Prayer will be our desert guide
Caputo does negative theology the highest honor when he means to criticize it. His point is to expose negative theology’s “safety,” always tied to a prayer which ties it to a particular God which it names, when it should be rather be wandering in the desert—in order, I presume, to keep it open to what is completely new. (Speaking of God so soon, he insists, closes off our capacity to receive the tout autre, the wholly other.) So he says, in words reassuring to those Christians who always fear negative theology’s indeterminacy, that “Dionysius’s apophaticism has not lost its way or its destination, is not destinerrant, but is more or less safely inscribed in a circle originating from and returning to ‘God,’ the saving name, the giver of all good gifts, the grammatical mark of which is prayer…. [P]rayer is its desert guide.” Which is precisely Dionysius’s point: our pursuit of a mystical theology, affirming and denying every name of God, uniting us with the God beyond every name—this pursuit is part of the “circle originating and returning to ‘God’” in the same way as all life and every power and every good thing, intelligible or sensible. Theology only follows the path of all things that come from God, down to the smallest stone, then back up—since these things are clearly not themselves God—to the Cause of all who is beyond all. All this is an act of praise of the one to whom we began our prayer.
All that is good is inscribed in the circle whose source and goal is God, which is why God’s first and most fitting name is the Good. We need not fear that ‘negative theology’ will make us lose our trust in the words of sacred scripture or in the ways God has already revealed himself to us. Our prayer (“O Trinity!”) guides us through the desert.
[Such overcomplicated prose! It’s a mistake, I think, to try to speak of Dionysius (already so foreign to us) after reading Caputo (already so obscure).]
31 August 2007 |
tags: Denys, John Caputo, Negative Theology, Prayer
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Caputo’s objections still apply – he critiques negative theology precisely because it has failed to be negative theology (not, because it points to God). He argues that it has become a hyper-essentialism and is therefore subject to the traditional critiques of metaphysics/onto-theology (offered by everyone from Heidegger to Derrida to Westphal).
Caputo (through Derrida) critiques the negative theologian who refrains from saying that God is good because he believes that God is “greater” than good. Caputo is upset because this failure of language is only seen as quantitative and not qualitative. A true negative theology would refrain from calling God “good” because it would understand that God is not just more than what we call “good”, but is also different than what we call “good”.*
A critique of metaphysics is not merely epistemelogical, but an attempt to undermine the human tendency to usurp – the will to power exerted through the acquisition of knowledge. In that case, instability for instability’s sake becomes much more understandable – instability is not to the content of our knowledge, but to inform our way of knowing, a way characterized by humility and faith.
For example, it is tempting to rationalize Abraham’s call to sacrifice Isaac through an appeal to a higher-order morality which superceded that of the law. In doing so, we would fall under the Caputo’s critique of traditional negative theology. Do we allow this story to be as scary as it is – that is, will we allow the trespass to exist as it appears phenomenologically, without attempting to peer behind the curtain and write the story how we want it?
Really, it goes back to Plato. Do we call something pious because it is favored by the gods, or do the gods favor what is pious? In terms of this discussion, do we demand that God be good, or will we allow what God does to determine what we call good? If the first, we risk worshiping ethics and not God. If the second, than we must first allow God to be God – instead of demanding that God be “good” (or that the Messiah come and through a coup, or whatever else we want).
I’m not necessarily arguing for a purely negative theology, or a religion without religion, but I don’t believe that these critiques can be dismissed easily. I also don’t believe that siding with Caputo/Derrida on this point refuses divine revelation. It only forbids our attempt to make Christianity into a philosophical system. It is one thing to say that we follow and worship the God who knows the answers, it is quite another to say that we have them.
*Merold Westphal writes well on this problem and does so with a the mind of a theologian and the heart of an evangelical – not so polemic nor heretical as Caputo.
throw a coup, is what I meant to say. You can’t go through one. Although maybe through a hoop. oh well.
Well summed. I think you’re right to call attention to the moral rather than merely epistemological elements of the critique of metaphysics, and I do think there’s a lot to learn there. Actually, I wasn’t trying to critique Caputo in this post so much as to give him a kind of underhanded compliment. His reading of negative theology at this particular point was quite insightful, pointing out the way that the opening prayer in Dionysius’ Mystical Theology contextualizes and ‘stabilizes’ the rest of his affirmations and negations. There’s a much older and contrary worry around negative theology than the worry about metaphysics, which is whether the negative theologian loses footing in basic Christian commitments by denying too much. Caputo and Derrida’s analysis of the role of the prayer in negative theology—especially Caputo’s, since Derrida doesn’t dwell as much here—helps give an answer to that worry. But like I said, that’s taking help from what’s meant as a criticism.
So I wasn’t trying to pull the rug out from under Caputo here. That said, I think your interpretation might be a bit too accommodating. I’m not so sure, for example, that Caputo’s critique of negative theology isn’t that it points to God (without scare quotes). Pointing to God, in some more determined sense than the tout autre which might be God, is a major part of the problem according to Caputo—which is why he wants to do away with Dionysius’ opening prayer. He says explicitly somewhere (though I don’t have the book in front of me) that he’s preaching the “bad news” that “nobody has a revelation.”
Plus, he’s simply wrong as regards Dionysius, maybe Eckhart too, insofar as he thinks that the denials in negative theology are “quantitative and not qualitative.”* For Dionysius, the point is that goodness and truth and life and oneness and every other power are secondary to God who is their Source, that God is prior to all these things and gives them their meaning, so that God is not these things even in their highest form. God is emphatically not the best of good things or the truest of true things. God is prior to goodness and truth themselves. God is not goodness; God is not truth. God: the source of all beyond all, beyond be-ing and before all in a manner that itself transcends every way of being (Divine Names 5, 8, 824b). This is undoubtedly a qualitative difference.
Oh! This is too long. Am I still dismissing Caputo too quickly?
* I think Caputo’s and certainly Derrida’s more central concern is the maintenance of presence, which negative theology never intended to abolish (though I doubt if Dionysius, at least, ever meant presence in the way that worries C+D). But the quantitative/qualitative distinction does get at some of what is pointed to by the accusation of ‘hyperessentiality,’ and seems like a major concern for more committed theologians like Westphal.
I have to defer to you on whether Caputo is right about Eckhart and Dionysius. If they do, in fact, admit a qualitative difference in their apophasis, then they would seem to escape Caputo’s criticism (as I understand him, C’s critique of “hyperessentialism” depends on this difference). What also interests me is Derrida’s thoughts in Sauf le nom that negative theology inherets the presuppositions of onto-theology, by assuming the same notion of essence/accident, phenomenal/noumenal, etc.
I think its an important critique if we do wish to make our theology biblical and not metaphysical – However, I’m not convinced that this “meta-metaphysical” is a true metaphysic, or if it is both Caputo’s and Derrida’s misunderstanding of the language surrounding the Holy.
You know that I passionately want to critique onto-theology and the presence of metaphysics in theology – I believe that they both represent an attempt to claim a knowledge of God that is scientific and philosophical. Both should be silent when it comes to God, precisely because they can not speak about God. Likewise, the claim of either that there is no God (or like, Derrida, that He can not be known or spoken of adequately) seem in someway to be irrelevant to a biblical understanding of a creator God.
What I find frusterating in what we are reading of Derrida is that he expects what he is saying to apply to theology, and not, as it were, just philosophy of religion. All “truth-claims” (even propositional ones) are not metaphysical in nature – and there is a theology which is not preceded by that scary “onto-”. Theology needs to be protected from philosophy: both modern and post-modern.
That which I find useful in his philosophy is not new – we have the prophets, the NT parables, negative theology, Kierkegaard – all hinting at protecting the Holy from us (even its definition as “set apart” testifies to this) as well as the impossibility and absurdity of faith. To the extent that Derrida pushes this limit further, I find his philosophy to be pointless – why say anything at all?
I feel that he is patting himself on the back for discovering that the world is not actually a stage – not realizing that this negation was already present in the metaphor. If this tension is forgotten, the negative voice needs to be heard – but only to reclaim the tension that was already there, a tension which creates a rupture towards something transcending the language used to describe it.
What more, he begins to equate the secret with khora – his argument seems to parallel in many ways that which is parodied in Romans: he begins to protect the khora as well as the name and in doing so conflates the problem with the savior because of its necessity for salvation, “What shall I go on sinning, so that grace may increase?” His khora seems to be a ground of sorts, but a primordial sap – murky waters which the spirit hovers over and also sin, which pervades us. Whatever is apropos in protecting God from our comprehension (and I mean this in both sense) fails if we allow Him to be so Other that He is indistinguishable from what He saved us from.
Forgive me for being incoherent – but I have already waited to long to respond and am hoping to get your thoughts on the reading too.