Editor's Note: It is not our intent to only publish those stereotypical vignettes of faith lost and mourned. If we only printed secular perspectives on religion, we would only be doing half of our job. It is in this space that we would like to publish theology, or at least a pop version of it. We would like this spot to be a place to publish engaged philosophical reflection on religion. Our theology tends towards the "radical," post-modern theology, weak theology and "Death of God" theology are the sorts of movements that Thirty First Bird Review is interested in publishing. That being said, we are also interested in reflections on possibly more traditional ways of religious thinking, from people either within or outside of said religious tradition. In terms of exegesis, we would like scriptural interpretations - the more heterodox and unusual, the better. And "Sermons"? Well that is what it says it is, with scare quotes and all...
In our modern normative religious discourse, theism and atheism operate within the same general hermeneutic. They function under a paradigm, regardless of whether they are affirming it or denying it that they agree on the details and contours of. Most modern theists and atheists define the word “God” in the same way, agreeing on the details of how this being should be understood, discussed, and interpreted. The dominant discourse defines God in the same way, as having certain affirmative characteristics; omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, among others. In mainstream religious discourse the only attribute that theists and atheists disagree on is existence. One group says yes, and the other no, but they both asked the same question – never considering that different ones existed at all.
The popular discussions have gotten more rancorous, yet Anglo-American theological discussion was not always so one dimensional. Before the “New” atheists, and before the frightening ascendancy of the religious right, serious academic theologians were discussed in the middle brow press. Today, with the extreme dichotomy between theism and atheism, even though they consent to the orthodox conception of God, it is shocking to learn that radical, heterodox, atheistic ideas were commonly discussed in American mainline seminaries only four decades ago.
Writing in 1966, Daniel Noel said “…we have been presented with what amounts to a manifesto for a new theological option in America…” (463) F. Thomas Trotter, writing in 1965 said “The expression ‘the death of God’ is now well established in the theological vocabulary. Widespread use in publication points to the popularity … of the term” (42). ‘Death of God Theology’ as expressed in the writings of thinkers like Thomas Altizer, Richard Rubenstein, Gabriel Vahanian, Paul van Buren, and William Hamilton among others, was for as revolutionary as it was, discussed in the mainstream American press. The April 8, 1966 Time Magazine article Toward a Hidden God which highlighted the work being done in American seminaries, is still the best-selling issue of the popular weekly newsmagazine to this date – even latter referenced in the horror movie Rosemary’s Baby. The “Death of God” theologians were involved in a program to create a new theology of absence, a system of praying to nothing. Their enigmatic counter-hermeneutic fascinated the general public, and for a few years “Death of God Theology” seemed to be another component of popular discussion. Today the thought that the strict dichotomy of theism and atheism was challenged and subverted in the seminary would seem surprising to most. A system of spirituality transgressive of theism and atheism seems odd to most believers – and disbelievers. That these ideas were considered in the mainstream press is more remarkable, but today these ideas on the editorial pages are replaced with letters from partisans of the religious divide.
Mark C. Taylor rhetorically asks “What is the time of negative theology? … Is the time of the return the present – here and now? Or is it another time” (1990, 2)? Indeed negative theology is a recurring undercurrent in the Western tradition. While the “Death of God” theologians seem an incredible break from the mainstream, they are not aberrations, but rather representatives of a venerable tradition. This is a theology concerned with absence, with the relative nature of representation, and with nothingness. While it seems to have disappeared from mainstream religious discourse, it still remains, as it always has, lurking along the borders between belief and disbelief.
Negative theology did not begin with the “Death of God,” and it will not end there. Long known as “apophatic” theology, negative ways of speaking about God are contrasted with the positive affirmations of “kataphatic” theology. Where the kataphatic discourse is concerned with defining the attributes of God; omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence and so on, the apophatic defines God by what He is not. Barbara Mujica explains “Apophatic theology, in contrast, stresses “imageless-ness” and “wordlessness.”… The goal is to obliterate all anthropomorphic notions of God, not in order to understand God rationally, which is impossible, but in order to confront the unknowable” (2001, 741).
This is an iconoclasm of words, where signifiers are seen as constructions of varying success in representing the ineffable. Once we strip away all the positive attributes of God we are left with only one – existence. To come to a truer God the negative theologian finds that they must strip that away as well. To paraphrase Paul Tillich, if “To affirm God is to deny Him” is the case, then the converse must also be true. By seeing God as “…absence, disappearance, silence, withdrawal, eclipse…” (Trotter 1965, 42) leads us to necessarily subtract existence. This is an extreme iconoclasm, but belief in God is the ultimate idolatry. Paradoxically it is only by denying God that we can come to the fullest affirmation of Him. It must be by killing God that we resurrect God. After all, as Altizer reminds us “No world religion has emphasized death as has Christianity...The contemporary Christian must be prepared to accept a destiny which lives out the death of God, to live immersed in an actuality whose very being blots out the presence of God” (1962, 25).
The apophatic tradition has been part of the thought of “…Pseudo-Dionysius, [John] Scotus … Meister Eckhart…” (Tracey 1994, 315). Christianity has “…used apophasis as a supplement to kataphasis, in order to underscore the divine mystery…apophatic theology has not been central to [Western] Christian theology” (Kenney 1993, 444). While the Irish monk John Scotus, the German Eckhart and the Spanish Theresa of Avila all utilized negative theology across several centuries, it was not central to orthodox Catholic and latter Protestant thought. Even a figure as influential as Aquinas made use of the via negativa, yet this was still far from the dominant theological method. Yet it is possible to conceive of a future movement that also embraces this counter-hermeneutic. It has periods like the in-coming tide where it flows onto the beach of normative religious discourse. It has been relegated in the West for “– the mystics, the hysterics, fools, avant-garde artists, and dissenters of all kinds” (Tracey 1994, 318). Yet it is not inconceivable that negative theology could return as the basis for a new faith, operating beyond both positivism and literalism.
As an original proposition, it could be argued that religion evolves at the normative level through three stages. There are always a variety of religious opinions, and always a minority of visionaries within any one stage, but the consensus is to conform to the paradigm that reigns during that particular stage. The three stages are the metaphysical, epistemological and aesthetic. During the metaphysical stage positive definitions of God dominate discourse; the concern of philosophers is to separate correct beliefs from heresy. Religious truths are correspondent to the transcendent, and there are correct and incorrect dogmas. With the rise of positive and literalism, the metaphysical is eclipsed by the epistemological, when the concern is with arguing as to whether God exists at all. There is an attempt to replace mythos with logos. This modernizing is continued by religious authorities, who react to positivism by spiritualizing it. When a positivist metaphysic is applied to religion we have the rise of literalism, fundamentalism and scriptural absolutism. In this sense, both scientific positivism and religious literalism are twin sides of the same modernizing project that encompasses this stage. David Tracy writes:
What modernity provides for the naming of God, therefore, is a series of seemingly endless debates on the correct ism, that is, the correct set of abstract propositions which name and think God. Moderns characteristically name God and think God in terms of some modern formulation of an ism: deism, theism, pantheism, atheism, agnosticism, panentheism. The reign of these isms is what principally interests modern thinkers. Each ism, moreover, is rendered through a modern form of argument and thereby names God through a modern form of abstract proposition (1994, 307).
These “isms,” are seen as literal statements that either do or do not correspond to transcendent reality. During the final stage they are rendered obsolete by apophasis. This is the aesthetic stage, the culmination of the counter-hermeneutic. There is no interest in trying to correctly define the qualities of God, because the via negativa has helped us to understand that “God cannot be described in human language because words are inadequate to the task” (Mujica 2002, 742) and that apophasis “…subverts our deep human tendency to settle for idols, reminding us that all theology can function properly only as an icon of the divine…” (Kenney 1993, 441). Since all definitions of God are inadequate there is no need to argue about the details – they are not attributes to be discovered but rather to be created. One of these attributes is existence itself; with this stage we can begin the discourse of creating that detail as well. With the rise of the aesthetic stage we will recognize theological language as an idol. But while idols should never be confused for the thing in itself, they can still be appreciated for the beauty they reflect. That is why theological language in the new stage must be interpreted as aesthetic. As a relative expression of human subjective religious beliefs, these propositions cannot be evaluated on how “correct” they are, but rather if it describes a being of fictional truth.
Religious ideas must be seen as aesthetic creations; the literary in theology gives religion a new metaphysic, and the transcendent in criticism returns sublimity to reading. Aichelle writes that “Modernist theories of fantasy depend upon the metaphysical polarity of real and non-real, and they agree that fantasy is logically and metaphysically secondary to the reality given through ordinary human experience” (1991, 324). In the new stage this dichotomy will be rejected. As Aichelle writes “…fantasy will operate within postmodern theological discourse…” (1991, 329).
What of the relationship between the kataphatic and the apophatic during this stage? Even within the last few years “… theologians have undertaken a reevaluation of the relationship between apophatic and kataphatic spirituality” (Mujica 2001, 748). During the aesthetic stage there is a realization that all kataphatic statements are non-correspondent. This means that fundamentally kataphatic truths collapse into apophatic truths, much as “…the death of God has collapsed the meaning of the First Commandment into the Second” (Noel 1966, 473). As the injunction against idolatry, the Second Commandment is in a sense necessarily apophatic; as a statement of affirmative existence, the First Commandment is necessarily kataphatic. While the via negativa is used as a critical dialectic to avoid viewing affirmative theological statements as absolutes, it does not preclude the appreciation of kataphatic propositions for aesthetic or literary value. This collapse of the two methods, and conflation of their attendant commandments may seem unusual, but it should not be viewed as suspicious. Raoul Mortly writes that “Firstly, negation can also mean assertion” (1982, 431), and that…”the negative adjective may be better regarded as providing an attenuated affirmation (1982, 433); and as Mark Taylor reminds us of Jacques Derrida’s work on deconstructive theology:
Though Derrida’s account of Christian negative theology is extensive, his point is simple. Among the Christian writers Derrida considers are Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Bernard of Clairvaus, and Augustine. In each case, Derrida maintains, the via negativa turns out to be implicitly affirmative (1990, 10).
While this implies that the apophatic is secretly kataphatic, the converse is true as well. As Taylor says in another article, “Identity, in itself difference, and difference, in itself identity, join in contradiction” (1984, 572).
This new system of fictionism, the paradigmatic theology of the aesthetic stage, is born out of a condition that this paper will call “The Scandal of Fiction.” This is the problem of the ontological status of fiction, of what the proper metaphysic is which explains the fictional category. As Aichelle writes “…a modernist metaphysics … posits the fundamental duality of the real and the fantastic. … to identify an entity as fantastic … is to give it a special relationship to reality” (1991, 323). This becomes important in not only creating a new theory of fiction, but also the new apophatic hermeneutic, because as Aichelle reminds us “fantasy lies in the indecision between the uncanny and the marvelous…it requires ‘near belief,’ which is neither belief nor disbelief” (1991, 326).
“The Scandal of Fiction” refers to the modern and post-modern silence on the ontological status of this category. While pre-modern discourse fully explored the contours of fiction and reality – its oppositions, relationships, and interactions – in a very fundamental way we have not. The correspondence theory of truth has yielded the twin positivist and literalist fallacies, both of which read fiction as a type of lie. The pre-moderns interpreted fiction, and most importantly the interaction of fiction with reality (a category that this paper will regard as “religion”) within a complex system of mutually interpretive exegesis, utilizing the full critical arsenal of allegorical and metaphorical understanding. We, however, have grossly simplified our understanding of fiction, and by proxy, religion. While the pre-modern hermeneutic perhaps supplies a model for a future discourse, this project must be accomplished in a distinctly contemporary way – the details of such a discourse are of course unknown today.
Meontology is the study of non-being; as fiction engages non-existent categories, all fictional literature may in some sense be regarded as meontological. Apophatic theology is the critical method of meontology, syllogistically apophatic theology must in some sense be the theology of fiction. As a category however, fiction does not use the via negative; it is rarely abstract, and normally its statements and prepositions are affirmative – like those of kataphatic theology. But as apophatic theology has already been defined as the theology of fiction, we must collapse the kataphatic category into the apophatic. Taylor, writing about Hegel, says “…the founding axiom of his philosophy as the ‘union of union and nonunion’ or the ‘identity of identity and difference’” (1984, 571).
All fiction is by proxy definition meontological literature – the only way to theologically discuss literature that is fictional is by recourse to the apophatic, to view it as kataphatic is a category mistake. In that all theology is narrative, kataphatic theology must be taken as a hidden apophatic, and we must doggedly refuse to be read it as literal. This doesn’t necessarily mean it must be read as metaphorical, but more importantly it must be read as fictional. With the acknowledgement that reading kataphatic theological pronouncements as literal is a mistake, we can engage an iconoclasm of words where we drain them of their literal meaning; with the breaking of these vessels we imbue them with higher meaning.
Yet as Kenney writes, “There is no escaping kataphasis, the efficacy of negative theology is proportional to the strength of the theological assertions that it serves to deny….apophasis without kataphasis is empty, and kataphasis without apophasis lacks mystery and depth” (1993, 448). While apophatic theology is the study of divine non-being, fictional theology must also engage the meontological category. Even though fictional statements may be affirmative statements, “the Scandal of Fiction” implies that even though fiction may be contextually “true,” and perhaps even “transcendentally” true, it cannot, by definition be seen as true based on any sort of correspondence theory (even if it contains "facts," i.e. there was a prince named Hamlet, there is a country called Denmark, etc). The “Scandal of Fiction” is that fiction is meontological, it is apophatic – and perhaps the place for the origins of a new theology. “Fantasy exposes the discontinuity between the signifier and the signified, the gap which we must endlessly seek to fill with ‘reality’” (Aichelle 1991, 325). Hence even mimetic literature cannot be real, since it is a non-being – it is meontological. If meontological literature is fictional, and meontological theology is apophatic then apophatic theology is the theology for examining fiction. Yet apophasis makes negative statements, but fictional statements can superficially and grammatically seem to make statements about reality, even if by definition they are not real. Thus, fictional statements are merely the positive statements of apophatic negativism, as Taylor writes “One can express the surreal only in negative terms. In this case, however, negation is at the same time affirmation” (1990, 9). This is the central paradox of the new meontological theofictionology.
Outside of historical religious narrative, the positive affirmation of kataphatic theology are empirically unverifiable (propositions like “The Father and the Son are of the same substance”, “God is omniscient”, etc), statements about Christology, eschatology, soteriology and so forth must be non-correspondent truths; since like fiction they cannot correspond to outside truths; kataphatic statements are necessarily fictional ones. Apophatic theology has been defined as the theology of fiction, kataphatic statements are all fictional, and thus kataphatic theology is secretly apophatic theology. This means that all kataphatic truths are subjective, contingent, relative and aesthetic; they must be judged not by standards of rational discourse, but by purely literary critical and aesthetic concerns. Poetics and theology must be fused, fiction should be elevated to the level of religion, and religion, will also elevated – to the level of fiction. All theology is apophatic, hence its truth cannot be seen as correspondent, but as higher then representational, i.e. as fictional. When fiction is seen as more significant and true then the misread literalism of kataphatic statements, and the kataphatic is seen as a positive aesthetic reflection of apophatic fictionism, then religion can leave the crude correspondence theory level of fact, and move towards more transcendent and aesthetic understandings of truth.
The Formalists, namely Roman Jakobson and the latter structuralist Tzvetan Todorov, become important when discussing the collapse of the kataphatic and apophatic categories – “the collapse of the first and second commandment” – because of what they specifically say about the nature of literary language. Aichelle writes “At the root of literature itself, fantasy is fundamentally textual in its self-referentiality” (1991, 331) Many of the Formalists argue that what makes poetic language different from normal language is that it draws attention to its own artifice – it represents itself. Fictional language has no referent other then the text – even if fictional language contains meaningful, mimetic, and realistic representations. Poetic and fictional language self-referentially communicates the very poetics of its existence, which is what makes a literary text fundamentally different from non-fictional text. The so-called scandal of fiction lay in the metaphysical status of questions like “What do you think Horatio did after the end of Hamlet?” or, “Do Ilsa and Rick ever meet again?” Though the syntactical structures of the sentences make complete sense, from the literal perspective of the correspondence theory of truth, such questions are illogical. They are literary questions in that a metaphysical investigation of their content will show their complete illusory artifice. The mistake in kataphatic theology is to think that questions like “Are works or grace the means to salvation?” and “Is Christ a creation of God the Father, or part of the Trinity?” are any more logically consistent from an objective correspondence theory of truth then those earlier questions. These questions are contextual, they are coherent, but analytically meaningless, they refer to themselves and highlight their own artifice – from a Formalist definition they are a type of poetry. Kataphatic theology must be understood not as an analytical investigation of an objective truth, but rather as a creative and subjective manifestation of creativity. Mujica writes that “Negative theology refuses to ascribe any quality to the Absolute and therefore denies language a role in the unitive process” (2001, 743) and yet it is the iconoclastic task of apophatic theology to show these aesthetic creations as being idols, and to not confuse them with the things that they represent. However, this critical function of apophasis does not need to ignore the beauty implicit in kataphatic statements.
During the aesthetic stage both theism and atheism must collapse into one another, questions of whether God exists or not are non-sensical, the only question that matters will be questions of depiction and representation. This could be called, using Sherwin Wine’s term, an “ignostic” situation, where we see the questions of God’s attributes from the metaphysical stage and the questions of his existence from the epistemological stage as a category mistake, a Wittgensteinian language game to be unraveled. Analytical philosopher A.J. Ayer was in agreement with Wine; he felt that to ask whether God existed or not was nonsense, since the word has no referent. But though the word might have no referent, it can still be enjoyed for its own meaning and beauty – during the aesthetic stage we can enjoy the multiplicity of God’s representations for what they are – representations. Mortley writes, “Naming is not so much an act of describing… language, though inappropriate to the task, is preserved as an essential human activity” (1982, 432). It is apophatic criticism that can strip away the ontological additions to both literary and theological language to show us that both have no referent. When theology is understood this way, it can be transformed into a type of poetics, a genre of literature. Yet when this happens, aesthetics can be reimbued with meaning, and there is a resurrection of the transcendent.
We must be for literature and against theology. This theological fictionology must see the kataphatic as aesthetic, pluralistic, relative, subjective and literary. In this way, what comes after the modern and post-modern is the aesthetic era, where religion is a literary concern. We will understand what Theresa of Avila, John Scotus, Thomas Altizer, and all the other negative theologians were saying – that semiotic descriptions of God cannot correspond to the real God; ontologically speaking he is as good as unreal. God is the ultimate character in our “Scandal of Fiction.” The apophatic approach must smash the idols of the kataphatic, but it must also appreciate the beauty of those icons while doing so. The search for transcendence must reinvigorate criticism, theory, and most importantly, the newly synonymous categories of religion and literature. This new aesthetic, iconoclastic and poetic faith must be suspicious of the words it also extols the power of. As the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, Theresa, Meister Eckhart, Harry of Susso and St. John of the Cross inaugurate a new Reformation, our metaphysic and our aesthetic categories must be rearranged. It is the power of fictional ideas that will imbue faith with new meaning, it is in this sense that we will offer our prayers to a non-existent God, we will supplicate before a fictional deity.
Works Cited
Aichelle, G. 1991. Fantasy and Postmodern Theology. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59 (2): 323-337.
Altizer, J. 1962. The Challenge of Modern Gnosticism. Journal of Bible and Religion 30 (1): 18-25.
Epstein, M. 1999. Post-Atheism: From Apophatic Theology to Minimal Religion in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture. Oxford: Bergham Books.
Hodgson, P. 1966. The Death of God and the Crisis in Christology. The Journal of Religion 46 (4): 446-462.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,835309-1,00.html Toward a Hidden God 1966 Time Magazine
Kenney, J. 1993. The Critical Value of Negative Theology. The Harvard Theological Review 86 (4): 439-453.
Leahy, D. 1994. The New Beginning: Beyond the Post-Modern Nothingness. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 62 (2): 403-433.
Lyas, C. 1970. On the Coherence of Christian Atheism. Philosophy 45 (171): 1-19.
Mortly, R. 1982. The Fundamentals of the Via Negativa. The American Journal of Philology 103 (4): 429-439.
Mujica, B. 2001. The Apophatic-Kataphatic Dialectic in Teresa de Avila. Hispania 84 (4): 741-748.
Noel, D. 1966. Still Reading His Will? Problems and Resources for the Death-of-God Theology. The Journal of Religion 46 (4): 463-476.
Polanski, R. 1968. Rosemary’s Baby. Los Angeles: William Castle Productions.
Ross, J. 1969. From World Negation to World Affirmation: A Study in the Development of the Theology of Thomas J. J. Altizer. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 37 (4): 353-359.
Taylor, M. 1984. Altizer’s Originality. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52 (3): 569-584.
Taylor, M. 1990. Non-Negative Negative Atheology. Diacritics 20 (4): 2-16.
Tracy, D. 1994. Literary Theory and the Return of the Forms for Naming and Thinking God in Theology. The Journal of Religion 74 (3): 302-319.
Trotter, F. 1965. Variations on the “Death of God” Theme in Recent theology. Journal of Bible and Religion 33 (1): 42-48.
