The article explores positive Christian interpretations of time through the writings of S. Kierkegaard and Edwin Muir.

According to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition ‘The Great Perfection’, we can distinguish between two basic dimensions of mind: an intentional dimension that is divided into perceiver and perceived and a non-dual dimension that transcends all distinctions between subject and object. The non-dual dimension is evident through its intuitional characteristics; an unbounded openness that is free from intentional limitations, a spontaneous luminosity which presences all phenomena, and self-awareness that recognizes the original resonance of beings. Owing to these characteristics, the descriptions of (...) this dimension exemplify an integrative way of speaking about primordial reality, which resolves the assumed dichotomy between kataphatic and apophatic discourses by pointing to a dimension that pervades all phenomena without being identified with any of those. In this article, I intend to discuss the characteristics of the non-dual dimension and their implications for our understanding of human consciousness and the inherent co-emergence of positive and negative perceptions of reality. (shrink)

Recent postmodern discussions of the Christian apophatic tradition level a noteworthy criticism: after all its negations doesn't Christian apophatic discourse in fact slip back into kataphatic assertions about God? This article seeks to address this claim by bringing into concert two important Christian apophaticists in order to designate a type of discourse that emerges from apophatic union, a discourse that is not kataphatic but logophatic.

abstract: This article compares and contrasts the Ignatian concept of consolation without previous cause with the Zen Buddhist concept of satori. The aim is to underscore a unique but not commonly recognized characteristic of Ignatian contemplation and promote interreligious understanding. I argue that Ignatian prayer methods, though primarily kataphatic in their approach, share common features with apophatic spirituality and Zen meditation, even though Zen does not make any reference to God. This article consists of three main parts: In the (...) first part, I delve into Ignatius's own religious experience, particularly the experiences he had during eleven months in Manresa, and interpret these experiences from the lens of the Ignatian consolation without previous cause. In the second part, I explore the overall goal of Zen, focusing on the discussion of Zen sunyata and satori. In the final part, I draw out points of contact and differences between the Ignatian concept of consolation without previous cause and Zen satori with an aim toward better appropriating the Ignatian consolation without previous cause from Zen satori. In doing so, I hope to make Ignatian spirituality more appealing and available to spiritual seekers across religious traditions. (shrink)

God's hospitality or welcome of human beings into eternal life can be approached by means of Western or Eastern strategies. I explore Derrida's understanding of "pure hospitality", which contains parallels with apophatic theology. I then appeal to Irenaeus's eschatology, which exhibits a fruitful tension between kataphatic and apophatic elements, to provide a transcendent warrant for human hospitality. On the one hand, the Bishop's millenarian opposition to Gnosticism implies the continuation of the substance of creation in the eternal Kingdom. On (...) the other hand, Irenaeus's emphasis on deification and visio Dei suggests a future of "pure hospitality" and openness. (shrink)

This essay arose from a collaborative project exploring the meaning of apophatic discourse in different religious traditions. I focus on the paradox of language as both liberating and ensnaring that resonates across the great diversity and heterogeneity of Buddhist traditions. Apophatic discourse is a widespread response to this paradox, as it is motivated by a recognition of the limits of words and concepts even as it seeks to point to that which is beyond these limits. The questions of whether there (...) is a nonconceptual reality beyond the limits of words and concepts, and if so, what it might be, and why, precisely, language and reason are incapable of articulating nonconceptual reality, and what the role of language might be in leading beyond itself, are all sources of considerable debate among Buddhist thinkers. What is shared by figures with different responses to these questions is an understanding of apophasis as a form of Buddhist practice. The aim of Buddhist apophatic practice is to disrupt our natural linguistic attitude, in which we are beguiled by language, presupposing that our words and concepts somehow correspond with the ultimate nature of reality. How is apophatic discourse—enacting an awareness of the limits of language—meaningful if it cannot actually describe that which it is about? Buddhist apophatic discourses, such as ontological doctrines of ineffability, negations, and silence, are not simply pointing to ultimate reality, but are meaningful as transformative practices in the context of an interpretive community with shared soteriological goals and doctrines. Thus, even as apophatic discourse is ever transcending positive claims, it depends on kataphatic discourse to have any specific meaning. (shrink)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , eminent Jesuit scientist and religious write, was one of the great Christian mystics of the twentieth century. Yet scholars of mysticism rarely discuss his works or typology of mysticism. I argue that the little studied, early Writings in Time or War, together with his late autobiographical essays, provide the hermeneutical key for understanding Teilhard's pan‐christic mysticism. My paper examines especially the experiential and cosmic dimensions of his pan‐christic mysticism of union and communion with Christ through (...) all things. This mysticism belongs to the kataphatic rather than apophatic tradition of Christian mysticism. It is deeply rooted in, and in full continuity with, the catholic tradition but through introducing innovative elements, it is at the same time also thoroughly transformative. I show this in relation to Teilhard's understanding of the Spiritual Exercises and, in particular, to that of the “Sacred Heart” whose meaning he greatly extended by understanding it in a universal, cosmic sense. He so frequently used the metaphors of fire and heart—well known, traditional images of Christian mysticism—that I describe Teilhard's mysticism as a fire and heart mysticism. I also discuss the significance of his typology of mysticism in relation to the comparative study of mysticism. (shrink)

This paper systematically reconstructs Boethius’s reflections on God, attempting to find the common element to which all of the variations in these reflections can be retraced. This common element is constituted by the continuous tension between kataphatic and apophatic theology. Boethius apparently both kataphatically defines God in his logical works, and maintains that God can only be defined apophatically in his theological works. This tension can, at times, cause some incoherence as one moves from one level of discourse to (...) another: that is, from the logico-linguistic to the metaphysical-ontological level of discourse. Boethius’s thought manifests this incoherence. This incoherence is in part common to Neoplatonic thought and its sources, but would also seem to be dictated by the nature of the very operation of reflecting upon God. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to call attention to Dionysius’s kataphatic theology and, in particular, to an aspect which is not commonly discussed: the dissimilarimages applied to God. More precisely, I will focus on the image of the worm, which Dionysius considers the vilest and most dissimilar image applied to the divineThearchy. I will try to show that the worm, with its multiple and contradictory attributes, is indeed the best example for Dionysius’s “absurd theology” of the dissimilar images, (...) since it perfectly fits the complex and paradoxical Dionysian view of the relationship/non-relationship between God and the world. (shrink)

Throughout his corpus , Augustine grapples with the challenge of how to speak of that which exceeds and resists conceptualization. The one who would speak of God is confronted, it seems, by a double‐bind: either one reduces God's transcendence to the immanence of language and concepts, or one remains silent. Even to call God ‘inexpressible’, he remarks in De doctrina christiana, is to predicate something of God and thus make some claim to comprehension. ‘This battle of words’, he continues, ‘should (...) be avoided by keeping silent’ . Augustine thus seems to privilege and apophatic strategy. But this is not his last word on the matter. Indeed upon the heels of this passage he carefully notes: ‘And yet, while nothing really worthy of God can be said about him, he has accepted the homage of human voices, and has wished us to rejoice in praising [laude] him with our words.’ My goal in this essay is to consider Augustine's laudatory strategy of ‘praise’ as a non‐objectifying discourse concerning transcendence which navigates the straits between kataphatic theological positivism and apophatic silence. This will be taken up against the horizon of contemporary discussions of transcendence and phenomenology, particularly in the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean‐Luc Marion. (shrink)

""This book contains a careful, thorough, and where necessary skeptical as regards doubtful evidence (especially in the case of Plato and the Old Academy) of the beginnings in European thought of the negative or apophatic way of thinking and its relations to more positive or kataphatic ways of thinking about God. One of its greatest strengths, perhaps the greatest, is that the author makes clear that none of the persons concerned, Hellenic, Jewish or Christian, was engaged in the pursuit (...) of a philosophical abstraction, or the heaping of rhetorical superlatives on God. They were rather concerned to present the origin of the universe as an intimately present living reality which infinitely transcends our thought and speech. This, combined with careful attention to the varieties of negative theology and its relations with positive, and the particular difficulties experienced by the members of the various traditions involved, makes the book the best introduction to the negative theology available."" -A. H. Armstrong, Emeritus Professor of Greek, University of Liverpool, England. Emeritus Professor of Classics, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Senior Fellow of the British Academy. Irish academic Deirdre Carabine has lived and taught in Uganda for more than twenty years. She has recently been founder Vice-Chancellor at the Virtual University of Uganda (VUU), the first fully online university in Sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to that she set up International Health Sciences University in Kampala. She has taught at Queen's Belfast, University College Dublin, and Uganda Martyrs University. Currently, she is Director of Programmes at VUU. She attended the Queen's University of Belfast where she graduated with a PhD in philosophy, and University College Dublin where, as one of the first Newman Scholars, she gained a second PhD in Classics. She is also author of John Scottus Eriugena in the Great Medieval Thinkers Series (2000). (shrink)

Thomas Williams has argued that the doctrine of univocity is true and salutary. Such a claim is frequently contested, particularly in regard to the property—if there be any such—of existence or being. Inspired by the thought of Francisco Suárez, I outline a way of understanding the thesis of the analogy of being that avoids the criticisms levelled by Williams and others against analogy. I further suggest that the metaphysically committed version of univocal predication favoured by many analytic philosophers of religion (...) causes difficulties for the practice of perfect being theology, which is often taken to play an important role in the construction of kataphatic philosophical theologies. My exposition of the analogy of being is, I suggest, better fitted to the practice of perfect being theology and, thus, salutary for the practice of Christian natural theology. (shrink)

Father Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), directly influenced by Vladimir Solovyov and especially by Father Pavel Florensky, developed his sophiological concept which takes a central place in his doctrine of Trinity and God's economy. The main failure of the Russian sophiology is that the question of God's Wisdom is not Christologically founded in the spirit of the New Testament and patristic teaching. Bulgakov neglects the theology of God's uncreated energies. He thinks that it does not sufficiently explain the creation of the world (...) as well as the relationship between God and the world. According to him, the creation of the world and its unity with God can be explained only through a mediator who acts as an “ontological bridge” between the Creator and the creation. Bulgakov, using the ontological mediation paradigms that are characteristic for certain ancient philosophical systems, especially Neo-Platonism, develops his doctrine of Sophia. She is immanent to both the nature of God and the creation. This attitude leads Bulgakov to the position of pantheism. In order to avoid this danger, he modifies his teaching introducing two models of Sophia: “Divine Sophia” and “Created Sophia”. Unlike the patristic theology, Bulgakov’s sophiological essentialism does not tend the antinomy of apophatic-kataphatic theology, and thereby he puts into question the ontological difference between the Creator and the creation. It is a failed attempt to interpret the dogma of the creation of the world ex nihilo, through categories and concepts that are alien to the church tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Denying Divinity: Apophasis in the Patristic Christian and Soto Zen Buddhist TraditionsJoseph S. O'LearyDenying Divinity: Apophasis in the Patristic Christian and Soto Zen Buddhist Traditions. By J. P. Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. 249. $65.00.Janet Williams studied patristic theology at Oxford and Soto Zen in Tokyo, in the circle of Nishijima Zenji. In Denying Divinity: Apophasis in the Patristic Christian and Soto Zen Buddhist Traditions, her (...) excellent account of negation and silence in Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor (pp. 64-126) and in Dogen (pp. 126-179) is preceded by surveys of apophasis in earlier Christianity and Buddhism and followed by an eloquent defense of the importance of the twofold apophatic tradition for contemporary theology (pp. 180-228).The initial surveys show a sure-footed scholarly competence that may owe something to the author's experience as an investment banker. Her writing often exhibits a concentrated justesse, as in the two paragraphs on Origen (pp. 26-27). The temptation to forced comparisons between the two traditions is avoided until the concluding chapter, apart from a few unconvincing touches such as this remark: "How similar all this sounds to the 'unsupported thought' and the 'absence of thought-coverings' in the Prajñaparamita literature!"—in reference to Gregory of Nyssa on Abraham's faith, which was "unmixed and pure of any concept" (p. 29). Similarly, to speak of Plotinus' "recoil from—or transcendence of—ontological views" (p. 18) is inappropriately Nāgārjunian; Plotinus held firm, dogmatic views and entertained a host of speculative ones. (Incidentally, it is probably wrong to identify the experience recounted in Enneads IV.8—the relatively frequent ascent of the soul to contemplate the intelligible realm—with the union with the One, evoked in Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 23, a much rarer event [p. 21].)Gregory of Nyssa is nudged in the direction of Buddhism when Williams talks of "the inchoate undermining of the realist ontology he inherited from Plato and Aristotle" (pp. 32-33) and suggests that "the hesitation between ontology and 'disontology,' if it were a little more developed, would become the kind of recoil from [End Page 370] ontological views which we see as characteristic of apophasis" (p. 36). As a very kataphatic theologian in dogmatic debate, Gregory has no aversion to views; his apophasis applies only to certain views of the divine, especially heretical ones that he sees as hubristic. In Mādhyamaka Buddhism, one transcends "views" about anything, but in the Greek Fathers it is only views concerning God that are problematized. The Buddhist transcending of views is oriented to a nondual experience of everyday reality, but in the Fathers it concerns only the divine simplicity, infinity, and transcendence and the mysteries of the eternal generation of the Son and the Incarnation. It is untrue that "there is no explicit apophasis in Gregory" (p. 35): there is plenty of it in Contra Eunomium II, albeit of a simple kind. Nonetheless, Gregory's ontology remains realistic even at the level of divine being. One might query the view expressed by Rowan Williams that, for Gregory, the divine essence becomes "an abstraction and, in a sense, a fantasy" (p. 34).Dionysius is presented as a mobile and open-ended thinker who has been underestimated. He "negates both affirmation and negation, but by offering no third alternative, in a sense affirms them too as the only usable theological resources" (p. 121). Maximus accords with this, although attaining "a finer balance of incarnational christo-centrism over Neoplatonism" (p. 124). The claim that Dionysius "is at pains to distance himself from the Neoplatonist tradition of making transcendence prior or superior to immanence" (p. 216) is overstated, and it misses the degree to which Proclus had already seen the cosmos as pervaded by divine eros (as pointed out long ago by Anders Nygren).The emphasis on a nonduality of transcendence and immanence brings Dionysius into a rapprochement with more of the this-worldly Zen vision. Similarly, the stress on a "shocking activity of emptiness" (p. 141) in Dogen hints at a parallel with the divine ekstasis in Dionysius. But the latter is merely a variant of the Neoplatonic... (shrink)

abstract: This essay explores the parallels in the life and teaching of the Korean Zen master Pojo Chinul (1158–1210) and the Franciscan saint and theologian Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (ca. 1217–1274). Living during the same thirteenth century but on opposite sides of the world, both men committed their lives to reforming the religious life and to attaining the experience of awakening in their respective traditions. To this end, both encouraged the study of their foundational texts, together with the earnest practice of (...) meditation and contemplation. Both commented on the issues of a kataphatic and apophatic approach to ultimate reality, finding in the latter a fuller description (by non-description!) of the goal of the spiritual life. Controlling thoughts and developing intuitive wisdom were practices that united the two men, aiming to establish a constant awareness of the numinous moment by moment. In this way, they rejoiced in the freedom from fear bestowed by awakening to a clear vision of things as they really are in the unity of the infinite yet intimate being that undergirds all things. Ultimately, they seem to part company in the practice of devotion, with Bonaventure pointing to the love of the crucified Jesus, and yet even here, the remembrance of the name of the Buddha or the Christ was valued by both as an authentic path to the journey's goal. (shrink)

Concerning Nicolaus Cusanus’ (Nicholas of Cusa, 1401–1464) mysticism of the intellect, his approach to the problem of ineffability deserves the special attention of researchers. Preceded by a general exposition on the topic of the inconceivability of the experience of the foundational autopoietic self-reference of thinking and speaking, this article shows how Nicolaus Cusanus has developed a complex approach to the problem of an “ineffable way of speaking” (ineffable fari). Cusanus developed a set of approaches to non-negatable cataphatic “pointing rods” (Max (...) Scheler) and apophatic ways of thinking about what is to be understood as ineffable in the sense of a philosophical form of mysticism. Both are still inspiring and highly relevant for the discussion today. In terms of the overall interior development of his philosophical way of “eloquent silence” (German: beredtes Schweigen), it is notable that Cusanus eventually referred to both ways of affirmative and negative theology in their dialectic interdependence. Eventually, he found increasingly simple ways to point the way towards the “likeness of the path along which the seeker must walk.” In his later works, Cusanus developed a unique understanding of the problem of ineffability about philosophical mysticism, the potential of which remains to be explored further in the future. (shrink)