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115 five Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas How to Speak Nevertheless about God— The Analogy of Being Deconstruction has been described as a ‘‘generalized apophatics.’’1 It reminds us how not to speak about anything at all, namely not to speak as if meaning were prior to language, as if the presence of the signified were prior to the use of the signifier,2 making it a transcendental signified available to us outside the chain of references (differences) which language is.3 Because negative theology is a reflection on the transcendence of God rather than on 1. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 28, 32, 41, 46, 55. 2. See the discussion of Augustine’s philosophy of language in ch. 4. 3. Since fully determinate meaning is always deferred in language by references not yet explicitly present to consciousness, linguistically embedded meaning is, in Heidegger’s language, always a combination of unconcealment and concealment. If language games are forms of life and, as Heidegger insists, meaning is also a function of our practices, the tacit dimension, the dialectic of presence and absence is extended even further. See Hubert L. Dreyfus, ‘‘Holism and Hermeneutics ,’’ Review of Metaphysics, XXXIV, 1 (September 1980) and my discussion in ‘‘Hermeneutics as Epistemology,’’ in Overcoming Onto-theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). Epistemic Transcendence 116 the (quasi)transcendental conditions for language as such, it is a particularized apophatics. It tells us how not to speak of God, namely not to speak of God as if any images derived from our perceptual powers or any concepts derived from our intellectual powers, including the divinely authorized images and concepts of biblical revelation, were adequate to the divine reality. God is never at the disposal of our cognitive equipment. We have seen that learning how not to speak about God can mean learning how to become silent. In the previous chapter we have focused on this dimension of Pseudo-Dionysius’ thought according to which negative theology reveals the inadequacy of all human language about God in order to loosen our grip on that language (or its grip on us). Thus freed, we are prepared for the gift of loving union in the silent darkness of the cloud of unknowing . After we have seen the inadequacy of all cognitive acts in relation to God, we leave them behind and move on beyond them to something higher and better. This is the successive-diachronic mode of negative theology. But the life of Moses is not lived at the top of Mt. Sinai, and except for rare moments of mystical ecstasy, the life of faith is lived at lower altitudes. There is an important dimension of negative theology that addresses itself to the life of faith in the cave, as it were, of language, images, and concepts. Here the task of negative theology is not to abandon the language of positive theology and lead us to silence, but to teach us how most properly to speak of God. Learning how not to speak of God means learning how to speak appropriately of God. In this simultaneous-dialectical mode, negative theology and positive theology are hopelessly inseparable. Dionysius ‘‘seeks to hold together affirmation and negation, similarity and dissimilarity as a dialectical way of understanding the many symbols of his tradition. A ‘dissimilar similarity,’ as he puts it, is simultaneously a similarity to be affirmed and a dissimilarity to be negated . . . affirmation and negation can never be separated entirely.’’4 This dialectic involves seeing at one and the same time that ‘‘positive affirmations are always unfitting to the hiddenness of the inexpressible’’ and that ‘‘forms, even those drawn from the lowliest matter, can be used, not unfittingly, with regard to heavenly beings. Matter, after all, owes its subsistence to absolute beauty and keeps, throughout its earthly ranks, some echo of intelligible beauty’’ (CH 150/141A & 151–52/144B, emphasis added). Hart relates negative theology in this dialectical mode to deconstruction and develops the thesis that while deconstruction is not negative theology, negative theology is a deconstruction of positive theology.5 Similarly, Caputo argues that deconstruction’s role in relation to negative theology is ‘‘to resituate 4. Paul Rorem, ‘‘The Uplifting Spirituality of Pseudo-Dionysius,’’ Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, ed. Bernard McGinn et al. (New York: Crossroad, 1988), pp. 136–37. The quoted phrase is from CH 148/137D. 5...

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