supernatural illumination from their blessed union Therewith, they learn that It is the cause of all things and yet Itself is nothing, because It super-essentially transcends them all. (Dionysius)" It is in this 'Pseudo-Dionysian' context that Sankara's doctrine of nescience has to be viewed. Nescience is the attribution of wordly properties to the Transcendent; an ascription of the quaqlities of creation to the Creator; of human to the Divine. 'The One, the Unknowable, the Super-Essential, the Absolute Good' is beyond all description and conception. Even the 'angelical communions', which are symbolical of a higher order of beings in the Christian vision of the heirarchical order of creation, a higher demension of Being, are above human understanding, intellect and the whole faculty of perception and comprehension. But even for the 'angelic communions' to enter that Transcendent Highest Abode the processes of their natural activities have to altogether cease. It is only upon this kenotic cessation of their natural activities The supernal light that thus inundates the soul emanates from a source that transcends even deity-hood. It is this absolutely negated space voided kenotically within the soul that receives and is illuminated by the divine light. It is thus that the union with the Godhead is effectuated.
This kenosis also manifests itself in the language of negative theology. The loss of metaphysics in the postmodern world is also a manifestation of this kenosis whereby the Christian God gradually but ineluctably divests Himself of the traditional metaphysical burden and manifestly takes on an infinite lightness of being; in fact a veritable non-being. Kenosis is the shedding of this extraneous mass of metaphysics culminating in the unveiling of the Christian Truth (Vattimo, Belief, 46-48). Kenosis is not just a Christological project but is at the heart of the Buddhist message, Sufism, and Sankara's monism. Kenosis is an emptying of the self effectuated through the emptying of language through negation. The Christological model of kenosis on the cross finds its ethical telos in the self-emptying of the subject in imitation of Christ. However, as stated before, the idea of kenosis is found in all the major religious traditions of the world. Therefore, just as Christ is the Christian exemplar of kenosis, the Old Testament has its own kenotic dynamics that precedes its Christological manifestation. The development of the kenotic ideal witnesses a shift from the objectivist dimension to a subjectivist one. It undergoes a movement from a kind of objectivist metaphysics to a subjectivist one. The idea of kenosis has seen a return to the theological mainstream in contemporary philosophy. In historical terms, this has meant a "weakening of strong structures. (Vattimo, Belief)" Being, Vattimo argues, ought not to be a product of the will to power. Being is rather the weak force that breaks though as trace (and grace) into the present. Grace is the 'weak moving force' acting as an impulse at the heart of all creation. It is what moves the word through weakness; through trace; through grace. Gianni Vattimo identifies this historical movement of the discourse about being with Heidegger's criticism of the positing of being in objectivist terms that reduces being to the status of an object of the will to power that perpetuates the subject-object dichotomy and introduces an element of power politics into theology. This post-metaphysical age has been a witness to a weakening of being. This softening of being finds its reflection in contemporary culture in the form of the rise of nihilism. Objects, whether cultural or scientific, are not as objectively and concretely defined as they historically had been. The erasure of objective truths, moral and philosophical, in contemporary culture is a manifestation of this historical event. Philosophy seems to have descended into a form of relativism and, even, nihilism. Nietzsche and Heidegger previsioned this descent into nihilism of the western culture. The crisis that it engendered in western culture and thought could not be easily resolved. It was not a simple deviation or miscalculation that could be retrospectively overcome by simply adopting a different perspective. It was an inseparable part of the very essence of the history of western thought that, drawn to its logical conclusion, had to inexorably climax into this nihilistic impasse. The history of metaphysics turned out to be the history of an error.
The predicament that modernity thus found itself in was succored by a turn to negative theology for a way out of the dilemma. "It is therefore very expedient and necessary, if the soul is to advance to these heights, that the dark night of contemplation should first bring it to nothing, and undo in it all its meanness, bringing it into darkness, aridities, loneliness, and emptiness; for the light that is to be given it is a certain divine light of the highest nature, surpassing all natural light, and not naturally cognisable by the understanding. If the understanding is to be united with that light, and become divine in the state of perfection, it must first of all be purified and annihilated as to its natural light , which must be brought actually into darkness by means of this dim contemplation.(J)" The conception of God must be denudated of its metaphysical encumbrances and its aspect of power politics and must articulate itself in terfms of a weak theology. The birth of this weak theology comes to a pass in the realm where will to power ceases, that is, where there is a complete cessation of the will to power. This cessation of the will to power is actualized through a negation of the self to gather 'truth' and power within its own individual limits. Kenosis is a letting go of individual limits and power. The soul thus rendered powerless and empty is ripe for the reception of the divine light and truth. The limitless apace thus created within the soul ready for the reception of divine light and truth must first pass through the stage of the 'dark night of the soul.' The soul here experiences a dark void within itself and outside as a consequence of this kenosis. "And the earth was without form, void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:2)" The human spirit must first contemplate this dark face of the deep before the divine light can illunine it from within. The human spirit, in a reflection of the creative act of the transcendent Spirit, broods over the face of the deep. This contemplation of this higher darkness is a precursor to the inflow and inundation of the divine light into the soul. The divine light, the supernal ray, is repulsed by earthly 'light.' The divine light does not penetrate earthly light. For the divine light to inundate and illumine the self, the earthly light of the self must die away. Only when this earthly light is dispelled and the soul turns away from the light of this world towards the divine darkness, that it becomes ready for the reception of the supernal ray emanating from the Godhead. Away from the things of the world, it turns toward the divine 'nothing.' Upon the undoing of the earthly meanness, it is brought into 'darkness, aridities, loneliness, and emptiness.' Through this darkness the natural understanding is purified and annihilated. " ... for the light that is to be given it is a certain divine light (in which the highest transcendent reality can be contemplated) of the highest nature, surpassing all natural light (in which earthly things are beheld), and not naturally cognisable by the understanding. One must be blinded (darkened) to the earthly for the vision to open unto the divine beauty. The natural vision must concede to the supernatural vision. The two cannot exist together. The soul must be first emptied before it can enjoy the divine fulness. This is the essence of kenosis. The soul must first be brought into a contemplation of this darkness before it can unite with that supernal divine ray.
Apart from the kenosis of the individual subject, there is also a historical process of kenosis which can be seen in the history of metaphysics from the ancient times down to the contemporary postmodern age. The loss of objective truths in philosophical thought has slowly found a widespread acceptance in contemporary culture and philosophy. The resistance to this natural historical course of philosophy has dwindled over the course of the twentieth century as it prepared to enter the new millennium. The whole trdition has been reinterpreted and re-experienced anew for the realization to dawn that the history of being within the western philosophical tradition had to per force play out the way that it really has historically. A direct apprehension of being, it came to be understood, is impossible and contemporary philosophy came to the appreciation that being can only be grasped hermeneutically and historically. The great chain of being (Arthur Lovejoy) is a hisorical chain of insights hermeneutically won. From the vantage point of historical hindsight, the history of being is a history of the gradual weakening of powerful structures and an erasure of metaphysics. This weakening of powerful structures finds itself mirrored in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of the Son of the powerful God in the form of a weak human person. The incarnation of God prefigures the weakening of ontology that metaphysics undergoes in late modernity. The kenosis that the figure of Christ passes through on the cross bears its own kenotic fruits in the history of western thought in terms of a kenotic and gradual erasure of metaphysics in the late modernity through a weakening of powerful structures. The doctrine of incarnation and kenosis transposes itself into the history of metaphysics. The 'death of God' and weak theology movements are essentially apophatic approaches. They let go of metaphysics in an attempt to reach the divine ground. Personal kenosis of the individual subject kenotically denudates itself of all preknowledge of God that delineates the Godhead in terms of metaphysical attributes such as eternal, immutable, unchangeable, the divine ground of all that is. The disintegration of the traditional metaphysics through the weakening of powerful structures concludes in the 'death of God.' The incarnation and kenosis of God is at the center of this weakening of metaphysics. The history of metaphysics is witness to just such a transposed kenosis which sees a historical dismantling of the traditional metaphysical structures. The traditional metaphysical attributes such as immutability, unchangeableness, eternity, the original and teleological ground etc. ascribed to objective being have, in contemporary cuture and thought, deserted the latter. The postmodern 'death of God' theology is a consequence of the voiding, in the theological realm, of the traditional metaphysical structures that propped up the 'old God.' Secularization is the aftermath of this kenotic voiding of metaphysics in both the theological and political realms. Both God and the state are anchored in a realm of values created beyond and after the abandonment of metaphysics. Secularization ensues from the abandoning of the strong (metaphysical) conception of God in the cultural domain. This abandoning is of the essence of Christianity symbolized by God's incarnational and kenotic experience on the cross. This abandoning of metaphysics in late modern philosophy is prefigured in the story of the cross.
"And yet since, as the Subsistence of goodness, It, by the very fact of Its existence, is the Cause of all things, in celebrating the bountiful Providence of the Supreme Godhead we must draw upon the whole creation. For It is both the central Force of all things, and also their final Purpose, and is Itself before them all, and they all subsist in It; and through the fact of Its existence the world is brought into being and maintained; and It is that which all things desire - those which have intuitive and discursive reason seeking It through knowledge, the next rank of beings through perception, and the rest through vital movement or the property of mere existence belonging to their state. Conscious of this, the Sacred Writers celebrate It by every name while yet they call It Nameless." The transcendent God is as nothing and yet it is the cause and subsistence and ground and purpose and force of all things; of all creation. Yet in itself it is as nothing. For, there is no thing in the whole of creation to which it can be likened or compared or by means of which it can be comprehended. It comprehends the whole of creation yet the whole creation comprehends it not. The movement to the Godhead, therefore, must encompass the whole creation. Notwithstanding that unaided by revelation, the whole of creation brought together into one is inadequate and powerless to comprehend it; nevertheless the whole creation must be made implicit in the attempt to comprehend it. It is both immanent and transcendentt. It is at the heart of the whole creation as the moving spirit and force behind it and yet it is above and before and outside and apart from it. It is immanently present everywhere and yet transcendently inaccessible to all things. Both life and matter are transcendently transformed at its touch and become at one with it upon their union with the Godhead. All classes of beings have their source and final abode in it and seek in their own manner and power after it. All desire has it for its telos. Life, human and otherwise, seeks it through perception, knowledge and vital movement and matter through its mere property of existence. All names of the created world serve to celebrate its glory, yet essentially it is nameless. Therefore, all names must finally dissolve and fall silent in the face of this deepest namelessness. The soul must abandon the crutches of names and must become kenotically empty, bare and void to receive this nameless Spirit.
Kenosis is interwoven into the history of metaphysics. That kenosis is implicit in the history of theological metaphysics implies that God cannot remain outside history but the conception of God is rather hermeneutically affected by the vicissitudes of history. The hermeneutical current flows against the static and objective concept of God. An overly radical conception of God's transcendence severs Him altogether from history for such a God resides in the realm altogether beyond history. However, the Judeo-Christian God is hermeneutically open to the currents of history. The prophesies, incarnation, and kenosis of God are events in history. The Judeo-Christian God actively participates in history. It is not merely that history is anchored in God but the obverse is also true, that God Himself is anchored in history. God's participation and incarnation is rooted in a form of historical dialectic. A categorically transcendent God apart from and outside history does not constitute the Judeo-Christian vision of God. Such an articulation of the transcendent truth is not open to hermeneutical interpretation. A god closed to a historically open hermeneutics does not do justice to history. An ahistorical theology (for that matter even an ahistorical metaphysics) is an impossibility in the contemporary context. A dialectical theology that interprets God's transcendence too radically does not do justice to the historical rootedness of God and theological ethics and effects a separation between God and history.
Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy and dialectical theology is the paragon of such positing of God as radically transcendent. Gianni Vattimo, on the other hand, is critical of such dialectical theology and the consequent radical separation that it produces between God and history. Levinas's transcendent ethical truth where God is the radical other of man resists all hermeneutical interpretation and results in a classical objectivization of his philosophy of the 'other.' His conception of God resists all historicization. For Levinas, God remains 'outside' history. Vattimo questions this estrangement of history from God and underscores the necessity for historicization of God and theological openness to hermeneutical interpretation. Vattimo views this openness to history in kenotic terms. What is common to these two thinkers is their resistence to metaphysics in theological articulations by harking back to the biblical roots of their faith. Vattimo, however, insists that despite his resistance Levinas lapses into metaphysics. It is with respect to this lapse into metaphysics of Levinas, a Jewish philosopher, that Vattimo postulates the Christian doctrine of the incarnation and kenosis of the Son of God (Vattimo, La Religion). It is, Vattimo conjectures, critical to understanding the individual subject's spiritual self-emptying and also the process of Kenosis which is at the heart of the history of metaphysics in the west.
"As it is fitting that the primary elements, that they may enter into the composition of all natural substances, should have no colour, taste, nor smell peculiar to themselves, in order that they may combine with all colours, all tastes, and all smell, so the mind must be pure, simple, and detached from all kinds of natural affections, actual and habitual, in order that it may be able to participate freely in the largeness of spirit of the divine wisdom, wherein by reason of its pureness it tastes of the sweetness of all things in a certain pre-eminent way. And without this purgation it is altogether impossible to taste of the abundance of these spiritual delights. For one single affection remaining in the soul, or any one matter to which the mind clings either habitually or actually, is sufficient to prevent all perception and all communication of the tender and interior sweetness of the spirit of love, which contains within itself all sweetness supremely. (J)" The metaphysical, from this perspective, is an extraneous affection of the soul of which the latter must be cleansed by a kenotic self-emptying. It is only as an inevitable effect of this kenosis that the mund, thus annihilated and purified, is able to taste of these spiritual delights. It is akin to the metaphysical process of purification whereby the primary elements are rendered devoid of all properties of smell, colour, and taste to become pure substance. The mind here is characterized by purity, simplicity and detachment from all natural affections of the soul. It is only when rendered kenotically devoid of all extraneous affections, qualities and properties that the soul becomes free to return to its final abode to participate in the 'largeness' of the divine Spirit and taste of its everlasting sweetness. The slightest stain on the soul prevents it drom entering the 'dark night of the soul' through which it must pass in its journey on to a union with the Godhead. "For instance, they call It Nameless when they say that the Supreme Godhead Itself, in one of the mystical visions whereby It was symbolically manifested, rebuked him who said: "What is thy name?" and, as though bidding him not seek by any means of any Name to acquire a knowledge of God, made the answer: "Why askest thou thus after My Name seeing it is secret?" Now is not the secret Name precisely that which is above all names and nameless, and is fixed beyond every name that is named, not only in this world but also in that which is to come?" This is also a kenosis of names, nouns, and adjectives. It is a kenosis that is operative at the very heart of language. It forbids the asking of the divine name(s) for name is but an affection and a limitation. For the Infinite is not bound by even the name 'infinite' by which we call it. The soul experiences this 'dark night' because no names can serve here as signpost to the destination which is a union with the Nameless. The knowledge of the divine names are futile in guiding the soul onward in its passage toward union with the Nameless Godhea;, in the acquisition of the knowledge of the Godhead. The most significant point that this passage intimates is that this name is just above and beyond and before all the names named and but also above and beyond and before all that is nameless. Not just all that finds articulation in language but all that fails to find articulation in it and even all that is impossible to speak, to find articuulation in it, is assumed in this highest Namelessness. All that is inevitably silent and all that is articulable find their true habitation within it. It is at a second remove, like the Platonic forms, not just from all that is named but also from that which is unnamed and unnameable separated by an ordinarily unbridgable gulf and to pass through which one must pass through the dark night of the soul in which all this named and nameless dissolves and approaches the Highest Namelessness. The dark night of the soul is a shedding of all the divine names in the transmutation that the soul must suffer on its path to union with the Godhead - a path unilluminated by any named signposts.
Secularization is assumed by Levinas to be a similar kenosis or purification of the Christian faith of metaphysics in the public-political realm; a revelation of the "faith's authentic essence.(Vattimo, Belief, 46)" The Levinasian theological ethics hangs on the notion of alterity where God is the transcendent other who is manifested in ethical praxis in the form of the stranger-the neighbour-the human other. Kenosis, for Levinas, is a religious experience that is manifested in the self's relationship to the other, the alterity of the self, and, ultimately, to that transcendent other, God. Through love to that other, on earth the stranger, in Heaven God, the self empties itself of all self-love that delimits the self and opens out to the other with and in limitless love, agape. Levinas promulgates a shift from a dogmatic religious faith to a hermeneuticized philosophical reflection as a vehicle of kenosis; a hermeneutical philosophical reflection that is open to all dimensions of human experience including the religious one. Philosophy thus acquires a form of instrumentality in interpreting religious experience as well. The 'dark night of the soul' is then a time and space of deep philosophical reflection where philosophical categories and propositions are negated through philosophical reflection. The purgation that the soul goes through can then be translated into philosophical terms as a dialectical negation of the categories of the mind as it ascends to a union with the Godhead. The spiritual kenosis finds its parallel in a philosophical kenosis that undergoes a denudation of the conception of the Godhead of all metaphysical attributes and categories. The agape that is engendered in the soul is of the essence of purity, simplicity and detachment. This agape breaks through and transcends the limits of the individual soul and leaves it at one with the whole creation in a relation of limitless love whose source is the divine ground itself. The dichotomy between the creator and creation thus dissolves. The soul loses its limits in and through its union with the Godhead and becomes unbounded love. The soul then exists in the same relation to the creation as does the Godhead. This perspective constitutes the monistic eschatology where Atman (individual soul) and Brahman (Godhead) become at one with each other. Here the soul loses its identity and dissolves into and becomes at one with the Godhead. The dualist eschatology, on the other hand, holds that the soul retains its identity and exists and basks in the infinite glory of the Godhead and contemplates the latter in a relationship of infinite love (agape).
"As the children of Israel, merely on account of that single affection for, and remembrance of, the fleshpots of Egypt, could not taste the delicious bread of angels, the manna in the desert, which as the divine writings tell us, had the 'sweetness of all taste,' and 'turned to that every man would', so the mind which is still subject to any actual or habitual affection or particular or narrow mode of apprehending, or understanding anything, cannot taste the sweetness of the spirit of liberty, according to the desire of the will. The reason is this: the affections, feelings, and apprehensions of the perfect spirit, being of so high an order and specially divine, are of another kind and different from those which are natural; and in order to be actually and habitually enjoyed, require the annihilation of the latter. (J)" The egoism of the individual soul must be annihilated for the soul to attain freedom and love man (stranger/neighbour) and God in this new found freedom. Agape is at the heart of this process of kenosis. The soul will remain bound and a slave to affections as long as an iota of egoism remains. "... so the mind which is still subject to any actual or habitual affection or particular or narrow mode of apprehending, or understanding anything, cannot taste the sweetness of the spirit of liberty, according to the desire of the will." AS long as the slightst affection remains in the soul, it rermains slavish to the limited, egoistic, separate, individuated, narrow and particular mode of existence; it remains trapped within the delimiting, individuating, separating and dividing confines of self-love. This self love restrains the soul within the confines of the individual self. According to the advaitic doctrine, this particular mode of existence prevents the individual self (soul) from attaining to the Universal self (Brahman) and keeps it entangled in an endless cycle of birth and death. The principle of ignorance (avidya), nescience or illusion (Maya) as enunciated by Sankara is at work here. It is equable to a form of narcissistic self-love that binds the individual within the limits of its limited and egoistical individual identity as an entity separate from God and the rest of creation. It is only through kenotic agape that this individuating delimitation of the self is annihilated and transcended and the soul advances toward a union with the Godhead and through the latter becomes at one with both creation and creator; it thus encompasses all that is immanent (which is all) and, simultaneously (in a manner of speaking) immerges into the transcendent. The 'fleshpots of Egypt' are here symbolic of an affection and temptation of the soul by succumbing to which the soul forfeits its freedom, rermains entrapped, delimited and bound within its individual existence separate and divided from God. The 'fleshpots of Egypt' are a manifestation of this narcissistic self-love, a symbol of the soul's ignorance of and separation from it's transcendent source, from the divine ground of all that is and of the whole creation, indeed, fromthe very ground and abode and telos of the soul itself in an infatuation with its own finite individual self ; a seemingly unbridgable gulf between the soul and its beloved God; a soul that is incomplete on account of being thus limited and finite. It is only through kenosis, a self-emptying of all egoistic affections, that the soul thus drawn in upon itself, caught within its own narcissistic boundaries, is, through agape, liberated of the vicelike grip in which the self-loving affections, symbolized here by the fleshpots of IEgypt, bind it, and is thus liberated and united with the Godhead. The 'sweetness of the spirit of liberty' and the 'delicious bread of angels' or manna symbolically stand for the enjoyment of eschatological delights in the here and now upon a kenotic cleansing and purification of the soul by passing through this 'dark night.' Agape is kenotic love. Kenosis is effectuated through agape in which the self empties itself of all selfish desires and experiences union with all creation and creatures in a selfless love. in levinasian terms, through this kenotic emptying of the self through agape the self receives the other, and through the other that 'transcendent other,' the beloved God. When the union with the Godhead is actualized through the emptying of the soul of all desires the soul experiences the essence of agape which is the enjoyment of a blissful union with the Godhead which comprehends the whole creation within itself. It is a state of limitless love and infinite bliss. In Indian philosophical terms, this state of bliss in divine union that comprehends both creator and creation is called 'sachidanand' (sat - being, cita - consciousness, and anand - blisss) (REference). It is a state of pure bliss, consciousness and being. The model of the kenotic self-emptying of Cnrist on the cross has its parallel in Indian Dharmic religions like Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism etc in the form of a kenotic cessation of desires (Sanskaras (Sanskrit) and Sankharas (Buddhist Pali) whereupon Mukti or Nirvana (Sanskrit) or Nibbana (pali) or Moksa (Reference for all the terms) or liberation is acheived when the self kenotically empties itself of all desires. The natural self whose 'pravrtti' (nature) is to desire thus must be annihilated and achieve a union of soul in love and freedom with the Godhead comprehending all creation. One must point out here that in Sankara's 'advaitavada' (Reference for all Indian philosophical terms and concepts) the nature of creation is illusory or originated of nescience (maya) (Reference). Some theist schools after Sankara like Ramanuja's (Visisadvaitavada), Unlike Sanka, hold creation to be real and not illusory and assert atman to be eternal and individual which maintains its individual existence eternally (and eschatologically) in an eternal contemplation of the Godhead. Sankara, on the other hand, maintains that the atman, upon realization of the eternal truth and liberation, loses its individual existence and becomes at one with Brahman (Reference for this whole sentence and the ideas and terms within it).
"Agape shares the immutability of heavenly realities. (Ceslaus Spicq, Agape)" Agape and fidelity are organically intertwined in a mystery. Fidelity is by definition immutability. Agape is selfless love that does not change, diminish, or vanish, but is eternally the same. It is of the nature of God, manifested in Christ (as per the Christian dogma), and therefore unchangeable and indestructible. At the heart of agape, in the christological sense, is the mystery of Jesus. God, through Jesus; is the source and essence of divine charity. God, by his very nature of being pure spirit, is characterized by invisibility. He is open to apprehension neither by the senses nor by the intellect. However, God is incarnated and becomes present on earth in and through the body and spirit of Christ who is interpreted to be the incarnated manifestation of Logos. God is thus present in Christ in a non-dual (advaitic) union. God who himself is invisible is seen in and through Christ and the love of God (agape) in the charity that Christ embodied. "We ourselves know and believe in God's enduring love at work among us. God is love." God is thus construed through agape. To truly know God through Jesus Christ is not just to know his holiness, omnipotence, or justice but to wholly comprehend him in his essential aspect of love through which He becomes at one with Christ and through Christ the whole creation in an advaitic communion.
The Johannine conception of God is an advaitic or monistic one. It would be worthwhile to trace St John's assertion, "Deus charitas est", genetically back to its origins. It is not a mere dogmatic assertion on the part of St John, but a profound reflection of a deep contemplation of the relation betrween Jesus and God the Father and the events and passions of the life and death of Jesus. St John expresses the nature of this relationship in advaitic terms - in terms of an advaitic union whose binding force is agape, and as we would later see, the Christic and divine kenosis. This advaitic communion of God the Father and Christ renders itself an object of contemplation for the seeker wherein the latter meditates on Christ's earthly mission and teachings centred on the threefold embodiment of the love shose source is the divine ground itself - agape, charitas and kenosis. Christ, through his hypostatic union with God in one ousia, in which, through agape, he partakes of the nature of God, reveals the latter to men as "one of the tyhree real and distinct substances in the one undivided substance or essence of God; (dictionary.com)"also as "a person of the trnity. The one personality of Christ in which His two natures, human and divine, are uniterd." The athanasian creed affirms this about Christ: "He is God from the essence of the Father, begotten before time; and he is human from the essence of his mother, born in time; completely God, completely human, with a rational soul and human flesh; equal to the Father as regards divinity, less than the father as regards humanity. Although he is God and human, yet Christ is not two but one. He is one, however, not by his divinity being turned into flesh, but by God's taking humanity to himself. He is one, certainly not by the blending of his essence, but by the unity of his person. For just as one human is both rational soul and flesh, so too the one Christ is both God and human. (Reference)" Although Christ is both human and God, yet he is not two but one." As '1 John 4:16' proclaims - God is love - therefore, Christ, through his divinity, is also love. Love is what unites two beings or substances or essences in (comm)union. Therefore, love overflows from God through Christ into cration and humanity. Divine love is the reason that multiple and separate entities exist and rest together in harmony in this universe. To resort to the metaphor of adhesion, love is the adhesive, the moving force, that holds creation together and unites creation and creator into one.It is the unifying and cohesive force behind creation. This metaphor, however, can develop into both monistic and dualistic fashions. In the dualist case, the individual soul maintains its individuatity and integrity and eternally exists in a loving communion with the Godhead. In monistic terms, two substances unite into one wherein their individual existences dissolve altogether and they become one new substance. God, however, is understood to be changeless and immutable. Therefore, in this union the individuating finiteness and delimitation of the soul, that enables its separate and individual existence, is rendered null and void. This process is conditioned by the fact that the soul/self (atman) in its particular, individuated, delimited, finite, and illusory manifest existence, unlike the Universal Soul (Brahman) which is also the true nature of the individual soul (atman), is essentially changeable and therefore destructible. The individual soul, in the advaita doctrine, realizes its true nature as Brahman and loses its individuated finite existence to become at one with Brahman. It posits only Brahman as real and the whole of created existence including the individuated soul as illusory. There is, therefore, only one and truly existent substance in the advaitic doctrine. In the Christian eschatology, on the other hand, the individual soul exists eternally in communion with the changeless and immutable Godhead upon salvation. However, the new testament does mention the soul as destructible. (The old testament metaphysics and eschatolgy are not explicit and consistent on the point of soul.) "And fear them not which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. (Matthew 10: 28). Christian soteriology posits the soul as in need of salvation or else it is destroyed or lost. The Indian theist schools of Ramanuja, Madhava and Vallabhacarya conceive the soul as eternal and real which, as postulated similarly as in Christian pneumatology, exists in an eternal communion with the Godhead or Brahman.
The essence of this communion is agape. The Johannine conception of God and of trinity is founded on the idea and praxis of agape. The trinity represents the divine communion where the three persons of the triune God are bound in one substance or ousia by agape. God in his relation to humanity through Christ is of the essence of agape. The Son of God in both his earthly life and resurrection 'lives' in a communion of agape with God the Father and with "his own (John 1: 11)." Christ is 'greater' than and different from the prophets and the saints because of the deep cpommunion of agape between him and God. "No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." Through the endless commiunion that exists between Christ and God the Father, the former is able to partake of the nature of the latter and reveal the divine mysteries to those ("his own") who, in turn, come into communion with him. Agape, thus, is at the heart of the communion and the hypostases; of the Christian ontology and metaphysics. God is the divine ground and origin of being and it is also its (final abode) telos the chain of being traces its genesis ultimately to this great ground of being and is held together in harmony and communion by agape that can only emanate from the Godhead and brought into creation through Christ. Agape, therefore, is the gift of divine grace."Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore, the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. (1 John 3: 1)" The knowing here is spiritual knowing which is made possible by agape. The word 'knowledge' is often used in the Bible for love - either spiritual or carnal. Therefore, we can safely affirm that 'it knew him not' translates in biblical (theological) terms into saying 'it loved him not.' Knowledge, here, is a function of agape and agape is the essence of communion, divine and human. "Beloved let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love." (1 John 4: 7-8) Love is of God and God is love. Love takes its origin in God and abundantly overflows from him into creation. Love is also the divine substance and the essence of God. Also, 'everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.' Through agape God fashions man anew in his spirit.This new man, through agape and in agape, experiences (comm)union with God and becomes a partaker of and a participant in God's unceasing act of new creation and tastes of the divine substance by virtue of having been born and created of the same divine substance in spirit. The divine substance (ousia) cannot be known unless it is revealed to the subject until the latter is born anew in spirit by an act of grace of God. In advaitic/monistic terms, this knowledge is construed as a state of union with God and in dualistic terms it is propounded as a communion in which God reveals himself as and through agape - infinite love. Christian theology has agape for its center and sheds light on the mystery of trinity which is held together by and rests on agape. Agape is also the bond between the creator and creation and is at the heart of the mystery that binds them in a loving communion. "And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." It is an expression not just of a communion, but of an advaitic or monistic union. Love is, in the Johannine gospel, repeatedly reiterated to be the essence of God and the substance and medium of divine hypostatic union and a personal (comm) between God and man.
Human charity is an infinitesimal derivative of divine agape through which God infinitesimally reveals himself on earth. The full substance of divine agape is eschatologically revealed to the salvaged soul in communion. However, the fullness of divine love, of agape, is incarnationally revealed in history in the body and acts of Jesus Christ. Jesus reveals this agape kenotically in and through his self-emptying on the cross. "We know what love is from the fact that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world. (1 John 4: 9)" In this communion Christ, God, and the believer(s) are brought together, united in their very being rather than by extrinsis relation. This monistic (comm)union is effected by a a process of kenotic self-emptying through which the soul hollows itself out and is prepared to receive the divine substance, agape, within itself. Agape is the substance of this bond or union and is also the essence of their being. " ... the soul is speaking of the way it followed in its departure from love of self and of all things (self-love) through a method of true mortification, which causes it to die to itself and to all these things and to begin the sweet and delightful life of love with God. And it declares that this departure was a 'dark night.' ... this dark night signifies here purgative contemplation, which passively causes in the soul this negation of self and of all things. (J)" This preceding quote from St John of Cross' 'Dark Night of the Soul' is the very definition of kenosis and is at the heart of the negative approach or apophatic theology. The soul here must be rid or all its affections or in Hindu and Buddhist philosophical terms 'sasnskaras or sankharas.' Jainism imagines the affections as karmic particles (lesyas) that cling to the soul and colour it.and hold it in bondage to this world. The affections or the karmic particles, in Jainism, are envisioned as a material substance or subtle matter that bind to the soul and trap it in the endless cycle of birth and death. (Reference) In the Buddhist doctrine of anatta or anatma (non-self), the very existence of the soul is nullified or negated and the 'being' is released into the 'great emptiness (Sunyata), which is, in reality, the 'great fullness.' (Reference) In the Christian and Judaic apophatic theology of St. John of Cross, Pseudo-Dionhysius the Aeropagite, Maximum the Confessor (Reference), Gregory of Nyssa, Philo of Alexandria, Plotinus, Proclus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyril of Jerusalem and others and in the christological dogma promulgated by the Chalcedonian council, the emptiness at the at the culmination of the kenotic process prepares the soul for an inflow of the supernal ray or the divine light whose content and substance and binding/uniting force (moving spirit) is agape which is preliminary to and accompanies the soul's comm(union) with the divine and is the very element or substance of this communion. "This night which as we say is contemplation, causes two kinds of darkness or purgation in spiritual persons according to the two parts of the soul, the sensory and the spiritual. Hence the one night or purgation will be sensory, by which the senses are purged or accommodated to the spirit; and the other night or purgation will be spiritual, by which the spirit is purged or denuded as well as accommodated and prepared for union with God through love. (J)" This pugation is a negative (apophatic) and kenotic process through which the soul is prepared to receive infinite agape and to unite with the Godhead in this agape. This kenosis is a negation of all that is built upon this egoistic foundation. The soul thus dies to itself through a mortification rooted and founded on agape. "Since the conduct of these beginners in the way of God is lowly and not too distant from love of pleasure and of self ... God desires to withdwaw them from this base manner of loving and lead them on to a higher degree of divine love (agape)." In the Johannine Gospel, a disciple is understood to be one who possesses and lives in divine love/agape. The whole economy of salvation is centred upon this divine love/agape in the Pauline theology. In the synoptic gospels, agape is manifested and God is loved in through the neighbour/stranger/orphan/widow. The counterpart of the stranger in the Hindu tradition is the guest (atithi or agantuk) who is loved, worshipped, and catered to as divine. (Atithi devo Bhava) (reference) One gices one's all and kenotically empties oneself in one's love for the stranger/neighbour. the stranger motif runs densely through the old testament and is the locus and telos of all biblical theological ethics.
The self-emptying or kenosis that Christ suffers on the cross is the embodiment or incarnation of divine love and an exemplar of agape. Agape is the bond of perfection between the creator and his creation and between the self and the other (and the transcendent other in and through this latter other). "Since God introduces a person into this night to purge his senses, and accommodate, subject, and unite the lower part of his soul to the spiritual part by darkening it and causing a cessation of discursive meditation (just as afterwards in order to purify the spirit and unite it to Himself, He brings it into the spiritual night)" (J). Kenosis is this purgation of senses through which the senses are orientated away from the world and the extrinsic self and turn inward into the spirit. This purgative dark night of the soul is purgative in the highest degree and is characterized by non-discursivity. This movement from the duscursive to the non-discursive, from speech to silence, is at the heart of all apophasis.This is the first and sensory dark night of the soul and is, upon its culmination, followed by the spiritual dark night of the soul.
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Kierkegaard's works often bespeak a kenotic understanding of Christology, especially his two pseudonomously authored works - 'Philosophical Fragments' and 'Practise in Christianity.' They express the Christic incarnation as kenotially accomplished. Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of the 'Philosophical Fragments' puts forward an analogy of a king who puts on the garb of a peasant to court a maiden of humble class (Reference). This is analogical of the Christic incarnation wherein the limitless divine Christ takes on or reduces and strips himself of his infinite divinity to take on the form of and become a limited, finite and humble human being. There is another instance, in Kierkegaard's practice in Christianity, that illustrates the arguments of the kenotic theologians about Christ's kenotic self-emptying whereby the eternal logos incarnated in Christ in and through this incarnation freely limits its own divine nature to be born as a suffering (human) servant. Anti-Climacus in 'Practice in Christianity' Jesus' concealment of his divine nature to freely embody and manifest himself as a lowly human being (Reference). In fact, the doctrine of kenosis is the secret heart of Kierkegaard's theology. "At the core of (Kierkegaard's) message is a bold assertion of the self-emptying of the Christ who meets men as a man. God in the servant form is at the center of Kierkegaard's thought." (Donald G. Gawe, The Form of a Servant. A Historical Analysis of the Kenotic Motif, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963, pp. 156-7) Kierkegaard was a significant and kenotic theologian in his own right and a strand of kenotic Christology runs through all his works, but most significantly through the 'Philosophical Fragments' and 'Practice in Christianity.' Similar to many other kenotic theologians Kierkegaard posits that God upon incarnation in the form of the suffering servant that was Christ undergoes a kenotic delimitation process. However, the originality of Kierkegaard as a kenotic theologian lies in his special emphasis on the radical nature of this kenosis and in his systematic weaving of the existential implications of such a kenotic Christology. The struggle of kenotic theology, like that of all Christian theology, is to arrive at an understanding, at the limits of reason, of the enigmatic figure of the Jesus of Nazareth - simultaneously divine and human. The kenotic theory is accounted of as a theoretical enterprise that seeks to reckon with this simultaneous divinity and humanity of Jesus. Kierkegaard's Christology probes this same possibility and nature of the kenoticism of Jesus the Son of God.
The catch here, however, is that Kierkegaard was deliberately not a systematic theologian and does not offer us a consistent Christology, Kenotic or otherwise. His writings are rich accounts of parables, metaphors and narratives that hint at rather than fully elaborate theological ideas. However, the theology undergirding and implicit in Kierkegaard's writings, notwithstanding their lack of systematicization, must be worked out in order to arrive at any understanding whatsoever of his kenotic Christology. That is the task that any critic or exegete of his writings must set out for himself. The same theology undergirds the Kierkegaardian concept of the absolute paradox. The Chalcedonian formula that Christ is both truly human and truly divine is at the heart of the articulation of this absolute paradox and is presupposed by it. The Chalcedonian formula further states that these two natures of Christ are mutually exclusive opposites. Kierkegaard does not just need to be situated in the context of nineteenth century debates in kenotic theology but must himself be seen as a kenotic theologian in his own right.
However, before we focus on Kierkegaard's kenotic thought, we must briefly explore the kenotic tradition in Christological thought. The kenotic tradition interprets Christ's incarnation as a fundamenta act of the self-emptying or limitation of the divine nature of Christ which consequently manifests itself in the form of the suffering human servant. It is worth noting that the human form in which Christ is incarnated is not that of a king or emperor of a realm, deominion, principality etc. - an earthly king, but as a lowly suffering servant. This latter fact indicates a second level of self-emptying. The first level of kenosis is from divine into human.. The second level of kenosis is the specific form of humanity into which Christ freely chooses to manifest himself, that is, that of a lowly suffering human servant. These two levels of kenosis have to be born in mind at all times that we are dealing with the kenotic tradition. This kenotic tradition is at the heart of the christological mainstream and helps us to come to grips with the mystery that is Christ.
The kenotic tradition mainly developed on the European continent and the anglophone world during the nioneteenth and twentieth centuries. The kenotic Christologies form an important and critical chapter in the history of theology in the Orthodox Church. But an implicit kenotic christology can be found embedded universally in the ancient church. The earliest waves to emanate from the thus newly constituted ancient Church, even before the proper so called apostolic times, possibly even before Paul penned down his founding epistles which were saturated with kenotic themes and undercurrents and documented the kenotic theme in the written form, carried the leitmotif of kenosis. Every period and age has seen a form and manifestation of the kenotic motif. Kierkegaard, though he at times stood out from the theological mainstream, was, nevertheless, connected to it through his expoisition of the kenotic motif. Divine self-emptying is a leitmotif not just of theology but of ascetic manuals and sermons as well. Kierkegaard was a part of this broader kenotic tradition in the west. Kierkegaard went about his task of kenotic theologizing in a way that addressed or altogether skirted the problems of kenotic theology in a way that his contemporary kenotic theologians found it impossible to do. One must, here, first identify kenotic motifs in Kierkegaard and situate the discussion in the context of the dialogue that Kierkegaard was enaged in with the kenotic tradition. Through this method one can identify the points that Kierkegaard had in common with the kenotic tradition and also the ways in which he was different from the latter. This would help us pin down the originality of Kierkegaard as a kenotic theologian.
Kierkegaard's portrayal of Christ and the use that he made of kenotic motifs in this portrayal are remarkable in their originality. However, these kenotic motifs are never explicitly delineated in his writings, but are rather a sub-text in the latter. Kierkegaard's kenotic theology is highly derivative from the Lutheran theology of kenosis. (Heinrich Schmid. The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, trans. by Charles A. Hay and Henry E. Jacobs (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House) The Lutheran School of these kenotic theologians hold that Christ never fully emptied himself of his divine powers and continued to hold them. However, they assert, he chose never to employ and use them except through his occasional miracles to heal others. He thus allowed himself to be crucified as he held his own powers in abeyance. Such a view of Christ's relationship to his divine aspects is not that of a self-emptying kenosis. It is rather a reduced form of kenosis in which Christ only chose not to use his divine powers. This kenotic view of Christ as the Servant Lord is reflected in the view of the Church as the servant people. This image of Christ has been an inspiration for christology everywhere and in every age.
Any form of kenotic christology, or for that matter all christology, is difficult to conceive in the present rationalistic age. For to conceive kenosis, one must first, as a preliminary step, accept the suprarational and the miraculous. This problem has beset christology from its very moment of inception. To imagine the figure of Christ, as Kierkegaard enunciates, as both human and divine is to be caught in a paradox - an offence to reason (Reference). Any conception of the being of God-man is a task fraught with paradox on which all christological reflection founders. To make this paradox intelligible and acceptable has been the challenge that theology has set itself everywhere and in all ages. Some of the earliest theology resorted to classical Greek philosophy to come to terms with this seeming paradox (Reference). Ancient Greek philosophy thus came to shape theological and christological reflection from the moment of its earliest inception and the dogma that was thus formed has lasted and is at work in the theological mainstream till today. The christological orthodoxy thus defined shapes theological discussions even today. However, the center of these dogmatic assertions is still miraculous and a rational foundation has eluded all Christological formulations till today.
It can, however, be pointed out in opposition to the Lutheran view that God's divine and human natures exist together that it jeopardizes the unity and integrity of the figure of Christ. The two natures of Christ, it can be argued, are united in one and that Christ retained his divine nature fully throughout his earthly ministry and that there is no real kenosis operative in the latter. To thus retain his divine attributes would mean that even in his earthly incarnation possessed in full the divine attributes of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. He was still omnipotent even when he was in the throes of death on the cross. The implication of this would be that throughout his incarnate mkission on earth, the divine powers of Jesus were under a freely willed concealment. He concealed his divine self from the world and only manifested his human remainder. Even his humiliation and death on the cross transpired under this concealment. Like these kenotic theologians who believed that Christ's kenosis is constituted by this cloak of free concealment of his divine powers beneath which he acted throughout his earthly mission even though he sometimes secretly exercised those powers through his miracles, Kierkegaard also gives his assent to this theory of a free concealment through which Christ hid his divine nature and powers from common view.
Kierkegaard's kenoticism can best be understood as the characterization of Christ as the suffering God. He held the orthodox Lutheran view that Christ was in full possession of his divine nature and powers and chose not to reveal and exercise them and underwent a kenotic self-emptying by freely enveloping his own divine nature. The christological affirmations have traditionally lacked rational coherence. They have had to rely on speculations on the mystical and the miraculous (as the case is here) to make themselves sensible and cognizable. The incarnate Christ's assumption of his lowliness and suffering is deemed to be an act of kenotic self-emptying. The biblical textual support for all these cases of kenoticism is ambiguous at the best. The christological dilemma is as alive today as it was in the earliest church. The historical frames of reference have shifted but the problematic is as valid today as it ever was. The philosophical movement of enlightenment in Europe have further compounded the classical christological problems and rendered their proposed solutions more complex than ever. The problems are quintessentially modern in their origins. This enlightenment rationalism has posed a challence to the classical 'suprarational' christology that has survived, evolved and accumulated over almost two millennia. Christology also has had to contend with the growing historical scholarship on Jesus the man. The 'Jesus of history' has now to be reconciled with the 'Christ of faith.' It implies profound changes in the way we approach and understand the two natures of Jesus - divine and human. Knowing historical facts like the spiritual and theological currents of the day of the historical Jesus provides us with insights into the psychical life of Jesus the first century Jew profoundly affects the we approach christological problems now. The thread of the kenotic motif, therefore, has to be traced from the ancient classical christology right down to its modern conceptions and the concomitant issues thereof. The kenotic motif deals with the problem of the divine-human consciousness and the divine-human being. Kenosis has always been and is also today at the heart of all christological reflection. It is also secretly at work in Kierkegaard's christology.
Kierkegaard accepts the basis tenets of a kenotic christology. The foundation of this kenoticism is a believe in the self-emptying/kenosis of the divine-human figure of Christ. Through this self-emptying or kenosis Christ the Son of God is incarnated as man. This kenotically human figure of Christ accomplishes the divine act of the redemption through his kenotic self-emptying sacrifice on the cross. Christ, through this kenotic self-emptying, freely limits his divine nature and takes on human finitude. His kenotic self-emptying does not stop with just the fact of incarnation but evolves and grows through his ministry on earth. His self-emptying kenosis climaxes with his humiliation and agonizing death on the cross. As the New Testament has it,"God has emptied himself, taking the form of a servant." (Reference) Hoever, as He undergoes this kenosis kenosis/self-emptying, he retains his divine nature and is not divested of it in any real sense. Kierkegaard is also in agreement with this active retention of the dual natues of Christ through out his earthly ministry. The comment of Anti-Climacus in 'Practice in Christianity' that Christ used his divine omnipotence to take on the form a suffering human servant is an assertion in kenotic theology. That is to say, he became human through an exercise of his divine omnipotence. Consequent upon his earthly incarnation Christ limited his divine attributes of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience for the duration of his earthly mission. (Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, p. 169) The self-limitation of the divine in incarnation is, in the final analysis, a divine act of omnipotence. It is, however, a mere temporary (and limited to his earthly existence) abandonment of divine powers by Christ. Paradoxically, through his omnipotent act of self-limitation and assumption of a lowly servant human form, the omnipotent Son of God binds himself to the conditions of earthly finitudes and mortal life. Kenotic theories bifurcate into two separate pathways here. One holds that Christ altogether abandons his divine nature even before his earthly incarnation. The other view espouses the paradoxical thesis that Christ used his omnipotence to become a powerless man/suffering servant. To refer back to Anti-Climacus' argument in 'Practise in Christianity' that employs the leitmotif of concealment, Kierkegaard can be inferred to lean toward the thesis that proposes that Christ hid his divine nature from the general humanity rather than toward the theory of kenosis whereby Christ altogether abandons his divinity. (Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianity in an Existential Mode, p. 130) However, there is another view put forwars by Kierkegaard through the comments of Climacus in the 'Philosophical Fragments.': the god, from the hour when by the omnipotent resolution of his omnipotent love he became a servant, he has himself become captive, so to speak, in his resolution and is now obliged to continue (to go on talking loosely) whether he wants to or not (Kierkegaard, Philosophical fragments)." God is thus caught up in His own deterministic power. There are, to reiterate, two views of the matter here in the analogy of the king and the humble maiden he pursues. The first is that Christ held his divine powers in secret from men and he exercised the latter in secret so as not to reveal himself to the crowd. The other view is that by dint of his own free choice in the matter Christ forfeited the use of his divine powers for the whole duration of his earthly ministry. Kierkegaard seems to align with this latter view as is evinced by Climacus' comment in the 'Philosophical Fragments', "He (the god) cannot betray his identity; unlike that noble king, he does not have the possibility of suddenly disclosing that he is, after all, the king. (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments)" Christ here has to abide by his own freely willed dictate to himself. This position reflects the view of the incapacity of Christ to freely use his divine powers during his earthly term. Even though Christ remains in full possession of his divine powers during the term of his earthly ministry, he is constrained not to reveal it even though it is theoretically possible. However, by paying attention to the analogy of the king and the humble maiden it is trtansparent to us that Christ is under his own divine obligation not to disclose his divine nature to the crowd.
Even in the acceptance of God of the human form with all its concomitant limitations and sufferings and in his embracing of that ultimate human destiny of Death, God still, at heart, remained God with all his godly attributes. Even though the creator chose to accept the finite form and destiny of his own creature, God did not, at the same time, forego his own eternal compass even as he made his way humanly through his earthly ministry to an ultimate humiliation of a lowly suffering servant and a death on the cross. The creator allowed his own creation to wield the ultimate power of death and life over him. This declaration is the founding tenet of the Christian faith. It is not the case that man has at any time found it easy to comprehend and embrace this declaration. It has stretched men's powers of credulity and challenged his basic and inherent rationalism. Men have throughout struggled to undertand and accept this bold and unique assertion of faith. This belief has to do with the very core, the center, of the Christian faith and has oftentimes been misunderstood. It is incumbent upon anyone who seeks undertand and appreciate the Christian faith and truth in its fulness to first come to terms with the doctrine of the kenosis of Christ. It also happens to be one of the earliest and cardinal formulations of the Christian faith that God freely limited himself to be born/incarnated as a suffering human servant. He was thus fully human and fully divine. God thus revealed himself through the human figure of Christ and through this revelation accomplished the redemption of humanity and of the whole created universe. (Romans reference, whole of creation travailed in pain) This revelation was not just a mystical vision granted to an elect or chosen people but a revelation of the eternal logos in the form of the human christ to all of humanity and creation. God was not just a static and unchanging reality hidden under a veil which was then revealed to men when the veil was rent in all its unchanging and ossified reality. This hidden reality was not the same before and in the revelation. God, rather, forsook his eternal unchanging aspect by emptying himself of all his divine glory and taking on the form a suffering and passible human servant. He became a partaker of the nature and destiny (death) of human beings and through his resurrection overcame the human nature and destiny of mortality, sin and death. God participates in the common human lot as human. God, whose true nature is changelessness and impassibility, renders himself subject to change and passion, traits of all that is human and created, for the sake of the redemption of humanity.
Kierkegaard's kenotic christology can be traced back to nineteenth century theological debates. They constitute the backdrop against which his christology was shaped. Gottfried Thomasius, an important nineteenth century German proponent of kenotic christology, Harbored views of kenoticism similar to Kierkegaard's. (Reference) Thomasius, like Kierkegaard, espoused the concept of the self-willed limitation/emptying of the incarnate logos that was Christ. This view is demonstrated by Climacus' statement in the 'Philosophical Fragments that "he (the god) has himself become captive, so to speak, in his resolution." (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments) Such a kenosis culminates in an internalization of divinity and God here freely becomes incarnate as human in a loving divine project of redemption of man in history. God enters history as man to liberate man from the shackles of history by freely relinquishing his divine status of eternal Logos. This view of kenosis emphasized the relinquishing, divestment and self-emptying of ther divine Logos of all his transcendent attributes of omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence etc. Kenosis is at the center of Kierkegaard's theology and christology and the latter brought his own philosophical, theological, and poetic originality to bear on the question of kenoticism. The kenotic motif in Kierkegaard is not related to any of the traditional dogmatic themes of christology like the dual natures of Christ, the problem of his consciousness (divine and human) or the doctrine of trinity. They, rather, relate to the question of the pursuit of truth that human beings, by their nature, find themselves engaged in. Kenosis is here related to the process of the discovery of truth. This shifts the focus away from the dual-natured figure of Christ and on to the nature of the relationship that subsists between man and Christ.
God's kenotic self-emptying is first outlined in the New Testament itself. The Philippians is the most famous kenotic text of the bible. "Though he was in the form of God, (he) did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2: 6 - 11)" These verses make clear and distinct reference to the two forms or two natures of Christ - 'in the form of God' and the 'form of a servant.' Not staying elevated with God, he forsook his divinity and descended in the form of man and partook of the latter's lowly destiny of suffering and death and purchased their redemption and liberation through his own excruciating death, voluntarily undergone, on the cross. He freely and lovingly shared in the suffering and death which is the lot of human beings. Thus the one who was the Lord of all became the servant of all. This belief in the notion of the self-emptying of God leading up to his assumption of the mortal human form is at the foundation of the Christian faith since the moment of its inception. As pointed out above, it was imagined and articulated in the New Testament itself.
The kenotic approach was to Christolgy was the only possible one in the face of the mystery that the figure of Christ was. The christian faith was preceded by the impassioned monotheism of Israel - their faith in the unity of one God. This God was majestic and inaccessible and was mediated through the prophets' inspired words and the history and destiny of the nation of Israel was shaped and guided by these words. However with advent of the Christic mission, death through crucifixion and resurrection, God intervened in a novel and intimate way in history and brought redemtion to humanity and creation through Christ. This was a fresh, original, and unique encounter of gad and man in history in the figure and form of the God-man - the Son of God. "In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prohets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son." (Hebrews 1:1-2) The figure of Christ and his chosen witnesses attested to the personal presence of God in him. God, through Christ incarnate, lived through the vicissitudes of sufferings, limitations and death, all of which form the common destiny of man on earth. Therefore, the person of Christ is understood to be a dual one; not psychologically, but spiritually. Just as he shared in the great glory of God, he also participated in the sufferings and sorrows of man and died on the cross.
Kierkegaard resisted all rational christology. Kenosis is not for him a theological tool or instrument through which to cut asunder the gordian knot of philosophical and historical entanglements and problems. It was, rather, for him, an absolute paradox on which all endeavours to rationalize away this mysterious core of the Christian dogma founder. It, to put it briefly, eludes reason and its ratiocinative project. It has resisted the European emlightenment project and its attempts to either dismiss it altogether as something opposed to reason or to assimilate it to itself through a prism amenable to a rational foundation and in the process transforming the 'faith' beyond recognition or changing its faith based character altogether. (Dawe, Form of a servant, 157) The kenotic motif does not seek to provide a rational foundation to the christian faith. It rather, on the contrary, intensifies its essential mystery and amplifies the offence to reason that Christian dogma at its heart is. (Reference) Kierkegaard's kenotic position is a rather radical one. he transformed the whole meaning and relevance of the kenotic motif through his theological writings. The kenotic motif, until kierkegaard, had been based on the principle of intelligibility or rationality whose raison d'etre was to search for a rational foundation to the christological mystery. However, Kiefrkegaard turned the perspective from that of a serch for a principle of intelligibility or rational foundation to that of a paradox of grace which is to be taken on faith as the knowledge whose foundation and medium is revelation. The whole power of the revelatory word lies in its reception in faith. It is no more a matter of solving intellectuyal, historical, or philosophical problems; for example, that of the dual natures of Christ or the problem of his divine-human consciousness. Kenosis, for him, is a sovereign act of the omnipotence of God through which the latter, paradoxically, renders himself humanly powerless and at the mercy of the malevolent designs of human beings. He thus puts in the hands of the latter power over his life and death and makes of himself, who is the lord of all, the suffering servant of all. All 'rational' articulations and speculations fall reverently silent in the face of this divine mystery. Kierkegaard thus turns the kenotic motif upside down and rendered its historical orientation and usage null and void. He seals kenosis off from from any further speculation in an apophasis of thought by encapsulating it in a paradox and elevates it to the highest pedestal of the christian dogmatic superstructure.
There appears to be, on first glance, a fundamental contrast between the Christic form of God and the Christic form of man. The whole situation makes for a fundamentally irreconcilable composite figure of Christ. This problem of two apparently irreconcilable figures, divine and human, of Christ has beset christianity since its very inception. Two opposing modes of existence having for their locus the same man is a paradoxical conception and an offence to reason. Simply put, how can God be man and how can a man be God? The answer to this question is found in the New Testament: "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal to God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." (Philippians 2:6-8) The technical name for this freely willed assumption of the form of a servant by God is kenosis which is derived from the Greek word 'keno' meaning emptied. (Reference) Kenosis is simply the belief in divine self-emptying of his divine nature. When God incarnated himself in the form of the suffering servant that was Jesus Christ he limited and circumspected in some form or aspect his own divinity. From long usage God's self-emptying act has become a theological and Christological commonplace, but when encountered in all its original power and meaning it surprises us with its radicality of conception in Christian faith and radically new understanding that it heraslds about the nature of God and his relation to man. This new understanding is epitomized by phrases such as "he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant" and "though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor" (Reference). The kenotic theme was a transvaluation of all values (Nietzsche, reference) and was a veritable theological and moral revolution in the ancient world whereby the hierarchy of values was upended and turned upside down. God in the servant form was blasphemous to the ancient imagination whose concept of divine was until then steeped in arictocratic values. The idea of kenosis brought a radically new conception to the fore which has now lost its edge somewhat with two millennia of indoctrination of the kenotic motif. Kenosis revolutionized the traditional notions of God, his relation to man, and religion. Now, having become a part of the doctrinal formulas, they have lost, to the moden ears, somewhat of their original power. The Roman skeptic philosopher, Celsus, was scandalized by this very declaration of the Christian faith that the eternal and unchanging God had descended to earth to be incarnated as a flesh and blood man who took on the passions and sufferings of the human light (Reference). This power to scandalize has somewhat diminished but not altogether lost by the Christian dogmatic faith. Celsus found such a conception of God to be inherently absurd and paradoxical. However, it is this very paradoxicality and absurdity in which Kierkegaard found the critical key to the Christian faith. (Reference) This very point, also, reflects the uniqueness and relevance of the kenotic motif to the Christian faith for it is through this kenosis/sel-emptying/self-limitation that the incarnation of God on earth is realized.
It is important here to remember that God was Divine in and through this fact of his free assumption of the human form to accomplish the divine project of redeeming all humanity through an intervention in history. Kierkegaard interprets this divine kenosis in aporetic terms. He argues that in the face of this absurd and the paradoxical, language must fall into proround silence and the void created by this apophatic silence overfilled with reverent faith. "Hence, we see in every theological treatise the Godhead religiously celebrated, both as Monad and unity, on account of the simplicity and oneness of Its supernatural indivisibility from which, as an unifying power, we are unified, and when our divided diversities have been folded together, in a manner supermundane, we are collected into a godlike unit and divinely-imitated union; but, also as triad, on account of the tri-personal manifestation of the superessential productiveness, from which all paternity in heaven and on earth is, and is named; also, as cause of things existing, since all things were brought into being on account of Its creative goodness, both wise and good, because all things, whilst preserving the properties of their own nature unimpaired, are filled with every inspired harmony and holy comeliness, but pre-eminently, as loving towards man, because It truly and wholly shared, in one of Its Persons (subsistencies), in things belonging to us. recalling to Itself and replacing the human extremity, out of which, in a manner unutterable, the simplex Jesus was composed, and the Everlasting took a temporal duration, and He, Who is superessentially exalted above every rank throughout all nature, became within our nature, whilst retaining the unchangeable and unconfused steadfastness of His own properties." (Dionysius, Divine Names) A simplex is composed of or characterized by a single part or structure. Jesus was formed in a mysterious way that defies all linguistic expression, rationality and logic - 'in a manner unutterable.' He is the everlasting that took on the limited and finite human's 'temporal duration'. That which is superessentially exalted above all ranks throughout nature 'became within our nature' and as he did so he retained his unchangeability and eternal essence (which is divine). That which is above all names brooks "no pondering about the loss or change of of divine attributes."(Dawe, Form of a servant, 160) The divine attributes, Dionysius posits, are retained in the human incarnation of Jesus as he is essentially divine mystery and a name above all names that seek to signify and comprehend it and eludes all aprehension mediated by language and human knowledge/sciences. "And yet, if It is superior to every expression and every knowledge, and is altogether placed above mind and essence, - being such as embraces and unites and comprehends and anticipates all things, but Itself is altogether incomprehensible to all, and of It, there is neither perception nor imagination, nor surmise, nor name, nor expression, nor contact, nor science; in what way can our treatise thoroughly investigarte the meaning of the Divine Names, when the superessential Deity is shown to be without Name, and above Name?" Christ, in his divine aspect, his true essence, is above, beyond and without all names.
Kenosis is not a problem for reason to grapple with but a paradox that has to be faithfully embraced. The kenotic motif is made manifest to understanding through revelation. It cannot be grasped by reason. Kierkegaard renders irrelevant the arguments about the dual natures of Christ, the question of the possession of divine attributes by the servant form of suffering, human Jesus. In the face of the paradoxical mystery that the figure of Jesus is, all argumentation, reasoning and language must fall silent. It is only in this apophatic silence that the true mystery of Jesus can be fully received. Kierkegaard deems the formulation of this question in these terms an unproductive one. The right question, or perspective, lies for him elsewhere. The right way for him to approach this problematic is from the viewpoint of faith or grace. God's kenosis is revealed to us the scriptural revelations which are a gift of the divine grace and the scriptural revelation takes precedence over all human reasoning. The only legoitimate hermeneutic principle in this context is of faith through which the scriptural revelation of God's self-emptying kenosis on the cross is made manifest to the subject's heart and mind. However, notwithstanding Kierkegaard's assertion that the question of God's dual natures is a futile one, we must nevertheless probe his writings as to the 'solution' of the question of God's concomitant humanity and divinity as it pertains to the fundamental question about God retaining his divinity while in the servant form.
"I make no new statement, but say what has long been settled. God is good, and beautiful, and blessed, and that in the best and most beautiful degree. But if he comes down among men, He must undergo a change, and a change from good to evil, from beauty to ugliness, from happiness to misery, and from best to worst. Who then would make choice of such a change?" (Origen, Against Celsus, IV. 14) Theologians have contorted and tied themselves into knots with their convoluted arguments trying to get at the mystery of the kenotic Christ. Celsus, steeped in Greek philosophy and theology, approached the problem of the kenotic, self-emptying God from the viewpoint of the Greek conception of God which imagined and posited the latter as changeless, impassible and eternal. From such a perspective, a conception that interprets God as in the throes of suffering, passion and death as untenable and impossible. To the ancient Greek mind, divine kenosis is a paradox, an offence to reason and an impossibility. The Jewish conception was that of a transcendent God whose name itself was too holy to be uttered. It was blasphemous to the Jewish mind to equate Jesus with this transcendent God or to understand him as the one and the same God. It was blasphemous for a Jew to consider Jesus divine in any way. To elevate Jesus to godhood was "to the jews a stumbling block, to the Greeks foolishness." (Reference) However, the very first believers or the early Christians entertained no doubt whatsoever of Jesus' godhood. Ancient critics of Christianity like Celsus recognized and understood, more acutely than many modern theologians, the divine kenosis to be the very heart of the christian faith. This doctrine of the divine self-emptying of Christ on the cross is the key to the mystery of the Christian faith.
Although, when dealing with the christological problems that we encounter on our way to understanding kenosis and the Christic mystery we tend to club distinct kenotic terms and processes like limitation, self-emptying, servant form etc. together, we must stay aware that they all have not just their own peculiar nuances, but also their own distinct connotations and denotations. God of his own sovereign and free volition emptied himself of his own divine content and assumed the form of a servant (a humble and suffering human being) through which form he experienced the humiliating and excruciating death on the cross. God, in Christ, freely undertakes to empty himself kenotically and freely chooses the servant form. God in his omnipotence and sovereign will makes the choice of being humanly incarnated and of dying on the cross. On a close reading of 'Practice in Christianity', one discovers that though Kierkegaard uses the term servant to characterize Jesus' earthly form, he does not explicitly articulate or formulate the concept of kenosis. Kierkegaard however does raise the question of the nature and content of kenosis. What is the divine content of which Jesus as a man is emptied? There is, here, a confusion of means and ends. The self-emptying/kenosis is the process or act or means through which his assumption of the servant form is effected. The two get confused into an inchoate mass of vague christology. It is, therefore, imperative that the questions are formulated precisely, clearly, and unambiguously. Kenosis has to be understood with respect to God's transcendence in relation to the human subject. The essence of kenosis has to be looked for in the relation of God to man. God's omnipotence is to be understood from the fact of his creating the world out of nothing. However, his relation to this world and the created human subject who inhabits it is not that of nothing for man is more than 'nothing' for him. God's incarnation in Christ is a reflection of this relationship. It is through this incarnation that God manifests and expresses his relation to creation. The relation in which God existed with the world is intensified by the event of his incarnate presence gracing the earth. The full reciprocality of the relation between God and man is embodied and signified by Christ's incarnate participation in the world of human suffering and death.
The incarnation is anchored in the essential and radical freedom of God and God embarks on this relationship with man in his absolute and essential freedom. God remains transcendent even as he enters into this relationship with man out of his own free and sovereign will. Christ is the immanent presence of the transcendent God on earth enunciated by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as Cosmic Christ (Reference). The decisions of the divine Christ are rooted and founded in eternity and the incognito incarnation is the eternal and free will of the God that is Christ. The concealment of God behind the figure of Christ is the most profound possible because humble and mortal man is at the furthest remove from the omnipotent and eternal God. (Paul Sponheim, 'Relational Transcendence in Divine Agency' in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Practice in Christianity, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004, 52) The kenosis that God thus undergoes to become man is definitely a divine one for no mortal man is capable of such self-emptying incognito. The incarnation of Christ is an intensification and a radical event in the history of humanity and of the world. Through this incarnation God enters in a radically new relationship with man and makes his will known and redeems the latter. Such a change in creation, which is promised to be made anew in and through the resurrection of Christ, can be wrought only in the unique way that God chooses to will it by incarnating himself in the form and likeness of suffering and mortal man. (Paul Sponheim, Kierkegaard on Christ and Christian Coherence, London: SCM, 1968, 177) God thus participates in the suffering and death of man to redeem and liberate him from the power of flesh and death. The incarnation and resurrection of Christ from the death on the cross is the fulfilment of the purpose of creation and is, at the same time, making anew of all things old and dead. Anti-Climacus describes the process of kenosis as "the infinitely long way from being God to becoming human." (Reference) Kierkegaard characterized the whole life of Christ on earth culminating in his death on the cross as a form of daily and continual kenosis. Christ's omnipotent and sovereign free will was maintained at all times and throughout his earthly mission and he voluntarily underwent the suffering and death entailed by his mission on earth. It was always and at all moments possible for him through his divine agence to summon the divine intervantion that would cut off his sufferings and free him from the mortal lot that he had freely chosen for himself. "...he, the abased one, at all times in his power to ask his Father in Heaven to send legions of angels to him to avert this terrible thing." (Sponheim, Relational Transcendence in Divine Agency,' 64) "Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?" (Matthew 26: 53, KJV) There is here a difference between absolute power and omnipotence as Kierkegaard enunciates it. Absolute powere is here an immanent attribute with which Christ is invested. However, Christ's earthly ministry is defined by an absence of the relative attribute of power which is omnipotence. This omnipotence has to do with the exercise of this absolute power in relation to the world. The relative attribute of omnipotence, therefore, instead of being a magnification of absolute power is rather a diminishing or limitation of it. Christ, Kierkegaard demonstrates in 'Practice in Christianity', exists by divesting himself of the possession of all power rather than by simply refraining from making use of that power.
The divine self-emptying in Christ is the key to and at the heart of the Christian faith. The mystery of divine kenosis has long puzzled and eluded humanity. The kenotic motif has yielded profound and radical insights into the nature of the divine, but, at the same, it has engendered a lot of mistenterpretation and misunderstanding of the articulations of the kenotic theme. In their attempts to construe kenosis in fidelity to its Christian origine, theologians have resorted to ancient Greek philosophical paradigms and to the poetics of metaphoricity. However, the kenotic motif has eluded all slick interpretations and neat fitting into pre-existent thought patterns. The idea of kenosis altogether transcended the whole history of theological thinking until then. However, it has been fateful in creatively shaping the emergence of Christology, that is, ways of thinking about the figure of Christ. From such a point of departure, it has expanded to encompass the doctrine of the idea of God and ethical praxis in Christianity. But the idea of kenosis itself has given rise to controveries, interpretations and counterinterpretations. However, the kenotic motif has been at work within the Christian dogma/faith from the earliest times to the contemporary. As pointed out earlier we find the kenotic motif articulated in the very text of the New Testament in one of the Pauline epistles to the Philippians. (Reference) This brief kenotic text is not an isolated phenomenon in the history of the Christian faith and was later, over the centuries, frequently taken up by theologians and is operative at the heart of the christological tradition. The kenotic motif is deeply intertwined with the theme of salvation in Christianity.
"For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich." (II Corinthians 8:9, KJV) The theme of kenosis is a rich and inclusive one and pertains to both the ethical and the soteriological domains. Paul exhorts the disciples to a self-emptying humility and cites divine kenosis on the cross as the exemplar. Christ's kenosis becomes the moral bedrock of the Christian faith. When addressing the Philippians Paul cites the example of Christ's sovereignly free act of abandoning his heavenly abode to descend to earth in the form of a lowly and humble servant partaking of the nature of suffering and death assigned to the human lot and purchasing the redemtion of humanity through his self-sacrifice on the cross. Sponheim points out that the kenosis of Christ, as delineated by Paul in the second Corinthians, becomes the foundation of the moral appeal by the former to the latter to generously give of their riches to the poor saints of Jerusalem. Christ's divestment of his own divine riches to become a poor servant on earth serves as an example of the foundational Christian moral value of charity. Christ's free self-giving becomes the moral foundation of all Christian self-giving and moral praxis.
The christological idea of kenosis is reflected in Hegel's speculative conception of the self-divesting of logos until "death of death and on the other hand with Kierkegaard's existential-dialectical determination of 'contemporaneity' solely with the abased God-man as the 'absolute paradox.'" The God-man, God incarnate as man, is the criterion that measures the theological determinations of this 'absolute paradox.' Kierkegaard, however, does not explicitly elaborate on the nature of kenosis that the figure of God-man undergoes on earth. For Kierkegaard, the whole meaning of faith hinges on an experience of contemporaneity with Christ. The faithful have to respond to Christ as if they are a contemporary of the latter. It is in this context that Kierkegaard asks the critical question about how and if we would have responded to the God-man Christ walking on earth had we been a contemporary of the latter. Therefore, all faith questions are judged from the perspective of this hypothetical perspective of contemporaneity with Christ and from the urgency of the question of faith the question of contemporaneity transcends its hypothetical nature. This question of contemporaneity gives rise to a new kind of scriptural hermeneutics. The contemporaneity with Christ, a figure that existed two millennia ago, is effectuated through a special strategy of reading the scriptures. A kind of 'imaginative co-presence' is conjured up by reading the scripture thus. ( (2017) Contemporaneity and communion: Kierkegaard on the personal presence of Christ, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 25:1, 41-62, DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2016.1219843) Christ is here interpreted as a living presence rather than an historical agent. The figure of Christ thus transcends history to become co-eternal with all times. Kierkegaard here resorts to a sacramental interpretation of the Christic mystery whereby Christ is made truly present in the sacament of communion. The same strategy of making Christ co-present with oneself is extended to the strategies of scriptural hermeneutics of co-presence. The contemporaneity with Christ is construed in terms of inter-subjective relations. Any intersubjective relation, between the I and thou, is not a one way street but a two-way exchange oif hearts and minds; likewise, Kierkegaard demonstrates, the relationship between Christ and the faithful is a two-way attention sharing. (2017) Contemporaneity and communion: Kierkegaard on the personal presence of Christ, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 25:1, 41-62, DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2016.1219843) God's free self-giving through kenosis on the cross, through the gift of his own life on cross and of miraculous powers throughout his earthly misnistry, sets the precedent for and becomes an exemplar for Christian self-giving. Christ's kenotic self-emptying on the cross shaped the very nature and essence of the Christian faith for millennia to come and became its moral and Christological cornerstone. The very divinity of Christ is defined by kenosis. It is both an ethical and theological motif. The kenotic motif forms the backdrop against which all the thorny issues of the Christian doctrine have been sought to be formulated. The kenotic motif is at the very center of the question of the freedom and immutability of God. There is a paradox, as Kierkegaard articulated it (see above), at the heart of the kenotic question. If God kenotically empties himself of his divine fullness and contenct, how can he still retain his Godhood as kenosis is a change that goes against the very grain of divine unchangability? It also brings into sharp focus the Christian dogma of a trinitarian God. How does the notion of a self-emptied Christ fit into the concept of trinity and what relations do the three parts of the trinity bear toward each other? To reverse the question, it can be asked how the divine self can exist humanly and what is the meaning of the historical and human existence of God whose true abode is eternity? What does it mean for him to exist historically in a mortal and susceptivle human form/body?
There is a stunning similarity, as Stephen Dunning points out, between in the way that Kierkegaard, through Climacus, in 'Practice in Christianity', depicts the assumption of the humble and suffering servant form and the portrayal of kenosis in Philippians 2. (Stephen N. Dunning, Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of Stages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 171) To infer the separation of the divine from the human in the figure of Christ through the process of Kenosis would be missing the point altogether. The humanity of God in Christ is not a contradiction in terms. The case of the kenotic Christ is neither an apotheosis in which a human or some other 'object' iselevated to the divine status of Godhood nor a theophany neither a theophany, that is, a visible manifestation of God to humanity. Nor was this a sublation of these two, apotheosis and theophany, into an Aufhebung. (Stephen N. Dunning, 'Transformed by the Gospel: What we learn about the Stages from the Lilies and the Birds,' in Robert L. Perkins ed. in Inernational Kierkegaard Commentary: Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005, p. 111) In the 'Upbuilding Discourses', Kierkegaard frequently alludes to the kenotic Christology of the Philippians. (Kierkegaard, Upbuiding/Edifying Discourses) Although it is not a dialectical synthesis of apotheosis and theophany which merge and form something new which retains the elements of the former two as thesis and antithesis. The theophanous element has an aspect of equality to it marked by the potential of the human to be divinized. The element of apotheosis, on the other hand is essentially asymmetrical, as the deity manifests itself to humanity without losing its divinity and itself becoming human. The asymmetry of the divine and the human is maintained here. Whereas the divinization of the human in apotheosis upsets the asymmetrical balance between God and man by equalizing the two. Christ for Kierkegaard, Dunning asserts, is God in the form of man as the culmination of the kenotic act of God. This 'new' Lord is lord precisely in his capacity as a servant of creation and humanity whose Lord he is in reality. This lord is a lord as a human being and a servant of those who, in the final analysis and at the beginning of beginnings are subject to his lordship.
The divine attributes of Jesus are hidden or incognito as the king is incognito in Johannes Climacus in Kierkegaard's 'Philosophical Fragments' and as Climacus emphasizes in Kierkegaard's 'Practice in Christianity'. Some theologians have written about this incognito or hiddenness or krypsis of the divine attributes in Christ. (John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought, London: SCM, 1990, p. 241) However, in any kenotic Christology there lurks a danger of docetism that though the disguise or garb or form of Christ was human, it was, nevertheless, a divine or celestial substance that constituted his body. Therefore, there was no real suffering in Christ's kenotic passion on earth and on the cross. Such a lapse into docetism of the kenotic doctrine, such as the one that the gnostics hold (Reference), rendefr Christ's body and spirit impermeable by and insensible to human pain and suffering. Such a Christ becomes a phantasm - neither human, nor god and his sufferings are reduced to mere spectacle or appearance. Kierkegaard does not have such a kenosis in mind at all when he emphatically asserts the divine krypsis of Christ. (Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought, p. 242) The parable of the king and the humble servant in Kierkegaard's 'Philosophical Fragments' is a case in point where any assertions that weaken the emphasis on this kenotic krypsis or the doctrine of the hiddenness of the divine attributes of and in Christ are counteracted by affirmations that bring into sharp focus the kenosis and Krypsis in a thoroughgoing synthesis leading up to a profound view of God.
This begs the critical question about how Christ can be human if he has merely hidden his divine attributes. It is at this point that the idea of kenosis comes critically into play. Kenosis, through a self-emptying makes the humanity of God possible. It forms not just Christological cornerstone of the Christian faith, but also sets the pattern for moral emulation and profoundly ethical norms. Kenosis is not merely a convenient theological tool but is operative at the very heart of Christian faith and its moral manifestation in agape. By dint of the Servant Lord it makes possible, it also creates a new 'class' of people that we can aptly call the servant people. The kenotic theme has been actively operative theologicall right through the first two Christian millennia and into the third. The kenotic hymn in the Philippians open the floodgates for kenotic productions to overflow the currents of the faith in the theological and devotional compositions of Origen, Tertullian, John Wesley, Gregory of Nazianzus, St Bernard, Hegel (in his ontological formulations), Luther, Gottfried Thomasius, and Karl Barth. (Oord. T.J. "Essential Kenosis" in The Nature of Love: A Theology, Chalice Press, 2010. p. 156) The kenosis motif runs right through the history of the faith. The theological doctrines of God and Christ and the ethical one of Christian praxis and love have all been witness to theologians rersorting to the notion of divine self-emptying in their struggle to achieve full and satisfying formulations and answers. However, any adequate appreciation of the kenotic motif necessiates the situating of the theme in the context of its historical development. There has been an intensification of the kenotic motif in the Christologies of the nineteenth and twenthieth centuries that has continued into the present century. Gradually, during the course of the last two centuries, a modern christology based on the kenosis motif has evolved. However, the kenosis motif has struggled to come to the fore of modern christological thinking. (Thomas Jay Oord Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement, Brazos Press, 2010)The key to understanding the value of the kenosis motif to Christology is in its ability to satisfyingly explain the dogma of the human incarnation of God. We have seen earlier how the krypsis or hiddenness or incognito motif fails to fully account for the human incarnation of God. The kenosis motif allows us to appreciate the fact that the human Jesus is not a mere incognito or guise or garb but the actual form of the incarnate God. Kierkegaard demonstrates this point through the parable of the king and the humble maiden. The king poders taking on the guise of the beggar which alludes to the krypsis motif of hiddenness or incognito. However, that would only be his guise or garb and not his true and actual form. This would engender duplicity into the courtship process and a true and faithful relationship cannot be built on such a foundation. Kierkegaard draws this conclusion from the parable that the servant form of God could not have been a mere guise but the actual incarnate form of God with all his divine attributes kenotically self-emptied. Kierkegaard resorts to the metaphor of imprisonment (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 55) to interpret Christ's human incarnation as god imprisoned in his servant form. This servant form is not one of hiddenness or incognito or krypsis but one of kenosis or self-emptying. According to this interpretation, Jesus is not the disguise behind which Christ hides but is actually the very form of God emptied of his divine content to enable him to participate in human suuffering and death and through this sym-pathetic participation to redeem mankind. By partaking of human suffering, he is able to redeem them from it. The parable of the king and the humble maiden alludes to the true self-emptying of God and not a mere krypsis. The question of kenosis is not merely one of christological formulations interspersing the history of dogmatic theology, nor is it merely a question of isolated kenotic passages in the New Testament, nor even that of a recurring theme in the history of faith; rather, it goes to the very heart of the Christian faith and impregnates and fructifies all its conceptions. It is at the center of the simple and fundamental faith of the church that Christ as the incarnation of God emptied himself of his divinity to achieve a life of human fulness and through this life bearing the cross and ending on the cross at the hands of man redeemed humanity. The kenosis underlines the fundamental freedom of God manifested in and through his choice of the servant form to accomplish the redemtion of the creation and God is fully God in and through this freedom. He is free to embody the absolute paradox of the servant God. (Kierkegaard, Absolute Paradox Reference). It is not a peripheral belief but cuts to the very heart of the matter. Truth, in the form of the incarnate God, is humiliated and persecuted on the cross where the crucified God fully empties himself in solidarity with the suffering humanity and hence passes a necessary stage on the path to redemption. Therefore, the crux of the moral imitation of Christ lies in the self-emptying and self-renunciation of the practitioner bound to the rest of the created order in co-suffering. (Romans 'creation travaileth' reference)
The kenosis motif has not had a permanent unchanging form through the history of Christian theology but has manifested itself in variegated forms. The connotations, denotations and nuances of and the distinctions between these various forms must be clearly eked out to arrive at a true appreciation and understanding of the kenosis motif and to clearly enunciate the potential of the latter for contemporary theology. A motif is defined as "a dominant or recurring idea in an artistic work" or "a decorative image or design, especially a repeated one forming a pattern" (Definitions from Oxford languages) Although kenosis is understood to be a motif in New Testament, there are not too many references to it apart from a kenotic hymn in II Philippians and an odd verse in the II Corinthians. (See above) It is much more fundamental motif operative in the depths of the faith and manifested in its scriptural texts, the tradition and its theological and exegetical outgrowth. The self-emptying of Christ on the cross acts as the fountain or wellspring from which Christian agape and faith abundantly flow forth. The connotations and denotations of this term must be first laid as bare as analytically possible. However, before one can embark on such an analysis, the meaning of the term must be defined and clearly comprehended. As we saw above, the concept of motif has had its origin in artistic and literary discourse and literary and aesthetic criticism. The motif forms one of the embedded subtexts of a given text. It can be either explicit or implicit. As an implicit motif, it runs along as an undercurrent hidden in s deeper layer of the text and from its depth shapes the meaning and structure of the text. In its explicit form, it subsists as a theme that intertwines in a playful engagement with other elements of the text and by doing this contributes critcally to the meaning-making enterprise of the text. Kenosis, from this point of view, is a motif of Christian faith. It enables the synthesis of the disparate elements and assertions of the text, often times articulated as questions or answers that beset the text from underneath, sometimes as implicit and complex themes which are woven into a coherent whole by the operative motif or motifs of the text. The New Testament Christological and theological questions and their tentative affirmations are woven together and given a meaningful shape and structure, shaping the emergence of christology and a new theology, by the kenosis motif. The kenosis motif is critical to the emergence of a christological theology. It provides the answers to the essential and underlying theological questions that the New Testament christology raises. A motif can be articulated in various possible ways. For example, in the New Testament text itself the Philippian epistle expresses it in the form of a hymn and the Corinthian epistle formulates it in the form of a moral exhortation. (References) The kenosis motif deals and engaes with fundamental questions and advances affirmations, negations, or propositions but not necessary in the form of logical statements. It can be expressed in any number of ways that discursive though embodies itself in. Poesis is, for example, one common way in and through which motifs work themselves out. The Philippians hymn on Christ's kenosis is a case in point.
Kierkegaard is grappling with the kenotic motif when he alludes to Christ's self-emptying through the parable of the king and the lowly maiden. Parable is a favorite genre of Kierkegaard when engaging with theological questions like the kenosis motif. He expresses and resolves the such theological theme through parables, epistles, prefaces, and other literary tools such as irony (on which his doctoral dissertation was based). (Reference) Through this parable Kierkegaard makes the case for kenosis as opposed to krypsis. Christ's kenosis, in the esthical context, becomes the highest moral standard by which all moral evaluations are judged. Kenosis is thus worked out by Kierkegaard as not just the theoretical cornerstone of the dogma but also as the revaluation of all moral values (Reference Nietzsche) - a moral revolution set in motion by his self-emptying and self-renunciation. The kenosis of an imitator of Christ is achieved through an emptying out of his ego and its contents: a self-denying that previleges the other over the self and co-suffers with all creation. Kenosis thus is an act of solidarity with the suffering of the whole created order "for the whole creation travaileth together in pain." (Romans Verse on travailing creation) Both Christianity and Buddhism recognize suffering as a necessary condition of human existence. (References) However, they differ on the value and the meaning of suffering. Whereas, Buddhism holds suffering to be a necessary truth of existence, it is sought to be overcome and does not contain any soteriological value in itself. The Christian outlook, on the other hand, deems suffering to be a positive aspect of the earthly existence on account of its soteriological and moral value and choosing a moral path fraught with suffering, bearing the cross (New Testament Reference), in solidarity and com-passion with the whole travailing creation and the divine injunction is enjoined. The theme of suffering and its moral implications has, all through the centuries, been profoundly shaped in Christendom by the Kenotic motif. It has continued to shed light on the theme of suffering down into the contemporary times.
The first of Kierkegaard's 'Two Minor Ethical-Religious Essays', titled 'Does a human being have the right to let himself be put to death for the truth?', signed pseudonymously as H.H., (Reference), comments on this relation between suffering and kenosis. Kierkegaard adumbrates that love stands counterpoised against the world in a kind of tension and the nature of God (agape) (Reference) is essentially opposed to the values of the world. However, with the advent of Christ in history this relationship between God and world, creator and creation, is inverted. Christ harbingers a moral revolution, a transvaluation of values, embodied by the beatitudes and his kenosis on the cross. (Reference beatitudes and Nietzsche) This self-emptying act of Christ transforms the very nature of the relationship between God and man, Creator and creation, and this transformation is manifested by his kenosis on the cross through which he demonstrates an ultimate and egoless concern for the other. (Reference Levinas) Kierkegaard suggests in the essay that the true nature of the divine Christ is reflected in his self-abasement, an act of agape and divine kenosis, that he subjects himself to in his salvational mission to redeem creation. If there is one category, above all others, that characterized the nature of the Christian conception of God, it is love or agape and this agape begins with, has its ultimate abode in and finds its essential nature in the kenotic act of Christ which is understood as self-emptying or the pouring out his whole self out of love for and in soliadarity with the travailing creation.
The kenotic motif has been articulated or expressed in variegated ways in the tradition/s. Differnt genres, discourses and systems, ranging from devotional hymns to theological treatises, have been employed to formulate the kenosis motif. The motif in itself is broader, more general and fundamental than any of its particular articulations. It may be a systematic or philosophical formulation through which the motif is worked out as a logical truth or proposition or statement. Or it may be a devotional or theological sentiment or emotion which is then given articulation through more artistic or aesthetic means such as hymns. or again it may be a moral assertion or exhortation which could form the theoretical or doctrinal core of a sermon. Kenosis, at the most fundamental level, is a motif of the Christian faith as a whole. In a theological context, a motif answers a key foundational question? The question of the what and the how of God's redemption of the world is such a foundational question and the kenosis motif addresses the very heart of this question and resolves it with affirmations formulated through diffrent genres of writing and speaking about the faith. The Christian faith holds the Christic incarnation, through which God gifts himself wholly and gracefully to creation (and humanity) to be the center of its response to this central question of the faith. God empties himself into creation in his sovereign and absolutel divine freedom. It is a movement akin to the divine act of creation in which God freely pours himself out into creation. God freely empties himself to become like one of and at one with the created order. God chose the servant form of the humble and suffering man whose existence is held in bondage with and in creation. God abandons his sovereign freedom and freely embraces this bondage to bind himself with his creation in solidarity and compasssion so that he can finally redeem it with his own redemption. The kenosis is wholly and finally effectuated on the cross and the redemption in resurrection. Go's full identification with the earthly man is realized on the cross man's total and final redemption in God's resurrection in Christ. It is thus that God fully participates in the world, creator in creation, through this kenotic assumption of the servant form.
Imitation Christis or imitation of Christ (Reference Thomas a' Kempis) is the primary moral template of the Christian faith. (Merold Westphal, 2004, 'Kenosis and Offense: A Kierkegaardian Look at Divine Transcendence', in Robert L. Perkins, ed., International Kierkegaard Commentary: Practice in Christianity, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, p. 152) An imitation of Christnecessarilies implies a self-emptying or kenosis patterned on that of Christ. Just as kenosis has a metaphysical aspect wherein the divine Christ self-empties into the human Jesus, it has also a moral aspect to it whereby the imitator seeks to replicate Christ's selfless kenosis in an ultimate concern for the other. (Reference Levinas) The disciple is willing to live and die and empty himself fully of all his possesions including his life for agape, for the love of the other. Although the Christological cogitations of Kierkegaard's 'Practice in Christianity' are anchored in the three gospel texts of Matthew 11: 28 (Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. - KJV), Matthew 11: 6 (And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me) and John 12: 32 (And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.) (References), there is also a significant allusion to the christological hymn in the Philippian epistle (Reference) on the kenosis of Christ. This is the foundational text of the kenosis motif in the Christian faith.
"Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." (Philippians 2: 6-8, KJV)
It is to this hymn that Kierkegaard alludes in his 'Practise in Christianity. 'The kenosis of Christ and the consequent resurrection is celebrated in this hymn as the final divine act that will seal the redemption of the world. The Lutheran strain in Kierkegaard manifests itself in the latter's kenoticism. (Reference for Luther's Kenoticism) The revival of the kenotic motif in the modern times was wrought by the theological revolution that Luther kindled in the western church. Luther was the first in the 'modern' era to recognize the kenotic process at work in the Christic incarnation whereby Christ emptied himself of his divine attributes to be incarnated as fully human. Luther interpreted the sacrament of the eucharist and percieved its symbolic significance for kenosis and inferred from its semiotic structure his concept of kenosis. However, the idea of kenosis was more fully developed in the nineteenth century through the works of Ernst Sartorius (Reference) and Gottfried Thomasius (Reference). (David R. Law, 'Luther's Legacy and the Origins of Kenotic Christology,' Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Volume 93, Number 2, Autumn 2017, pp. 41-68, Manchester University Press) Kenosis can not be appreciated in separation and disassociation from the theme of resurrection which is the form that redemption takes in Christian theology. The assumption of creaturely limitations through the self-emptying of God has for its theological conclusion the overcoming of those very limitaions, the overcoming of the servant/human form as whole which is radically transformed upon the glorification/resurrection. It is in sharp contrast to the preceding Judaic theological conception of an almighty and omnipotent God who intervenes and salvages through sheer power. In a reversal and transvaluation of all values, God, in and through Christic incarnation, redeems through powerlessness. "Nothing is less sure, of course, than a god without sovereignty, nothing is less sure than his coming of course." (Jacques Derrida, Reference) God is the name of an event, a (weak) call for justice. (Reference, John Caputo) However, the horizon of this event is the furthest thing from any expectation of power. The name of God, rather than being merely the referent or the nominator of an event, is the very event itself, it is, therefore, denotive of a weak force. The metaphysical way of thinking and the resultant metaphysical theology tends to interpret God in terms of a strong force (omnipotent). However, as John Caputo argues (Reference), the God of metaphysical theology has had his time and it is time to think God anew and in a fashion wholly otherwise. According to this view, the call of this weak force that is God is unconditional but not that of a sovereign power. In a reversal of values reflective of the Sermon on the Mount (Reference the reversal of values in Sermon on the Mount) the strong are weak and the weak are strong.
God is the subject of theology, differance that of (Derridean) postmodern philosophy. Through an association of the two, John Caputo results in the coupling of a strong and major voice with a weak and minor one; God is undoubtedly here the strong and major voice and differance the weak and minor one. The semiotic and meaning-making system hinges on differential spacing through which the belief-systems of both believers and non-believers are engendered and function. Non-believers after all are those who merely believe something different from believers or have a different belief system. The spoken and written systems of language are made possible by the phonic and graphic differentiation respectively. Meaning creation in language is undergirded and marked by difference. This is true not just for linguistic signification but all systems and the whole range of cultural meaning. The structuralists, befoire Derrida dawned on the scene, interpreted language and other cultural systems to be rigorously structured and methodically governed by rules. Derrida argued against this formal completeness of the so called structural systems and posited that they are rather characterized by open-endedness and incompleteness. Caputo cites the example of the World Wide Web of such a network structured in an open-ended way where one link leads to another in an unpredictable and unsystematic way. It grows 'rhizomatically' and has no beginning and no end. It is essentially incompletable.
Jesus, likewise, is not associated with sovereign power but with the lowly and abased form of the servant. The servant form of Jesus is held in contrast to the glorified and exalted Christ. One can be a contemporary to the former but not to the latter. The latter has not yet dawned in history. This distinction by Kierkegaard between the lowly Jesus and the exalted Christ mirrors the 'theologia crucis' of Luther's Heidelberg Disputation of 1518. (Reference) The theses of this disputatioin find themselves mirrored in some of the Kierkegaardian themes. The influence of the Heidelberg Disputation on Kierkegaard is manifestly visible in Kierkegaard's writings, especially his 'Practice in Christianity'. The attitude of Anti-Climacus in 'Practice in Christianity' harmonizes profoundly with Luther's 'double thesis' of Christian faith, the first of which states that any real knowledge of God is mediated through Christ in specifically his servant form. The second part of the thesis pertains to moral praxis in Christian faith. Simple worship or admiration of Christ is grossly insufficient. One must, rather, fully imitate Christ in his suffering and abasement - in his servant form through which his agape is embodied. (Reference Matthew 7: 21) Imitation of Christ's kenotic dimension is enjoined above mere worshipful devotion. It is a fact that kenotic
"As a fool ignorant in my own mind, I ask for the hidden places of the gods - not having discovered I ask the sages who may have discovered, not knowing in order to know." (S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy)
Greek mythology, it is interesting to notice, connects eros, the god of love, corresponding to kama, with the creation of the universe. Plato says in his Symposium: "Eros neither had any parents nor is he ssaid by any unlearned men or by any poet to have had any ..." According to Aristotle. God moves as the object of desire. (S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy)
The poet's soul hears or has revealed to it the truth in its inspired condition, when the mind is lifted above the narrow plane of the discursive consciousness. (S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy)
In deep sleep the spirit dwells i a region far above the changeful life of sense in absolute union with Brahman. The turiya condition brings out the positive aspect of the negative emphasised in the condition of sleep. (S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy)
It is impossible for us finite beings to define the character of the ideal reality, though the Upanisads are quite emphatic that it is not a blank.Yet to refute false ideas of the highest and to point the truth that it is no abstraction, they indulge in inadequate concepts. Strictly speaking we cannot say anything of it. Yet for purposes of discussion, we are obliged to use intellectual concepts with their limited validity.(S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy)
It was not the intention of the upanisads to make of the deeper self an abstract nothingness. It is the fullest reality, the completest consciousness, and not a mere negative calm, untroubled by any unrest, and unpolluted by any blot or blemish. The logic of thought has in it a negative movement, where it rises by a repudiation of the finite, but this is only a stage in the onward march. By the negative process the self has to recognise that its essence is not in its finitude or self-sufficiency.
A rational demonstration of the limits of thought such as the one we have in Samkara is rendered possible only by the intervening of the great Buddhist tradition between the Upanisads and Sankara. (S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy)
The problems raised by intellect solve themselves the moment we transcend reasoning and start to live the religious life. (S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy)
We can describe this experience only by metaphors. (S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy)
The negative definitions point out how the positive attributes known to us are inadequate to the highest. (S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy)
Contradictory predicates are attached to Brahman to indicate that we are obliged to use negative conceptions so long as we employ the dialectics of intellect, though positive features are revealed when Brahman is intuited. (S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy)
While intellectual modesty born of a consciousness of human imperfections compelled the thinkers of the upanisads to rest in negative statements of the supreme reality, the false imitators of the Upanisad ideal, with an extreme of arrogant audacity, declare that Brahman is an absolutely homegeneous impersonal intelligence - a most dogmatic declaration alien to the true spirit of the Upanisads. Such a positive characterisation of the nature of Brahman is illogical - for even Samkara says that the real is non-dual, advaita, and nothing positive.
(S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy)
Traditionally, eros is counterposed against agape. St. Augustine was the first to explicitly enunciate this relationship of opposition between these two forms of 'love.' The two were "living realities for him, and helped to mould his conception of love.(Anders and Nygren, Agape and Eros)"
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