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Contemporary Apophaticism and Virtues Ethics David M. Wilmington

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Contemporary Apophaticism and Virtues Ethics David M. Wilmington ABSTRACT A Pregnant Silence: Contemporary Apophaticism and Virtues Ethics David M. Wilmington, Ph.D. Director: Barry A. Harvey, Ph.D. This dissertation surveys and critiques the ethical consequences of the contemporary revival of apophaticism. It examines representative examples of a continuum of contemporary apophatic thought—primarily Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, Richard Kearney, Jean-Luc Marion, and Denys Turner—and assesses the ethical implications of the accounts themselves as well as the compatibility of their accounts with virtues ethics. It concludes with a study of Bonaventure and argues that his Christocentric Exemplarism allows him to harmonize the tensions between both the apophatic and cataphatic and between the relationship of apophaticism with virtues ethics. I suggest that the centrality of humility in Bonaventure’s thought offers rich resources for the contemporary theological reconsideration of metaphysics and ethics. A Pregnant Silence: Contemporary Apophaticism and Virtues Ethics by David M. Wilmington, B.A., M.T.S. A Dissertation Approved by the Department of Religion William H. Bellinger, Jr., Ph.D., Chairperson Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Baylor University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved by the Dissertation Committee Barry A. Harvey, Ph.D., Chairperson Thomas S. Hibbs, Ph.D. Paul Martens, Ph.D. Accepted by the Graduate School August 2015 J. Larry Lyon, Ph.D., Dean Page bearing signatures is kept on file in the Graduate School. Copyright © 2015 by David M. Wilmington All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................vi Dedication..........................................................................................................................vii Chapter One: Why Speak of Silence?: The Return to the Apophatic Tradition................. 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1 Whose Virtues?: Contemporary Virtues Formation as Hermeneutical Lens........ 14 The Continuum...................................................................................................... 20 Chapter Two: Shaping the Traditions of Wonder and Silence......................................... 23 An Occasional and Subjective Selectivity............................................................. 23 Christian Apophaticism......................................................................................... 35 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite: Overflowing Order and the Affirmation and Negation of Negativity.............................................................................. 47 A Bridge to Levinas, The Postmodern Bridge...................................................... 57 Chapter Three: Undecidable Responsibility..................................................................... 65 Derrida’s (Non-)Apophaticism: Playing with Denials.......................................... 67 A Postmodern Ethic?: Responsibility Without Response and Purely Formal Formation.................................................................................................. 90 Chapter Four: Knowledge, Language, and Silence: Dialectic and Beyond.................... 119 Richard Kearney’s God, Maybe......................................................................... 121 Jean-Luc Marion: Loving Without Being........................................................... 131 Denys Turner’s Dialectic of Knowing................................................................ 154 Transition: From the Continuum to Ethics......................................................... 174 Chapter Five: Praise, Silence, and Knowing Virtue: Bonaventure’s Harmony.............. 180 Why Bonaventure?............................................................................................. 180 Exemplarism and Hierarchy: The Harmonic Order of Existence...................... 186 Bonaventure on the Knowledge of God............................................................. 198 A Bonaventurean Distinction: The Transitus..................................................... 219 Hierarchizing the Soul: A Journey Through the Three Ways into Ethics.......... 225 Conclusion: Illumination Beyond Enlightenment.............................................. 229 Chapter Six: Knowing, Speaking, and Becoming in a Pregnant Silence........................ 233 Christocentric Harmony: The Key of Humility.................................................. 241 Bibliography................................................................................................................... 258 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I offer my sincere thanks to all those who have encouraged, sustained, and guided me through the writing of this dissertation. My director and mentor, Dr. Barry Harvey, has been a patient reader, conversation partner, and guide throughout graduate school and the long process of writing. Drs. Thomas S. Hibbs and Paul Martens were both influential and encouraging at every stage of this journey, as well. Without the gracious, patient, and loving aid of my parents, Howard and Debra Wilmington, I could not even have begun pursuing a Ph.D., much less have been able to finish this project. Their contribution to its completion is immeasurable. My wife, Molly Wilmington, and my children Luke and Anna Grace have been inspiring and supportive throughout. I give thanks to God for all of these as well as other family, friends, and colleagues who have supported me. v For my family: in the harmony of faith, hope, and love vi CHAPTER ONE Why Speak of Silence?: The Return to the Apophatic Tradition In order to unfold what is implicit in so many discourses, one would have each time to make a pedagogical outlay that it is just not reasonable to expect from every book. Here the responsibility has to be shared out, mediated; the reading has to do its work and the work has to make its reader.1 — Jacques Derrida Introduction What is Apophaticism? In the broadest sense of the word, apophaticism identifies a stream of philosophical or theological thought that stresses the limitations, or even the impossibility, of human knowledge and language about God. As we shall see, the terms “mystical theology,” “negative theology,” or even “mysticism,” are often—and often confusingly— also used to describe this kind of thought and the literary styles that express it. Evidence of apophatic thought stretches back to the pre-Socratics, finds its earliest influential expression in Plato’s Timaeus, and becomes inextricably linked to the western philosophical tradition through the patristic Christian engagement with Philo and middle- and neo-Platonism.2 The Platonic tradition emphasized human inability to know or to say 1 Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger, the Philosophers’ Hell,” in Points . .:Interviews, 1974-1994, Elisabeth Weber, Ed., Peggy Kamuf, Transl. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 187-188 2 For one compendium with commentary which attempts to represent the major strands of apophatic thought in philosophy, theology, and poetry, see both volumes of William Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). For another (though problematic) attempt at tracking and interpreting the development of “negative theology” in early Greek and Christian thought up to Pseudo- Dionysius, see both volumes of Raoul Mortley, From Word to Silence, (Bonn: Hanstein, 1986). 1 what God is, as we read in the Timaeus that “To discover the maker and father of this universe is indeed a hard task, and having found him it would be impossible to tell everyone about him.”3 Especially when referred to as “negative theology,” a label used with various and sometimes contradictory meanings, apophatic thought is often summarized by the statement that it is more true to say what God is not than to attempt to say what God is.4 Consistent with this summary, the most influential formulations of apophaticism have a paradoxical character, such as Pseudo-Dionysius’ late-6th century teaching in Divine Names and Mystical Theology that the ascent to God is a movement to be “supremely united to the completely unknown” and to know “beyond the mind by knowing nothing”—a journey that brings us into a “brilliant darkness.”5 Although other emphases eventually eclipsed awareness of its influence on scholastic theology, apophatic thought played a critical and ubiquitous role in the development of the medieval philosophical and theological tradition which so thoroughly shaped the modern era. For example, Aquinas quotes Pseudo-Dionysius second only to Aristotle. Nevertheless, a renewed interest in apophaticism beginning in the 1980’s now seems remarkable considering the Bernard McGinn’s multi-volume The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism necessarily addresses much of the Christian apophatic tradition, but, while aware of the more philosophically flavored expressions, he focuses more attention on what is later recognized as the mystical mode of expression. 3 Plato, “Timaeus,” in Timaeus and Critas (Revised), transl. Desmond Lee, (New York: Penguin, 1977). 40, 27e; p. 41, 28e. 4 For an explanation (which stretches to consider Bonaventure, as well) of the sense in which even a robustly Christian interpretation of Pseudo-Dionysius should be understood
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