Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality

In the Image of the Invisible

 In the Image of the Invisible K AT H R Y N TA N N E R Christian theologians often maintain that God is incomprehensible, beyond human powers of positive explication through concepts and speech, because God is without limits or bounds. God is without limits of time, being framed by no beginning or end. Existing in perfect simplicity, God is without internal limits or boundaries dividing the divine nature into manageable component parts or aspects for our comprehension. The absolute fullness of being and goodness, God transcends all divisions between kinds and exceeds all bounds of a particular nature or mode of being that might allow God to be set alongside others or encompassed by anything it is not. The divine, in short, cannot be comprehended or contained in any respect; it is simply not anything that we can get our heads around. Christian theologians, following verses in Genesis to this effect, also commonly claim that human beings are created in God’s image. Putting the two ideas together, one might expect them therefore to develop just as commonly the way in which human nature reflects divine incomprehensibility . Theological discussion of what it is about humans that makes them the image of God frequently moves, however, in the opposite direction : such discussion often simply amounts to the effort to find some clearly bounded human nature of quite definite character that both re- flects the divine nature and sets humans off from all other creatures. Humans are created in the image of God because, unlike other creatures, they have reason, free will, or the ability to rule over others as God does. 118 兩 i n th e i ma g e of t he i n v is i b le Given this interest in well-defined and well-bounded characteristics that are ours by nature, theological anthropology runs afoul of a number of contemporary intellectual trends. Biotechnologies, particularly interspecies gene transfers, call into question the fixed boundaries of natural kinds. Violence bred of ethnic and religious division in our world familiarizes us all too well with the bellicose potential of narrowly drawn, closely guarded identities. Feminists remind us of the way appeals to fixed and given natures help solidify unjust social arrangements and disguise their contingency. Postmodernists of various stripes caution against the insistence on a self-identical, coherent character, rigidly predicated on the exclusion of others so as to promote protective postures that degrade and sever human connection with them. And they lead us to question the ethical priority of self-discovery, as if the truth about oneself—an already established nature or identity—could determine all by itself what one might become, one’s place within the world, and the character of one’s responsibilities, in sovereign independence of any unpredictable entanglements beyond one’s control with human and nonhuman others. The intent of this essay is to move theological anthropology away from this sort of fixation on a fixed human nature, this preoccupation with established capacities and given identities, by diagnosing its theological underpinnings, and by developing an alternative account of the way humans image God in conversation with early Christian thought. I show, thereby, how an apophatic anthropology is the consequence of an apophatic theology. If humans are the image of God, they are, as Gregory of Nyssa affirmed, an incomprehensible image of the incomprehensible: ‘‘If, while the archetype transcends comprehension, the nature of the image were comprehended, the contrary character of the attributes . . . would prove the defect of the image. . . . [S]ince the nature of our mind . . . evades our knowledge, it has an accurate resemblance to the superior nature, figuring by its unknowableness the incomprehensible Nature.’’1 At least in part, preoccupation with a well-bounded and clearly defined human nature seems fomented by theological anthropology’s isolated attention to humans in and of themselves, as if the image of God could be located in them, in abstraction from their relations with others, particularly the God they are to image. The underlying problem is simply the presumption that human beings have a definite nature to begin with that could be considered in itself and perfectly well specified in its own terms. k a th r y n t a n ne r 兩 11 9 What Augustine attempts in books 8–11 of his De trinitate would be a prime illustration of such a problem—at...