A Sneak Peek at My Research
Update on My Theological Writing
I write on (or intend to anyway) a number of subjects for A Wild Logos, including Neoplatonism, German Idealism, Neochalcedonian Christology, and the metaphysics of Scripture.
One area where I see all of these intersecting is the problem of apophaticism or negative theology, which is actually the subject of my dissertation research. On that note, I am happy to report that I finally sent a complete draft of my dissertation to my advisor, and I thought I would share with readers what I have been working on.
Here is a brief summary of the dissertation and a peek at the table of contents.
The Eclipse of the Word: The Problem of Modern Apophaticism
Over the last few decades, philosophical theology has witnessed an explosion of interest in negative theology and all things apophatic. As Denys Turner claims, “we are all apophatic theologians now.”
This dissertation (1) attempts a critical assessment of the contemporary apophatic turn and (2) stages a Christological intervention. The immediate target will be two theological trajectories which showcase the lack of linguistic confidence Venard laments. “Grammatical Thomists” such as Herbert McCabe or Stephen Mulhall offer an austere reading of the first questions of Aquinas’ Summa in the vein of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.[1] Meanwhile, a looser constellation of radical phenomenologists and hermeneuts, ranging from Jean-Luc Marion to Jack Caputo, privilege Heidegger, Levinas, and above all Derrida. Through the lens of these continental figures, we are presented with an apophatic canon: Dionysius, Nyssa, and a smattering of mystics.[2]
These two trajectories evince what this dissertation will call “the problem of modern apophaticism.” Negative theology, I argue, has come unmoored (along with anthropology and the doctrine of God) from a broader and more capacious theology of language, one which would see creatures as divine speech, at once included in and empowered by the eternal utterance of a divine-human Word. Instead, it now bears the unacknowledged but unmistakable stamp of Kantian agnosticism. Theological speech is straightjacketed by (1) a priori limits on human linguistic capacities and (2) models of transcendence which make collapse and failure their site. With religious language emptied of all intelligible content, divine-human linguistic communion is barred by an impermeable semantic barrier between God and creatures. This separation, Nestorian in its logic, undermines the very possibility of revelation and bars the way to a Christology faithful to post-Chalcedonian orthodoxy. The latter, I argue, proves the only foundation for a genuine “linguistic turn.”
Part I of this dissertation – “The Apophatic Turn: A Theological Appraisal” – operates primarily in a diagnostic or critical register. With telescoping focus, I stage a critique of the apophaticism which dominates contemporary theologies of language. At once a stance on linguistic and cognitive limits in things divine and a model of transcendence, the rough consensus I identity as “modern apophaticism” erects an impermeable semantic barrier between God and creatures, thus emptying theological speech of all humanly accessible content. No genuine doctrine of revelation or Christology, I argue, can be constructed on such a chasm, once established.
The first chapter – “‘To Whom Shall [Language] Turn”: A Metaphysical and Theological Crossroads – supplies wide-angle context for understanding modern apophaticism by charting two broad trajectories within twentieth-century philosophy of language’s so-called “linguistic turn” – or perhaps better, within this turn as received by contemporary philosophical theology. A first trajectory, suspicious of speculative metaphysics and vigilant about language’s limits, emerges in the analytic tradition from Wittgenstein and in the continental tradition from Derrida and key aspects of Heidegger’s thought. Rather than being theologically neutral, I argue that this iteration of the linguistic turn represents a kind of secularized negative theology which has had a hidden but distortionary effect on subsequent Christian thought. More fruitful, although still in need of a Christological clarification, is another trajectory which emerges in Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and certain other parts of Heidegger: a speculative metaphysics of the w/Word which foregrounds the disclosive capacities of language.
With this philosophical background in mind, the second chapter – “The Apophatic Gambit: Convergences in Theology’s Linguistic Turn” – offers a historical survey and theological profile of two of modern apophaticism’s most prominent varieties: Grammatical Thomism (roughly, a Wittgensteinian gloss on Aquinas) and radical phenomenology/hermeneutics (an interpretation of the mystical tradition after Dionysius indebted to Derrida and Heidegger). Despite their differences, I argue that both approaches espouse an apophaticism far more radical in its formulations and consequences than scholars have yet recognized, one which empties theological speech of all humanly accessible content and erects an impermeable semantic barrier between God and creatures. This convergence represents an astringent negative theology’s near-stranglehold on contemporary thinking.
The third chapter – “The Silencing of the Word: Modern Apophaticism’s Foreclosure of Revelation and Incarnation” – presses my critical appraisal to its theological conclusion, picking up on the Christological throughline in the argument thus far. If revelation is to be genuine, it must be received, or intelligently appropriated by its human recipients, which is not possible if it is emptied of all ascertainable meaning as modern apophaticists suggest. This undermining of revelation’s possibility is mirrored by a parallel problem in their Christologies: divinity is gramatically predicated of Christ, as something he has, but does not seem to deify or concretely interpenetrate his humanity. All this confirms that the semantic barrier erected by modern apophaticism’s model of transcendence is Nestorian in its fundamental logic. Unlike the unitive Christology of later councils (to which this dissertation attempts to remain faithful), modern apophaticism leaves no path open for divine revelation or genuine incarnation.
With this critique firmly in place, Part II of the dissertation – “An Ampler Ark: New Horizons in French Religious Thought” – develops a constructive Christological alternative in dialogue with the work of Olivier-Thomas Venard and Jean-Louis Chrétien. These under-appreciated authors have been selected for several reasons. First, they illustrate more capacious readings of the very figures championed by modern apophaticism: Aquinas and Dionysius, respectively. Second, the currency of this authors in Radical Orthodox circles allows for an illustration of this dissertation’s distinctive interpretation. Finally, they both face squarely the disjunctive tendencies of modern apophaticism and develop key aspects of an adequate Christological response.
The fourth chapter – “In Search of the Lost Word”: The Contribution of Olivier-Thomas Venard” – considers the Dominican friar’s “gothic” reading of Aquinas as a master of the arts of language whose confidence in logos was underwritten by faith in the Logos. Venard, facing ineffability’s void and postmodernity’s “generalized agnosticism” head-on, finds in the Angelic Doctor an unbroken symbolic continuum spanning cosmos and Trinity. Crucially, however, this continuum is Christologically guaranteed by the Incarnate Word’s assumption and “magnetization” of speech. Lingering tensions in Venard’s synthesis allow for an exploration of the limitations of Thomistic analogy and the exclusive reliance on metaphor.
The dissertation closes with an immanent critique of negative theology: “Silence and the Ark of Speech: The Linguistic Legacy of Jean-Louis Chrétien.” The French poet and man of letters demonstrates that the postmodern regard for silence and excess which animate modern apophaticism are best sheltered by linguistic audacity instead. Chrétien shows that a silence which is not promised to speech’s ark – like the “silence of the Platonists” – proves less hospitable than the Word and his polyphonic choir, the Mystical Body. For Chrétien, the only site where finite language’s collapse in the face of transcendence can be said without contradiction is the very place where its finitude is overcome – the hypostatic union and our ecclesial inclusion therein. Our words are incorporated into the Word, the Speech that goes from God to God, and so forever sheltered within a linguistic “ark” that resonates in the silence of the Father.
[1] These figures perhaps extend as far back to Victor Preller but include Herbert McCabe, the early David Burrell, Brian Davies, Stephen Mulhall, and Simon Hewitt. Their work is echoed at many points by the more eclectic—and often more cautious—scholarship of Denys Turner and Rowan Williams. Key works: Preller, Divine Science and the Science of God: A Reformulation of Thomas Aquinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); McCabe, God Matters (London: Continuum, 1987); Burrell, Aquinas: Faith and Action (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979); Mulhall, The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Simon Hewitt, Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2020); Turner, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), The Darkness of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). See chapter 2 for an extended profile.
[2] See especially the work of Jean-Luc Marion, Merold Westphal, and Jack Caputo, despite their differences. Key works: Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Towards a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001); Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). For an example of the use of Nyssa, see Scot Douglass, Theology of the Gap: Cappadocian Language Theory and the Trinitarian Controversy (New York: Peter Lang, 2005). Slightly less radical is Christos Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite, trans. Haralambos Ventis (London: T&T Clark, 2003).