Growing into the Darkness of God: The Inseparability between Apophatic Theology and Ascetic Practice

When considered in the light of the description of divine darkness among ancient ascetical writers, the contemporary discussion of “negative theology” occasionally has a foreign ring. At the very least, it seems imbalanced. While it is true enough that a common antagonism to idolatry unites apophatic writers past and present, the problem in traditional texts is never merely—or even primarily—an intellectual one. Rather, apophaticism is always bound up with a problem of desire. The particular problem is one that might be called “graspingness,” the desire to have or to know God as a possession, in a way that does not require one’s own transformation. Intellectually problematic accounts of the divine are symptomatic of this more basic problem of desire—and to treat the symptom without treating the underlying condition is to achieve nothing—it is to reestablish graspingness in a new form. True apophasis occurs only as a result of what Gregory of Nyssa calls a “washing of one’s eyes” and what Gregory Palamas refers to as “purification.” Such achievements, these writers allege, require potentially long practice in the virtuous life, the result of which is the transformation of one’s very being, its increasing fittedness for communion with God. More important still, Gregory of Nyssa in particular presents apophasis as that which occurs to a person as part of this transformation as often as he presents it is as a strategy or method undertaken to achieve it. Gregory’s Moses finds himself amid darkness after ascending the mountain of God he arrives at through pursuit of the perfect life. He does not necessarily invite it. The bride in Gregory’s commentary on the Song of Songs experiences the absence of the bridegroom until she gives up her desire to possess him—and the process of giving up that desire is for her neither quick nor without pain.

There is no denying that apophaticism is at times put forward as a theological method or intellectual activity that one may pursue in order to produce within one the proper attitude toward God. Dionysius’ description of ascent to God by means of denial looms large here. At the same time, however, and often in the same texts, apophatic language is used to talk about the process of transformation itself, the happening to one of the healing of the graspingness that hinders one from receiving God into one’s life. As such, one could say that apophaticism—the denial of qualities to God, the silencing of speech, the entrance into darkness—is as much the result of an ongoing relationship as it is the carrying out of a plan, as much an account of the change one is said to undergo in the course of being united to God as it is the execution of a deliberate strategy. The line between the effort one makes to accustom one’s desire to the reality of God and the suffering of transformation one undergoes in relating to God is often blurred in the Christian ascetical tradition.¹ Apophaticism refers both to the disposition that one adopts to encounter God truly and the effect within one of the life of God. I believe that the latter aspect is at times insufficiently emphasized in accounts of the strategy of negative theology.

The purpose of this essay is twofold: First, I will review some of the contemporary literature on the strategy of apophaticism, the active process of negating qualities of God most often associated with the topic. What this literature has done so well is to show that the apophatic strategy is not aimed at metaphysical precision or even the regulation of speech about God, but the cultivation within one of the receptivity necessary to live with God.² It is, in other words, an ascetic discipline. But apophatic writers do not envision this discipline apart from the virtuous life. Scaling the mountain of God is inconceivable in isolation from the more pedestrian task of living well. Secondarily, drawing primarily on Gregory of Nyssa, I will argue that apophatic discourse cannot be fully understood...