Apophatic and Cataphatic

Orthodox theology speaks of God in two ways — by affirmation (kataphasis), naming him from what he has done, and by negation (apophasis), denying of him everything creaturely. This file sets out how the two ways are ordered, why negation has the last word without becoming agnosticism, where the Dionysian corpus stands in the tradition and what is honestly known about its authorship, and why the Trinitarian names are the one case where affirmation cannot be dissolved into negation.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Two Ways

Cataphatic (affirmative) theology names God from his works: he is good, wise, living, powerful, just, God. Apophatic (negative) theology denies of him every such name in the sense in which creatures bear it: he is not good as any good thing is good, not living as any living thing lives, and — at the limit — not a being among beings at all. The two are not alternatives between which a theologian chooses. Every affirmation is made in order to be denied, and every denial presupposes the affirmation it corrects.

The formal structure is set out in the corpus attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. The Divine Names proceeds by affirmation, drawing the names of God from Scripture and ordering them; The Mystical Theology, a text of a few pages, then strips them away, ascending from the grossest denials to the finest, and ends by denying even the denials — God is beyond assertion and beyond negation alike (Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology 1.2, 5; trans. Colm Luibhéid and Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Classics of Western Spirituality, New York: Paulist Press, 1987). The famous conclusion is that the cause of all “is not soul or mind… nor is it speech or thought… nor is it darkness or light, nor error, nor truth” — and beyond this, “there is no speech of it, nor name, nor knowledge.”

The authorship must be stated plainly, because the corpus’s authority in the East has sometimes been defended by not stating it. The writings present themselves as by the Athenian converted by St. Paul (Acts 17:34), but they quote Proclus (d. 485) and presuppose a developed liturgical practice unattested in the first century; the scholarly consensus places them in Syria around 500, and they first surface in the record at the Collatio of 532, where the Severan party appealed to them and the Chalcedonian party questioned their genuineness. The Church has received the corpus as patristic and it is quoted as authoritative by St. Maximus, St. John of Damascus, and St. Gregory Palamas; that reception is not affected by the fact that the attribution is pseudonymous, and this collection reports both (Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite, London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989; Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Negation Is Not Ignorance

The whole point of apophasis is missed if it is taken as a report that we do not know much about God. The tradition’s claim is stronger and stranger: the denials are the accurate speech. To say that God is not a being is not to say we have failed to determine whether he is one; it is to say, correctly, that he is the cause of being and therefore not among the things caused. St. Gregory of Nyssa gives the metaphysical ground for this in his doctrine of divine infinity (apeiria): God is without limit, and what is without limit cannot be comprehended, since to comprehend is to encompass and so to bound (Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius I; Life of Moses II.163–164; trans. NPNF II/5 and Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1978). Gregory was, so far as the record goes, the first Christian writer to make infinity a positive attribute of God rather than a defect, and the consequence he draws is the one that matters here: the soul’s approach to God has no term, because there is no term to reach.

Gregory names this endless approach epektasis, from St. Paul’s “stretching forward to what lies ahead” (Philippians 3:13). It is a genuine and beautiful strand of his thought. It should be noted that the doctrine of deification in this repository is deliberately not built upon eternal epektasis, which remains a Nyssen theme rather than a conciliar definition; the point stands here in its proper and limited place — as an account of why the unknowability of the essence does not frustrate the soul but constitutes its joy (see What Theosis Is Not: The Dogmatic Guardrails).

The classic scriptural image of the whole method is Moses on Sinai. He goes up into the darkness where God is (Exodus 20:21), asks to see the glory, and is shown the back parts only (Exodus 33:18–23). Both Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory the Theologian read the episode as the paradigm of theology: the ascent is real, the encounter is real, the darkness is not a failure of the ascent but its summit (Gregory the Theologian, Oration 28.3; Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses II.162–169).

Where the Affirmations Come From

If nothing may be said of the essence, what grounds the affirmations? Two things: the economy, and the energies.

The economy is what God has done in history. The names God bears in Scripture are drawn from his acts toward us — creator, shepherd, saviour, judge — and are true of him as the agent of those acts. St. Gregory of Nyssa presses this to the point of an etymological argument in Ad Ablabium: even the word “Godhead” (theotēs) is derived not from a nature but from an operation, from God’s beholding and overseeing of all things, so that the most general divine name is itself an operation-word (Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Ablabium; GNO III/1; NPNF II/5). This is the technical reason the Fathers can name God at all while denying that any name reaches the essence.

The energies are the doctrinal form the same insight took at the Councils of Constantinople of 1341, 1347, and 1351: God’s uncreated operations are truly God, truly participable, and truly distinct from the imparticipable essence. Cataphatic theology is thus not a set of approximations to an essence we cannot see; it is exact speech about God as he really gives himself. The distinction is dogma, not opinion, and this collection does not restate the case for it (see The Palamite Settlement; St. Gregory Palamas: The Essence-Energies Distinction).

The Trinitarian Names Are Not Dissolved

Here the pattern breaks in an important way, and it is the reason this file belongs in a collection on the Trinity.

Most divine names can be denied as well as affirmed, because they are drawn from creatures and applied by analogy. The names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not like this. They were not inferred from the creation and they are not corrected by negation, because they were given: they are the names in which the Church baptizes, on the Lord’s own command (Matthew 28:19), and they name not what God is but who each of the three is in relation to the others. Apophasis strips away everything drawn from the world; it does not strip away the revealed relations of origin, because those are not drawn from the world in the first place.

This is why the Church can hold, without contradiction, that the divine essence is utterly unknowable and that the doctrine of the Trinity is definite, defensible, and worth anathemas. What is confessed at Nicaea and Constantinople is not a description of the essence but a statement about who God has revealed himself to be — and, negatively, a set of exclusions ruling out the readings of that revelation which the Church found to destroy it. Apophaticism does not soften the dogma; it is what makes the dogma the only thing that can be said.

The Modern Recovery and a Caution

Apophatic theology was recovered as a central category for modern Orthodox thought largely through Vladimir Lossky, whose The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church opens by treating apophasis not as one theological method among others but as the fundamental attitude of all theology, inseparable from the life of prayer and from the vision of God (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London: James Clarke, 1957, chs. 1–2; see The Divine Darkness). The influence of this framing on the last century of Orthodox writing is hard to overstate, and it is broadly sound.

One caution belongs with it. Lossky’s presentation is bound up with a larger historical thesis — that the West lost the apophatic dimension and that this loss is traceable to its Trinitarian theology — and that thesis is contested, including among Orthodox scholars. It is treated as a live and unadjudicated question elsewhere in this collection and in the collections on the theologians who advanced it (see The Modern Personalist Reading; Lossky: Dionysius, Eckhart and the Negative Way). What is not contested, and what this file confesses with the whole tradition, is the rule itself: the essence is unknowable, the energies are God, and every affirmation about God is made in order to be exceeded.

References

Gregory of Nyssa. Against Eunomius; Ad Ablabium (On “Not Three Gods”). Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 5; Greek in Gregorii Nysseni Opera (GNO), ed. W. Jaeger et al.
Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Moses. Trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1978.
Gregory the Theologian. Oration 28. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Divine Names; The Mystical Theology. In Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibhéid and Paul Rorem. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957.
Louth, Andrew. Denys the Areopagite. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989.
Rorem, Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.