Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality

Intimate Mysteries: The Apophatics of Sensible Love

 Intimate Mysteries: The Apophatics of Sensible Love K R I S TA E . H U G H E S ‘‘I am a little discouraged,’’ Hélène Cixous laments to her beloved; ‘‘I shall never have the strength nor the time to write something worthy of you. Would I do better to remain silent?’’ For ‘‘to say you, multimillionly of you, that goes beyond all possibilities, even the imaginary ones, of ever producing a successful stroke of writing. Yet,’’ she confesses, ‘‘I do not have the courage not to write: I write to you, I write myself to you.’’ Flowing from the most intimate of human love, this apophatic dilemma torments Cixous far more than cautious attempts to (not) speak of God; for, she wryly observes, ‘‘if one does not want to speak of God, it is permissible to not-speak of God with a perfect and definitive silence. . . . One can say nothing about God. And another way of speaking about God is to say God of him. . . . About God, one can say everything that is on the scale of impossibility, there is all nothing to say, which is obvious, and impossible but not difficult.’’ The ease of these ‘‘divine mathematics’’ seems to Cixous insignificant and ‘‘really without relation to the torments that bring the need to speak to you absolutely non-absolutely, but absolutely faithfully . . . to say You, humanly infinite, inconclusive.’’1 Cixous’s impassioned, agonizing, joyful struggle to write of and to her beloved poignantly depicts the theme of this volume, apophatic bodies. Her prayer of confession, lamentation, and praise celebrates precisely the incarnate infinity of the one whom she loves. An apophatic gesture at its emotional fullest, its appeal is strong: love, eros, rather than moral restraint or abstract speculative rigor, funds the utter unspeakability of the 350 兩 t h e a p o ph a t ic s o f s e n si b l e l o v e other. Within a discursive world replete with abstractions, Cixous’s en- fleshed apophasis of a particular intimate love stirs the theological air. Is this not what the genuine urge to unsay the divine should sound like— look, smell, feel like? Could Cixous’s apophatic confession inspire theology toward more richly textured apophatic expression? Or, the inner voice cautions, would a theological appeal to her ebullient celebration of human love risk luring us into the very idolatries that theology’s apophatic gestures are deployed to prevent? If we are reflecting on not simply apophasis but apophatic bodies, then Cixous’s perspective, I believe, opens up something unique and something needed, particularly for a feminist theological contribution to the conversation on apophasis. The reclamation of bodies and the senses has been one of feminist theology’s central concerns, of course. Its relation to apophatic discourse, however, has been more ambiguous. On the one hand, the apophatic gesture has long been a potentially dangerous prospect for feminists: the call to unsay, or simply be silent, just as women (and historically silenced others) are finally finding their voices and being heard, poses a potential threat to the world’s marginalized bodies. On the other hand, apophasis has played a significant role in prominent works of feminist theology. Elizabeth Johnson, for example, in her feminist systematic theology She Who Is, demonstrates how an apophatic posture toward the divine, by affirming God’s ultimate unknowability, challenges the reification of masculine metaphors for God and opens the way for new and vibrant ones.2 Similarly, philosopher of religion Grace Jantzen has underscored the fundamental ineffability of the divine in medieval mystical narratives, asserting that it is precisely the unspeakability of God that allows the mystics to plumb the ‘‘great fecundity and versatility’’ of language about the divine.3 Deploying the apophatic in the service of feminist scholarship is even more important given that women historically were denied the apophatic voice, as Amy Hollywood has argued in her work on mysticism and sexual difference. The modern study of mysticism, she notes, has asserted a simplistic and mistakenly gendered opposition between imagistic or kataphatic mystical texts, ‘‘by women,’’ and ostensibly more sophisticated apophatic ones, ‘‘by men.’’ She shows instead that both kataphatic language and apophatic language consistently occur within mystical texts k r is t a e. h u gh e s 兩 3 51 (regardless of the gender of the author),4 echoing...