0. Introduction
Apophatic theology is perhaps most closely associated with the Eastern Fathers and it is the view that the divine essence is utterly transcendent, ineffable, infinite and incomprehensible. As a consequence, one must use negative speech or apophatic language concerning God, saying what he is not rather than what he is. I shall discuss the distinction between essences and properties that this doctrine implies and I will argue it entails a denial of any sort of essentialism, and makes it impossible to make coherent claims about the essence of any particular.
1. The Divine Essence
The New Testament authors say that “no one has seen God at any time,” (Joh. 1:18; 6:46; 1 Joh. 4:12) and even declare that it is impossible for him to be seen, “who alone has immortality and dwells in approachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see.” (1 Tim. 6:16) The epistles of Paul give the title “the invisible God.” (Col. 1:15; 1 Tim. 1:17; cf. Rom. 1:20) Paul describes the transcendence of God this way:
“O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” (Rom. 11:33-36)
These statements express a great distance between God and the created order, in terms of nature and comprehension. But there are also claims to the opposite effect, that God is close to the world and all of creation, “in him we live, and move, and have our existence.” (Acts 17:28) The saints have a special closeness with the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Paul says to the Corinthians, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (2 Cor. 13:14) They are baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” (Matt. 28:19) The Johannine writings claim the saints will see God, as he is, and will “be one” with the Father in a similar manner to how Christ is one with the Father. (1 Joh. 3:1-2; Joh. 17:21-24) The eastern fathers often claimed that God’s essence was infinite and transcended all comprehension and is therefore inaccessible to all creatures. As in John of Damascus, “As regards what God is, it is impossible to say what he is in his essence, so it is better to discuss him by abstraction from all things.” (Expos. Fidei 1.4) Dionysius the Areopagite tells us, “He cannot be known by the senses, nor in an image, nor by opinion, nor by reason, nor by knowledge.” (De divinis nominibus 1.5) Dionysius explains that the divine essence is not on our plane of existence or in any way analogous to existing things in our sense-experience, and is forever beyond our reach, “He is neither conceived, nor expressed, nor named. And He is not any of existing things, nor is He known in any one of existing things. And He is all in all, and nothing in none. And He is known to all, from all, and to none from none.” (De div. nom. 7.3.) Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) admitted that when taken together all of these statements appear contradictory, but he claims they are both true.
“It is right for all theology which wishes to respect piety to affirm sometimes one and sometimes the other, when both affirmations are true.” (Physical and Theological Chapters, 121.)
Gregory Palamas is most famous for articulating and defending a distinction between the divine essence and the uncreated energies of God which was affirmed by the orthodox Councils of Constantinople of 1341, 1351 and 1368 which are sometimes called the Palamite councils. Palamas says the divine essence “exceeds even His uncreated energies, since this essence transcends all affirmation and all negation." (Triads, 2.3.8) The saints participate in the energies or operations of God, and thereby in the life of God and become deified (theosis) but they do not participate in the essence of God, “Illumination or divine and deifying grace is not the essence but the energy of God.” (Physical and Theological Chapters, 69.)
2. Apophaticism and Divine Properties
In conciliar formulations of the Trinity doctrine, the three divine persons are the “one God,” hence, the only true God is the Trinity. There are not three Gods because the divine persons are identical with the divine essence, and yet there are three distinct persons because the persons are not identical with one another. Cyril of Alexandria says in the Council of Ephesus (431) the Son “is One with his Father through the identity of essence.” (Cum salvator noster, 12.) The Second Council of Constantinople (553) likewise, "the nature or essence of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is one." The Father is unbegotten, while the Son is begotten, and the Holy Ghost proceeds, therefore, the conciliar definitions claim a real difference exists between the persons. As Gregory of Nyssa says, “the idea of cause differentiates the Persons of the Holy Trinity.” (Not Three Gods, 18.)
The divine essence is incomprehensible so must be talked about only in a negative manner, saying what it is not. Even here our language is not perfect, says Dionysius, “when pursuing the negative method to reach That which is beyond all abstraction, we must begin by applying our negations to things which are most remote from It.” (De Theologia Mystica, 3.) The Synodical Tome (1341) of the first Palamite council affirmed “the blessed and holy Godhead in its essence is beyond ineffable and beyond unknowable and infinitely removed from all unlimitedness.” (par. 28.) If the persons of the Trinity are identical with the essence, then it follows that the Trinity is likewise incomprehensible and must be described only “by abstraction” which is to say negatively, or apophatically. Therefore, Augustine says “If we are asked to define the Trinity, we can only say, it is not this or that.” (De Trin. 4.100.1) Evagrius Ponticus similarly says “remember the true faith and know that the Holy Trinity does not make himself known.” (Epistle 29.) And Dionysius again, "The Supernal Triad, Deity above all essence, knowledge and goodness." (De Theologia Mystica, 1.1) However, if someone were to ask for a definition of the Trinity and I were to answer, “the Trinity is not a book nor is it a color.” This would not be an insightful or satisfying answer. It would be an answer only of negation, saying what the Trinity is not. It would also seem to make any systematic theology impossible if God could not be described positively whatsoever. But both Augustine, Dionysius and Evagrius offer many positive descriptions of the Trinity in their writings, saying that there are three persons, and describing their relations and so on. This seems like a contradiction. To say that the divine essence is utterly unknowable, while simultaneously making claims about God, his properties, and how many persons God is. This apparent contradiction is addressed by making a distinction between God’s properties and his essence.
"It is necessary to distinguish this negative method of abstraction from the positive method of affirmation, in which we deal with the Divine Attributes." (De mystica theologia 2.2)
For Dionysius, one might know everything about the attributes of God and still know nothing about his essence. Borrowing somewhat from the tools of Aristotelian metaphysics, the eastern made a distinction between the unknowable essence of God and his properties. Aristotle made a distinction between essences and properties or accidents. Though modern interpreters disagree over precisely what Aristotle means by an essence in distinction to a form, the details are somewhat inconsistent, “the substance (ούσια) is the form (μορφή)” of a thing, and yet he also says, “By the substance without matter I mean essence,” λέγω δὲ οὐσίαν ἄνευ ὕλης τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι. (Met. 1032b14) Aristotle also discusses four different sorts of causes or explanations, αίτια, a term which the Cappadocians would later borrow to describe trinitarian processions. (Phys. ii. 2; Met. 5.1013a cf. Basil of Caesarea, De Spiritu Sancto 6; Gregory Nazianzen, Orat. 2.3; Gregory of Nyssa, Adv. Eun. 1.28.1, et al.)
Which is to say, in the traditional view, it is possible to make many statements about the properties of God, to assert that he is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, necessarily existent, etc. without having said anything about the divine essence itself directly. The essence remains “neither an object of intellectual nor of sensible perception, nor is absolutely anything of things existing,” but God may positively be described as “almighty” and “the Cause formative of all.” (De divinis nominibus, 7.3.) But it is not the view of the eastern fathers that God has no properties.
3. Properties and Essences
For Dionysius, one can only speak negatively about the divine essence but it is possible to make positive affirmations about the properties of God. An illustration of this distinction may be found in the mystery of the eucharist, which asserts that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ. (cf. Mk. 14:22–24) Early church fathers like Ignatius of Antioch took this literally, condemning the Docetae for denying that "the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ." (Smyrnaeans 6:2) And of course, the other fathers aforementioned would not deny ex professio the real presence of Christ in the eucharist. Though the bread and wine retain their original properties, they are believed to transform in essence, becoming Christ's body and blood while still appearing as bread and wine. This view seems to entail a denial of any sort of essentialism, because all of the properties of the bread and wine remain the same although there is a change of essence. Likewise, whatever knowledge one has about the properties of God, it remains impossible to know anything about his essence. The metaphysical claims made by the fathers seem to necessitate the following claims:
For any entity a it has an essence e and instantiates a set of properties.
For any a it is the e of a that determines what sort of thing it is, not whatever properties it has.
For any e it is ineffable iff it is impossible for any created intellect (νοὸς) to define or comprehend it.
For any e it is transcendent iff it is not spatially circumscribed, and transcends all categories of existence (ὑπεροὐσία).
It seems the most problematic claim is 2, but this claim is necessary for the sort of distinction that must be made for apophaticism to be sensible. As in the case of the eucharist, the flesh of Christ can have all of the properties of bread and yet still not be bread. The eucharistic offering is the flesh of Christ because that is its essence, even if it has none of the properties which are associated with flesh rather than bread. If situations like this can occur then the properties a thing has do not give us insights into what their essences could be. The essences of any particular object remain epistemically inaccessible to us. The only reason anybody thinks that bread becomes flesh in the eucharistic ceremony is that they believe God has revealed that this takes place, but in the absence of a divine revelation there would not be any method to tell that the bread has become flesh. There are no set of scientific experiments that would be possible, because the physical properties of the sacramental bread do not change after the consecration. There just is no way to know what essence anything would have in the absence of a divine revelation. It might be that my chair really has the essence of Julius Caesar, even though it has all of the properties of being a chair and I could never be made privy to this fact. What is an essence supposed to be if not the essential properties that a thing has? It seems that “essence” is a meaningless word if it is divorced from the properties of a thing in the way these mystics wish to. If it is not the case that the essence of a thing determines what it is irrespective of what properties it has, then apophatic theologians are simply contradicting themselves when making claims about divine properties while simultaneously saying that the divine essence is indefinable and unknowable. If their claims about his properties are in fact true, then they are defining the divine essence to some extent when talking about God’s properties—unless a strict separation is made between essences and properties in the way in which I have spelled out.
No comments:
Post a Comment