Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality

Introduction

 Introduction 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 Apophatic bodies. If the phrase stops the reader short, perplexes, provokes a pause, it will have begun to do its work. Indeed, the modifier ‘‘apophatic’’—that which ‘‘unsays’’ or ‘‘says away’’—presses toward the pause and the silence within language. It pauses before the unknowable infinity of: bodies? Surely not! The ancient tradition of apophasis, or negative theology, concerns itself with the infinity called ‘‘God.’’ It says and unsays talk about that God. It falls speechless before a mystery that inspires more speech in the next moment. Surely the paradox entailed in this traditional apophatic gesture is mind-bending enough—speaking as unspeaking, knowing as unknowing, darkness as light—to keep us occupied for all these pages. The apophatic mystics—Jewish, Christian, Muslim—do surely speak. They speak and unspeak volumes. With uninhibited kataphasis (the presumed affirmative opposite of apophasis), at once confessional and speculative, liturgical and philosophical, they speak about God. The more they speak, the more they unspeak; and yet because of the infinity of which they speak, it would seem they can never stop speaking. For without our finite images, images of the illimitable drawn from our bodily limits, would ‘‘God’’ exist for us? But without God as the selfgiving source of all the embodied reality from which those images emerge, how would ‘‘we’’ exist—at all, let alone for God? In one ear, we hear Meister Eckhart admonish: ‘‘[B]e silent and do not chatter about God; for when you chatter about him, you are telling lies and sinning.’’1 Yet there remains the divine referent of apophasis itself, 2 兩 i n tr o d uc t i on the said that must be resaid if only to be unsaid ever again. ‘‘Of God we know nothing,’’ writes Franz Rosenzweig. ‘‘But this ignorance is ignorance of God.’’2 Thus, for instance, Eckhart, one of the most radical of theological unsayers, nonetheless does not cease to wax kataphatic. So in the other ear he whispers, for example, that ‘‘[w]hat God gives is his being, and his being is his goodness, and his goodness is his love.’’3 ‘‘Silence ,’’ explains Elliot Wolfson, who has written voluminously on it, ‘‘is not to be set in binary opposition to language, but is rather the margin that demarcates its center.’’4 This conundrum of creaturely speech about incomprehensible divinity runs so deep and is so stubbornly irresolvable that one can hear it echoing centuries later, and in the most unlikely places: in the unapologetically protestant voice of Karl Barth, for example , struggling with the perilous aporia facing the preacher ascending the steps of the pulpit, knowing that she cannot rightly speak of God and yet, nevertheless, that she must speak of God.5 Indeed Barth affectionately likens theology, as appropriately ruptured and broken speech, to an ‘‘old woman’s stammering.’’6 The stammer, neither a pure silence nor a smooth proclamation, provides the alternative to the chatter. AS IF THAT WEREN’T E NOUGH: APOPHASIS A ND BODIES Surely this predicament is dicey enough. Why make more trouble for ourselves? If this volume does, it may be in order to focus the light of scholarly imagination on a troubling effect of an invisible, unspeakable transcendence—trouble, that is, for bodies. The traditional agents of apophasis evince little interest in the material body, beyond the disciplines needed to quiet its cravings so as better to hear ‘‘the mysteries of God’s Word . . . in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.’’7 They conjure for us the ascetic body, monkishly clad, itself writing bodies of light, angelic, saintly, or resurrected bodies, anchored perhaps in the singular incarnation, the only body whose fleshly vulnerability really matters for them. And however we may correct such a limited representation, there is no denying that the apophatic tradition in Judaism and Islam as well as Christianity is steeped in Neoplatonic sensibility. The hierarchical ascent to the immateriality beyond finite form—‘‘simple, absolute, and unchangeable,’’ to return to the poem of Pseudo-Dionysius—aspires beyond every bodily being, beyond being itself , hyperousios. If we are looking for bodies, surely negative theology c h ri s b oe s e l a n d ca t h er i n e k...