Apophatic Theology and Twentieth-Century Novels

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-333
Author(s):  
L. Lamar Nisly
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Negative Theology ◽  
Apophatic Theology ◽  
Catch 22

Abstract Drawing on apophatic theology, this essay argues that some twentieth-century texts invite an apophatic approach by revealing the limits of language and hinting at some understanding of God, without doing so directly. First, Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River shows a divine encounter but, in the process, underscores the limits of language to describe this experience. Second, in a sort of parallel to negative theology, Walker Percy’s Lancelot points readers toward God by having Lancelot descend into sin and evil, an affirmation of God through negation. Finally, in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a novel without explicit Christian interests, characters parody prayer, rail against the world’s unfairness, and deny God, but in these interactions they actually reveal something about belief and God. These texts reveal that an apophatic understanding can enrich our reading of twentieth-century novels.

scholarly journals The Catch of the Hyperreal: Yossarian and the Ideological Vicissitudes of Hyperreality

Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 386-410
Author(s):  
Abdolali Yazdizadeh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
American Life ◽  
Ideological Discourse ◽  
Catch 22

Hyperreality is a key term in Jean Baudrillard’s cultural theory, designating a phase in the development of image where it “masks the absence of a profound reality.” The ambiance of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) closely corresponds to Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal as images persist to precede reality in the fictional world of the novel. Since for Baudrillard each order of simulacra produces a certain mode of ideological discourse that impacts the perception of reality, it is plausible that the characters of this fictional context should be ideologically impacted by the hyperreal discourse. From this vantage point it is possible to have a new critical assessment of Yossarian’s (protagonist) antiheroic stance and study the role of the “business of illusion,” whose ideological edifice is based on the discourse of the hyperreal, on his antiheroic stance and actions. By drawing on Baudrillard’s cultural theory this paper aims to read Heller’s novel as a postmodern allegory of rebellion against the hyperreality of the twentieth-century American life and trace its relevance to modern-day U.S.

What Do I Love When I Love My Patient?

Janus Head ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-105
Author(s):  
Mark Fratoni ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Negative Theology ◽  
Preliminary Attempt ◽  
Apophatic Theology ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Theological Language

This essay examines the implications of Jacques Derrida’s complex engagement with negative theology for the field of psychotherapy. Negative (or apophatic) theology is a long tradition which emphasizes God’s absolute otherness. This essay explores Derrida’s attempt in The Gift of Death to translate this theological language into the language of human intersubjectivity. John Caputo, the most renowned American interpreter of Derrida’s writings on religion, calls for a “generalized apophatics,” an application of apophatic thought to fields outside of religion. Caputo bases his exhortation on Derrida’s assertion that “every other is wholly other.” This essay is a preliminary attempt to sketch the outline of an apophatic psychotherapy, with an emphasis on Derridean themes such as the impossible, the secret, and translation.

The Critical Value of Negative Theology

1993 ◽  
Vol 86 (4) ◽  
pp. 439-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Peter Kenney
Keyword(s):  
Critical Value ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Philosophical Foundation ◽  
Negative Theology ◽  
The West ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Apophatic Theology ◽  
Anglo American

If metaphysics seems today to have buried its undertakers, then negative theology may soon silence its critics. Having established a significant if sometimes recessive presence in Western theism, negative theology is again an important element in contemporary philosophical theology. While Anglo- American philosophy of religion remains dominated by analytic neoscholasticism, in the last decade a countercurrent has emerged that makes common cause with the apophatic tradition. The Gifford lectures of Stephen R. L. Clark are examples of this development, as are the works of Leszek Kolakowski. Each thinker has attempted to expand discussion beyond the scholastic parameters of the field and make connections with important historical figures who are often neglected in the literature. Neoplatonism has featured prominently this development; as the principal philosophical foundation for apophatic theology in the West, it has been invoked in both its original Greco-Roman guise and its subsequent manifestation within the Abrahamic tradition (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).

scholarly journals Kazimir Malevich’s Negative Theology and Mystical Suprematism

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 542
Author(s):  
Irina Sakhno
Keyword(s):  
Negative Theology ◽  
Visual Optics ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Apophatic Theology ◽  
Geometric Abstraction ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Invisible

This article examines Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist art in the context of negative (apophatic) theology, as a crucial tool in analyzing both the artist’s theoretical conclusions and his new visual optics. Our analysis rests on the point that the artist intuitively moved towards recognizing the ineffability of the multidimensional universe and perceiving God as the Spiritual Absolute. In his attempt to see the invisible in the formulas of Emptiness and Nothingness, Malevich turned to the primary forms of geometric abstraction—the square, circle and cross—which he endows with symbolic concepts and meanings. Malevich treats his Suprematism as a method of perceiving the ineffability of the Absolute. With the Black Square seen as a face of God, the patterns of negative theology rise to become the philosophical formula of primary importance. Malevich’s Mystical Suprematism series (1920–1922) confirms the presence of complex metaphysical reflection and apophatic thought in his art. Not only does the series contain icon paraphrases and the Christian symbolism of the cross and mandorla, but it also advances the formulas of the apophatic faith of the modern times, since Suprematism presents primary forms as the universals of “the face of the future” and the energy of the non-objective art.

scholarly journals The concept of "despair" by S. Kierkegaard in rationalistic and postmodernist reflection

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Negative Theology ◽  
High Quality ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Logical Structures

The concept of "despair" of S. Kierkegaard in the rationalist and postmodern reflection is considered. It is noted that consideration of the reflection on Kierkegaard’s writing heritage demonstrates the contemporality of the ideas of Kierkegaard and representatives of the philosophical trends of the twentieth century. This is due to the relevance of the comparative "re-reading". In conditions of the crisis of Christianity S. Kierkegaard, combining in one person the philosopher, theologian and writer, deliberately violated the classical demand for purity of the genre in the name of the creation of a-system anthropology of change, which involves the movement-formation of an existential subject to faith. Care for the reader, to which S. Kierkegaard ultimately refers, involves the use of an indirect form of communication as the only means of attracting the reader to the aporias of existence. To the same aims serve such concepts — existentials in its negative (pathetic, lyrical) dialectics as fear, despair, repetition, which differ from any formal-logical structures due to rhetorics of the image and character specificity. Representatives of rationalist philosophy, Theunissen and Habermas, categorizing despair in the discourse of negative theology, considered it as a condition for the possibility of intersubjectivity, by asking and solving the problem of the Other, which has become ultramodern one again. The category of despair, which is thoroughly considered by Kierkegaard, becomes a subject of the religious-philosophical description. Increased attention to the very form of the work and the context of its appearance (in the particular case - "Concluding Unscientific Postscript") distinguishes Kierkegaard from contemporaries and synchronously leads him into a deconstructionist camp, that allows some thinkers to mark him as a Christian postmodernist. For Derrida, the aforementioned work is a model of a "high-quality" simulacrum that produces an over-textual excess of meanings. But for Kierkegaard as a Christian, this is another form of despair.

Introduction: Failing

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Marika Rose
Keyword(s):  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Negative Theology ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Mystical Tradition ◽  
Apophatic Theology

Whichever way you look at it, theology has failed. This chapter explores the problem of theology’s failure, placing it within the context of the linguistic turn in continental philosophy—which raises the question of language’s failure—and the problem of economy. Suggesting that Žižek’s work represents a return to the central ontological—rather than linguistic—concerns of Christian apophatic theology, this introduction sets out the overall structure of the book, which positions Žižek’s work in relation to first, the Christian mystical tradition that begins with Dionysius and second, contemporary debates about continental philosophy and negative theology. Via Žižek, it proposes a materialist model of faithfulness to the Christian tradition that is inescapably bound up with failure, with infidelity.

What Is Positive in Negative Theology?

2019 ◽  
pp. 151-173
Author(s):  
Lenn E. Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Negative Theology ◽  
Apophatic Theology

Does the negative theology inspired by thoughts of God’s transcendence reduce to vacuity, leaving only atheism or agnosticism as its residue? Maimonides helps us frame an answer. The “lexicon” of biblical anthropomorphisms he surveys in the first seventy chapters of the Guide to the Perplexed prepare one for the discipline of apophatic theology by mapping an ontological, axiological, and epistemological hierarchy oriented by an axis stretching away from physicality and toward the intellectual and ever more real. God surmounts its summit. We enrich our grasp of God’s infinite perfection as our appreciation grows of the myriad ways in which perfection shows itself in nature. So broader experience can give content to our thoughts of God’s absoluteness and guide us in pursuit of a perfection of our own. Reaching beyond Maimonides’ hylomorphic axis of perfection, the Chapter 6 seeks to bring matter itself in from the cold.

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