Fordthought
  • Blog
  • Word of the Week
  • Dig Deeper

Word Of The Week: W/C 09/03/15 - Apophatic

8/3/2015

 



Apophatic theology - Aka the Via Negativa - is a theology that attempts to describe God by negation; to speak of God only in absolutely certain terms and to avoid what may not be said

Picture
Picture
How can you describe something you have never seen? How can you talk about someone you have never met?

This is the fundamental idea behind the Via Negativa, otherwise know at the Apophatic Way. This is the concpet that because God is so beyond our experience and understanding we cannot hope to talk about him in any meaningful way - and so we should not try. We can only say what God is not: God is not a body, God is not finite, God is immortal etc.


Picture
The idea has very deep roots in Philosophy going back to Plato, Philo of Alexandria, Plotinus,  Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor and Thomas Aquinas (who, in his Summa Theologica, quotes Pseudo-Dionysius 1,760 times!)

One way of trying to get your head around how different God is to us is laid out by the contemporary philosopher Peter Vardy. He uses the thought experiment of a philosophical fish - this fish is considering what created the fish pond in which he lives. The fish cannot logically conclude that the pond was made by a “super-fish” who is like him in any way - the creator of the pond must be utterly different to the pond. How else would he be able to dig it and fill it with the contents needed? So it is, Vardy argues with the cosmos - all we can say for certain is that God is NOT like us - or indeed like anything within the cosmos.



The Apohatic way is to accept this total difference between us and God, embrace it and wonder at the nature of God as a result. As Aquinas put it in his work Mystical Theology:

The higher we soar in contemplation, the more limited become our expressions of that which is purely intelligible; even as now, when plunging into the Darkness which is above the intellect, we pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute silence, of thought as well as of words … and, according to the degree of transcendence, so our speech is restrained until, the entire ascent is accomplished, we become wholly voiceless, inasmuch as we are absorbed in Him who is totally ineffable.
I think this is a really wonderful quote, not least because this is a quote that looks back in philosophical history as well as forward. It is no coincidence that Aquinas uses the term ascent; this is a reference to the Allegory of the cave by Plato (Republic 514a–520a). It also uses the term ineffable which was to be used later by William James when discussing the qualities of religious experiences in his famous work The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature published in 1902. So it is that Aquinas is at the crux of a very important notion in Philosophy - that God is beyond our knowledge and not knowable. This is the Apophatic Way.

Aquinas felt this sense of ineffability keenly - so keenly in fact that a few months before his death in 1274 he stopped writing, refused to continue and declared that all his previous attempts at writing about God were “but straw”. This does not necessarily mean "rubbish" but rather, according the philosopher Mark Vernon, rough and basic rather than refined and accurate. So it was that he had entered into the Via Negativa. 


Of course we are still left with a huge amount of his Cataphatic Theology to consider. But to find out what this means you are going to have to wait for a future word of the week!

Picture
Do you know what the word Cataphatic means? Do you think the Via Negativa is a good way of considering the divine? Or are there serious weakness that mean that this is a fruitless exercise? 

    Archives

    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014

    Categories

    All
    Abortion
    Absolutism
    Agnostic
    Analogy
    Animal
    Apophatic
    A Priori
    Aquinas
    Article
    Assisted Dying
    Banking
    Bertrand Russell
    Book Review
    Buddhism
    Christianity
    Cosmological
    Covenant
    Dawkins
    Debate
    Design
    Diaspora
    Dig Deeper
    Dukkha
    Epiphany
    Equality
    Euthanasia
    Existentialism
    Fallacies
    False Dichotomy
    Family
    Fertility
    Genesis
    Hajj
    Higher Education
    Hindu
    Hinduism
    Holocaust
    Hospice
    Human Rights
    Human-rights
    Hume
    Islam
    ISRSA
    Judaism
    Justice
    JWT
    Lent
    Life After Death
    Love
    Martyr
    Messiah
    MOOC
    Narnia
    NDE
    News
    Nirvana
    Ontological
    Plato
    PPE
    Pro Choice
    Pro-Choice
    Pro Life
    Pro-Life
    Prophet
    Reformation
    Relativism
    Religion
    Rights
    Sabbath
    Science Vs Religion
    Secularisation
    Soul
    Sport
    Stewardship
    Surrogacy
    Teleological
    Temple
    Ten Commandments
    Theology
    Viability
    Via Negativa
    Vision
    Warfare
    Wittgenstein
    Word
    Word Of The Week
    Word-of-the-week

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photos from sneakerdog, Steve Slater (Wildlife Encounters), Art4TheGlryOfGod, johndillon77, dustinj, Charlie Davidson, ineffable_pulchritude, LisaW123, jamee.khairul, Abode of Chaos, Dunleavy Family