Column 04/25/2023: Apophaticism, Incarnation, Bythos: A Response to Timothy Troutner's "Five Theses on Apophaticism"

Apophaticism, Incarnation, Bythos: A Response to Timothy Troutner's "Five Theses on Apophaticism"

Once upon a time, there was a bottomless abyss of unformed, undefined, unrelated infinity.

Once upon a time, there was a single, absolutely solitary, absolutely unrelated, and so absolutely sovereign will.

Once upon a time, there was a Father and his Son.

What is God? 

Is God something?

Is God nothing?

An acquaintance of mine, Timothy Troutner, a theology graduate student at Notre Dame, has recently published "Five Theses on Apophaticism," a distillation of his dissertation in which he issues a public challenge to what he sees as a troubling trend in modern theology by which a kind of apophaticism has come to assume a "systematic, total, and regulative" governance of Christian theological doctrine. I could not possibly hope to do justice to his overall thesis, particularly in its treatment of various specific modern academic-theological trends and actors. I am not familiar with or embedded in the world of modern academic theology; I am, I think, quite familiar with the world of ancient philosophy and theology in general and Trinitarian controversy in particular, about which I am in the process of publishing a monograph. It is from this perspective, then, that I write, and which will shape my focus in responding to Troutner's theses.

Before I begin, I would direct my readers to two recent pieces I have written that lay some of the foundations for this discussion: my argument about Trinitarian theology and its relationship with ancient Platonic debates, and my attempt to summarize Hilary of Poitier's doctrine of divine equality. As will become clear, I think these articles are related to Troutner's points in several ways. For the broader points made here, I would ask readers to consult Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Zlatko Plese's excellent scholarship on Gnosticism, and eventually my forthcoming monograph.

To quickly sum up my responses to Troutner below: while Troutner does appear to be in certain ways unfair to Patristic and Scholastic treatments of apophaticism, I think his argument does highlight a perennial danger for Christian theology, which to a large extent modern academic theology has not avoided, and helps us in setting some limits for apophaticism as a concept. My main critique, as will become clear, is that he seems to concede far too much to his modern apophaticists even in conceptualizing an escape from them, and thus produces a construal of the Trinity that I find very hard to accept.

What is Apophaticism?

Troutner has solicited responses from various theologians of different traditions; thus far, the principal substantive respondent has been the Catholic Thomist Frederick Bauerschmidt, who, writing from within the principal strain of modern Thomism, responds with bemusement to Troutner's characterization of the apophatic tradition. I sympathize to a large degree with Bauerschmidt's reaction.

It is good to be clear on this: apophaticism in the original and principal sense of the term is not a theological thesis, or even a kind of theology. It is, rather, a method of theology; a mode or way of speaking about God. Nor, indeed, has it ever been the sole or even prevailing mode of talking about God. In philosophy and theology, speaking about God in apophatic terms has always been supplemented (and generally outweighed) by speaking about God in analogical terms drawn from created things and more specifically from God's status as the cause and and end of the cosmos and creatures. In Catholicism in general, it has been vastly outweighed by revelatory ways of talking about God, from the Scriptural narratives to narratives of saints and angels and miracles to discussions of piety and sacrament and religious practice to doctrinal debates and definitions. 

The threat Troutner sees, however, is one where the apophatic ways of talking about God in some way fatally undermine or even destroy the other ways of talking about God, emptying them of meaning and significance and reducing them to meaningless linguistic structures without any referent external to themselves. In the more extreme modern apophaticists he discusses, it does seem that perhaps this point has been achieved, or even boasted about.

The simplest possible improvement on Troutner's theses, I think, would be to more narrowly define who his enemies are: for while he makes Immanuel Kant central to this tradition and quotes certain modern apophaticists, he also issues a somewhat scattershot attack on Dionysius the Areopagite, Thomas Aquinas, John Damascene, and a larger set of Patristic authors. This is a lot for any one author to take on. It is something of a shame that the modes and rhetoric of heresiology have fallen out of fashion; for what Troutner would seem to require is principally a set of heresiological definitions of precisely what propositions and characterizations he means to attack and condemn, and in what senses. Once made, he can then leave it to others (or to later, more detailed work) to apply them throughout the tradition, and decide whether the evil is in particular cases merely apparent or substantive.

This might also help him avoid reactions like that of Bauerschmidt. Speaking from within the mainstream Catholic Thomist tradition, it seems merely obvious to Bauerschmidt that the apophatic method does not destroy all other ways of talking about God, but merely sets limits to them: limits that are ultimately to be overcome in the Beatific Vision, where God will communicate himself to us directly. While the interpretation of Thomas is somewhat complex, I am personally in no doubt that Thomas is fundamentally someone who sees us as capable of making true statements about God and his essence and odesiring and finally through grace achieving a true vision of the divine essence and what God is. 

Still, for Bauerschmidt as for all Thomists, the limits imposed by apophaticism are quite real and fundamental, particularly as they relate to the statements we make about God in this life. And indeed, they impose these limits even or especially on divine revelation and the Scriptures. The Scriptures in this tradition are not a Vedic or Q'uranic eternal act of divine speech, but a form of revelation delivered through and adapted to human language, intelligence, culture, and tradition. Thus, when the Scriptures speak of God, they speak of him by way of and by reference to creatures and in the manner appropriate to creaturely intelligence. 

The primacy in this theological system thus belongs to the reality of grace, or direct divine presence and interpenetration in the human person, culminating in the Beatific Vision, in which God will in some mysterious way come to constitute the means by which we know God. As Bauerschmidt says, Thomist apophaticism is thus to a large extent an aphophaticism of hope: acknowledging the limits to creaturely knowledge of God in this life to encourage looking forward to their overcoming in the next life.

Such an apophaticism is, as he argues, in its own way quite fruitful--not only for theological and philosophical reflection, but also for (what Bauerschmidt does not mention) the mystical traditions of the Church. St. John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, and Edith Stein would not be what they are without a robust concept of apophaticism as not only a theological but a practical and personal method of approaching God: one that, however, does not end in negativity, but in a positive grasp and experience of the essence of God, purified of every remainder of created being. An engagement with Carmelite theology in particular would seem to be potentially fruitful for Troutner in this respect in showing a kind of apophaticism that is both extremely thorough in denying a likeness between created and divine being but also based around true and intimate experiences of and relationship with God.

While helpful in themselves, however, Bauerschmidt's response does seem to largely miss the point of Troutner's theses. The threats Troutner perceives, could, however, be put in basically Thomistic terms: (1) Troutner perceives in many modern apophaticisms, and to an extent in some of Thomas' apophatic statements, the threat of emptying the speech-acts of divine revelation, including the Scriptures and the Incarnation, of any actual meaning or linguistic content, and hence of rendering impossible revelation as Thomas defines it. After all, if our speech and desire and participation about God are all fundamentally about nothing, they can hardly direct us to our final end in the sight of the divine essence. Faith, hope, and charity are thus impossible, and thus sanctifying grace, and thus the Beatific Vision. (2) Perhaps most fundamentally, Troutner sees, I think correctly, in certain modern apophatic treatments of God an idea of God-in-himself that essentially and not merely accidentally negative, defining God-in-himself merely by his incommunicability and contradiction to relation and the objects of our experience. This latter, I think, is the greater threat, and is what I will primarily focus on here.

Troutner's Solution

In seeking a way out of this bind, Troutner proposes, tentatively, a few solutions. In the first place, he argues for a re-thinking and elevation of human language and indeed language as such. The Trinity is a "speech-event" of communication, and human language in itself contains the seeds, actualized by grace, of facilitating a return to God. In this, Troutner would seem to reject or at least be in tension with the idea of language that underlies many ancient authors, by which human language is most fundamentally characterized by acts of naming and definition and thus of disjunction and division and categorization and circumscription and comparison. It is these acts to which, in most ancient and medieval characterizations, the divine essence is inherently not susceptible. To overcome this, Troutner has to argue either that this is not in fact how human language functions--or in some way render divinity susceptible to these acts.

It would seem, in fact, that Troutner wishes to do the latter; and his method is in the first place an odd construal of the Trinity and in the second place a particular interpretation of the Incarnation. 

It is with the former that Troutner seems, at least to me, to stumble. In discussing both Trinity and Incarnation, Troutner asserts repeatedly and without qualification that "the divine nature cannot be spoken, thought, or objectified" and "taken abstractly, is strictly unknowable" and even "in short, if the divine nature were all that God is [...] then something like modern apophaticism would be true." Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that Troutner appears here not only to not reject modern apophaticism, but actually to incorporate it wholesale into his Trinitarian and Incarnational theology, identifying its formless void with the divine essence or substance or ousia of Catholic dogma. As he argues, "the divine nature, considered abstractly, proves indistinguishable from the empty void, and culminates in the purest form of negative theology." 

Out of this rather odd definition of the divine essence, Troutner constructs a rather odd Trinitarian theology. Since the ousia of God is a kind of formless and empty void, it is only thanks to the Trinitarian relationships that "the divine life has the shape and positive content of Trinitarian self-definition." God's essence, then, is negative; it is his relations that contained and define positive content. Thus for Troutner the "Trinitarian speech-act" is first and foremost not an act of divine communication, but rather of "self-definition." Somehow, out of the formless, undetermined, and incommunicable void of his essence, God determines and defines a disjunctive linguistic-cum-grammatical structure and thus provides a Trinitarian definition of himself--one in some way congruent to defining, disjunctive human language. 

As I will explain in a moment, I find this Trinitarian theology rather problematic and counterproductive--even though, as I will argue below, there is indeed a necessary and legitimate sense in which the Trinity acts as the transcendent grounding for reason and language, and even though I freely acknowledge that I may not be properly or fully construing Troutner's intentions in his brief summary. 

Troutner's focus on the Incarnation, however, seems to me even in its present sketchy form far more promising, even if it seems to be in part based on the logic of his Trinity by which "nature" or "essence" is identified with incommunicable void and the hypostases or persons with linguistic structure, meaning, and communicability. Troutner thus argues for a "Neochalcedonian Christology" where Christ possesses a "composite divine and human hypostasis" where, although the natures in themselves are absolutely other and contradictory to each other, "the properties of the one [nature] come to characterize the concrete existence of the other" and thus "our speech becomes modally divine (deification) precisely to the degree that God’s becomes modally human (kenosis)," resulting in a "linguistic communion" between us and God rooted in the concrete existence of Christ. 

Bauerschmidt's response to this is in essence that this is already how the Thomistic tradition treats the Incarnation: as a means by which we are enabled to speak about God in concrete human ways and modes thanks to the Incarnation and the singularity of Christ's hypostasis and existence. This is only another way of saying, however, that Troutner's approach does in fact capture and crystallize important truths of Patristic and Scholastic Christology. A detailed use of this tradition to respond to modern apophaticists thus seems extremely promising.

Still, as a response or overcoming of the apophatic challenge in the broader sense, this solution still leaves a number of questions in my mind (questions that I imagine might be addressed by his full dissertation). Troutner clearly thinks that the concrete historical act of the Incarnation allows us a degree of access to divinity and even divinity-in-itself that would otherwise be impossible; and in particular allows us to speak of God and God-in-himself using ordinary human language with a degree of insight and truthfulness that would otherwise be impossible. 

He again, however, seems to construe this in an oddly modern-apophatic way: the shape and positive content of divinity is contained, not in the unknowable abyss of the divine essence, but in the divine relations and hypostases--including the assumed, divine-human hypostasis of Christ. As the hypostatic relations of the Trinity provide a kind of quasi-linguistic realization or definition of God, so the hypostatic relation of Christ provides a new kind of definition or linguistic instantiation of the relationship between divine and human natures and God. Thus we are enabled to speak of this relationship in a new way, according to that definition and referent, in such a way that our speech-acts about God are in reality about the concrete existence (ousia?) of Christ and his composite divine-human hypostasis.

While very interesting and promising, it is not entirely clear to me whether this approach solves Troutner's problem or only repositions it, a la Monophysitism. If the divine nature in itself is absolutely other and incommunicable, and if the human nature of Christ is identified with and subsumed into the divine nature through some composite structure that allows us to ascribe our speech about Christ's humanity to divinity without distinction, then God has been communicated only in the most technical and grammatical of senses. Certainly in Patristic thought the Incarnation does unite divinity and humanity in a real and actual sense and thus acts as the means by which we are united to the divinity supernaturally. But is this unity in fact centered around human language, and can it be captured in it? I am not entirely sure; but I would certainly like to hear more.

God in Himself

I would like to begin at the other end, then, not with the Incarnation but with the previous Trinitarian debates and Platonic controversies about the essential nature of God in himself: and indeed, with the all-important question of whether God and the divine nature are in fact intrinsically and in themselves unknowable and uncommunicable and definable merely by the negation of creaturely existence. This is where the specter of Gnosticism, as well as the specter of Plotinean and Proclean Neo-Platonism, and finally the specter of Arianism, rears its head.  

This, I think, cannot be too emphasized: given the doctrine of the Trinity, the divine essence cannot be definitionaly or absolutely incommunicable or incomprehensible. After all, the doctrine of the Trinity declares that the divine essence has in fact been communicated in its totality from Father to Son, and then from Father and Son to Holy Spirit. Indeed, in a proper Thomist (and one should say, original Socratic-Platonic and Aristotelean) frame of reference, as pure actuality and the fullness of being, divinity is in fact the most purely comprehensible and communicable thing conceivable. In more Platonic Trinitiarian systems like that of Bonaventure, it is likewise that most purely diffusive good which in and of itself necessarily communicates and spills out of itself into the Trinitarian relations.

As I argue in my forthcoming book, it is no accident that 4th century Trinitarian debates ultimately crystallized into a debate over whether it was possible or allowable to speak of a divine ousia or essence. The ultimate Arian "homoian" doctrine centered on the denial that this concept could in any sense be applied to God--since God in himself was necessarily and absolutely beyond relation, comprehension, and communication. All that could be ascribed to God were the accidental, asymmetrical, will-based relations contained within the Trinity as construed by non-Nicene thinkers. The Father willed the Son into existence, and the Son in turn the cosmos; hence, the Father existed independently of the Son, and the Son of cosmos; hence Son and Spirit could not be equal to Father since there was no conceivable term by which they might be related. 

For the Nicenes, on the other hand, the positive confession of a single divine ousia actually possessed and communicated and shared in by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit came to take on absolute doctrinal necessity, for the same reasons. Divinity must have some positive content or being, absolutely different from ordinary created being yet actually communicable to another and in fact for all eternity communicated to another. While Arians were comfortable speaking of the persons of the Trinity as hypostases, constituted by their (accidental) relations, Nicenes insisted on the countervailing assertion of a divine ousia shared by these hypostases. 

In the full theology of Athanasius and Hilary of Poitiers, indeed, this act of divine communication and procreation constitutes the archetype and grounding for both the creation of the cosmos and the Incarnation. Because God-in-himself eternally and fully expressed his essence in the Son and Spirit, thus he imperfectly imaged his essence in the created cosmos, and then entered into his cosmos to communicate his essence in a more perfect way to rational beings. Hence the nature of the Son as "logos," or intrinsic reason of the Father, fully expressing the content of divinity and out of it generating the imperfect archetypes and forms constitutive of created being. 

This is, to me at least, what is so strange about Troutner defining nature and being precisely as what is abstract and beyond reason and incommunicable. In fact, nature is precisely what is communicated and shared in any act of birth or procreation. Thus, Cyril is able to treat Christ's two natures precisely as two acts of birth: God the Father communicates the divine nature to the Son through an eternal birth, and then Mary communicates her human nature to Christ through a birth in time. And thus, as Athanasius argues, Christ is homousios both with God the Father and with us.

Thus Trinity and Incarnation are united by the fact that both are fundamentally acts of procreation and thus of communication of rational, shareable nature or essence. The Incarnation is itself a kind of communication of God to human nature and intellect: hence the focus in the late 4th century on asserting the actual existence of the human intellect of Christ against Apollinarianism, and hence the Thomist focus on defining the human intellectual knowledge of Christ and its perpetual Beatific Vision. Christ's being God does not just consist of a kind of superposition of absolutely other natures by which the properties of one can be linguistically ascribed to the other, but in some actual communication of the content of one nature to the other. To be God, among other things, Christ's human intellect must know the divine essence to the greatest degree possible for a human intellect, for every moment of his actual existence. 

For Troutner, on the other hand, the divine nature would seem to be nexus, not of divine communication and content, but of absolute intrinsic incomprehensibility. It is merely in his hypostatic relations that God becomes in some way knowable--even, apparently, to himself.

The Bythos

Haunting ancient philosophy and theology is the specter of the Gnostic Bythos--who is also, to a large extent, the Neo-Platonic One, as well as the Arian Father. 

Perhaps the simplest explanation of this doctrine would be a purely and intrinsically negative definition of God. This is by no means the same as apophaticism. Rather than asserting that God does have an essence, but that this essence is (for whatever reason) not susceptible to human language and definition, these doctrines define God precisely by a negative disjunction and relation with creation and/or other entities. 

In the Revelation of John, the Gnostic Christ defines the ultimate divine Bythos (or depths) through a series of seemingly apophatic negations--but also through a series of contradictory affirmations. The point of this exercise is not to clear away the obstacle of creaturely knowledge or even to help understand what God is by defining his precise differences with creaturely being, but rather to define the highest divinity precisely in negative terms. In this and other Gnostic texts, the highest divinity is conceptualized precisely as an "empty" intellect prior to any thought, even self-realization or self-consciousness, and/or as a will prior to any determination. Likewise, in Arian authors of the 4th century, the Father is defined as beyond ousia and as absolutely contradictory to any mutual or intrinsic relation to another and any determination or constraint in willing. 

What is precisely impossible for such an entity is the full communication and self-realization contained in the Trinity, and hence the imperfect communication and realization contained in creation, and hence the transcendent salvific communication contained in the Incarnation. Gnostic myths thus consist logically of an indefinite series of failed or imperfect communications or self-realizations of the essentially content-less, negative divinity, culminating in the most failed and most imperfect version identified with the cosmos. The bythos generates a series of divine emanations in an attempt to determine and realize himself, but those emanations, precisely in their determination and realization, fall necessarily and infinitely short of their progenitor. The bythos is not communicated, but remains in himself incommunicable abyss. 

Arian cosmogenies, in contrast, feature merely the single necessarily imperfect communication or realization of divine will contained in the Son, who makes it possible for divinity to remain uncommunicated and undetermined in itself while nonetheless allowing it to be imperfectly reflected and (most importantly) the divine will be carried out and obeyed in some genuine sense in creation and Incarnation. The Son in a sense acts so as to determine the undetermined and infinite and unbounded will of the Father; he is the concrete realization of the will to create a cosmos, who protects the Father's will from the actual act of creation and everything that follows from it. It is thus the Son who actually creates the world and rules it, and the Son who is Incarnate within it, though even here Arians tended to also be "Apollinarians," treating the Son's Incarnation not as an act of communication, but merely as the extrinsic manipulation of an inert, intellect-less body. 

I confess it is difficult for me not to see in Troutner's Trinity, where the ousia is indistinguishable from an empty void but determines and defines itself through the speech-act and self-definition of the Trinity, while remaining in itself absolutely incommunicable and unknowable and undetermined, something at least remotely analogous to a quasi-Gnostic or quasi-Arian cosmogony. In this, far from escaping a modern apophaticism, he seems rather to me to accept far too much of it.

For Thomas and the orthodox Fathers, after all, God-in-himself is not a negative abyss. He is, rather, a perfect act of communication and realization, reflected imperfectly but genuinely in cosmos and Incarnation. The divine essence is not the absolutely unknowable-in-itself, but the positive term and content of what has already been perfectly communicated and realized throughout all eternity within the divine life. In this sense, Orthodox Catholicism simply and definitely denies the existence, not so much of the Gnostic emanations as of the Gnostic bythos, and not so much of the Arian Son as the Arian Father. The Arian Son is an active, creative deity with a positive transcendent divine intellect and will and content--the Arian Father is a mere inert, delimited, essentially helpless and powerless abyss.

The Trinitarian Father, on the other hand, has no existence prior to or apart from his act of full communication of the divine essence to the Son; there is thus no prior, undetermined divine will and no prior, unrealized and uncommunicated divine essence. Since the Son is already in himself the perfect (transcendent rational/linguistic) realization and communication of the divine essence in eternity, he is both the Divine Logos or reason and the intrinsic Divine Wisdom; it is thus fitting that he become Incarnate and serve also as the temporal, human communication of the divine essence in creation. The logos asarkos is thus not a contradiction to the Incarnate Word, but rather the perfect, archetypal, eternal grounding for the temporal act of Incarnation within flesh.

Whither Apophaticism?

This is already too long, but I will end it by posing what I see as a fundamental question to pose to apophatic construals of divinity, namely, whether they are merely methodological, or whether they in some way aspire to a purely negative characterization or definition of divinity in itself. 

There is in itself nothing about a methodological apophaticism in any way opposed to the idea that God in himself is communicable or communicated--or even to some kind of present linguistic knowledge of and speech about God. In fact, the goal of most apophatic methodologies has been to establish true knowledge about God and speak of him. Again, in many pre-modern construals of human language and naming, definition has frequently been assumed to occur to a large extent or principally via negativity and contrast and even contradiction. By speaking about God by negations of what is different from him, we are in one sense merely speaking about God as we speak about any other object of our experience. It is precisely this negative aspect of human creaturely reasoning that is responsible for one major limitation of our knowledge of God--since God does in fact contain some positive content not definable merely by negation of what is unlike him, we cannot gain exhaustive or intrinsic knowledge of God merely through negation. Thus, apophaticism serves both to establish knowledge of God and to remind us that God is not in himself a negation or abyss or emptiness or incommunicability or contradiction or disjunction. It reminds us that our negative and disjunctive and apophatic speech cannot exhaust or bind God. In that sense, a proper apophaticism helps to protect God from apophaticism as Troutner fears it.

On the other hand, the danger of an intrinsic apophatic construal of God is precisely that by defining him in negative terms, we are in fact defining him entirely by reference to the cosmos and created being. A purely negative God is almost by definition a God capable of being confined within the world of human language and experience. This is again an issue at the heart of both the struggle with Gnosticism and 4th century Trinitarian controversies. The Gnostic bythos is ultimately little more than a construct of the rhetorical human speech-mode of negation and contradiction, or at best the negative remainder of our own ideas and definitions of divinity and intellection. Likewise, if God the Father by definition cannot relate to any other, he appears a mere extension of our creaturely ideas of power and independence; he is as much defined and constrained by that independence as any human monarch. 

A truly transcendent deity, on the other hand, whose deity has a positive intrinsic content and thus does not consist in any position or even negative relation to the cosmos, as Athanasius argues, is capable of communicating himself and acting and creating and being present in and active in and even Incarnate in and so finally in some mysterious way communicated to his creation without imperiling his essential positive divinity.

I would be so bold then, to say in response to Troutner that what we need is not merely an absolute apophaticism somehow transmuted through Trinity and Incarnation into its opposite, but an apophaticism conscious of divine positive transcendence, one that sees itself as incapable of grasping or defining or delimiting divinity in human language--even or especially negative human language--and hence as merely (one) means at the service of the divine act of self-communication in eternity and time. In this, I think I emphatically share goals in common with him.