The Eclipse of the Word: The Problem of Modern Apophaticism

Over the last few decades, philosophical theology has witnessed an explosion of interest in negative theology and all things apophatic. As Denys Turner claims, “we are all apophatic theologians now.” This dissertation conducts a theological assessment of this apophatic turn and stages a Christological intervention. The first part, focusing on Grammatical Thomism and radical phenomenology/hermeneutics, questions the theological adequacy of modern apophaticisms. I argue that fear of “rationalism,” “ontotheology,” and turning God into “an object” have driven the field in general towards a hasty and indiscriminate embrace of a God entirely beyond speech. We encounter, in Kantian fashion, (1) a priori limits on human linguistic capacities and (2) models of transcendence which make collapse and failure their site. Language, emptied of all intelligible content, becomes an impermeable barrier between God and creation. Here negative theology comes unmoored (along with anthropology and the doctrine of God) from a broader and more capacious theology of language, one which would see creatures as divine speech, at once included in and empowered by the eternal utterance of a divine-human Word. Modern apophaticisms culminate in an unwittingly Nestorian theology of language, one that bars any linguistic communion between the divine and the human and undermines the perichoresis which makes revelation and Christology possible. Following this diagnosis, the second part turns to contemporary French religious thought – specifically the work of Olivier-Thomas Venard and Jean-Louis Chrétien – in search of a more capacious theology of language centered on Christ’s composite person. By sketching an unbroken symbolic continuum spanning cosmos and Trinity – guaranteed by the Incarnate Word’s assumption and “magnetization” of speech – Venard seeks to “rebuild confidence in language” in the face of postmodernity’s “generalized agnosticism” and its obsession with abstract ineffability’s void. For his part, Chrétien performs an immanent critique of negative theology, showing that postmodern regard for silence, hospitality, and excess are best sheltered by linguistic audacity. Through the Mystical Body, humanity as polyphonic choir is incorporated into the Speech that goes from God to God, forever sheltered within “the ark of speech.”