Conclusion

This chapter highlights the broader theoretical points that can be made on the basis of the analysis made in the previous chapters. It engages with contemporary philosophical and theological discussions beyond Islamic studies, criticizing the reduction of negative theology to paradoxicality, and the modern association of apophaticism with mysticism, critical thinking, and morality. It further argues that “negative theology” does not address a sui generis category or an enduring, well-defined group of intellectuals; it is rather a conceptual construct with debated meanings in changing historical settings. The chapter reminds that there were numerous negative theological positions regarding but a single question in a rich field of intellectual activity. These positions could and did transcend disciplinary boundaries as they were adopted by scholars with diverse orientations and backgrounds. Thus, construction of singular and distinct Christian, Jewish, or Muslim “negative theological traditions” not only overlooks the diversity, and sometimes conflicts, among various theological positions within religious traditions, but it also misses the historical fact that the negative theological positions among intellectuals from different religious backgrounds had strong overlaps. The rich theological networks highlighted the intellectual porosities between not only disciplines but also religious traditions.

Necessarily Dissimilar

In the centuries following al-Kindī, Muslim philosophers developed a coherent family of apophatic theological positions on the divine essence and its accessibility. The recurring aspects of this philosophical apophaticism were (1) a negative theology of divine attributes that reads them as negations, (2) the unknowability of the divine essence, closely connected with an Aristotelian version of the Neoplatonic distinction between discursive thought [dianoia] and non-discursive intellection [noēsis], (3) the necessary dissimilarity of God as the first cause of everything else, and (4) a philosophical hermeneutics that protects divine oneness and dissimilarity. Most of these aspects were established in conversation with the Muʿtazilites. As early as al-Kindī, Muslim philosophers adopted such a philosophical apophaticism of the divine nature, which later would take diverse forms, while preserving strategic resemblances.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the framework and the content of the book and discusses the basic conceptual problems revolving around “negative theology.” It argues that we should not only move from “negative theology” to “negative theologies” in order to approach Islamic intellectual landscapes, but we should also qualify the particular question of theology we are examining. Discussions of negative theology as such tend to confuse divine attributes and the divine essence and reduce apophaticism into a hunt for negative particles and statements. The chapter narrows down the scope of the book to the negative theologies of the divine essence. It also presents justifications for its boundaries and its linguistic preferences, and it defines some technical terms that appear throughout the book. It provides a conceptual introduction to negative theology and a compass to the subsequent chapters of the book.

“Yes and No”

This chapter introduces paradoxical apophaticism on the divine essence and tests the common association of paradox and Sufism, with a particular focus on the self-contradictory phrases and statements in the “X-not-X” forms. Neither the employment nor the celebration of paradoxes were uniquely Sufi phenomenon. Yet it was primarily Sufis from early on who consciously adopted paradoxical apophatic approaches to the divine essence. I argue that the employment of paradoxes follows a rule-governed set of strategies in order to negate propositional discourse on God. These strategies entailed (1) a balanced, or symmetrical, attitude that finds affirmative and negative language equally disqualified, (2) a balanced take on the binary of divine incomparability and immanence, while the vast majority of Muslim scholars hold the former superior, and (3) a dialectical logic that performs divine trans-discursivity by uniting the irreconcilable opposites that constitute propositional discourse.

Against Discourse

Since its emergence as a systematic discipline, the scholarship on prophetic traditions depicted itself as the heir of a scripturalist apophaticism, which cancels itself in favor of the unknowability of the divine nature and the incomprehensibility of the sacred Qurʾanic discourse on it. The main features of this tradition were as follows: (1) the conviction that the Qurʾan is the uncreated, eternal word of God. (2) This premise was fundamental in canceling out human discursive constructs, since they cannot grasp the meaning of the transcendent discourse on God’s nature, specifically in the case of Her anthropomorphic depictions. (3) Any interpretive inquiry is doomed to fail before the unknowable divine nature and the transcendent discourse on it. Theological discourses nullify themselves in favor of a non-cognitive position, where neither the divine ipseity, nor the meaning of the transcendent discourse on it can be known. This non-cognitive, anti-interpretive position played an important and rather exceptional role in the canonization of Sufism in the tenth and eleventh centuries and in the formation of the nascent Sufi orders in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

Double Negation

This chapter introduces the contours of the classical Ismāʿīlī negative theology of the divine essence. The apophatic path developed by Ismāʿīlī scholars had distinct cosmological markers and a logical structure that enabled the performative self-cancellation of discourse about the inaccessible divine essence. Respecting their diversity, and without essentializing or dehistoricizing them, we can highlight three general features that widely circulated among Ismāʿīlī thinkers until the Mongol invasion: (1) They put the divine essence beyond the divine word, which lies beyond the first creation, the universal intellect. (2) The relative oneness of the divine word can be transcended only by two negations. The first one negates the positive ground and relationality, and the second cancels all (positive and negative) discursivity in order to indicate the beyond of the relative oneness beyond creation. (3) The absolute oneness of God is unknowable, beyond the impenetrable oneness of the divine word.