Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality

Notes

N O T E S I N T R O D U C T I O N 兩 C H R I S B O E S E L A N D C AT H E R I N E K E L L E R 1. Meister Eckhart, Sermon : Renovamini spiritu (ep. .), in Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and Bernard McGinn (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1981), 207. 2. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 23. 3. Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and Bernard McGinn. (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1981), 195. 4. Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 289. Regarding extralinguistic expressions, note the source of this book’s cover design. 5. Karl Barth, ‘‘The Word of God and the Task of the Ministry,’’ in The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper, 1957), 186. 6. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/I, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 203. 7. ‘‘The Mystical Theology,’’ in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1987), 135. 8. Nicolas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia 1440, in Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1997), I.26.86, 125. 9. Ibid., 104, 56. 10. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967), 51f. 368 兩 n o te s 11. Augustine, Sermon , n. 16 in Sérmons Vol. III, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill (Brooklyn, N.Y.: New York City Press, 1991), 57. 12. See John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 13. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation ,’’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), 307. 14. Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 2002), 117. 15. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 2. 16. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 234. 17. Trinh, Woman, Native, Other, 2. 18. Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 206. T H E C L O U D O F T H E I M P O S S I B L E : E M B O D I M E N T A N D A P O P H A S I S 兩 C AT H E R I N E K E L L E R 1. Nicholas of Cusa, De visione Dei, 1453, in Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1997), 9.36, 251. 2. If one looks for medieval antecedents of a flesh-affirmative theology, the more affective, erotically charged female mystics (Mechthild, Julian, Teresa, even Hildegard) hover closer to the flesh, to Christ’s exceptional flesh first of all, but with no less ambivalence. See Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption : Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1982), and Grace M. Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Or one turns to Thomas Aquinas, with Denys Turner, juxtaposing his ‘‘thorough-going incarnational apophaticism’’ to the rhetorical radicalism of Meister Eckhart and other ‘‘over-enthusiastic apophaticists of his time’’ (Denys Turner, ‘‘Apophaticism, Idolatry and the Claims of Reason,’’ in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, ed. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002], 30, 34). 3. Amy Hollywood analyzes the mystical, and particularly apophatic, relation of the body as a matter of ‘‘the suffering that seems constitutive of embodiment .’’ In relation to Porete and Eckhart, ‘‘[T]he desire to transcend such n o te s 兩 36 9 suffering in body and soul leads to the primacy of apophasis’’ (The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of...