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GRAMMAR AND GLORY: EASTERN ,

THE “RESOLUTE” WITTGENSTEIN, AND THE OF ROWAN

WILLIAMS

Dissertation

Submitted to

The College of and Sciences of the

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

The Degree

Doctor of in Theology

By

D. Michael Cox

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

Dayton,

May, 2015

GRAMMAR AND GLORY: EASTERN ORTHODOXY, THE 'RESOLUTE'

WITTGENSTEIN, AND THE THEOLOGY OF

Name: Cox, D. Michael

APPROVED BY:

______Silviu N. Bunta, Ph.D. Co-Faculty Advisor

______Brad J. Kallenberg, Ph.D. Co-Faculty Advisor

______Kelly S. Johnson, Ph.D. Faculty Reader

______William L Portier, Ph.D. Faculty Reader

______Bishop Alexander Golitzin, Ph.D. Outside Faculty Reader

______Daniel S. Thompson, Ph.D. Chairperson

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© Copyright by

D. Michael Cox

All rights reserved

2015

ABSTRACT

GRAMMAR AND GLORY: EASTERN ORTHODOXY, THE “RESOLUTE”

WITTGENSTEIN, AND THE THEOLOGY OF ROWAN WILLIAMS

Name: Cox, D. Michael University of Dayton

Advisors: Dr. Brad J. Kallenberg, Dr. Silviu N. Bunta

This dissertation argues that the cultivation of a non-dual, Christian theological imagination can profitably be resourced by attending to the convergence between the linguistic non-dualism of Wittgensteinian philosophy and the theological-imaginative non-dualism of ancient Jewish and Christian (subsequently reflected in

Eastern Orthodox theology, liturgy and iconography). I frame this convergence using the writings of Rowan Williams, whose engagement with both traditions witnesses to the fruitfulness of their further mutual encounter.

First, as a matter of exposition, chapter one contends that Williams’s thought has been profoundly influenced by Orthodox theology, particularly in the “kenotic ” that inflects his Trinitarian theology, and theological anthropology. Second, as a matter of interpretation, chapters two through four trace the trajectory of Williams’s thought from an overly formal notion of “intentional” union toward a much “thicker” notion of participation animated by his aesthetic reflection and by the fruitful interaction between the “vocabularies” of the divine energies and

Thomistic participation. Finally, in a more constructive mode, chapters five through eight pursue a programme of mutually illuminating dialogue between the two non-dualisms,

iv making further connections between the traditions with respect to , and the cultivation of a liturgical-theological imagination. The dissertation culminates with an examination of Williams’s reflections on the Orthodox liturgy, highlighting both the link between liturgy and poetry and the importance for theology of attending to the formation of a “liturgical humanity” capable of inhabiting a posture of “unselfing attention”—a patient attending to what is given—open to an astonished wonder at the world lit by the divine love. On this reading, the “manifest wonder” of the distills a spiritual pedagogy in which both the cause and effect are liturgical.

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To Jeannette, Elijah and Abigail.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to my dissertation committee, especially my co-chairs, Silviu Bunta and Brad Kallenberg. Fr. Bunta set me on the path toward this research, and I have benefited immensely from his guidance to the worlds of Orthodox theology and ancient

Jewish and . Dr. Kallenberg first introduced me to the study of

Wittgenstein, and his generous and thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this material challenged me to think more clearly and carefully.

I owe a debt of gratitude to countless friends and intellectual companions, though none more than Ethan Smith. Our conversations about one another’s research afforded me a testing ground for many of these ideas, and our friendship provided valuable encouragement during the writing process.

Finally, and foremost, to my wife, Jeannette, and our children, Elijah and Abby, whose love and support have been an inexhaustible source of joy.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... iv

DEDICATION ...... vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... vii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

I. AND APOPHASIS: EASTERN ORTHODOX THEMES IN THE THEOLOGY! OF ROWAN WILLIAMS ...... 12 !1. Williams’s Conception of the Person Is Both Kenotic and Ecstatic ...... 17 2. Williams’s Trinitarian Teology Defines Personal Existence as Fundamentally Kenotic! ...... 23 2.1. Williams Articulates a Kenotic Account of the Wich Informs His ! Conception of Apophaticism ...... 24 2.2. Williams Draws on the Orthodox Emphasis on the in His “Erotic” ! Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine ...... 29 ! 2.3. Williams’s Account of Creation Echoes His Kenotic Trinitarianism ...... 37 3. Williams’s Teological Anthropology Emphasizes Human Existence as Fundamentally! Called to Kenosis ...... 41 3.1. Williams’s Pneumatology Follows an “Eastern” Model that Emphasizes ! Incorporation into Christ ...... 42 3.2. Williams’s Anthropology Emphasizes the Dangers of Self-Deception and the ! Need for ...... 45 3.3. Williams Articulates an Apophatic Anthropology that Draws Together the Endlessness of Desire, the Fluidity of Language, and the Believer’s Incorporation ! into the Trinitarian ...... 52 ! 4. Conclusion ...... 61 II. WILLIAMS! AND THE DEBATE OVER ...... 63 1. A Brief Introduction to the -Energies Distinction ...... 67 2. Te Substance and Significance of Williams’s Criticisms of Palamism ...... 72

viii !2.1. Williams’s Criticizes Palamas (and Dionysius) for Platonic “Realism” ...... 74 2.2. Williams’s Criticisms Set a Benchmark for Future Ecumenical Discussion of the ! Palamite Distinction ...... 83 3. Williams’s Article Misinterprets Dionysius and Palamas in Important Respects! ...... 87 !3.1. Williams’s Methodology Mischaracterizes Palamas ...... 87 3.2. Dionysius Is Better Interpreted in the Context of Syriac and His ! Transformation of ...... 92 ! 3.2.1. Te Dionysian Proödoi/Energeia Are “Neither Lesser nor Less ” ...... 96 3.3. Palamas Was Heir to a Radical Dionysian Apophaticism that Relativizes Human ! Intellection ...... 105 3.3.1. Apparent Tension between Dionysius and Palamas Can Be Mitigated by a ! “Grammatical” Reading of “Essence” ...... 112 ! 3.3.2. Palamism and Personalism Are Complementary ...... 117 4. Te Debate Over Palamism Reveals “Structural” Differences between Eastern and! Western Teological Vocabularies ...... 120 4.1. Te Doctrine of the Divine Energeia Reflects the Difference Between Eastern and ! Western Traditions with Respect to Participation ...... 121 4.2. Te Difference between Eastern and Western Construals of the Intellect’s Role ! Owes to Teir Reception of Alternative Streams of Neoplatonic Tought ...... 131 4.2.1. Augustine’s Reflects the Influence of Plotinian-Porphyrean ! Neoplatonism ...... 132 4.2.2. Aquinas’s Inheritance of Porphyrean Neoplatonism Distorts His ! Interpretation of Dionysius ...... 138 ! 4.3. Is Differently Conceived in Eastern and Western Traditions ...... 146 ! 4.3.1. Divine Simplicity in the West Is Construed as Identity ...... 146 ! 4.3.2. Divine Simplicity in the East Is Construed as Unity ...... 156 ! 5. Conclusion ...... 161 III. DEMYTHOLOGIZING! THEOPHANY AND THE ABSENCE OF THE SIGN 163 1. !Augustinian “Demythologization” Disjoins Sign and Signified ...... 165 1.1. Augustine’s Disjunctive Is Reflected in His “Demythologization” of ! Biblical Teophanies ...... 166 ! 1.2. Augustine’s Disjunctive Semiotics Governs His and ...... 170 2. Te Centrality of Absence in Williams’s Teology Risks Foreclosing the Possibility! of Presence ...... 177 !2.1. Absence Dominates Williams’s Treatment of Augustine’s Semiotics ...... 178

ix 2.2. Williams’s Treatment of the Dereliction Demonstrates the Centrality of Absence in ! His Teology ...... 187 2.3. Williams’s Treatment of the Empty Tomb Demonstrates the Centrality of Absence ! in His Teology ...... 194 3. A Comparison with Certeau Illuminates the Pitfalls of a Disjunctive Emphasis on! Absence ...... 200 3.1. Certeau’s Disjunctive Account of Christian “Mysticism” Assumes the Priority of ! Absence ...... 202 ! 3.2. Certeau’s Account of Christian “Mysticism” Risks “Hypostatizing” Absence ...... 209 ! 4. Conclusion: On the Road to Emmaus ...... 217

IV. FROM INTENTIONAL PARTICIPATION TO “REAL PRESENCE”: THE DEVELOPMENT! OF WILLIAMS’S VIEW OF PARTICIPATION ...... 225 1. Williams’s Conception of Participation Has Developed from Formal !“Intentional” Participation toward “Real Presence” ...... 227 ! 2. Conclusion ...... 248

V. WITTGENSTEIN AND PALAMISM: REALISM-ANTIREALISM AND A “RESOLUTE”! READING OF THE PALAMITE DISTINCTION ...... 250 1. Te Wittgensteinian Perspective on the Realism-Antirealism Debate Clarifies the !Argument over whether Palamism Is a “Real” or “Notional” Distinction ...... 251 2. A Wittgensteinian Critique of Essentialism and the “Resolute Reading” of the Tractatus Can Inform a “Non-Mythological” Interpretation of Palamism, Especially! Understood as a Model of Language ...... 259 !2.1. Te Palamite Distinction Can Be Read as a Critique of Essentialism ...... 259 ! 2.2. A Resolute Reading of the Tractatus and the Palamite Distinction ...... 266 2.2.1.! Te Resolute Reading of the Tractatus ...... 267 2.2.2.! A “Resolute” Reading of the Palamite Distinction ...... 274 2.2.3.! Williams’s Gifford Lectures Embody Tis Non-Dual Understanding ...... 286 2.2.4. A “Resolute” Palamism Clarifies the Non-Dual Affirmed by ! Williams and Eastern Orthodox Teology ...... 292 ! 3. Conclusion ...... 295 VI. JACOB’S! LADDER: THE DIVINE BODY BETWEEN AND EARTH 297 1. !Te Divine Body in the Old Testament ...... 299 1.1. In the Preexilic Period, the Divine Embodiment Is “Transcendently ! Anthropomorphic” ...... 302

x 1.2. In the Postexilic Period, the Priestly Tradition Represented by Ezekiel Speaks of ! Yhwh by Means of the Anthropomorphic Glory ...... 304 1.3. Te Divine Body in Shiur Koma Mysticism Is Related in Complex, Teurgic ! Fashion to Israel’s Praise ...... 308 1.4. “Transformational Mysticism” Picture a Fluid Human Body Open to Glorification ! and Emblematized by Adam and the High ...... 315 2. Jewish Mystical Traditions Concerning Both the Figure of High Priest and the Extraordinary Character of the Manifold Divine Body Are Reflected in the Christian! Understanding of Christ ...... 323 2.1. Transformational-Mystical Anthropology Illuminates the New Testament Portrait ! of as a High Priestly Messiah ...... 325 ! 2.2. Shiur Koma Mysticism Informs the Conception of Christ’s Body in Ephesians ...... 332 ! 3. Conclusion ...... 339

VII. NEITHER LITERAL NOR METAPHORICAL: ANTHROPOMORPHISM, INDISPENSABLE! PICTURES AND “SECONDARY SENSE” ...... 342 1. !Indispensable Pictures and “Secondary Sense” ...... 347 1.1. Te Non-Representational Function of Language Is Reflected in Wittgenstein’s ! Concept of Indispensable Pictures ...... 347 1.2. Wittgenstein’s Concept of a Word’s “Secondary Sense” Represents a Non-Literal ! and Non-Metaphorical Use of Language ...... 351 2. Scriptural Anthropomorphism Can Be Profitably Read as a Special Kind of !“Secondary Sense” ...... 362 ! 3. Conclusion ...... 371

VIII. POETRY AND LITURGY: WILLIAMS’S VISION OF AND A “LITURGICAL! HUMANITY” ...... 375 1. Williams’s Aesthetic Writings Trace an “Excess” in the Everyday beyond Our Habitual! Modes of Perception ...... 377 !1.1. Williams’s Writings on Aesthetics Contrast Secular and Artistic Vision ...... 377 ! 1.2. Williams’s Gifford Lectures Contrast Description and Representation ...... 386 2. Williams Construes as a Kind of “Preparatory Exercise” that Finds Its Grounding! in the Liturgy ...... 395 !2.1. Williams’s Aesthetics Trace an ‘Excess’ in Artistic Activity ...... 395 2.2. Williams’s “Orthodoxy in America” Lecture Grounds His Aesthetics in an ! Account of “Liturgical Humanity” ...... 402 3. Conclusion ...... 409

xi ! !CONCLUSION ...... 412 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 415

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INTRODUCTION

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. – Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §115.

. . . we take every thought captive to obey Christ. – 2 Corinthians 10:51

Wittgenstein observes that certain imaginative pictures can seem so obvious, so self-evident, that they “force” themselves on us. The picture that “held us captive” here was a conception of the isolated ego, the contents of whose mind are transparent to its knowing, while contact with the world is mediated by some kind of “representation.”

This mind-world dualism, which pictures a contrast between “inner” and “outer,” has exercised a “powerful imaginative hold” in theology.2 Indeed, by opening the

Philosophical Investigations with a passage from Augustine’s , Wittgenstein touched a nerve in theological anthropology. He thus “plac[ed] his explorations of the epistemological predicament of the self in the context of a narrative which, as it interweaves biblical language with metaphysical dualism, autobiography with doxology, establishes the sense of the ‘I’ in the sight of God which remains the paradigm for the self even where the theology has been abandoned.”3

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1. Unless otherwise noted, all citations of Scripture in English are from the NRSV.

2. , Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford; New York: Blackwell, 1986), 21.

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The epistemological dualism which Wittgenstein interrogated overlaps with, and often mutually implicates, other metaphysical dualisms: theological (God–world), cosmological (heaven–earth), anthropological (– or mind–body), and eschatological

(history–eternity). Whatever the guise, such dualisms have come in for a great deal of criticism on the part of both philosophers4 and theologians.5 Nonetheless, as Charles

Taylor notes, “even though [Descartes’] terms are repudiated, we frequently find the basic structure remaining in place.”6

If theology is to break free from such metaphysical dualism, it needs not only conceptual critiques but also non-dual imaginative resources compelling enough to

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3. Ibid., 42.

4. E.g., John McDowell, Mind and World (, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

5. E.g., Sara Grant, Toward an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian, The Teape Lectures, 1989, introduction by Bradley J. Malkovsky (Bangalore: Asian Trading Corp., 1991). Nicholas Lash argues that “It is far from clear that, in order to safeguard Christian convictions concerning human freedom, the hope of resurrection, and the of God, it is necessary or desirable to espouse a metaphysical dualism according to which the items that constitute the furniture of the world can be exhaustively distributed between two classes of entity: ‘mental’ and ‘physical,’ ‘spiritual’ and ‘material.’ On the contrary, the ascription of man’s intellectual and ethical capacities to any ‘entity’ other than the corporeal (and hence material) human person could be objected to on theological, as well as on scientific and philosophical grounds.” “,” in The Westminster Dictionary of , ed. Alan Richardson and John S. Bowden (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), 353. Lash advises “to forego the imaginative satisfaction of popular dualisms. An which was ‘materialist’ at least in the twofold sense of rejecting metaphysical dualism and resisting the temptation to suppose that ideas, rather than people, are the motor of historical change, might better serve attempts to speak of a God who is neither Geist nor , but creator, and destiny of the material (including the human) world.” Ibid., 353–354.

6. Charles Taylor, “Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B.N. Hansen (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 27. Rowan Williams remarks: “Certainly, popular religious has always swung towards dualism. It sounds easy. There’s a bit of us that’s solid and a bit of us that’s shadowy, smoky, vapoury, the cartoon image of the dead body and the little ghost whizzing up and away.” “Belief and Theology: Some Core Questions,” in God’s Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation, Rupert Shortt (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 5.

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dispel dualism’s attraction. The usage of the language of “non-dualism” in what follows indicates theology’s need for language that equally avoids both dualism and — where the former contrasts, and so opposes, two elements, while the latter ultimately denies the reality of one of the aspects.7 The language of “non-dualism,” then, indicates a

“non-contrastive” relation, which refuses to locate the two elements as competitors.8

This thesis quarries both conceptual and imaginative resources emerging from the fruitful convergence of two non-dualisms: 1) the “theophanic” tradition given shape in Eastern Orthodox theology, liturgy and iconography, and stretching back

(particularly through Syriac Christianity) to certain strands in ancient Jewish and

Christian mysticism, and 2) Wittgensteinian philosophy of language and philosophical theology.9 I frame this convergence using the writings of Rowan Williams, the 104th

Archbishop of and present Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, whose engagement with Eastern Orthodoxy and the philosophy of language suggests the potential fruitfulness of their further mutual encounter.10 This convergence is further suggested by the fact that both non-dualisms emphasize an ethos of “attention,” which seeks to avoid illusion and self-deception, invests particulars with significance (rather

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7. James Charlton suggests that the term “non-dual” can be understood to imply “bringing the subject (e.g. the Source or the One) and the object (e.g. a worshipper of the Source) more closely together.” Non-Dualism in Eckhart, and Traherne: A Theopoetic Reflection (New York: Bloomsbury c, 2013), 1.

8. The language of a “non-contrastive” relation is Kathryn Tanner’s. Describing a “non-contrastive” conception of the God–world relation, Tanner says, “God transcends the world as a whole in a manner that cannot be talked about in terms of a simple opposition within the same universe of discourse.” God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment (Oxford, UK ; New York, NY, USA: Blackwell, 1988), 42.

9. The primary thinkers on which I draw include Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, James Conant, Stephen Mulhall, and Rowan Williams.

10. Indeed, Williams himself explicitly suggests that Orthodox theology might benefit from engagement with Wittgenstein. “Eastern Orthodox Theology,” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. David F. Ford (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 512.

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than abstracting from them), and remains wary about laying down rules in advance or in the absence of contextual considerations.

My use of the term “theophanic” denotes a nexus of related traditions in apocalyptic and early Jewish and Christian mysticism. Drawing on the Old

Testament theophanies, these traditions emphasized themes of Temple, Glory, heavenly ascent and transformation (inter alia). This approach to Scripture as configured around the theophanies gave a particular shape to much early Christian , asceticism and mysticism. The preservation of these currents in later Byzantine thought and practice prompted Alexander Golitzin to remark that this theophanic outlook “is at the heart of

Orthodox Tradition. It is what the Christian East has always understood as the very content of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. . . . Theophany permeates Orthodox tradition throughout, informing its dogmatic theology and its liturgy. That Jesus, Mary’s son, is the very One who appeared to and the prophets—this is the consistent witness of the ante-Nicene Fathers, and remains foundational throughout the fourth-century,

Trinitarian controversies and the later Christological disputes.”11 In light of the pervasiveness of theophany in the tradition, I will speak more generally of a “theophanic vision” and “theophanic ,” which conjoins an understanding of genuine divine manifestation with a sense that such manifestations are “shadowed” by an “excess.” As

Boris Bobrinskoy writes, “God reveals Himself and speaks, but He does not exhaust

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11. Alexander Golitzin, “Theophaneia: Forum on the Jewish Roots of Orthodox Spirituality,” in The Theophaneia School: Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, vol. 3, ed. Basil Lourié and Andrei Orlov, Scrinium: Revue de Patrologie, d’Hagiographie, Critique et d’Histoire Eccléliastique (Piscataway, NJ: Press, 2007), xvii-xviii. Cf. Bucur: “Theophany discloses the meaning of Christian life as well as that of ‘doing theology’ in the academia. It is in this way, face turned towards the Face of Christ in theophany, that are unveiled the truth of Scriptures, the richness of Liturgy, the foundation and horizon of social diakonia.” Bogdan G. Bucur, “Theophanies and Vision of God in Augustine’s De Trinitate: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2008): 92.

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Himself, does not limit Himself in His words and manifestations.”12 Golitzin suggests that this “theophanic logic” is reflected also in Orthodox iconography, which means that it is equally “iconic” and “epiphanic.”13

At the most general level, I advance three related claims. First, primarily as a matter of exposition, I contend that Williams’s thought has been profoundly influenced by Orthodox theology, particularly in the “kenotic personalism” that inflects his

Trinitarian theology, pneumatology and theological anthropology. Second, primarily as a matter of interpretation, I argue that Williams’s writings can be read as the pursuit of a non-contrastive theology, and that his thought has become more non-dualistic as it has developed in a more “thickly” participatory direction. Williams’s development in this direction has been animated by his aesthetic reflection and by a continually fruitful interaction between the “vocabularies” of Eastern and Western theology. Third, in a more constructive mode, I argue that Williams’s work is suggestive of a convergence between the linguistic non-dualism of Wittgensteinian philosophy and the theological- imaginative non-dualism of Jewish and Christian mysticism. Building on this convergence, I make further connections between the two non-dualisms with respect to theology proper, language and the cultivation of a liturgical-theological imagination.

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12. Boris Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Trinity: Trinitarian Experience and Vision in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition, trans. Anthony Gythiel (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1999), 54. Elliot Wolfson says of Jewish mysticism that “the experience of the mystic may point beyond the morphic form to that which is absent in its presence.” “Mysticism, Judaism And,” in The Encyclopedia of Judaism, ed. Jacob Neusner, Alan J. Avery-Peck, and William Scott Green (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004), 927.

13. Bulgakov speaks of “the as originating in theophany, divine revelation.” Sergius Bulgakov, and the Name of God, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 119. Nikos Matsoukas makes the link between icons and theophanies explicit, commenting that “the Orthodox theology of icons is based on the of theophanies.” “The of the : The Standpoint of Orthodox Theology,” The Ecumenical Review 41, no. 3 (1989): 401.

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The thesis consists of eight chapters. The first chapter “sets the stage” by tracing the influence of Eastern Orthodox theology on Williams’s work, contending that this eclectic and elusive thinker can be better understood through attention to his Orthodox influences. To that end, I identify a constellation of Williams’s characteristic emphases in order to advance an interpretation of his thought as centered on a notion of personhood that is deeply informed by Orthodox theology. I contend that the influence of Orthodox theology is particularly inscribed on Williams’s conviction that personal existence—both divine and human—is fulfilled in kenosis. I suggest that this “kenotic personalism” is central to Williams’s thought, and that around it cohere a constellation of other, mutually illuminating concepts and questions (e.g., Trinity, pneumatology, theological anthropology). This personalist theology, which draws together many of Williams’s characteristic concerns and themes, owes fundamentally to the influence of Eastern

Orthodox theology—particularly to the work of two Russian émigré theologians,

Vladimir Lossky and .

With this background of influence and appreciation, the heart of the dissertation proceeds in two parts. The first part, consisting of chapters two through four, examines

Williams’s thought chronologically in three stages, advancing an interpretation of the trajectory of his work as moving from an overly formal notion of “intentional” union toward a much “thicker” notion of participation predicated on a more non-dual imaginary. The thesis’s second half, consisting of chapters five through eight, alternates between Western and Eastern traditions in order to suggest the possibility of their mutual illumination. Chapters five and seven draw from Wittgensteinian philosophy of language in order to clarify or reformulate Palamism and scriptural anthropomorphism respectively. Chapters six and eight explore the “theophanic” traditions of ancient

Jewish and Christian mysticism in order to suggest resources for the further cultivation of a non-dual theological imagination.

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Chapter two begins with an examination of the young Williams’s criticisms of the

Palamite distinction between the divine essence and energies, which has been central to much of contemporary Orthodox theology. These criticisms center on the question of participation and the Orthodox reception of Platonic “realism.” After responding directly to several questionable interpretative judgments with respect to both Dionysius and Palamas, the chapter expands its scope in order to trace some of the “structural” differences between the Eastern and Western traditions. I examine three such differences in particular: participation, the role of the intellect and divine simplicity. The chapter seeks to challenge zero-sum construals of such ecumenical encounters, contending instead that the differences between the Eastern and Western theological traditions— differences brought into relief by the debate over Palamism—can be better understood

(at least in part) as a difference between two “language games” or “vocabularies,” each of which possesses its own unique strengths and weaknesses.

The third chapter further develops the thesis concerning the two theological vocabularies with respect to questions of presence and absence. During the 1980s and

1990s, Williams wrote several important essays on Augustine, and I contend that these essays reflect a period in which Williams was processing questions of participation alongside an Augustine semiotics that threatened to underwrite a disjunctive logic of sign and reality. I argue that the tension between the two theological vocabularies is thus manifest in Williams’s struggle to reconcile the Eastern stress on theophany and manifestation with a Western idiom of absence and a wariness about the correlation of presence and possession, vision and objectification. The chapter’s final section considers the problematic extremes to which this idiom of absence can lead by examining Michel de Certeau’s work on mysticism.

By tracing developments in Williams’s thinking about the essence-energies distinction—and the related question of participation, the fourth chapter advances a reading of the trajectory of Williams’s thought in which his understanding of

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participation becomes gradually more “robust” as it moves away from a formal concept of “intentional” union to speaking in terms of the active presence of the known in the knower. This development, evident both in Williams’s pastoral and academic writings, suggests that in recent decades Williams has become both more non-dualistic in his approach to the God-human relation and simultaneously more amenable to, or at least more tolerant of, the Palamite vocabulary. This chronological examination culminates in the consideration of several of Williams’s most recent writings, which suggest a fruitful convergence between the Wittgensteinian philosophy of language and Palamism.

Taking its cues from this recent work, chapter five develops further the fruitfulness of two Wittgensteinian conversations for articulating points of convergence between Eastern and Western non-dualisms. First, I suggest that the Wittgensteinian approach to the realism-antirealism debate illuminates the question of whether Palamism represents a “real distinction” (pragmatiki diakrisis) or merely a “conceptual” one (diakrisis kat’epinoian, i.e., according to our [human] thinking or conceptualization). Second, in harmony with Williams’s recent reflections and drawing on the work of several interpreters of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, I advance a “resolute” reading of the essence- energies distinction as a compelling contemporary interpretation of Palamism.

The sixth chapter turns to theophanic materials, examining ancient Jewish and

Christian traditions concerning the manifestation of the divine body, the complexity of which defies the conventional and commonsense interpretative binary between literal- descriptive and metaphorical-ornamental readings—i.e., “pure presence” or demythologized absence. A survey of some of the history of these divine body traditions—first in the Hebrew and early Jewish mysticism, and then in the appropriation of these traditions in the early Christian understanding of Jesus—reveals that, while a divine body (or bodies) is assumed in the Hebrew Bible, the of that body was construed in complex ways. That Christians appropriated many of these traditions in order to portray the manifold body of the risen Christ underscores the

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inadequacy of treating the picture of the divine body either as literal description or dispensable metaphor. I suggest that these theophanic traditions challenge disjunctive

(dualist) interpretations while also proffering resources that ground the theological- aesthetic vision at which Williams has arrived more deeply in Jewish and Christian traditions of exegesis and mystagogy.

Taking the failure of the literal-metaphorical binary as its impetus, the seventh chapter quarries the work of the “new Wittgenstein” school in order to advance a third exegetical option—which avoids the false choice between the literal-descriptive and the metaphorical-ornamental. On this third view, which seeks to be attentive to and reflective of the mystical and mystagogical uses of anthropomorphic language in particular Jewish and Christian communities, anthropomorphic language, as with certain forms of poetry, offers an indispensable and non-literal picture. By articulating this alternative reading, the chapter attends to aspects of convergence between early Jewish and Christian mystical language and linguistic possibilities highlighted by Wittgenstein and several of his philosophical interpreters. I suggest that such philosophical reflection helpfully illuminates, by way of mundane analogue, some of what sets mystical language apart from both the literal and the metaphorical. The result is a theological account that both highlights neglected mystical traditions and redresses a prevailing inattention to the diversity of our life with language.

The eighth chapter turns back to the East, though it begins with an examination of Williams’s aesthetic perspective as articulated primarily in the “communicative” mode, that is, in ways that seek to identify connections between Christians and nonChristians.14

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14. In the “Prologue” to On Christian Theology, Williams draws a methodological distinction between three theological modes: celebratory, critical and communicative. Williams explains that “[t]he assumption [of the communicative mode] is that this or that intellectual idiom not only offers a way into fruitful conversation with the current environment but also that the unfamiliar idiom may uncover aspects of the deposit of belief hitherto unexamined.” Rowan Williams, “Prologue,” in On Christian Theology,

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The second section follows Williams in connecting his aesthetic reflections to the

Orthodox liturgy, where the Christian vision is made visible and effective in the embodiment of a “liturgical humanity.” Focusing on Williams’s 2014 “Orthodoxy in

America” lecture, this second section registers the insights of Orthodox liturgical theology while also situating Williams’s reflections in light of the broader context of

Jewish and Christian mysticism. By attending, albeit briefly, to the scriptural, mystical and pedagogical roots of Orthodox liturgical theology, I indicate deeper springs from which to water the non-dual Christian imagination.

If theology has been held captive to a dualistic picture, Christ—the one who

“made captivity itself a captive” (Eph 4:8)—offers his Spirit. St Paul thus exhorts us to be

“captive[s] to the Spirit,” our thoughts captured by obedience to Christ (Acts 20:22; 2

Cor 10:5). Now it is the image (indeed the icon) of Christ by which we must be captivated, transfixed by the brilliance of the Glory radiating from the face of the crucified. Rather than picturing a primal separation, Christ is the focal image of cosmic perichoresis, the communion of the visible and invisible. Gathering Temple and icon in his theophanic train, Christ draws the universe together around himself in a great

“cosmic liturgy,” commending and enabling a non-dual theological vision, a truly perichoretic imagination. As writes:

Yes, for the sake of Christ—rather, for the sake of the mystery that is Christ—all

the eons, and all that the eons contain, have received the origin of their

from Christ and find the destiny of their being also in him. For the final purpose

as designed in God’s mind, and conceived in anticipation from the beginning,

was the unification of all the eons: the union of what is specific with what is

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Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), xiv.

10

unspecific; of what is measured with what is unmeasured; of what is limited with

what is unlimited; of the Creator with the created; of what is [unchangeable and]

lasting with what is [changing and] in motion. And this union has been revealed

at the end of time in Christ, who in himself brought God’s foreknowledge to its

fulfillment.15

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15. Maximus the Confessor, PG 90, 621BC. Quoted in Christoph Schönborn, God’s Human Face: The Christ-Icon, trans. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 124.

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CHAPTER I

KENOSIS AND APOPHASIS:

EASTERN ORTHODOX THEMES IN THE THEOLOGY OF ROWAN WILLIAMS

God is the supreme paradigm of the personal, a life wholly lived in ekstasis and kenosis, since the divine hypostases which are God are wholly defined by relations of love, gift, response. It is from the paradigm of the divine hypostases that we come to grasp our own vocation to personal being.1

In drawing extensively from both the non-dual traditions of Eastern Orthodox theology and Wittgensteinian philosophy, Rowan Williams’s theology suggests the potential fruitfulness of their further mutual encounter. Since Williams’s thought will structure and inform subsequent discussion, the present, largely expository, chapter

“‘sets the stage” by tracing the influence of Eastern Orthodox theology on Williams’s work, contending that this eclectic and sometimes elusive thinker can be better understood through attention to his Orthodox influences.2 To that end, I identify a constellation of Williams’s characteristic emphases in order to advance an interpretation of his thought as centered on a notion of personhood that is deeply informed by Orthodox

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1. Rowan Williams, “Eastern Orthodox Theology,” 506.

2. E.g., Williams’s understanding of “,” which I discuss in more detail below (see page 26), owes more to the ecstatic dimension characteristic of Eastern apophasis than the conceptual negation typical of much Western “negative theology.”

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theology.3 To anticipate, I contend that the influence of Orthodox theology is particularly inscribed on Williams’s conviction that personal existence—both divine and human—is fulfilled in kenosis. This “kenotic personalism” especially inflects his

Trinitarian theology, pneumatology and theological anthropology.

To speak of Williams’s “thought” in this way may at first seem odd, as though either positing a static essence or exalting a particular moment (the present perhaps?) in abstraction from the whole. In contrast, my use of the singular is intended to highlight the remarkable thematic consistency across Williams’s corpus. Williams appears very early to have attained a central insight which involved discerning the shape of the

Gospel in light of a particular account of what it means to be a person. As an interpretive lens through which to understand the foundational events of Christ’s death and resurrection, this central personalist insight has been the lodestar for much of Williams’s subsequent work, its fuller implications both clarified and ramified through a series of questions and in dialogue with various interlocutors.

This chapter addresses Williams’s understanding of the crucial concept of personhood, around which a whole constellation of other, mutually-illuminating concepts and questions cohere (e.g., Christology, Trinity, pneumatology, theological anthropology). This is not to suggest that Williams begins with a fully formed notion of person, formulated in isolation from, and then applied to, Scripture. On the contrary, for

Williams, it is only through the narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection that one learns what it means to be personal, which Christians confess of God and of humanity

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3. As a recent example: In his 2014 “Orthodoxy in America” Lecture, given at Fordham University, Williams draws on the work of Olivier Clément in insisting that what the most needs to address the spiritual poverty and banality of modern society is “the experience of a distinct kind of humanness, in which the twin notions of liberty and personhood are creditably fleshed out.” Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy in America,” Annual Orthodoxy in America Lecture (Fordham University, 2014), ca. 20:40, Http://digital.library.fordham.edu/cdm/ref/collection/VIDEO/id/718.

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made in God’s image (imago dei). Indeed, Christians regard Christ as both Theophany and anthropophany, manifesting both God and Humanity. This personalist theology, which draws together many of Williams’s characteristic concerns and themes, owes fundamentally to the influence of Eastern Orthodox theology—particularly to the work of two Russian émigré theologians, and Sergei Bulgakov. Together they impressed on Williams the centrality of dispossession (keno¯sis) and purgation (asce¯sis) as preparatory for the self’s “departure” (ekstasis) from an isolating egocentrism in order to

“discover” itself (or be constituted) in communion with others.4 The centrality of this

Orthodox conception of personhood, in turn, means that its influence radiates outward

to the whole of Williams’s thought, from the doctrine of the Trinity through theological

anthropology and into and /social theory.5

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4. I examine the relation between these concepts in more detail below. Though closely related, I occasionally distinguish two “aspects” of the kenotic dynamic: “negative” (ascesis or aphairesis, “stripping away”) and “positive” (ekstasis). Though distinguishable, these two aspects should not be played off one another, since they are inherently related—i.e., ascetic renunciation and stripping enables the ego’s ecstatic “departure” from self-enclosed isolation into communion. Williams himself links them together, remarking, “Self-abnegation is not simply a virtue that Christians ought to exercise, as if it were good for us always to remember our worthlessness. Self-abnegation is rather what happens in communion: that is to say, it is giving life to the other, and receiving life from the other, as in the life of the Trinity.” Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence: The Holy Spirit in Russian Orthodox Theology (Quebec: Editions du Lys Vert, 2008), 31. Alongside this more inclusive notion of kenosis, I also employ kenosis in a manner more in keeping with conventional usage (and since ascesis has other connotations as well). That is, I frequently use “kenosis” by itself as shorthand for the “negative” dimension, and in this capacity frequently pair it with ekstasis. “Kenosis and ekstasis” thus becomes a way of denoting the “positive” and “negative” dimensions of the dynamic that I cumulatively refer to as “kenotic.”

5. Ben Myers remarks that “[i]t would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of Russian [Orthodox] thought in the shaping of Williams’ imagination.” Benjamin Myers, Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2012), 16. The substantive influence of Orthodox theology frequently goes unnoticed, making Myers’s acknowledgement rather exceptional. This is not to say, of course, that Orthodox theology is the sole or even determining influence on Williams’s thought.

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Williams was first drawn to Eastern Orthodox theology while a student at

Oxford. Having first considered Bulgakov for his dissertation research,6 he settled on

Lossky with the help of his supervisor, , who presented Williams with a

large amount of unpublished transcripts of Lossky’s lectures in French.7 Reflecting on

this research years later, Williams says that what came to the forefront in his reading of

Lossky was the notion of the “ineffability of the human person.” That is, the “personal”

is not an item alongside others in an anthropological inventory; rather, “it is the

strangeness and difficulty, the irreducibility, within any relation.”8 This connection

between theology proper and theological anthropology—articulated in terms of the

traditional concept of the imago dei—is central in Williams’s work. For Williams, to affirm that human are made in the image of God—specifically, the image of the

Trinity (imago trinitatis)—means that “talking about the person is as difficult as talking

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6. Of Bulgakov, Williams says “Sergei Bulgakov is a theologian who, to my mind, stands head and shoulders above almost every other Orthodox writer of the twentieth century: a very controversial judgement, I know, and yet one that I would be prepared to defend.” Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 18.

7. Todd Breyfogle, “Time and Transformation: A Conversation with Rowan Williams,” Cross Currents 45, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 307. By 1972, Allchin told his student that he had nothing left to teach him, so Williams completed the thesis on his own. Rupert Shortt, Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the (: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008), 78. Summarizing the thesis’s critical argument, Williams says that “while [Lossky] thinks he’s using the Fathers in the ecclesiastical tradition against the Russian philosophical world, he’s very often reading the Fathers through the eyes of the very people he’s disagreeing with.” Breyfogle, “Time and Transformation,” 307. Rather than undermining the integrity of Lossky’s project, however, Williams sees himself registering the originality of Lossky’s work, though in ways Lossky himself would neither have recognized nor admitted. Allchin, an Anglican priest and theologian, had himself been deeply attracted by Eastern Orthodoxy in his youth. Advised instead “to be Orthodox in an Anglican form,” Allchin worked to advance ecumenical understanding between Anglicans and Orthodox, attending the conferences of the Fellowship of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius, which encourages links between the Orthodox and Anglican churches. David Scott, “Donald Allchin Obituary,” , 24 February 2011, n.p.

8. Breyfogle, “Time and Transformation,” 308.

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about God. . . . [and] it may be in that difficulty and elusiveness that the centrally human is to be located.”9

These Russian theologians are hardly Williams’s only dialogue partners for thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity. Part of what animates Williams’s thought is his creative juxtaposition of a range of sources and influences. So in addition to

Bulgakov and Lossky, Williams’s Trinitarian reflections are constantly nourished by

Augustine, Aquinas and . Somewhat reductively, then, we might describe Williams’s Trinitarian theology of personhood as a synthesis of a typically

Eastern emphasis on kenosis and personalism with an Augustinian theology of desire,10 a

Thomistic account of the “grammar” of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, and John’s image of the dark night of the spirit.11

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9. Breyfogle, “Time and Transformation,” 307.

10. On Williams’s reading, Augustine’s understanding of signification and desire are extremely closely linked. See his “Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s De Doctrina,” Journal of Literature & Theology 3, no. 2 (July 1989): 138–50. The understanding of desire Williams develops in this essay proves important for his later work on, inter alia, human sexuality (cf. “The Body’s Grace”) and the Trinity (cf. “The Deflections of Desire”). “The Body’s Grace,” in Our Selves, Our and Bodies: Sexuality and the Household of God, 10th Michael Harding Memorial Address – Institute for the Study of Christianity and Sexuality, ed. C. Hefling, reprint, 1989 (Boston: Cowley Press, 1996), Http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/08/24/3301238.htm; “The Deflections of Desire: Negative Theology in Trinitarian Disclosure,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and , ed. Oliver Davies and (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 115–35.

11. Ben Myers describes Williams as a “catholic thinker,” and remarks that it is the “uneasy juxtaposition” of his influences that “generates much of the peculiar energy of Williams’s thought.” Christ the Stranger, x. Having spent the decades since his dissertation on Lossky attending to questions of language, meaning and sociality, Williams’s as Archbishop in 2002 coincided with a period of renewed attention to the doctrine of God. For Williams, these interests are hardly unconnected, since Trinitarian theology itself serves to illuminate “the intelligibility of human desire, meaning, and belonging.” Ibid., 83. Discussing his work in an interview, Williams remarked: “Obviously, the theology of God as Trinity has been very much in my mind over the years . . . It’s not a tidy description; it's just the ‘least worst’ way we've found of talking about something very disturbing and inexhaustible. And I suppose that's why I've been trying for many years to write a book on the Trinity.” David S. Cunningham, “Living the Questions: The Converging Worlds of Rowan Williams,” The

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This sense of the elusiveness and difficulty of personal existence—anchored in a thickly textured account of the Trinitarian perichoresis—animates the entirety of

Williams’s thought and so provides a particularly appropriate résumé of Williams’s

engagement with Eastern Orthodoxy. Accordingly, the present chapter pursues three

related goals. First, and most generally, it provides valuable background for later

chapters by presenting an interpretation of the coherence of Williams’s theology

centered on the theme of personhood. This concept of the person as both kenotic and

ecstatic decisively informs and connects his Trinitarian and anthropological reflections.

Accordingly, after a first section that exposits Williams’s understanding of personalism,

the chapter’s two main sections (2 and 3) trace the theme of kenosis with regard to its

divine and human inflections. Second, I highlight the influence of Eastern Orthodoxy—

particularly Lossky and Bulgakov—on Williams’s thought, with particular attention to

his understanding of apophasis and to the pneumatological linkage between divine and

human kenosis. Finally, at several points I also highlight ways in which Williams has

integrated his Eastern sources with revisionist interpretations of Augustine and Thomas,

particularly concerning anthropology and epistemology. While a centrally kenotic

theology is hardly unique to the East, I conclude that Williams’s construal of the relation

between kenosis, ascesis, ekstasis and apophasis—together with its Trinitarian ground—

has been fundamentally informed by an Eastern Orthodox theology of personhood.

1. Williams’s Conception of the Person Is Both Kenotic and Ecstatic

Williams’s interest in Orthodox personalism was apparent from his first

published article, which discussed Christos Yannaras’s dissertation, “The Ontological

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Christian Century 119, no. 9 (April-May 2002): 26. As a result, Williams’s earlier researches have culminated in an attempt to articulate his understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity as the “the real grammar of social life.” Myers, Christ the Stranger, 83.

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Content of the Theological Notion of Personhood.”12 Though in large part a synopsis of

Yannaras’s work, the article touches on several points that would become abiding concerns in Williams’s later work. First, there is the centrality of the concept of person itself, along with the notion that truly personal existence is realized only as “being-in- communion.”13 Summarizing Yannaras, Williams thus underscores the importance of relationality for personal existence: “[t]he reality or unreality of entities depends on their relatedness or non-relatedness to persons; personhood, then, is the ‘horizon’ (‘ορι'ζων

[horizo¯n] in Greek means ‘that which determines or defines’) upon which all beings manifest themselves, and so it may be said to have a ‘universal’ character.”14 Second, such being-in-communion is contrasted with the atomistic existence of the self-enclosed individual.15 Third, this conception of the person is bound up with the dynamics of kenosis and ekstasis, and is treated analogically with respect to both human and divine existence.16 Finally, the essay anticipates Williams’s later reflections on Lossky’s personalism, the problems he sees in Palamism, and the possibility of reconciling

Eastern apophaticism and through personalist notions (a possibility advanced, for example, by E. L. Mascall17).

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12. Williams described Yannaras’s dissertation as “a synthesis of what may loosely be called the Greek patristic tradition (conceived of as including Palamas and other mediaevals) and modern phenomenological thought.” Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras,” 6 (Winter 1972): 416.

13. Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood,” 420.

14. Ibid., 417.

15. For humanity, the way to fully personal existence is opened in Christ, who gives us “authentic personal freedom, the freedom to be persons, freedom from the threat of existence-in-isolation.” Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood,” 427.

16. Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood,” 419.

17. “It would, of course, be rash in the extreme to identify the divine existence in Thomism with the divine energy in Palamism; nevertheless it would be a fascinating and

18

That these themes have been of lasting importance to Williams can be demonstrated from two recent touchstones, from the beginning and end of his tenure as the Archbishop of Canterbury respectively. Though each address contains unique emphases, both trace the same trajectory, beginning from the believer’s incorporation into the Trinitarian life and moving to the resultant socio-political implications. First, near the end of his enthronement sermon as Archbishop in 2001, Williams publicly asked himself the question, “What do I pray for in the Church of the future?” to which he gave four responses: confidence, courage, thankfulness, and an imagination set on fire by the vision of God the Holy Trinity. As his answer reflects, the wellspring of Williams’s theology is the Trinitarian mystery, which grounds his discourse about the dynamics of personhood.18 The rest of the sermon fleshes out what Williams means by “the vision of

———————————— really important question for investigation whether Thomas and Gregory were not ultimately concerned with the same theological and religious question, even if they expounded it in terms of divergent metaphysical systems. . . . even if we cannot simply equate existence with energy, perhaps we can see a difference between essence as it is understood by Aquinas and by Palamas, and the reconciliation may lie along this line.” E. L. Mascall, The Openness of Being; Today, The , (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971), 222.

18. Williams’s sense of the centrality of the doctrine of the Trinity itself likely reflects the influence of Lossky, who wrote: “[t]he Trinity is, for the Orthodox Church, the unshakeable foundation of all religious thought, of all piety, of all spiritual life, of all experience.” The of the Eastern Church, translated from the French by members of the Fellowship of St. Sergius and St. Alban (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 65. Cf. Ibid., 177. The mention of Trinitarian “grounding” here raises the question of method—that is, where do we begin? Does Williams’s account of personhood begin from the doctrine of the Trinity or from human existence? Williams article on Yannaras’s personhood anticipates the question, to which he responds, “At one level, we are not ‘starting from’ either the finite or the infinite pole, we are presupposing both; while at another level—as it is almost trivial to point out—of course we are beginning from finite existence, simply because we are finite existents. It is important not to confuse ontological priority with epistemological priority . . . any talk about the content of a revelation necessarily requires some underlying theory of what it is that enables us to talk about a revelation as the revelation of God.” “The Theology of Personhood,” 425. I take Williams’s meaning to be that—rather than beginning from either the Trinitarian dogma or anthropology and then imposing the resulting account of personhood on the other—we proceed from both ends at once. On such a view, neither pole simply dictates to the other. There is rather a kind of discernible convergence between the Christian account of personhood, grounded in Scripture and

19

God the Holy Trinity” as involving the believer’s learning to stand in trust before the

Father in the place of Jesus.19 The Church, Williams says, exists in order to pass on this promise: that it is possible to stand in God’s presence without fear.20 In characteristic fashion, Williams proceeds to connect this understanding of Christian identity-in-Christ with its social implications: “Once we recognise God's great secret, that we are all made to be God’s sons and daughters, we can’t avoid the call to see one another differently.

No one can be written off; no group, no nation, no minority can just be a scapegoat to resolve our fears and uncertainties. We can’t assume that any human face we see has no divine secret to disclose: those who are culturally or religiously strange to us; those who so often don’t count in the world’s terms (the old, the unborn, the disabled).”21

Trinity, theological anthropology, social responsibility. Williams explores the same themes in his last major public address before stepping down as Archbishop in

December 2012. Beginning with a discussion of Lossky and the emergence of Christian

“personalist” theology, Williams echoes Lossky’s claim that we need a vocabulary capable of distinguishing the irreducibly unique dimension of our existence from that

———————————— doctrine, and the phenomenology of human existence. Christians would accordingly claim that part of the Gospel’s compelling character lies in the fact that what emerges from close attention to the textures of human existence “fits” with the story that Christian theology tells about the Source of personal existence.

19. “[W]e learn painfully quickly,” Williams says, “that we cannot hold our own there by our own strength; it is Jesus's gift in life and death and resurrection that makes it possible for us to stand with him, breathing his breath, his Spirit. . . . And if we're not seeking to stand where Jesus is, our talk about God remains on the level of theory; nothing has changed.” Rowan Williams, “Enthronement Sermon,” Sermon preached by Dr. Rowan Williams at his enthronement as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury at Canterbury on Thursday, February 27th, 2003 (2003), n.p.

20. Rowan Williams, “Enthronement Sermon,” n.p.

21. Rowan Williams, “Enthronement Sermon,” n.p. The quotation also reflects the significant influence of René Girard on Williams’s thought. Williams goes on to argue that Christian political protest arises wherever and whenever believers feel that “insult and violence blot out the divine image in our human relations, the reflection to one another of the promise of Jesus in one another.” Ibid.

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which makes us members of a class—a distinction Lossky made using the language of

“person” and “nature.”22 According to Williams, the difference between the two concepts hinges on relationality: “[w]hat makes me a person, and what makes me this person rather than another, is not simply a set of facts—or rather, it is the enormous fact of my being here rather than elsewhere, being in these relations with those around me, being a child of these parents, a parent of these children, the friend of X, the not-so-intimate friend of

Y, or the Archbishop of Z, as the case may be. I stand in the middle of a network of relations, the point where the lines cross.”23 In other words, what sets the person apart from an impersonal natural unit—that which constitutes the person’s “irreducibly unique dimension”—is a particular relational network.

If we conceive of a person in these terms—that is, as “the point at which relationships intersect, where a difference may be made and new relations created”—then we cannot understand what it means to be a “person” in abstraction of a network of relations, in and through which the person is constituted. In other words, Williams says, part of “the implication of this profound mysteriousness about personal reality” is that we find our identity, our sense of ourselves, in others.24 Such an account of existence, at once kenotic and ecstatic—because the hope of a fixed identity is surrendered in favor of being discovered in relation—is difficult to sustain either on materialist or essentialist

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22. “There is something about us as conscious agents that doesn’t simply boil down to being one example of a kind of thing. That is not to say you have to search for some specific element that makes us personal rather than otherwise—say, intelligence or freedom or whatever. It is more like an observation that when we talk about being ‘a person,’ we’re talking of something about us as a whole that isn’t specified, that isn’t defined just by listing facts that happen to be true about us.” Rowan Williams, “The Person and the Individual: Human Dignity, Human Relationships and Human Limits,” Fifth Annual Theos Lecture (2012), n.p., Http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2636/archbishop- delivers-fifth-annual-theos-lecture.

23. Rowan Williams, “The Person and the Individual,” n.p.

24. Ibid.

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views. Accordingly, Williams says, we must conclude, “I am neither a machine nor a self- contained soul. I am a person because I am spoken to and attended to and loved into actual existence.”25 The opposite of personal existence, then, is the self-enclosed individual, the “uncooperative self”26 which “assumes that what comes first is this isolated interior core which then negotiates its way around relations with others but always has the liberty of hurrying back indoors.”27 Somewhat paradoxically, then, it is the individual, isolated from distinguishing relations, which appears as nothing but an

“example of a certain kind of thing.”28 Williams’s conclusion highlights the importance of this conception of personhood for his understanding of theology itself:

it is in turning away from an atomised and artificial notion of the self, towards

that more fluid and risky, but also more human discourse of the exchanges in

relations in which we are involved, and grounding this discourse on the basic

theological insight that we are always already in advance spoken to, addressed

and engaged with by that which is not the world and not ourselves—it is in that

process that theology comes into its own.29

For Williams, kenosis and ekstasis—the self-emptying and other-centeredness of love—are the central dynamics of personhood. This truth is so fundamental that the doctrine of the Trinity affirms its inscription at the very source of personal existence, namely, the triune God.30

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25. Ibid.

26. Williams takes the phrase from Richard Sennett’s Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation (New Haven, CT: Press, 2012).

27. Rowan Williams, “The Person and the Individual,” n.p.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

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2. Williams’s Trinitarian Theology Defines Personal Existence as Fundamentally

Kenotic

Williams’s reflections on the Trinity begin from the conviction that the knowledge of God, including the doctrine of the Trinity, is grounded in the Church’s memory and experience of the risen Jesus.31 Thus, early Christians came to confess Jesus’ as they experienced transformed relationships both with God and one another.

This creative newness deriving from life “in Christ” was so radical as to be assimilated to creation itself—that is, , Jesus’ life, death and resurrection were understood as effecting a new creation.32 What was thought to be “characteristic of God alone—radical ‘generative power,’ global creativity, the capacity to constitute the limits of human experience, and so forth—has been experienced in connection with the life and death of a human being.”33 This in turn means that knowledge about God is subsequently conditioned by relation to this particular human life.34 Accordingly, the significance of Jesus’ story

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30. Thus Dumitru Stăniloae remarks, “The Trinity is the supreme expression of the declaration of love, a declaration beginning in the Father and answered by the Son.” The Holy Trinity: In the Beginning There Was Love, trans. Roland Clark (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012), 54.

31. “Nothing is known of God the Trinity that does not come through the Word incarnate.” Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 61.

32. Rowan Williams, “Incarnation and the Renewal of Community,” in On Christian Theology, reprint, 1989 (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 234. Cf. “Trinity and Revelation,” in On Christian Theology (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 138.

33. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Revelation,” 139. Cf. “The of the resurrection stories is the dialectic of all our worship and contemplation, so that to see in the risen Jesus both an endlessly receding horizon and a call to journey more and more deeply towards our centre and our home is to see him as God-like: more simply, to see him as God, because he is the concrete form in which we encounter this infinity of challenge and infinity of acceptance most clearly and comprehensively.” Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, reprint, 1982 (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2004), 88.

34. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Revelation,” 139.

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resists capture; it is always spilling outward, escaping over a receding horizon of new connections.35

The experience of this new creation comes in the form of a reconstructed humanity, which, in turn, “spills over into the reconstruction of discourse about God: if new humanity, then a new God.”36 In other words, talk about God must now account for the particular story of “risk and consummation, of unity forged through absence and death between God as source (Father) and the created life of Jesus of Nazareth (as Son).

We are left with only the most austere account of God’s life as such: that it must be what makes this possible.”37 On one hand, Christians ascribe to Jesus’ life, death and resurrection a comprehensive scope, which means that these events are uniquely understood as “the act and the speech of God.” On the other hand, Jesus now defines our theological discourse, such that through his kenosis “we learn to see God’s creative act as in itself a giving away, a letting go.”38

2.1. Williams Articulates a Kenotic Account of the Trinity Which Informs His Conception of

Apophaticism

Taking Jesus as God’s definitive self-revelation, Williams articulates a thoroughly kenotic doctrine of the Trinity: “‘Kenosis,’ renunciation, is the way of Jesus in his

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35. Cf. “They saw Jesus as a ‘man for all seasons,’ a man for all climates and languages, capable of transforming any human situation by his presence. And when you put it like that, you can see how this echoes what is said about God’s all-powerful nature, capable of transforming any situation. Jesus, then, is seen as embodying, making visible, the purpose of God and the action of God.” Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 65.

36. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Revelation,” 138.

37. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Ontology,” in On Christian Theology, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 159–60.

38. Rowan Williams, “Incarnation and the Renewal of Community,” 234.

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historical life, opening to us the vision of how God always is.”39 In Jesus we see who God is, namely, “the outpouring and returning of selfless love, which is the very essence of

God’s definition, in so far as we can ever speak of a ‘definition’ of the mystery.”40

Moreover, because Jesus’ kenosis is itself understood as a response to the Father, “we learn that God’s act includes both a giving and a responding, that God’s life is itself in movement and in relation with itself.”41

The influence of both Lossky and Bulgakov can be discerned in this kenoticism, both as “defining” the character of God and as definitive for personal existence as such.42

Thus, for Lossky, Williams says, “it is in the cross that we see the revelation of what it is that characterises God’s personal being, and so also of what is possible for man: the cross reveals personality as ‘kenotic.’”43 In Christ, we discover that personal existence,

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39. Rowan Williams, “Incarnation and the Renewal of Community,” 234. In the words of Herbert McCabe, the story of Jesus comes to be understood as the “projection of the trinitarian life of God on the rubbish dump that we have made of the world.” God Matters, Continuum Icons (London: Chapman, 1987), 48.

40. Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust, 71.

41. Rowan Williams, “Incarnation and the Renewal of Community,” 234. Cf. “If you take the life of Jesus as a whole, you are prompted to think of God’s love as both a giving and a receiving, a flowing out and a reflecting back, an initiative and a depending.” Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust, 66.

42. Williams says of Bulgakov in particular that he is “certainly the only theologian of the century to use kenosis as a pivotal and normative concept for all language about God, in creation as in . “Eastern Orthodox Theology,” 504. Williams goes on to note that this emphasis on kenosis is not wholly unique to Bulgakov and Lossky, since it is ingrained in the whole Russian religious tradition. For Williams, the Russian accent on kenosis dovetailed with that of his closest mentor at Oxford, Donald MacKinnon, who integrates the kenotic and tragic in ways similar to Williams. For example, MacKinnon insists that “it is the notion of keno¯sis which more than any other single notion points to the deepest sense of the mystery of the incarnation.” “‘Substance’ in Christology: A Cross-Bench View,” in Philosophy and the Burden of Theological Honesty: A Donald MacKinnon Reader, ed. John C. McDowell and John McDowell, assisted by Scott Kirkland, reprint, 1972 (London ; New York: T & T Clark, 2011), 251.

43. Rowan Williams, “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” in Wrestling with Angels, ed. Mike Higton, reprint, 1979 (Grand Rapids:

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both divine and human, is fulfilled in kenosis. This gives shape to the imago dei,

grounding human dispossession in the foundational divine self-donation to which it

seeks to respond in love.44

In similar fashion, Bulgakov’s picture of the Trinity focuses on the Father’s self-

emptying in an act of bestowal so radical that it constitutes the possibility of its own free

response in the Son. For Williams, this gives a positive orientation to the notion of

kenosis as being-toward-otherness—it envisions the act of emptying or being stripped as

a “giving over to,” an ekstasis. As Williams explains, “[t]he Father gives all that he has

and is to the Son, gives over everything to the Son. When the Son comes forth in the

Father’s begetting, nothing is held back.”45 This fundamental act of self-giving means

that the very life of God is ecstatic, a “yielding or giving-over into the life of an Other.”46

At the same time, the accent on self-abnegation is equally strong in Bulgakov, and

Williams is particularly struck by Bulgakov’s use of the extraordinary term “self-

devastation” for this act of dispossession, commenting that “[t]he Father in begetting the

Son ‘lays himself waste,’ empties all that he might hold, so we can never understand the

Father independently of that utter bestowal and emptying into the life of the Word or

the Son.”47

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Eerdmans, 2007), 14.

44. Williams remarks that the human history of Jesus represents “the convergence of two journeys of dispossession, human and divine.” Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London; New York: Bloomsburgy, 2014), 184.

45. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 22.

46. Rowan Williams, “Author’s Introduction,” in Wrestling with Angels, ed. Mike Higton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), xiii.

47. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 22.

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For Williams, apophatic theology is less the conceptual negation typical of much

Western “negative theology” than this ecstatic (or perichoretic) movement: apophasis is

“more than a conceptual move, because it is anchored in the reality of personal kenosis, divine and human.”48 Such apophasis marks the fact that identity, since it is constituted in “self-transcending relation,” cannot simply be secured or finished.49 Accordingly, for

Williams, themes of kenosis, ascesis, ekstasis and apophasis all cohere in the concept of the person.50 That is, personal existence is fulfilled through ascesis and ekstasis. The self’s ekstasis—its “leaving” itself in dispossessing love and entering into reciprocal relation—

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48. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 134. This linkage between the apophatic and the personal is pervasive in Williams. Compare Williams’s characterization of apophaticism in Lossky, for whom “apophatic theology, if it is truly Christian, must point beyond the intellect to the personal mystery of the Trinity which encounters the human person in the act of revelation.” Rowan Williams, “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 4. Cf. “The source and end of apophatic theology for Lossky is, therefore, a fully conscious (though non-intellectual) relationship of personal confrontation between man and God in love; and the importance of »εκστασις in the attainment of this relationship is very great.” Ibid., 13. Later in the same essay, Williams describes the Orthodox theological synthesis articulated by Palamas as “apophatic (and therefore personalist).” Ibid., 9.

49. Rowan Williams, “Author’s Introduction,” xiii. Commenting on Lossky’s understanding of apophasis, Williams concludes that “the reality underpinning apophatic theology is ‘ecstasy’ – not a particular brand of individual mystical experience, but the sober acknowledgment that we must let go of the control of conceptual analysis when we are touched by God and advance to a stage beyond the life of conscious ‘natural’ individuality, closed upon itself.” Rowan Williams, “Eastern Orthodox Theology,” 506. Williams highlights the theme of perichoresis in his comments on St John of the Cross, for whom, “[i]t is as if the ser [essence] of the Godhead is being identified with the formal pattern of indwelling itself—not with a ‘nature’ beyond or behind the three, but with the movement of one into another in desire.” Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 118.

50. According to Williams, “[t]he unifying theme [of Lossky’s work] is what might be called ‘personalism’” which he uses to indicate that “the central and controlling idea of the system is that of the personal subject in the context of its relations with other subjects.” Rowan Williams, “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 18. For Lossky, “[t]he person is a reality beyond the bondage of a closed conceptual system; and thus its proper activity is apophasis. Apophasis is not the same thing as ecstasy, but they are intimately connected as two manifestations of that which makes personal reality what it is.” Rowan Williams, “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 13.

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renders it fluid, mobile, immune to fixed definition. This means that the apophatic is not an inaccessible inner dimension but an unspecifiable range of possible identities-in- relation. With respect to the Trinitarian Persons, this conjunction of the personal and apophatic prevents any polarization of an unknown essence and manifest Persons, since the apophatic is applicable not only to the divine nature but also to the divine Persons and their relations.

Apophatic observations about the divine nature are, as we have said,

“grammatical” remarks about the impossibility of specifying what it is that makes

God to be God. Apophatic accounts of the trinitarian persons and their relations

are a way of expressing and evoking the particular theme of the endlessness and

non-possession of trinitarian relation, gift or love. The two dimensions of

negative theology here do not represent two objects under discussion (nature and

persons), but simply mark the two moments of recognising the radicality of

divine difference that arise in the lived process of not only trying to speak

consistently of God but trying to live coherently in the pattern of divine life as it

is made concrete to us in the history of Jesus and made available to us in the

common life of the Spirit-filled community.51

The indeterminacy of possible identities-in-relation, then, arising from personal kenosis and ekstasis, is the ground of apophasis, that is, the “ineffability of the human person.”52

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51. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 134–35.

52. Andrew Louth echoes this personalist conception of apophasis with respect to Maximus the Confessor: “The apophatic points to the person of Christ: it is in a personal relationship with the incarnate Word that God’s unknowability is not only registered but experienced. . . . For Maximus, . . . the ineffable, the inexhaustible, is actually found in the face-to-face, person-to-person experience disclosed by the incarnation. . . . apophatic theology is an acknowledgement of the overwhelming reality of the person of God, rather than a principle of denial that qualifies and limits our affirmation of the revealed images and concepts of God.” Andrew Louth, “From Doctrine of Christ to Icon of Christ,” in In

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2.2. Williams Draws on the Orthodox Emphasis on the Spirit in His “Erotic” Reformulation of

Trinitarian Doctrine

Williams attributes to Eastern Orthodox theology a salutary appreciation for the place of the Spirit, who is accordingly quite prominent in his account of the kenotic divine life.53 The Spirit is “the Spirit of kenosis,” and so is “the concrete manifestation and communication of the truth that this is how God lives.”54 In a work on Orthodox pneumatology (2008) which treats , Lossky and Bulgakov, Williams indicates the scope of the Orthodox influence on this area of thought, writing that “[f]or nearly forty years, the material I have outlined here has been for me a decisive point of orientation in thinking through all sorts of theological issues.”55

Echoing Bulgakov and Florensky, Williams suggests that a purely dyadic relation between Father and Son would risk becoming a mutual cancellation, a self-contained dialectic. That this relation is more than simply a self-canceling exchange is

“safeguarded” by the Spirit, through whom their mutual love becomes a giving out rather than simply a reciprocal giving to.56 As Ben Myers comments, it is as though “the

———————————— the Shadow of the Incarnation: Essays on Jesus Christ in the Early Church in Honor of Brian E. Daley, S.J., ed. Peter W. Martens (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 268.

53. Lossky and Bulgakov share a particular stress on the role of the Holy Spirit, and Williams acknowledges a particularly strong debt to Eastern Orthodox theology in this area. The pairing of Bulgakov and Lossky as the preeminent Orthodox influences on Williams’s thinking might at first seem odd, given Lossky’s well-known (and pointed) criticisms of Bulgakov’s sophiology. Williams, however, regards the two theologians as “brothers under the skin,” partially due to their shared emphasis on the theme of kenosis. Breyfogle, “Time and Transformation,” 308.

54. Rowan Williams, “The Spirit of the Age to Come,” Sobornost 6, no. 9 (1974): 623; Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 23.

55. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 10.

56. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 23. Cf. Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” in Wrestling with Angels, ed. Mike Higton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 43, and Rowan Williams, “What Does Love Know? St Thomas on the Trinity,”

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identity of the Father might have collapsed into that of the Son; but the Spirit comes between them, securing their by holding them apart. The Spirit thus brings the Father and the Son into mutual articulacy, ‘into vision’ before one another, sustaining their love by sustaining the distance that love requires.”57

Myers’s remark about the “distance” required by love connects our discussion with Williams’s reformulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of ecstatic desire.58

God is love, and that loving wisdom, which Bulgakov refers to as “the love of loving,” opens up a differentiation within the divine life.59 God loves God, “loves what is understood in the eternal Word.”60 Thus, “God is a movement towards God, God’s wanting of God so that God may be fully and blissfully God, may enjoy the ‘natural good’ proper to divine nature.”61 To realize the fullness of love, however, desire cannot simply terminate in the other, and so must be reconstituted in the divine life as the

“pattern of a ceaseless or circling deflection, an emptying of ‘desire’ that seeks closure with a determinate other, and an opening therefore on to the dimension of a love that is always directed to but never determined by a specific other—the dimensions of a love that can properly be called endless.”62

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New Blackfriars 82, no. 964 (June 2001): 271.

57. Myers, Christ the Stranger, 87.

58. See “What Does Love Know?”; “The Deflections of Desire”; A Margin of Silence. Myers judges this “systematic reformulation” to be the “most important scholarly contribution throughout his years as Archbishop of Canterbury.” Myers, Christ the Stranger, 85.

59. Rowan Williams, “Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness: The Wisdom of Finite Existence,” Study Day on (Oxford, 2005), n.p.

60. Rowan Williams, “What Does Love Know?” 265.

61. Ibid.

62. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 120.

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This means that the Son’s love for the Father is never “finished,” never

“satisfied,” since “the love of the Son for the Father is itself a desire for the desire of the

Father, and so for the Father’s excess of love ‘beyond’ what is directed to the Son.”63 In the Spirit we see that “the Father’s character as giver is not restricted by being Father of the Son; in begetting the Son, there is an ‘excess’ of gift.”64 Thus, the Spirit “sustains the exchange of love between Father and Son precisely by being more than that exchange, by personifying their mutual excess of love.”65 In other words, the love between the Father and the Son is not enclosed on itself; it is ecstatic, overflowing hypostatically in the

Spirit as well as “outside” Godself in creation.66 Thus, “what the Son really loves is the absence of satisfied desire. God loves the very negativity of love—or as Augustine argues, what love loves is loving.”67 By opening the divine love outward in this way, the Spirit

“articulates” the divine life as “the silent totality of mutual giving that is the source of everything.”68 Fittingly, then, both the Spirit and the divine life “as a whole” have been

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63. Ibid., 119.

64. Rowan Williams, “Trinitate, De,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, general editor Allan D. Fitzgerald, associate editors John Cavadini and et al. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 1999), 850. Cf. “The ‘self- alienating’ of divine life in the Father’s self-gift to the Son ‘alienates’ itself, posits itself as more than a symmetry of self-sacrifice.” Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Difference,” in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2007), 81.

65. Myers, Christ the Stranger, 86.

66. Quoting first Maximus and then Dionysius, Christos Yannaras remarks that “[i]n the patristic tradition, God himself in his internal triadic life will be defined as ‘the whole of eros,’ the fullness of continuous erotic unity: ‘This eros is love, and it is written, that God is love.’ And this eros is ecstatic, ‘stimulating the erotic inclination of God’ which founds and constitutes the beings ‘outside him.’” Christos Yannaras, Elements of : An Introduction to Orthodox Theology, trans. Keith Schram (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991), 70–71.

67. Myers, Christ the Stranger, 86. This accent on absence is pervasive in Williams’s writings and will be treated in more detail in chapter three.

68. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 24.

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designated as love, since the Spirit as excess of love and joy “secures the character of

God-as-such” as one of self-giving love.69

In thus “articulating” the relation of Father and Son as one of mutual gift,70 the

Spirit as Spirit is silent. Williams observes that both Bulgakov and Lossky describe this as the Spirit’s kenosis. Bulgakov thus says that,

Like the first two hypostases, the Third hypostasis has, in its own hypostatic life,

its own kenosis, which consists precisely in hypostatic self-abolition, as it were: By

its procession from the Father upon the Son, the Third hypostasis loses itself, as

it were, becomes only a copula, the living bridge of love between the Father and

the Son, the hypostatic Between. But in this kenosis the Third hypostasis finds

itself as the Life of the other hypostases, as the Love of the Others and as the

Comfort of the Others, which then becomes for it too its own Comfort, its self-

comfort.71

The Spirit’s kenosis is not only seen in the Third Person’s witnessing to the Father and

Son, but also, as Williams emphasizes, in the Spirit’s “continuing, faithful coexistence in the Church with human freedom. The Holy Spirit is present in self-emptying and in

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69. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 118. On this connection, Williams notes that, in contrast to the intellect’s verbum, “we lack a word for the ‘product’, the active presence of the beloved in the lover. . . . Hence the confusion in theological language between love as what the entire Trinity does and is, and love as the name of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity.” Rowan Williams, “What Does Love Know?” 265.

70. See above, page 31.

71. Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2004), 181. The Spirit, says Bulgakov, “does not have its own Face . . . but is only the Face of the Son in His Glory. But its supra-eternal kenosis is also , Glory, which is not only the glorification of the Son but also Glory in Itself. However, in the light of this Glory we can discern the glorified Face of -Christ but not the proper Face of Glory itself, which remains invisible both in its kenotic self- renunciation and even in the glory of the glorification of the Logos.” Ibid., 188.

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patience—in self-forgetting—by being there alongside our fallibility, not overcoming it, not taking it over and ironing it out.”72 The Spirit’s gifts bring the transfiguration, not obliteration, of human life. Williams continues, noting that, for Lossky, the Spirit’s kenosis means that “the face of the Holy Spirit is the faces of all the saints. If you want to see the face of the Holy Spirit, look at holy people. That’s the only face of the Holy

Spirit you’re going to see, because in those holy faces, those people who have uniquely realised [sic] their Christ-likeness because of the Spirit, we see the fusion of Word and

Spirit which is the new creation.”73 This new creation is decidedly paradoxical, however, since it is the same self-effacing Spirit who enables us to see our own “silence and emptiness as life and fullness.”74 That is, we see the Spirit at work wherever we find ourselves decentered, where our selfish desires for closure are frustrated, and where our love for the other is “deflected” outward into new expressions of costly self-giving.75

Williams sees the Spirit as an indication that, in God, identity and otherness are not opposed but simultaneous, held together by the radicalness of a self-gift that constitutes the very possibility of the other’s freedom. Accordingly, Williams’s account of the Trinity stresses that God is “eternally one who generates what is other, who eternally makes different his own life in the outpouring and exchange of the life of

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72. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 29.

73. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 41. Cf. Lossky, “We should say, rather, that the Holy Spirit effaces Himself, as Person, before the created persons to whom He appropriates grace.” The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 172. Or again, “In the κε'νωσις of the incarnate Son the person is plainly manifested, but the nature remains hid beneath the form of the slave. In the coming of the Holy Spirit, the is revealed as a Gift, while the person of the Giver remains undisclosed. In thus annihilating Himself, so to speak, in hiding Himself as Person, the Holy Spirit appropriates uncreated grace to human persons.” Ibid., 244. See also pp. 85, 159-160, 168 and 172.

74. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 24.

75. As Williams explains,“It is in our silence and our self-forgetting, our own silent receiving, that we become alive, that we become open fully to the fertile, regenerating life of the Father and Son as the source of everything.” Ibid.

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Father, Son and Holy Spirit—that tells us that in the heart of God there is what you might call the energy of difference, an outpouring of life into otherness.”76 The divine difference makes possible an otherness in which there is no rivalry or competition. The divine life “exists only and necessarily in the act of ‘bestowal,’ in a self-alienation that makes possible the freedom and love of an other that is at the same time itself in otherness.”77 This identity-in-otherness is at the heart of the divine kenosis, which emerges in the starkest terms in the gulf that separates from the “God- forsaken” Jesus78:

the divine life is what sustains itself as unqualified unity across the greatest

completeness of alienation that can be imagined; and so appears as unqualified

gift or (as I have been calling it) bestowal. The gulf between Father and crucified

Son, between Father in heaven and Son in , now appears as the immeasurable

measure of the way divine love ‘leaves’ itself, travels infinitely from itself (from

self-possession, self-presence). Here there can be no identity prior to

differentiation: the only identity in question is precisely the total and eternal self-

bestowal that constitutes the other.79

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76. Rowan Williams, “Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness,” n.p.

77. Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Difference,” 81.

78. Williams suggests that “the juxtaposition of the Cross and the Trinity is . . . at the centre of Christian belief,” which makes clear that “tragedy is inseparable not merely from the historical facts of the life and death of Jesus, as Mackinnon has reminded us, but from the very fact of the Incarnation.” Rowan Williams, “The Spirit of the Age to Come,” 619.

79. Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Difference,” 81. Williams had earlier remarked about the tragic character of the Incarnation itself: “And so, at this level, the Incarnation itself is a necessarily tragic , for God enters into the humanity whose mode of being is God-less-ness.” Rowan Williams, “The Spirit of the Age to Come,” 619. Emphasis in original.

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Once more, the Spirit plays a central role, sustaining the unity of the divine life across this “gulf of immeasurable otherness”: “the life bestowed in its wholeness upon the Son is both returned to the Father and opened up beyond the duality of Father and Son as the Holy Spirit.”80

In his 2001 Aquinas lecture, Williams extends these reflections on identity and difference in dialogue with St Thomas, for whom the inseparability of knowledge and love becomes a way of understanding the divine life in terms of an otherness both

“knowable and unmasterable.”81 Put schematically, Williams suggests that “knowledge is about the continuity between subject and object, love is about the discontinuity.

Knowing is the other coming to be in the subject, love is the acknowledgment that the other remains other, even in the subject.”82 Thus, to say that God both knows and loves

Godself is to say that there is in God both unity and difference, both a “self-image generated by knowledge” and “an impulsion of love toward the unexhausted difference” which “exceeds that repetition or reproduction.”83 Williams thus sees Thomas thinking through “what there is in God that is in its own mode as ‘other’ as the world itself” while also testing out how the “ for thinking about the presence of the other in the same that we use in reflecting on human consciousness might then hold in respect of

God.”84 In other words, Thomas is asking what must be true of God in se if we confess that the God of revelation is “radically committed to the love and understanding of what

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80. Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Difference,” 81.

81. Rowan Williams, “What Does Love Know?” 266. The background for both Thomas and Williams is Augustine’s “psychological” analogy, which aligns the Son with knowledge and the Spirit with love.

82. Rowan Williams, “What Does Love Know?” 264–65.

83. Ibid., 265, 267.

84. Ibid., 268.

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is substantively other.”85 Williams’s conclusion emphasizes the need to hold together love and knowledge in our speech about God in order to remind ourselves

that what we want to say about the subject and the other always requires a

complex interplay between doing justice to the ‘participatory’ element, the life of

the other in the subject, and doing justice to the abiding difference, the

exploratory element, the invitation of the other to the subject. In God, the

doctrine tells us, that is, in the reality that is formative of the entire universe,

there is perfect reflection or participation, and there is endless invitation, the

stimulus of difference; as if (you can say no more) God is utterly familiar to God

and utterly ‘strange’ to God.86

Accordingly, the eternal act with which our own knowing is in some way continuous is never simply a possessing precisely because “it is the act (the knowledge) of love.”87 It

would be possible, and no doubt fruitful, to trace the threads of this argument outward

to Williams’s reflections across a range of topics (e.g., language, art, ecclesiology, human

sociality). In the immediate epistemological context, however, Williams highlights the

importance of this interweaving of knowledge and love for the way we “understand our

understanding,” since it suggests both the insufficiency of instrumental reason and the

need to see knowledge “as a process in which the life of the other lives in me—and not

only lives in me, but, as loved, not just known, also lives in me as a provocation to

further action, which in finite means change.”88

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85. Ibid.

86. Ibid., 271.

87. Ibid., 272.

88. Rowan Williams, “What Does Love Know?” 272. This more “robust” understanding of Thomistic participation reflects a significant development in

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Williams’s Trinitarian reflections, anchored in the life of Jesus, repeatedly return to consider the ways in which God “makes possible identity-in-difference—indeed, identity in distance or in absence.”89 This distance is not only that between Father and

Son, but also that between Creator and creature, since Jesus’ life is simultaneously the life of God projected in history, and also the paradigmatically creaturely life, a life in some sense distanced from God.90 Jesus’ humanity thus spans the distance of creation from its Creator, constituting, together with the Spirit, the condition of the possibility for creation’s free inclusion in the divine life.91

2.3. Williams’s Account of Creation Echoes His Kenotic Trinitarianism

The Christian belief that God eternally generates what is other in an act of dispossessing love enables us to understand creation as another mode of this eternal self- gift.92 Thus creation is not simply an extrinsic augment to the trinitarian relations, but the transcription in a new register, the “remaking” at another level, of the intra- trinitarian joy in the other.93 Such transcription is neither necessary (e.g., emanation) nor arbitrary (e.g., ), but follows naturally from an understanding of who

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Williams’s thought, the contours of which I examine in chapter four.

89. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Ontology,” 158. Williams thus seeks to dissolve anxieties about purity, identity and otherness that animate much rhetorical and political violence. Cf. Charles Taylor, “Notes on the Sources of Violence,” in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 188–213.

90. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Ontology,” 158.

91. Of course this is not to say that Jesus is simply another creature, since in him there is “a mutually constitutive presence, an internal relation of terms” that is decisively other than creation’s “externality” from its creator. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Ontology,” 158.

92. “If God were not like that we could not understand creation; or rather we might understand creation in a completely misleading way.” Rowan Williams, “Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness,” n.p.

93. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 117.

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God has revealed himself to be. That creation is called to participate—indeed already participates in some sense—in the divine life, then, makes sense “when we understand

God as a God who makes himself other, who is in a relation of loving difference. . . .

What is natural to God as God in being trinity is then freely and willingly shared in the act of creation.”94 In short, creation is “the sort of thing God does.”95 Again, the linkage of kenosis and creation, emerging from the difference of the Father and Son, is signalled by the “second difference” of the Spirit, who marks the overflow of the divine life into the “wider spiral” of creation in such a way that the divine transcends even itself.96

Williams’s kenotic account of the divine life, then, understands creation as consistent with the logic of divine identity-in-difference first pressed on us through meditation on Christ’s and dereliction. The cross is an irritant for our thinking about God, prodding us toward an understanding of the divine life that maintains itself across difference. Accordingly, as with filiation and spiration, Williams conceives of the act of creation as deeply kenotic:

Before the Word of God empties himself to take on human flesh, the trinity is

involved in a self-emptying act in shaping the world. That the world should be is

for God (so to speak) to withdraw but not to be absent. It is for God to let be a

world with its own freedom, its own integrity. The God who creates a world of

freedom, a world that is itself, is a kenotic God, a self-giving, a self-emptying God

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94. Rowan Williams, “Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness,” n.p.

95. Ibid.

96. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 127. The notion almost certainly owes to the influence of Lossky, whom Williams echoes in describing creation as “God’s ‘self-transcendence,’ a ‘transcendence of transcendence.’” “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 16.

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whose being is for the other. And as we understand this in the eternal life of the

Father, the Son and the Spirit, we understand how it is in creation.97

The creation of free, personal beings involves a sort of “risk” in which God’s “voluntarily limits his own omnipotence.”98 God gives creation the space to “be,” and to be other than God through “the free bestowal of God’s life in the forms of finitude.99

For Williams, the possibility of creaturely freedom is clarified by careful attention

to the implications of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. According to the ontological distinction, the gulf separating Creator and creation is , “inexhaustible and irreducible.”100 Thus, there can be no question of co-ordination, that is, of fixing the coordinates of Creator and creation within the same framework. The sheer radicality of the difference, however, means also that it cannot be construed as an opposition, the divine negation of the finite (since that would be to reinstate another form of co- ordination). Such a negation would mean locking God into the world’s discourse as its rivalrous other, “the antithesis of the world’s thesis,” and there would be no possibility of genuine divine freedom.101 God’s difference from the world is too radical to be framed by any parallel (and so contrastive) formulation of “God and the world.”102

Understanding the divine self-sufficiency means “think[ing] away any boundary between

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97. Rowan Williams, “Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness,” n.p. Cf. “We might say that by creation ex nihilo God ‘makes room’ for something which is wholly outside of Himself; that, indeed, He sets up the ‘outside’ or nothingness alongside of His plenitude.” Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 92.

98. Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Difference,” 80.

99. Ibid.

100. Ibid.

101. Ibid., 83.

102. Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 39.

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God and the world as between two entities,” a move which “is no more than an exegesis of the strict sense of classical theology, God as the non aliud.”103

This non-contrastive, non-competitive relation articulates the reality of genuine freedom for both Creator and creature, and so also the possibility of an act of self- bestowal so radical that it constitutes the possibility of the other’s freedom (and so the possibility for mutual love):

the life of creation is not an independent subject alongside the divine life, but

that life itself freely ‘alienated’ from itself in a gift so absolute that it establishes

the possibility of a free response, of an authentic love. God truly loves God; yet

God truly loves God in and through what is, without qualification, not God—the

realm of time and vulnerability, in which loving subjects are formed.104

The loving, consubstantial difference “within” the life of God is echoed “outside” the divine life in the further difference realized in creation. Once more, the Spirit’s unique role is as an emblem of this outpouring of God’s love for God in what is not God, the sign of “God’s life as it is shaped and directed towards the good of the other by the recognition, the knowledge, of divine life as self-bestowal.”105

In sum, Williams’s Trinitarian theology has been profoundly shaped by

Orthodox pneumatology. That influence is apparent first in Williams’s identification of the Holy Spirit with the divine ekstasis “within” the Godhead. At the same time, the

Spirit also makes possible truly personal (because kenotic) existence in the created realm through conformation with the pattern of the Son.106 The Spirit thus occupies and

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103. Ibid., 40.

104. Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Difference,” 80.

105. Rowan Williams, “What Does Love Know?” 265.

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enables the moment at which the overflow of the divine love finds its echo in the answering love of creation. The gift of the Spirit is thus realized in the “translation” of the relation of Father and Son into the medium of creaturely existence, drawing humanity into the ecstatic circulations of the divine love.107

3. Williams’s Theological Anthropology Emphasizes Human Existence as

Fundamentally Called to Kenosis

Lossky claims that personal existence is fulfilled kenotically,108 which means that

personhood is realized in mirroring the divine act of self-giving, that is, exercising “the

faculty of ‘self-transcendence’ which constitutes [us] as personal.”109 Summarizing

Lossky’s project, Williams writes that the person

emerges in and only in the act of spiritual creativity which is response to this self-

gift of God – in ekstasis and kenosis, self-transcending and self-forgetting, the

overcoming of the boundaries of mutual exclusion that define individuals over

against each other. It is in this context that he claims that the doctrine of the

Trinity is the cardinal point of ‘negative theology.’110

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106. Rowan Williams, “The Spirit of the Age to Come,” 623.

107. Rowan Williams, “Word and Spirit,” in On Christian Theology (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 120. Cf. “Theologically, the Spirit is what makes possible the extension or repetition of the Father-Son relation for persons within the created order.” “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 43.

108. Lossky insists that “the perfection of the person consists in self- abandonment: the person expresses itself most truly in that it renounces to exist for itself. It is the self-emptying of the Person of the Son, the Divine κε'νωσις. ‘The entire mystery of economy’—said St. —‘consists in the self-emptying and abasement of the Son of God.’” The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 144. See also Ibid., 182.

109. Rowan Williams, “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 19.

110. Rowan Williams, “Eastern Orthodox Theology,” 506.

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Once again we find Williams stressing that apophasis arises from personal kenosis and ekstasis, from the indeterminacy of the person in self-transcending relation.111 Since this human kenosis is grounded in the divine dispossession, “the renunciation of existing-for- oneself is man’s most authentically personal act and so also man’s most Godlike act.”112

Here, according to Williams, we find one of Lossky’s major contributions to dogmatic theology—seeing humans as created in the “imago trinitatis not in virtue of the structure of [their] interiority, but because of [their] capacity for ‘kenotic’ relationship” with others.113 In other words, the image of God lies not “inside” the self, in some inner dimension or faculty, but “outside,” in the capacity for dispossessing love.

3.1. Williams’s Pneumatology Follows an “Eastern” Model that Emphasizes Incorporation into

Christ

For Williams, the center of the theology of the Holy Spirit lies in manifesting or

witnessing to the loving relation of the Father and Son, not only in the sense of disclosing

the pattern of kenotic self-giving, but in bringing creation itself into encounter with the

relation between the Father and Son.114 In his emphasis on the Spirit’s role, Williams is

explicitly seeking to redress the marginalization of pneumatology typical of Western

theology, much of which has, according to Williams, presupposed a fairly “linear” model

of the Trinity which construes revelation unidirectionally as mediation between two

starting points (i.e., God and creation). Such models logically require only a single

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111. The concept of ekstasis figures centrally in the theological anthropology of Christos Yannaras, who deploys the notion in his synthesis of Greek patristic theology and Heideggerian philosophy. See See his The Freedom of Morality (1984), Person and Eros (2007) and Relational Ontology (2011).

112. Rowan Williams, “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 14. Emphasis in original.

113. Rowan Williams, “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 19.

114. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 42.

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mediator, and Williams suggests that the relative neglect of pneumatology in the West has in large part followed from the fact that Christology alone can serve this mediatorial- revelatory function.115 Where the Spirit is included, it is often as the substitute revealer in the second stage of a “single process of divine communication.”116

Over against such linear, sequential models of the Trinity, Williams advocates for a relational model in which revelation aims not simply to communicate but to incorporate the believer within the divine life. The center of all trinitarian discourse is thus “the conviction for Christian believers that they stand where Jesus Christ stands and are related to the divine source of this life as he is related to it.”117 In such an incorporative model, the Spirit’s work is to conform believing humanity to the likeness of the Son. The

Spirit is thus “the pressure upon us towards Christ’s relation with the Father”118 and “the constitutive reality or quality of Christian existence,” active not simply to inform but to transform us into “analogues of Jesus.”119 The theme of is central: we are adopted through the Spirit, coming to stand in the place of Jesus the Son, sharing in and responding to the outpouring of the Father’s love.120

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115. Rowan Williams, “Word and Spirit,” 110. Williams also notes that Eastern Orthodox theologians attribute the asymmetry and “Christomonism” of much Western theology to the . Ibid., 109.

116. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Revelation,” 144.

117. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 128.

118. The entire quotation elaborates the point, identifying the Spirit as “the pressure upon us towards Christ’s relation with the Father, towards the self secure enough in its rootedness and acceptance in the ‘Father,’ in the source and ground of all, to be ‘child,’ to live vulnerably, as a sign of grace and , to decide for the cross of powerlessness.” Rowan Williams, “Word and Spirit,” 124.

119. Rowan Williams, “Word and Spirit,” 116; Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Pluralism,” in On Christian Theology (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 172. The Spirit “creat[es] in the human subject response to, and conformation to, the Son.” “Word and Spirit,” 120. Emphasis in original.

120. Commenting on the meaning of the ascension, Williams says that the

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For Williams, the Spirit’s conformation of believers to the Son’s likeness is fundamentally the placing of their entire existence “under the same ‘logos of the Cross’

(1 Cor. 1:18).”121 That is, the place of the Son into which the Spirit incorporates believers is above all the cross. Believers are conformed to the crucified Jesus: “God’s purpose for humanity is made clear in the cross. For human beings to ‘attain to’ the life of God, they must pass through a self-negating death like that of .”122 The Spirit is thus

———————————— transformation of Jesus’ disciples is understood in Scripture as “freedom to be in the Father’s presence, purified to worship him in all we are and all we do—to be where Jesus is, do what he does, pray as he prays. The receiving of Jesus in heaven fulfils the promise expressed in John’s Farewell Discourses: a place to stand before God is laid open to us through the death of Jesus. And to receive the Spirit in our baptismal entry into his humiliation and death is to enter this ‘place’ of trust and love between creature and Creator, and, more significantly, between Son and Father.” Rowan Williams, “Ascension of Christ,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Alan Richardson and John S. Bowden (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), 44–45. Cf. ”[W]e can’t know fully who God is and what God gives unless we are willing to stand in the same place as Jesus, in the full flood of the divine life poured out in mercy and renewal.” Rowan Williams, “Enthronement Sermon,” n.p. See also Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 119 and Rowan Williams, Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another, foreword by , introduction by Laurence Freeman (Boston: New Seeds, 2005), xiii.

121. , Love Alone is Credible, trans. D.C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 85. Cf. “The desire to be in God’s image without attaining Christ’s image is a desire for immediacy, which wants everything without detour and without self-actualization, a narcissistic desire of the ego to settle down in God, immortal and almighty, that doesn’t find it necessary ‘to let its life be crucified’ and to experience the night of .” Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross, reprint, 1979 (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1991), 21.

122. Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 28. Cf. “In brief, “[w]here there is salvation, its name is Jesus; its grammar is the cross and the resurrection.” Resurrection, 65. While Williams insists that Cross and Resurrection are inseparable and that “the theologia crucis is the theologia gloriae,” his elaboration of this identity arguably risks giving full weight to tragedy while effectively muting glory. Rowan Williams, “The Spirit of the Age to Come,” 619. Myers describes Williams’s theology as thus marked by a “pervasive ontological sadness.” Christ the Stranger, 116. With respect to the effect on Williams’s interpretation of the resurrection, Myers notes that Williams’s reading of Freud around this time was likely a leading influence: “his account is oriented around a Freudian concept of trauma. The Christian tradition is like the adult self: often outwardly stable, but inwardly shocked and shaken by an inaccessible originating wound. Christ’s resurrection is at the root—and also the permanent disturbance—of Christian identity.” Christ the Stranger, 31. Whatever the merits of approaching the

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linked to the Christian life as it is practiced in the context of and asceticism, abandonment and failure.123 The work of the Spirit in us, accordingly, is that of dispossession, stripping and renunciation, themes central to Williams’s thought. Myers thus describes the defining feature of Williams’s theology as “an austere asceticism—an almost overwhelming horror of the power of self-deception, combined with a vigilant alertness to opportunities for renunciation. Devotion to Christ as ascetic renunciation of fantasy: that is the theology of Rowan Williams.”124

3.2. Williams’s Anthropology Emphasizes the Dangers of Self-Deception and the Need for

Asceticism

Christian discipleship thus begins in, and advances through, renunciation as the layers of self-deception and self-regard are stripped away by God’s loving truth. This process of ascesis entails first of all the refusal of the temptation to an idolatrous egocentrism, which would set itself up in the place of God.125 Importantly, the possibility for such an existence-in-communion—the self’s ecstatic movement beyond “atomicity”— is established on the basis, not of a self-dependent process of individual willpower, but of Christ, in whom we can receive “authentic personal freedom, freedom to be persons,

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resurrection as a founding “trauma,” it is clearly not an interpretation that emphasizes the theme of glory common to many interpretations.

123. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 13.

124. Myers, Christ the Stranger, 113.

125. Commenting on Lossky’s emphasis on the unity between dogmatic and , Williams suggests that “theology itself must be ascesis, even crucifixion.” “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 14. Cf. Lossky: “The human hypostasis can only realize itself by the renunciation of its own will, of all that governs us, and makes us subject to natural necessity. The individual, i.e., the assertion of self in which person is confused with nature and loses its true liberty, must be broken. This is the root principle of asceticism; a free renunciation of one’s own will, of the mere simulacrum of individual liberty, in order to recover the true liberty, that of the person which is the image of God in each one.” The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 122.

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freedom from the threat of existence-in-isolation.126 By contrast, the isolated ego, clouded by its own self-regard and self-dramatizing, is in “flight from the real”127—

especially the reality of its own creaturely dependence—and this denial of reality is

“basically what hell means.”128 The opposite of Christ-like kenosis, then, is the ego

completely turned in on itself (Luther’s homo incurvatus in se129) in such a way that

“errors and self-delusions build themselves into a formidable carapace of unreality,

reinforced by every fresh stage in our self-representation.”130 The centrality of this

complex of themes in Williams’s thought prompted Myers to suggest that a “dread of

self-deceptive fantasy is, in fact, the secret engine of Williams’s work,” since it motivates

both his reformulation of the doctrine of the Trinity through the “deflection” of desire

and his conception of the spiritual life “not as wholeness but as a sort of stripping bare,

until finally nothing remains but an absence, the hollow centre of the human self, the

dark night of desire.”131 In short, Myers says, “the problem of fantasy leads [Williams] to

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126. Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood,” 427.

127. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 79.

128. Williams says, “[t]he determination to protect the self at all costs leads to a denial of reality, and that denial is basically what hell means, however you dress it up.” The Lion’s World: A Journey Into the Heart of Narnia, illustrations by Monica Capoferri (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 102.

129. See Matt Jenson, Gravity of : Augustine, Luther, and Barth on ‘Homo ’ (London: T & T Clark, 2006).

130. Rowan Williams, “‘Know Thyself’: What Kind of an Injunction?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 32 (1992): 220. Cf. Nicholas Lash’s summary of Hegel’s understanding of as “the condition of those who (whether as individuals or as societies) are so locked into narcissistic self-absorption as to be cut off from relationship with God, deprived of that redemptive knowledge of God which is our human participation in the reality of God’s self-movement. Atheism, then, is the condition of those who get stuck in their finitude, where ‘finitude’ means, not contingency, but egotism.” Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God, The Richard Lectures for 1986, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988), 112.

131. Myers, Christ the Stranger, 107.

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envisage Christian faith as one enormous pattern of asceticism and kenosis.”132

Identifying underlying “sources” with any kind of confidence is always tricky, but it is, I think, safe to say that Williams’s emphasis on asceticism and the renunciation of self-serving fantasy integrates several different influences united by their shared emphasis on attention. First, I suspect that Williams’s approach is fundamentally informed by the Russian Orthodox spirituality which Williams finds clearly articulated in the modern context by the “personalism” of modern Orthodox theologians like

Lossky133 and Yannaras.134 Much of Williams’s work, then, can be seen as the fusion of

these currents of Orthodox asceticism with a commitment to a tragic “Augustinian

realism” and an engagement with Freud’s critique of religion135—a combination that has

made him acutely sensitive to the dangers of fantasy and self-gratifying projection.136

The result is a “tragic moral vision,” and Williams’s articulation of this vision—which

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132. Ibid., 107–8.

133. Rowan Williams, “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 18.

134. According to Yannaras, the core of the Gospel of salvation is this: “The renunciation of life in itself, in order that life be achieved, the acceptance of death if the last existential resistance of individuality is to yield and existence is to be drawn not from the created nature, but from the personal relationship with God the Father, the giver of life. . . . Everything that can be seen, everything which becomes accessible to us by means of individual senses and every knowledge which we acquire by our individual understanding, everything which seems to be subordinated to us thanks to our individual abilities, must be crucified and buried, be put to death as individual certainties and a fortress of the ego, if they are to function as a loving relationship and self-transcendence.” Elements of Faith, 113–14.

135. For Freud’s critique of religion, see The Future of an Illusion, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott, The International Psycho-Analytical Library, no. 15 (New York: H. Liveright, 1928).

136. According to Williams, Freudian psychoanalysis alerts us to “the ambiguous, domesticated, fantasy-ridden or self-indulgent functions of our religious language” and so pushes us towards “the purifications of a negative theology which is constantly suspicious of the religious temptation to seek for absolute knowledge.” Rowan Williams, “Freudian Psychology,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Alan Richardson and John S. Bowden (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), 221.

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insists on honestly seeing the world as it is without the evasions of fantasy or philosophy—also owes to the influence of ,137 T. S. Eliot138 and Donald

MacKinnon.139 Like Wittgenstein, these authors demand an austere attention to particulars which resists the manifold temptations to look away, to “think away particulars into comprehensive explanatory systems.”140 In a sermon commemorating

Eliot, Williams affirms the starkness of the Eliot’s moral vision, arising as it did from one

“who was exceptionally alive to the possibilities of illusion and self-deception in human

lives.”141 Eliot, says Williams, shows us that

there is no escape [from tragedy], except into fantasy, there is only a penetrating

further into the blackness and destructiveness of the world. Face the truth; face

the fact that the world is a world of meaninglessness, of destruction, of violence,

death and loss, that no light of ecstasy can change this. Only when we stop

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137. Rowan Williams, “Simone Weil and the Necessary Non-,” in Wrestling with Angels, ed. Mike Higton, reprint, 1979 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 203–27.

138. Myers remarks that “[i]t would be hard to overestimate the importance of Eliot in Williams’ thought. Some of his deepest theological convictions are rooted in the dark soil of Eliot’s poetry, and throughout his career he has quoted the Four Quartets more frequently than any other work. Indeed, his theology never really moves beyond Eliot but only digs more deeply into that fertile imaginative world of the Quartets – a world of tragedy, renunciation, and fragile hope.” Myers, Christ the Stranger, 25.

139. Rowan Williams, “Lazarus: In Memory of T. S. Eliot,” in Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1994), 218–19. Myers describes this tragic moral vision as “a sort of ethical version of negative theology.” Christ the Stranger, 26.

140. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Ontology,” 155. At least one problem with such schemes is their inattention to the complexities of lived reality, especially in its tragic dimension. In that connection, Williams suggests that “[c]omplexity as a source of resistance” would be a fitting summary of MacKinnon’s theological project. Ibid., 165.

141. Rowan Williams, “Lazarus,” 216.

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projecting patterns on to the world can we live without illusion; and living

without illusion is the first step to salvation.”142

The question for Williams thus becomes “Can we face the truth and still speak of

God?” Or, to put it the other way round, “If we are to speak of God, can we do so in a way that does not amount to another evasion of the world?”143 At this point Williams turns the tables on Freud, arguing that traditional Christian faith “is actually a more honest, less delusory project.”144 Returning time and again to the harsh reality of the crucifixion, the Church needs to have “more, not less exposed nerves than others to see the world with honesty enough to grasp its appalling cruelties.”145 For Williams,

Gethsemane and the crucifixion are the paradigm experiences of faith, which means that

Christians’ defense against the Freudian charge of “cosy fantasy” is ultimately the fact that faith delivers not consolation but desolation, not comfort but affliction.146

To contemplate Jesus on the cross means abandoning all self-gratifying images of

God, any notion of God as guarantor of our comfort and consolation.147 Genuine

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142. Ibid., 217–18.

143. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Ontology,” 155.

144. Rowan Williams, “Freudian Psychology,” 221.

145. Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 88. Cf. “[I]f the Church allows full weight to the death of her Lord, it is never in a position to qualify the fact of tragic destruction, catastrophe.” Rowan Williams, “The Spirit of the Age to Come,” 620.

146. Williams writes that “[i]n the middle of all our religious constructs—if we have the honesty to look at it—is an emptiness. It makes nonsense of all religion— conservative or radical—and all piety.” Rowan Williams, “‘The Dark Night’,” in Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1994), 96.

147. Williams writes that we are thus stripped “of any remaining spiritual gratification and of every consoling image of itself. Only beyond this does the dawn of illumination break into final union.” Rowan Williams, “Dark Night, Darkness,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. Gordon S. Wakefield (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), 104. The change demanded of us by the Gospel, says Williams, is “wrought by anguish, darkness and stripping. If we believe we can

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participation in the divine life is only possible in the wake of these self-serving illusions: the “life of God comes to its fullness in the world solely by the death, the stripping, of the human,” where “the human” is conceived as “something solid in itself, as the finite negation or contradiction of the divine.”148 In being stripped of these illusory projections, we are enabled to commit ourselves to God not for what he offers us but “for his own sake,” thereby declaring that

we are ready to face the cost of truth, to let God be God and not prescribe what

he shall and shall not be according to our selfish wants. It is a promise made with

Jesus in Gethsemane to go with Jesus into abandonment and hell, so that we may

be led away from self-indulgent delusions, from religious games.149

Such ascetic renunciation is the path to truthful self-knowledge, which requires

“not that we bravely go on undertaking more and more complex explorations into the ego, only that we declare to God our willingness to be stripped.”150 This discovery of our

———————————— experience our healing without deepening our hurt, we have understood nothing of the roots of our faith.” The Wound of Knowledge, 20. Williams remarks that “faith moves and adapts, matures and reshapes itself, not by adjusting its doctrinal content but by the relentless stripping away from faith of egotistical or triumphalistic expectations.” Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, The Making of the Christian Imagination (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 10.

148. Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 45.

149. Rowan Williams, “‘The Dark Night’,” 98.

150. Rowan Williams, The Lion’s World, 86. To truly know oneself involves “a constantly self-critical autobiographical project,” destabilizing any sense of a self- determined identity through self-questioning and self-scrutiny. “‘Know Thyself’,” 221. Medi Ann Volpe has criticized Williams for stressing the need for formation without adequately treating the bodily practices involved in such training. She summarizes her criticisms thus: “While it seems clear that Williams is in favor of a recovery of the soul, it is not so clear how that might happen or what it might entail. At the same time, a thorough treatment of the persistent obstacle to such a recovery is lacking: Williams gives insufficient attention to the effect of sin. Finally, the development of a sense of soul, and of habits of living that counter the effects of sin, point to the need for an account of formation.” Medi Ann Volpe, “‘Make Love Your Aim’: Sin and the Goal of

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identity through self-scrutiny and dispossession, however, is not something we can do for ourselves or on our own strength, since “we shall always be tempted to stop before we get to the deepest level and so always liable to imagine we have ‘arrived’ when we haven’t.”151 Only God can interrupt our self-deception, silence our self-projection.152

The Spirit’s “translation” of the divine kenosis into the phenomenology of the

self means opening the individual from his self-destructive self-enclosure to the

possibility of loving communion.153 As Williams says, through the Spirit,

the knowing subject becomes aware of its derivative or receptive character, and

insofar as it is able to allow this awareness to free it from the labour of defensive

self-construction and self-maintenance it sets in train a movement that liberates

otherness, excess of being and relation beyond any fixed world of individual

. If we seek to talk about the presence of an active trinitarian God, it

must be in terms of a particular kind of disruption of the self and its stories of

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Charity in Christian Formation,” Ph.D. dissertation (Duke University, 2006), 77.

151. Rowan Williams, The Lion’s World, 86.

152. Rowan Williams, “‘Know Thyself’,” 220. Cf. “Here is God, then: in the event which attacks and upsets my self-image, and so confuses the whole of my speech and imagery.” Rowan Williams, “A Ray of Darkness,” in Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1994), 120.

153. Life “in the Spirit” is seen as a “restoration of authentic humanity—that is, a personal existence in which we are fully conscious of our interconnectedness with each other, of our bodily nature and of our involvement in the non-human world as well. . . . the Spirit is what connects us with our material world by connecting us with the self- giving of God in creation and redemption.” Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 46. Commenting on Nicholas Lash, Williams writes of the need to “locat[e] the self as acknowledging its derived nature. It is perhaps to recognise that the primary language of the self seeking a way out of its fictive enclosure is gratitude, the expression of ‘giftedness.’” Rowan Williams, “ and Divine Action: Reflections in the Wake of Nicholas Lash,” An address by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, presented in absentia to a colloquium, ‘The Presences of Christ’. The colloquium was held at , 30 June 2011, on the occasion of the award of an honorary doctorate to Nicholas Lash (formerly Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity in the ). (2011), n.p.

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itself, a disruption which creates what is in principle a radically unlimited space

for a free but ‘indebted’ (receptive and responsive) other.154

Williams’s anthropology returns time and again to the need for such ascesis if we are to reach the place of receptivity. Here Williams compares God to a conversationist in the art gallery: “God works patiently to remove the grime, the oil and dust of ages, and to let us appear – as we say – in our true colours. Wonderful, yes; but it means also that God will lay bare all the ways we hide from him and each other, all the sad and compromised and cowardly things we do to stop ourselves being human.”155 Only after such stripping and purgation can the “life of God come[] to its fullness in the world.”156

3.3. Williams Articulates an Apophatic Anthropology that Draws Together the Endlessness of

Desire, the Fluidity of Language, and the Believer’s Incorporation into the Trinitarian

Perichoresis

The self stripped bare of its illusion and self-regard recognizes that its identity is not a thing possessed, not a territory to be secured and defended against the threat of otherness. On the contrary, entails a process of “unselfing” through which the ego becomes decentered and displaced, thereby learning to give “place” to others, “as God has given ‘place’ to all in his Son.”157 Following Certeau, Williams describes the self as a “non-place,” underscoring that the self’s identity is found not in

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154. Rowan Williams, “Divine Presence and Divine Action,” n.p.

155. Rowan Williams, “Enthronement Sermon,” n.p.

156. Commenting on Lossky, Williams writes that “[t]he dogma [of the Trinity] is ‘a cross for human ways of thought’ because it demands a belief that the abnegation of self and the absence of self-assertive, self-interested ‘’ are the fundamental notes of personal existence at its source, in God.” “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 15.

157. Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 23.

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substance but in activity.158 That is, the self’s unity derives from its activity and desire, from the élan toward another which inscribes otherness in the self.159 In this way, self- abnegation appears not simply as self-erasure, but as the product of communion, realized in imitation of the divine perichoresis: “it is giving life to the other, and receiving life from the other, as in the life of the Trinity.”160 Summarizing the point from the and mothers, Williams says succinctly, “the neighbour is our life.”161

Williams’s apophatic theology is thus correlative with an “apophatic

anthropology,”162 in which desire plays a central role, less as the (static) principle of the

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158. Rowan Williams, “God,” in Fields of Faith: Theology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-First Century, ed. David F. Ford, Ben Quash, and Janet Martin Soskice (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 82.

159. The self becomes “a ‘place of the other’ . . . in such a way that the created other finds place in my self, and my ‘interest’ is shifted from an individual focus to one that prescribes reciprocity and involvement.” Rowan Williams, “God,” 87. Cf. Yannaras, Elements of Faith, 73.

160. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 31. “The whole idea of indwelling— perichoresis (to use the classical theological term both for the relations within the Trinity and for the interaction of divine and human natures in Christ)—is fundamental: I have no life that is not also yours.” Ibid., 36. Williams also draws the ecclesiological conclusion: “[t]here can be no doctrine of the Church which does not return again and again to the particularity of persons with actual faces looking at one another and finding themselves in one another, in the ‘yes’ of each other.” Ibid., 32.

161. Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, 34. Cf. To find my own life is a task I cannot undertake without the neighbor; life itself is what I find in solidarity.” Ibid., 25. Williams connects this emphasis with Bulgakov in particular, for whom “the Orthodox Church is all about plurality in unity, all about the finding of self in the other, and about the inescapable particularity of the relation with the other.” A Margin of Silence, 34. Williams has also explored the political implications of this line of thought, particularly the need for mutual “recognition” in modern political society . See Rowan Williams, “Beyond ,” 3, no. 1 (2001): 64–73.

162. Cf. Lossky: “The image of God in man, in so far as it is perfect, is necessarily unknowable, according to St. ; for as it reflects the fullness of its archetype, it must also possess the unknowable character of the divine Being. This is the reason why it is impossible to define what constitutes the divine image in man.” The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 118. Panayiotis Nellas echoes the sentiment, writing, “since God is beyond understanding, His icon within humanity is also incomprehensible. In our talk about humans as well as our talk about God, there needs to be an apophatic dimension. Our negative theology demands as counterpart a

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self’s unity than as the “trajectory for [its] reintegration.”163 That is, the ego comes to self-knowledge not in “solipsistic interiority” but in the movement of desire164—not as a

“finished and determinate object,” but as already addressed by and engaged with a desirable other. For Williams as for Lossky, then, apophatic anthropology is not merely a dialectical correction to cataphasis, but the primordial theological posture of repentance and receptivity to the Word.165

Through the dynamics of desire, the other finds a place in me, and I am constituted precisely as a desiring subject in dialogue with this otherness. That this relation is able to avoid the reduction to rivalry owes to the fact that it is comprehended by our mutual relation to a non-rivalrous horizon. That is, my relation to the created other is framed and resourced by our shared relation to an Other166 who, not being a

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‘negative anthropology.’” Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person, translated from the Greek by Norman Russell, with a foreword by Kallistos of Diokleia, Contemporary Greek Theologians, no. 5 (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 9.

163. Volpe, “‘Make Love Your Aim’,” 42.

164. Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in the De Trinitate,” in Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum, ed. Joseph T. Lienhard, Earl C. Muller, and Roland J. Teske (New York: P. Lang, 1993), 125–26 “[W]hat we see when we look at ourselves is desire.” Ibid., 131.

165. Rowan Williams, “Eastern Orthodox Theology,” 506. Myers puts the point epigrammatically, “[w]e find ourselves only as we begin to lose hold of ourselves, and so become free to receive ourselves as a gift.” Christ the Stranger, 114. Cf. “There is a fundamental level at which I have to say, almost nonsensically, that I do not and cannot know what I want. That is the level where alertness and receptivity must begin.” Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 77.

166. “. . . the inaccessibility of the divine perspective is paradoxically liberating: there is always a resource for the renewal or conversion or enlargement of myself independent of what may happen to be my resources at any given moment, and there is always the possibility of more adequately ordering the telling of my life as I draw towards a perspective on myself undistorted by my self-interest—a perspective never possessed, never simply mine, but imaginable as a horizon against which other perspectives may be tested. And none of this would be conceivable if God were the occupier of a ‘point of view’ comparable to my own, a positional perspective like that of an ordinary subject, only larger.” Rowan Williams, “‘Know Thyself’,” 223.

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competitor for space or resources, can provide a “ground for discourse about our human negotiation that is not immediately trapped by rivalry: a common discourse before a common other, to which I and the other are alike vulnerable or responsible.”167 God’s

action is always “prior to human activity, and as such ‘gracious’—that is, undetermined

by what we do.”168 Rather than denying my identity or threatening my security, this

Other is present as “an offer and an invitation: it is an otherness that seeks itself in me,

and enables me to seek myself in it, not a diminution of my own solidity but the

condition for it, because what is utterly without foundations is a selfhood cut off from

dialogue, from the active presence of the other.”169

Authentic personality is accordingly found in communion.170 Pace Sartre we

could say that hell is not other people but rather being closed off entirely to ourselves as

“atomistic” individuals.171 Denied the growth and expansion that comes through

exchange with what is other, “the isolated will can only ever return to itself” and so is

locked into its own agenda, narcissistically captivated by its own self-image.172 Only by

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167. Rowan Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament ,” in On Christian Theology (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 244.

168. Ibid., 248.

169. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky, 208.

170. “Growth in holiness is growth in personhood and therefore growth in communion.” Rowan Williams, “The Spirit of the Age to Come,” 622.

171. Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood,” 420.

172. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky, 221. As Williams says, the desert fathers and mothers teach us that “the insoluble problem is myself; the hairline fracture is the elusive but fatal element of self-regard, inattention to the neighbor, which threatens to leave me eternally broken and at odds with God and myself.” Where God Happens, 77. Williams suggests that “the monastic insight is to recognize how much of this moving and drawing [of the will] is mediated in human community, how much the barriers of egotistic fantasy are broken by the sheer brute presence of other persons.” Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 115.

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confronting a world that is other and “engaging with discourses that are not one’s own” can the self be free of “the fantasy of self-definition.”173 The Church’s role, according to

Williams, is on one hand to propose just this revolution in the life of the self, that is, to

“nurture change in behaviour and habitual perception” by relativizing the perspective of the solitary ego in light of what is other and in excess.”174

The Spirit thus produces a kenotic community that mirrors the divine mutuality,175 a community in which properly-oriented Christian desire for God appears as progressive participation in Christ’s desire.176 Our love is thus both a participation in and enactment of the eternal divine life.

As we are taught and enabled by the Spirit to let go of narrowly individual

concern and desire, to desire each other's good with something like hunger

(hunger and thirst for righteousness, perhaps), our human freedom is aligned

with the divine freedom, and the self-emptying but eternally fruitful Wisdom of

God is brought to life as wisdom, order and beauty on earth in the form of the

Church’s life, personal, spiritual, sacramental.177

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173. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky, 173. Cf. “Interiority and Epiphany,” 243.

174. Rowan Williams, “Divine Presence and Divine Action,” n.p. In its challenge to the myth of the atomistic individual, the Church is nourished by Scripture, experience, and tradition—i.e., by its ever-new awareness of “the connection between the disorienting moment of perceiving the holy and the comprehensive narrative and (we may as well use the word) metaphysic of trinitarian activity.” Ibid.

175. “Thus the Spirit produces community, a religious community in which there is both humility, dependence, acknowledgement of powerlessness, and also liberty, authority and the confidence that we can make a difference. That is the kenotic community.” Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 31.

176. Glossing William’s point, Volpe says that “[i]n Christ, the believers come to participate in the love and desire of God for God.” Volpe, “‘Make Love Your Aim’,” 41.

177. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 32.

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That is to say that we discover our identities when we become sites of God’s own dispossession, enacting the divine rhythms of self-gift and participating thereby in the circulations of divine love.178

This search for self-knowledge entails, in part, confronting our own creatureliness, learning the humility to accept rather than deny our creaturely limits and limitations, including death.179 We are prone, says Williams, to “arrogating divinity to

[our]selves . . . a temptation manifest in the refusal to accept finitude, creatureliness and dependence.”180 Over against such self-regard, Jesus presents us with the paradigm of humility, and so provides the key to reversing Adam’s error: “Adam’s resentment at not being God is transfigured by Christ into the free acceptance of not being God.”181 Jesus’ free acceptance of the human condition in all its frailty and finitude, including death on a cross, “restores the glory of creatureliness . . . affirms that creation is good.”182 Our own commitment to the everyday world is thus enabled by Christ’s commitment to it as well as to us—his “day-to-day solidarity with human beings.”183 As a result,

we in Christ rejoice at not being God. We ought to give thanks daily to God that

we are not God and that God is God . . . And the secret is that only in that

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178. Knowing myself means confronting my own poverty and emptiness in order to learn “to shift away from the centre of my preoccupation the dramas of a solitary ego so that what simply is takes place in me. . . . [F]or the Christian, what most simply and fundamentally is is the action of the threefold divine life.” Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 130.

179. Rowan Williams, “On Being Creatures,” in On Christian Theology, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 78.

180. Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 16.

181. Rowan Williams, “Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness,” n.p.

182. Ibid.

183. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky, 36.

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rejoicing that we are not God do we come to share the divine life in the way we

are made to do – the paradox that only by our completely not wanting to be God

can the divine life take root in us. Discipleship in the body of Christ is in one

sense simply a matter of constantly battling to be a creature, battling against all

those instincts in us which make us want to be God or make us want to be what

we think God is.184

The grammar of cross and resurrection, then, means learning to rejoice that we are not

God, abandoning the myth of self-creation in order to receive our identity through the grace of God. Realizing the image of God, then, requires “a movement into our createdness, because that is a movement into God’s own life as turned ‘outwards.’”185

Williams pictures this incorporation by grace into the divine life as our coming to participate in “the ‘deflection’ of the Son’s desire towards the Father’s excess of love: we are taken into the movement of the Spirit.”186 This means that, for us as for Jesus, there is no consolation.

In the life of God, love is always deflected from the ‘object’ that would close or

satisfy, that would simply be the absent other imagined as the goal of desire; the

other is always engaged beyond, engaged with another otherness. So to be

included in the love of the Son for the Father is to participate in a love without

satisfaction or closure—an endless love; and for us as creatures, that can only be

felt as pain and privation before it is recognised as freedom (and continues as

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184. Rowan Williams, “Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness,” n.p.

185. Rowan Williams, “Sapientia and the Trinity: Reflections on De Trinitate,” in Collectanea Augustiniana: Mélanges T.J. Van Bavel, ed. B. Bruning, M. Lamberigts, and J. van Houtem (Leuven: Leuven University Press: Uitgeverij Peeters, 1990), 321.

186. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 119.

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pain even within the recognition).187

The Spirit actively enfolds us in the kenotic rhythm of the Trinitarian life, cultivating in us the likeness of Christ and rendering us transparent to the action of divine love.

In Williams’s thinking, the apophatic nature of human identity and the endlessness of desire are bound together with the fluidities of our language.188 Truth, says Williams, is only touched “in the non-finality of historical relationships and historical ‘satisfaction,’ and in the consequent restlessness that keeps us active and attentive.”189 Since the same can be said of the “truth” of the self, Williams avers that self-knowledge is unfinishable, precisely because “we have our identity within the shifting, mobile realm of representation, non-finality, growing and learning.”190 We are “always

becoming ourselves in relation to what is not ourselves—other agents, circumstances,

sheer ”191—which means that the self is “the product of time.”192 Self-knowledge,

then, is found in knowing myself not as a fixed essence but “as incomplete, as

seeking.”193 Williams finds this insight reflected in Augustine’s De Trinitate, which he

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187. Ibid., 121.

188. Williams says that “language in its fluidity and displacements is inseparably interwoven with the restlessness or openness of desire that is what is fundamentally human.” Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 148.

189. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 145.

190. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 141. Since it is oriented beyond itself by its desire, “[h]uman nature is seen as essentially restless, precarious, mobile and variegated.” The Wound of Knowledge, 66.

191. Rowan Williams, “Making It Strange: Theology in Other(s’) Words,” in Sounding the Depths: Theology Through the Arts, ed. Jeremy Begbie (London: SCM Press, 2002), 20.

192. Rowan Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany,” 240. Williams wonders whether our “inner life” might be better spoken of in terms of “the time it takes to understand.”

193. Rowan Williams, “‘Know Thyself’,” 221–22. Cf. “The self is in construction;

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says shows us that the mind’s self-knowledge is that of a “self in movement, knowing its temporal incompleteness and its motivation by desire. . . . The self’s presence to itself is the awareness of a mobile and developing activity.”194 Self-knowledge, on this view, is an enacted practice of “conversational self-questioning,”195 which should make us very skeptical of claims either to complete perspicuity or to having done with the struggle of self-knowing.196 Thus, despite the counterintuitive nature of the claim, Williams insists that knowing myself is scarcely less difficult than knowing others.197

In an important essay,198 Williams reads Rublev’s icon of the hospitality of

Abraham as a symbol of this path toward self-knowledge and so inscribes his theological anthropology within the bounds of Trinitarian perichoresis. In the icon, the three

———————————— the relating of a history is not the fixing of the self's definition or the uncovering of a hidden truth, but part of the process of construction, a holding operation.” Ibid., 222. Commenting on Augustine, Williams remarks that “the paradox he presses upon us is that a mind intrinsically incomplete, desirous and mobile, intrinsically incapable of possessing a definitive and unrevisable account of its contents and specific workings, can rightly and intelligibly be said to know itself completely. Self-knowledge is being defined, not as cognition of a spiritual substance, but as awareness of the conditions of finitude and the ability to live and act within them.” “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in the De Trinitate,” 129.

194. Rowan Williams, “Trinitate, De,” 849. Emphasis mine. The real self, according to Williams, is “the action that here and now gathers events narrated from the past and possible courses of action in the future into one story that is unceasingly being revised from one utterance to the next.” Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 81.

195. Rowan Williams, “‘Know Thyself’,” 213.

196. Rowan Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany,” 241.

197. Cf. “Ultimately, for Augustine, the problem of self-knowledge is the problem of true conversion; which is difficult, but not conceptually difficult. The teases and convolutions of his treatment have the (paradoxical) goal of letting us know that what we lack in tackling the problem is not information or clarity but the truthful love of God.” Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in the De Trinitate,” 133. One is reminded here of Cavell’s discussion of skepticism in light of the distinction between knowing and acknowledging. “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 328–66.

198. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire.”

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angelic figures lead our gaze along a circulating path of attention and regard, directing us by turns from the Son to the Father, then to the Spirit and back to the Son. Read in the context of such an icon, self-knowledge means knowing myself “in the movement of being displaced by or through the self-displacing love of the Trinity. What I now see in myself is the motion of the Father, the Son and the Spirit; myself as the ‘site’ where this eternal movement of dispossession is being enacted.”199 Being in Christ thus means being “co-opted” into the divine action, acting so as to “manifest” the divine activity which is the divine nature visible in us as it was in the life and death of Jesus.200 Williams compares the Christian’s responsibility to that of the musician during a performance.

Such a musician “consent[s] to something happening in or through [her] agency,” and while this consent requires all her skill and effort, what is happening is, in another sense,

“nothing to do with [their] skill and effort.”201

4. Conclusion

In this chapter, I have advanced an interpretation of Williams’s thought as structured by the dynamics of a kenotic personalism, grounded in the Trinitarian perichoresis, made incarnate in the Son, and “translated” into creaturely existence through the Spirit. I have further argued that this leitmotif in Williams’s work has been profoundly informed by his reading of Eastern Orthodox theology (especially the work

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199. Ibid., 129.

200. According to Williams, “ethics is about manifestation.” “Interiority and Epiphany,” 258, 254, 255. Williams sees wisdom being used by both Bulgakov () and Augustine (sapientia) as a way of talking about the creaturely participation in the dispossessing activity of God. In this way, the kenosis of persons divine and human is concretely connected through wisdom, understood as the activity that constitutes the divine life as what it is. Wisdom thereby becomes a means of relocating discourse about the divine nature by “binding it to the concrete activity” of the self-giving God, i.e., the divine essence in a “relational and active mode.” “Commentary,” in Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and , ed. Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 41.

201. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 130.

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of Lossky and Bulgakov), particularly in its articulation of the themes of kenosis, ascesis and ekstasis, its personalist conception of apophasis, and its pneumatological linkage of divine and human dispossession.

No, we don’t walk like him. We stagger up / the steps in padded jackets, moonboots, /

crash-helmets, filters and shades. In gravity. / Some of us try to strip; but what’s beneath /

is very cold, even under the dark bare sun: a stiff, gaunt crying. I must not be loved, / and

I must not be seen, and if I cannot walk like god, / at least I can be light and hungry,

hollowing my guts / till I’m a bone the sentenced god can whistle through. — Rowan

Williams, “Simone Weil at Ashford”202

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202. Rowan Williams, The Poems of Rowan Williams, foreword by Phoebe Pettingell (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2004), 81.

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CHAPTER II

WILLIAMS AND THE DEBATE OVER PALAMISM

Despite the significant influence of, and appreciation for, Eastern Orthodox theology reflected in Williams’s work and outlined in the first chapter, he has remained wary of one of the central features of much contemporary Orthodox theology (especially in the form championed by Lossky): the Palamite distinction between God’s unknowable essence (Gk: , ου’σι'α) and his revealed energies (or “operations” or

“activities”; Gk: energeia, ’ενε'ργεια).1 In fact, Williams played a prominent role in

articulating the Western critique of “Palamism,”2 first in his dissertation on Lossky and

then two years later in an article on Palamism’s “philosophical structures” written during

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1. These divine energies (’ενε'ργειαι)—also referred to as divine “operations,” “attributes” (’ιδιω'µατα) and “names” (’ονο'µατα)—are understood as the manifold effluence (radiance) of the one, eternal splendor of God. The energies are God as he is manifest in and to creation. Romanian theologian Dumitru Stăniloae says, “The operations which produce the attributes of the world are, therefore, bearers of certain attributes found in God in a simple and incomprehensible way. The operations, therefore, are nothing other than the attributes of God in motion—or God himself, the simple One, in a motion which is, on every occasion, specific, or again, in a number of different kinds of motion, specified and united among themselves. . . . his operations are what makes God’s qualities visible in creatures, creating these with qualities analogous, but infinitely inferior, to God himself, and then imparting his uncreated operations or energies to them in higher and higher degrees.” Dumitru Stăniloae, Revelation and Knowledge of the Triune God, vol. 1 of The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, translated and edited by Ioan Ionita and Robert Barringer, foreword by Bishop Kallistos Ware (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994), 125.

2. Following the convention, itself embodied by Williams’s article, I will employ the term “Palamism” as shorthand for the essence-energies distinction as the epitome of ’s theological framework.

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the height of Orthodox-Anglican dialogue.3The present chapter, as a step toward better ecumenical understanding, examines Williams’s article as an influential engagement with Palamism from a Western perspective, one that set a benchmark for future discussions. The chapter consists of four sections. In the first, I briefly introduce the

Palamite distinction and its place in the Eastern Orthodox theological tradition. The second section, relying primarily on the 1977 article, “The Philosophical Structures of

Palamism,” summarizes the criticisms leveled by Williams against the Palamite distinction. This article, published two years after the completion of Williams’s dissertation on Lossky, reflects Williams’s reservations about key aspects of the

Orthodox tradition at this early stage of his engagement with Eastern theology (while also articulating long-standing concerns on the part of Western theologians).

Accordingly, consideration of the article establishes a “baseline,” especially for chapter four’s examination of developments in Williams’s thought regarding Palamism and participation.

The chapter’s third section pursues several lines of response to Williams’s criticisms, arguing that he misreads or misrepresents his interlocutors in several important ways. Together with Williams’s criticisms, these circumscribed responses clarify a sense of the “structural” differences between the Eastern and Western traditions. The fourth section examines three such differences concerning participation, the role of the intellect and simplicity. I contend that these differences between the

Eastern and Western theological traditions—differences brought into relief by the debate over Palamism—can be better understood (at least in part) as a difference between two

“language games” or “vocabularies.” Reflecting on Wittgenstein’s concept of the

“language game,” Martin Benjamin observes that “human beings have devised a wide

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3. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” Eastern Churches Review 9, no. 1–2 (1977): 27–44.

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variety of vocabularies . . . for contending with their experience and the world, and each of these vocabularies, insofar as it is retained, seems to do some important work that cannot be done nearly so well by any of the others. Choosing, in particular situations, between competing vocabularies turns therefore on comparative overall usefulness rather than on accuracy of representation.”4 On this view, each theological vocabulary—East and West—has developed conceptual resources and capacities adapted to its own context(s) and form(s) of life. Each vocabulary is thus well-suited to certain theological uses and contexts, less well-suited to others. Accordingly, we need not construe the adoption of one vocabulary rather than another as a once-for-all decision based on which vocabulary offers the best representation of reality. Rather, the question is which vocabulary better serves our immediate purposes, which proves more useful in (e.g.) illuminating the dimensions of our lives under consideration. At the same time, conceiving them as vocabularies highlights that the choice of one vocabulary rather than another typically entails both gains and losses: certain aspects are illuminated while others are obscured.5

On this view, part of the ecumenical challenge is the difficulty of listening in the hope of mutual recognition. Only through mutually attentive dialogue can I learn to see my own assumptions, that is, what my own framework illuminates and what it obscures.

Accordingly, since I am writing as a theologian trained in the Western vocabulary, I feel it incumbent upon me—lest in attending to the speck in my neighbor’s eye I fail to notice the log in my own—to exact a greater scrutiny on my own theological vocabulary

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4. Martin Benjamin, Philosophy & This Actual World: An Introduction to Practical Philosophical Inquiry (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 75. Benjamin adapts the language of “vocabularies,” as a more focused term than “form of life,” from Richard Rorty.

5. Chapter four argues, in part, that Williams’s own work reflects this shift toward conceiving the two traditions less as rivals than as mutually illuminating repertoires that might be deployed to different ends and in different contexts.

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while attempting to render the Eastern tradition as fairly and charitably as possible. This avowed methodological asymmetry is reflected in the fourth section’s choice of topics for comparison (e.g., participation), since I believe that much Western theology could benefit from the Eastern vocabulary in these areas of persistent disagreement.

Accordingly, my aim is to move away from a posture of defensiveness and toward one of ecumenical hospitality and receptivity, in which I search out the other’s best aspects in order to challenge and enrich my own tradition.

As an essay in ecumenism, then, the present chapter moves beyond a close reading of Williams’s criticisms of Palamism and potential Eastern Orthodox responses in order to examine underlying “fault lines,” larger issues (e.g., participation, simplicity) along which the differences and tensions between the two vocabularies may be traced.

Such an ecumenical undertaking faces a number of difficulties. In addition to the very real risk of misrepresentation, there is the challenge of distinguishing—without wholly abstracting—figures as influential as Augustine and Aquinas from their theological legacies and later interpretations. Fortunately, the caricature and polemics that marred much of the ecumenical dialogue in the last century has given way, in recent decades, to thickly textured, historically attentive studies that have highlighted significant areas of sympathy, even agreement, between the two traditions.6 Thus while the present chapter attempts to rebut those criticisms of the distinction which misunderstand or misrepresent its substance, it also seeks to demonstrate that, despite agreement between the traditions on a variety of questions, there remain profound structural differences

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6. This has enabled the recognition, for example, that Palamas quoted lengthy passages from Augustine’s De Trinitate (see Reinhard Flogaus, “Palamas and Barlaam Revisited: A Reassessment of East and West in the Hesychast Controversy of 14th Century Byzantium,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 42 [1998]: 1–32) or that the Eastern reception of Aquinas was enthusiastic and widespread (see Marcus Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, Changing Paradigms in Historical and [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]).

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between the two theological idioms, which “begin from very different theological grammars, and with terminologies that can achieve only proximate correspondences, and from within conceptual worlds whose atmospheres are not perfectly congenial to one another’s flora, and from a settled tradition of mutual (and frequently willful) incomprehension.”7 If ecumenical discussion is to advance, it must be established on the basis of genuine dialogue and the possibility of, if not agreement, at least mutual understanding. To that end, those of us in the West must reckon with the legacy of our misunderstanding if we are ever to move past it to a point of authentic ecumenical exchange.

1. A Brief Introduction to the Essence-Energies Distinction

The essence-energies distinction has figured centrally in contemporary Eastern

Orthodox theology, especially under the influence of the “neo-patristic” school represented by , Lossky and .8 While the distinction was articulated with particular emphasis by—and so came to be identified with—Gregory

Palamas, the fourteenth-century hesychast9 monk and later Archbishop of ,

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7. , “The Hidden and the Manifest: After Nicaea,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, ed. George Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2008), 192.

8. The phrase “neo-patristic synthesis” was coined by Georges Florovsky. The “neo-patristic” school could equally be called “neo-Palamite” in light of its championing of the related Palamite themes of apophaticism and the essence-energies distinction. George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, “Augustine and the Orthodox: ‘The West’ in the East,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, ed. George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2008), 25.

9. Kallistos Ware explains that, in principle, “hesychia [‘stillness,’ ‘silence’] is a general term for inner prayer, and so it embraces a wide variety of more specific ways of praying. In practice, however, the majority of Orthodox writers in recent centuries use the word to designate one spiritual path in particular: the invocation of the Name of Jesus. Occasionally . . . the term ‘’ is employed in a yet more restricted sense to indicate the physical technique, involving especially control of the breathing, which is sometimes used in conjunction with the .” The Inner Kingdom, The Collected Works, vol. 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 98. Ware delineates

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these neo-Palamite scholars argue that it represents the culmination of long-standing

Eastern convictions stretching back at least to the Cappadocians.10 For Palamas, the distinction reflects not the articulation of a theological or philosophical “system,” but rather the theological defense of hesychastic mystical experience in a polemical context.11

Palamas’s defense involved the simultaneous affirmation of God’s hiddenness and manifestation. As explains, for Palamas, “divinity is not exhaustively expressed in its communion with creation, although it is divinity in its totality that comes in communion with beings. Or, in other words, . . . God is always

———————————— three senses of hesychia, including (1) solitude, (2) the spirituality of the monastic cell, and (3) inner stillness and prayer (the “return into oneself”). Accordingly, he observes that the definition of the true hesychast advances from solitary living in the desert to an understanding that “solitude is a of soul, not a matter of geographical location, and that the real desert lies within the heart.” The Inner Kingdom, 93.

10. See Leonidas C. Contos, “The Essence-Energies Structure of St Gregory Palamas with a Brief Examination of Its Patristic Foundation,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 12 (1967): 283–94; Alexis Torrance, “Precedents for Palamas’ Essence-Energies Theology in the ,” Vigiliae Christianae 63 (2009): 47–70; for precedents in Dionysius, see George Habra, “The Sources of the Doctrine of Gregory Palamas on the Divine Energies,” The Eastern Churches Quarterly 12 (Summer 1958): 244– 52; Alexander Golitzin, Et Introibo Ad Altare Dei: The Mystagogy of Dionysius Areopagita: With Special Reference to Its Predecessors in the Eastern Christian Tradition, Analekta Vlatadon (Thessalonike: Patriarchikon Idruma Paterikon Meleton, 1994).

11. Meyendorff describes Palamism as an “existential philosophy,” noting that Palamas’s starting point is not the divine essence, but rather “the divine existence made accessible in the Christian experience.” St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, authorized translation by Adele Fiske (1974), 123. See John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, trans. George Lawrence (2nd ed. London: Faith Press, 1974, c1964), 202–27. One of Meyendorff’s students, Joost van Rossum, contends that “Palamas’ theology does not fit in a philosophical system. His ‘energies’ do not have to be conceived of as impersonal emanations in a neo-platonic sense, but rather as the manifestations of a who is totally present, both in his essence and in his energies.” Joost van Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 47, no. 3–4 (2003): 367. Again, Rossum argues that, while Palamas employed philosophical terminology, he did so “in order to express that which is above all expression. . . . he was ready to change his terminology if necessary, because, as Gregory the Theologian said, ‘the truth lies in the content, not in words.’ Palamas’ theology is first of all a theology of experience.” Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 372.

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more than his essential expressions.”12 To these Orthodox writers, the distinction constitutes an attempt to navigate the central paradox of Christianity—namely, God’s radical transcendence and radical —by affirming both the unknowability of

God’s essence and the conviction that humans are created for genuine union with God.13

This union, expressed in terms of “deification” or theosis,14 is given through

gracious participation in the divine energies, which are fully God. This is the heart of the

essence-energies distinction, which has its impetus in the desire to affirm this union with

God.15 Accordingly, some have regarded the distinction as central to all Eastern

Orthodox theology.16 —an Orthodox theologian and Bulgakov’s

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12. Nikolaos Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation: Palamate Analogy as Dialogical Syn-Energy and Thomist Analogy as Emanational Similitude,” in Divine Essence and Divine Energies: Ecumenical Reflections on the Presence of God in Eastern Orthodoxy, ed. Constantinos Athanasopoulos and Christoph Schneider (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2013), 125.

13. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 21–22; Aristotle Papanikolaou, “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood: Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas on Conceiving the Transcendent and Immanent God,” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 (July 2003): 359.

14. Cf. 2 Peter 1:4: “Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature” (NRSV). Evdokimov calls theosis “the defining term of Orthodox spirituality.” Orthodoxy, preface by Olivier Clément (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2011), 24.

15. It must be remembered that Palamas is foremost a monastic mystic. In his Gifford Lectures, E. L. Mascall remarks that “[t]he whole point of the Palamite distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies is that it makes for a real deification of the creature; no creature can receive the divine essence, but to receive the divine energies is nevertheless to receive God.” The Openness of Being, 219.

16. Kallistos Ware remarks that “This distinction is fundamental alike to the doctrine of the Trinity, to Christology, and to the theology of [humanity’s] and ‘’ (theosis), and it is presupposed in the spiritual experience of Orthodox saints both in the past and during our own time. Since all the different parts of Holy Tradition cohere in a single whole, it is impossible to understand any aspect of Orthodox theology or spirituality without taking into account the dogma of the distinction-in-unity between the essence of God and his uncreated energies.” “God Hidden and Revealed: The Apophatic Way and the Essence-Energies Distinction,” Eastern Churches Review 7, no. 2 (1975): 136.

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student at the St. Sergius Institute in —stresses the importance of the distinction through its connection to deification:

the essence of God is radically transcendent; only his ‘operations’ (energies,

grace) are immanent and shareable. This is not in the least an abstract matter,

but one of life or death—because it concerns the very realness of communion

between God and humankind. The human cannot commune and participate in

the essence of God—that would mean that it was God—but any communion with

a created element (supposing grace to be created even though supernatural) is

not communion with God at all. But if human beings enter into the most real

communion with the divine operations, the manifestations of God in the world,

then they have received the whole nature of God, as in the mystery of the

Eucharist. Communion is neither substantial () nor hypostatic (which

belongs only to Christ) but energetic, and in his energies God is totally present.17

The distinction thus emerges, as Evdokimov observes, from the desire to affirm the possibility of genuine communion between God and humanity without lapsing into either pantheism or extrinsicism. The same dynamic is also operative epistemologically as the distinction preserves both divine transcendence and the reality of genuine theological knowledge. That is, God can truly be known in his revelatory acts of self- manifestation (i.e., the energies), but we will never comprehend the divine essence, knowing God in se, as he knows himself.

Philosopher of religion David Bradshaw notes that the neo-patristic claims about

Palamism have operated at three “levels”: the ecclesiastical, the historical and the

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17. Evdokimov, Orthodoxy, 36. Cf. Gregory Palamas, One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, ch. 75. in The : The Complete Text, vol. 4, compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, translated from the Greek and edited by G. E. H. Palmer, et al. (London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), 380.

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theological. With respect to the ecclesiastical claim, neo-patristic theologians have largely won acceptance for the idea that Palamism represents the authentic teaching of the

Eastern Orthodox Church.18 The historical claim—that Palamas’s thought, far from being an innovation, is in substantial continuity with that of the Greek Fathers—has proven more controversial, particularly outside Eastern Orthodoxy, and it is part of the argument of Williams’s dissertation that the traditional continuity asserted by Lossky flattens the textures of historical complexity in this regard. Finally, these neo-patristic authors, Lossky foremost among them, have advanced the theological claim that

Palamas’s teaching is the best and most cogent way of understanding the relationship of

God to the world and so is of essential and continuing value to contemporary theology.

Bradshaw suggests that this last claim has not so much been debated outside of Eastern

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18. As Aristotle Papanikolaou observes, the leading exception to this consensus is John Zizioulas, who has sought to displace the soteriological centrality of the energies in Orthodox theology with the concept of personhood. For Zizioulas, as opposed to Lossky, “[a]pophaticism is no longer foundational in God-talk, while person replaces energies as the dominant soteriological concept. The concept of divine energies is not as central to Zizioulas’s soteriology as it is to Lossky’s.” “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood,” 375. Zizioulas worries that Lossky’s own affirmation of the notion of personhood is undermined by the primacy of apophaticism in his doctrine of God. Thus, “[t]he biggest danger Zizioulas sees to a Losskian apophaticism is that it ineluctably leads to a ‘mystical trinitarianism’ in which the particularities of the persons of the Trinity are eviscerated.” Ibid., 372. At the same time, theosis for Zizioulas is “not about participating in the ‘energies’ of God but in the hypostasis of Christ.” Ibid., 358. Both Papanikolaou and Zizioulas repeatedly slip into conceiving the divine energies as impersonal and as something other than the essence (as though receiving the energies means receiving something less and other than God himself as he can be received by finite beings). That is, in emphasizing the bridge between theologia and oikonomia, both ignore the account given of that connection in neo-Palamite theology. Papanikolaou appears to read Lossky as separating the essence and the energies like two territories in God, one of which is simply “off limits” to us. In this respect, Papanikolaou, like Western critics of Palamism, charges Lossky with exalting the hyper-essence over the trinitarian persons, simultaneously divorcing the trinitarian persons from being given in the energies and reverting to a doctrine of God that prioritizes the essence, the very feature that Lossky castigates in Western theology. While it is not part of my present aim to vindicate Lossky, I will have recourse to his writings in advancing a quite different reading of the essence-energies distinction which I believe avoids these charges. I leave to the side the question of whether, or to what degree, this reading is faithful to Lossky himself.

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Orthodoxy as it has been ignored altogether.19 Though somewhat exaggerated,20 this last conclusion highlights the fact that Palamas is not well known in the West. Williams’s article, then, marked an important moment of Western engagement with Palamas, while also regrettably abetting long-standing Western misunderstandings.

2. The Substance and Significance of Williams’s Criticisms of Palamism

In his response to Williams’s 1977 article, Kallistos Ware sketched the historical background to Williams’s criticisms of Palamas.21 The contentious history began with

Martin Jugie’s now-infamous 1932 article on Palamas in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, which dismissed Palamism as a theological innovation lacking in patristic basis.22 Jugie concluded that Palamas had made several rudimentary philosophical and theological blunders, and that the essence-energies distinction violated the divine simplicity—charges that would be repeated by Western critics for decades.23 Partially in

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19. David Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 94. Bradshaw that this neglect owes in part to Orthodox theologians’ failure to situate Palamas with respect to the history of Western philosophical development.

20. Among the notable efforts at ecumenical engagement with the essence- energies distinction since Bradshaw’s remark, one might include Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider, eds., Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009) and Constantinos Athanasopoulos and Christoph Schneider, eds., Divine Essence and Divine Energies: Ecumenical Reflections on the Presence of God in Eastern Orthodoxy (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2013).

21. Kallistos Ware, “The Debate About Palamism,” Eastern Churches Review 9, no. 1–2 (1977): 45–63.

22. In his survey of the Western reception of Palamism, Norman Russell concludes that “all the work by both Western and Orthodox scholars in the last eighty years has been related in some way to the positions laid out by Jugie.” Norman Russell, “The Reception of Palamas in the West Today,” ΘΕΟΛΟΓΙΑ 3 (2012): 7.

23. Jugie claimed that Palamas, “in his attempt to justify at all costs the contention of certain hesychasts that they saw God in this present life, invented a theology which rejected even the most elementary and theology.” Quoted in George Mantzarides, “Tradition and Renewal in the Theology of Saint Gregory Palamas,” Eastern Churches Review 9, no. 1–2 (1977): 2. In similar fashion, S. Guichardan said that Palamas “does not in any way represent either the Fathers of the

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response to Jugie—and building on a revival of interest in the Fathers already underway24—several studies of Palamas’s thought were published by Orthodox scholars beginning in the late 1930s,25 though these made little impact in the West.

That changed, however, with John Meyendorff’s A Study of Gregory Palamas

(1959), which inaugurated a new period of interest in Palamas’s work that was amplified by the translation into English of two of Lossky’s works—Vision of God (1963) and In the

Image and Likeness (1974)—as well as Christos Yannaras’s On the Absence and Unknowability

of God (1967). These works were received enthusiastically in Anglican circles, as reflected

in several articles in the journal Sobornost during the 1960s and 70s and in volumes like

Orthodoxy and the Death of God (1971), edited by Williams’s dissertation director, A. M.

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Eastern Church or, more specifically, the Byzantine Fathers. . . . No Eastern Father or theologian professed such a doctrine before him.” Ibid. Jugie also argued that “Palamas’s teaching on ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ is a ‘gross error’ and that the other Palamite theses on uncreated deifying grace, uncreated gifts of the Spirit, and uncreated glory visible to eyes of flesh are also ‘erroneous and verging on .’” Russell, “The Reception of Palamas,” 8. That Jugie’s legacy continues to this day can be seen in Dirk Krausmüller’s contribution to the volume on “” in the Cambridge (2006). Krausmüller claims that Palamas, driven to radical and incoherent conclusions by his polemical context, abandoned the teachings of Maximus the Confessor, ruthlessly set aside large parts of the patristic spiritual tradition, was indifferent to the dangers of mystical experience, eliminated the role of discretion at all stages of the spiritual life, and, at the level of natural contemplation, replaced analytical thought with wonder and awe. “The Rise of Hesychasm,” in Eastern Christianity, ed. Michael Angold (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 122–23. He concludes that “Palamas’s main achievement was to give the hesychastic vision a theological foundation and to have this foundation imposed on the Orthodox Church at large,” with the result that the Byzantine tradition took on a “distinctly fundamentalist character.” Ibid., 124, 126. Cf. Russell, “The Reception of Palamas,” 16.

24. John Meyendorff, “The Holy Trinity in Palamite Theology,” in Trinitarian Theology East and West: St. --St. Gregory Palamas, Michael A. Fahey and John Meyendorff, Athenagoras Memorial Lectures (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977), 26–27.

25. Dumitru Stăniloae, “Viata si învătătura sfîntului Grigorie Palama; cu trai tratate traduse” (“The Life and Teaching’ ’ of ’St. Gregory Palamas; with Three Tractates Translated”), Sibiu, 1938; Basil Krivocheine, “Asketicheskoe i bogoslovskoe uchenie sv. Grigoriia Palamy” in Seminarium Kondakovianum VIII, Prague, 1936, 99–154. English translation published as “The Ascetic and Theological Teaching of Gregory Palamas,” The Eastern Churches Quarterly 3 (1938): 1:26–33; 2:71–84; 3:138–56; 4:193–214.

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Allchin.26 Williams’s article, then, represents a response to this eager Anglican reception of Palamas by questioning the facile hope that Eastern Orthodoxy would simply cut the

Gordian knot of Western theology. Williams thus refers to Palamism as a “theological nostrum,” the popularity and attractiveness of which have prompted him to articulate what he sees as the dangers, or at least the “gravely ambivalent features in the [Palamite] system.”27

2.1. Williams’s Criticizes Palamas (and Dionysius) for Platonic “Realism”

Williams’s criticism of Palamas centers on the latter’s understanding of ousia

(essence), and can be summarized as the judgment that Palamism represents the

“unhappy marriage of Aristotelean and Neoplatonic systems, the characteristic extreme

realism of Neoplatonic metaphysics colouring (and confusing) a terminology better

understood in terms (inadequate though they may be) of the Aristotelean logic already

applied to Christian trinitarianism.”28 In other words, in contrast to the view of the neo-

Palamite authors, Williams thinks the Palamite distinction owes less to Christianity than to Neoplatonism. Rather than fueling a theological renaissance, Williams concludes that

Palamism—understood as a metaphysical system—should be relegated to the museum of outdated, and ultimately incoherent, theological speculation.

Turning in more detail to Williams’s arguments, we find that one of his central claims is that Palamas is confused about the Aristotelian notion of essence in relation to the divine energies (energeia).29 Since these energies are neither identical to the essence

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26. A. M. Allchin, ed., Orthodoxy and the Death of God: Essays in Contemporary Theology, ed. A. M. Allchin, Studies Supplementary to Sobornost, no. 1 (London: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, 1971).

27. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 38.

28. Ibid., 41.

29. In his dissertation, Williams maintained the need to hew closely to Aristotle’s original conception, arguing that “the Aristotelian sense of ου’σι'α cannot be simply

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nor accidental, Williams inquires as to which Aristotelian category statements about the energies belong. Given the terms of the distinction, such statements obviously cannot be predicated in the category of essence, so Palamas assigns them to the category of action.

Williams sees this as Palamas affirming that our speech about God is not restricted only

to statements about “what God is” but also includes statements about God’s actions

toward us.30 Nonetheless, Williams finds such a distinction between God’s essence and

his actions confused, for while from the human perspective we distinguish between

God’s eternal actus essendi and his self-revealing activity in and to his creation, this

distinction does not exist in re. Piety allows a great deal of latitude to our language, says

Williams, but, when it comes to God, predication in the category of action (as distinct

from the category of essence) is really “no more than a convenient fiction.”31 Logically, all

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abandoned, since it is at the root of the classical Eastern Trinitarian formulations.” “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique,” DPhil (, 1975), 165, Http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A15b86a5d- 21f4–44a3–95bb-b8543d326658. With respect to the claim that Palamism is philosophically confused: one of Williams’s closest mentors at Oxford, Dom Illtyd Trethowan, advanced related criticisms of Palamism, arguing that the Palamite distinction violates the divine simplicity, that the Palamite notion of union with God is unnecessary since such a union is already intelligible on the model of human knowing (itself a kind of “union without confusion” with the object of knowledge), and that the Eastern theological method of employing antinomy amounts to reducing theology to meaningless contradictions. “Irrationality in Theology and the Palamite Distinction,” Eastern Churches Review 9, no. 1–2 (1977): 19–26. See also Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 191– 92. More recently, David Bentley Hart expresses the hope from within Eastern Orthodoxy that the encounter with Radical Orthodoxy might serve to embolden Orthodox theology “to abandon the Neo-Palamite theology that has become so dominant in their Church since the middle of the last century, and frankly acknowledge its incoherence, and come to recognize that in many ways Augustine or Thomas was closer to the Greek Fathers in his understanding of divine transcendence than was Palamas (at least, Palamas as he has come to be understood).” David Bentley Hart, “Foreword,” in Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy, ed. Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), xiii.

30. In addition to statements about the differentiation of the Trinitarian persons, which are understood to belong to the category of relation.

31. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 31.

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of God’s actions can only be predicated in the category of essence—since their separation

would suggest unrealized potentiality—and a “sound theology,” according to Williams,

will acknowledge the “necessary correctives of strict logic” in order to help steer us away

from any “mythological” idea of events that are sequential to God.32

Williams believes that Palamas’s confusion owes to his assumption of Platonic

realism. Indeed, Williams claims that, by considering Aristotle to be little more than a

pedestrian adjunct to , the tradition of Christian has encouraged

carelessness with respect to Aristotelian vocabulary. Thus, on Williams’s reading,

Palamas is guilty of “ontologizing” Aristotle’s logical categories—making linguistic

relations into real ones and transforming the formal category of ousia into the “stuff-

ness” of God.33 Whereas ousia for Aristotle simply answers the question “What is x?”, for

Christian Platonism ousia points out something, some stuff that, in the case of God,

constitutes the inaccessible “hinterland” of divine interiority.34 Such reifying is typical of

Neoplatonism, in which “attributes are conceived as having a kind of substantiality of

their own, some sort of independent reality.”35 Rather than understanding logic as regulative of language, then, Palamas has understood it as descriptive of facts, and so has “harden[ed] a somewhat ad hoc epistemological point into an ontological

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32. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 31. Evincing the influence of Aquinas’s philosophical theology (Cf. ST I.3.4.), these remarks about Palamas’s confused notion of ousia reflect Williams’s larger concern about the Eastern tradition, which he believes is “pervaded by philosophical and logical inconsistencies” largely because it was never “subjected to the rigorous systematisation which, in the West, the Patristic tradition received (for good or ill) at the hands of the schoolmen.” Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky,” 179.

33. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 32.

34. Here Williams notes that the Palamite suggestion that God possesses something other than ousia (i.e., the divine energies) is, on Aristotelian terms, nonsense. “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 32.

35. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 35.

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differentiation really present in God, in order . . . to safeguard a view of participation-in-

God” which is “insupportably ‘realist.’”36 While Palamas’s notion of participation may not be completely materialistic, “it certainly is far more than a merely linguistic one.

Having said that, of course, it is by no means easy to say precisely what third option there is between and the extreme of quasi-materialist realism.”37 Williams thus joins earlier critics38 who charge Palamas with transforming what was, for the

Cappadocians, an epistemological distinction39 into a metaphysical one.40

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36. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 44. In passing, I would note that this kind of criticism is typical of Wittgenstein, for whom metaphysics “obliterates the distinction between factual and conceptual investigations” (Zettel, §458). Cf. Remarks on the I, §949: “A metaphysical question is always in appearance a factual one, although the problem is a conceptual one.” Both quoted in Duncan Richter, “Wittgenstein on Ethics, Nonsense, and Metaphysics,” in Ethics and the : Wittgensteinian Approaches, ed. Ylva Gustafsson, et al. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 124.

37. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 36. This criticism, common among Thomist critics, is also levelled by Yves Congar, who, despite a largely sympathetic reading, claims that: “From the philosophical point of view, this Palamite idea of participation is clearly elementary and material, one might almost say Neo-Platonic. The interpretation provided by Thomas Aquinas (and Maximus the Confessor), on the other hand, is Aristotelian, although it has taken from Plato a note of exemplarism.” I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. David Smith, Milestones in (New York: Crossroad Pub. Co., 1997), III:65. John Meyendorff observes that this criticism also originated with Jugie’s article. “The Holy Trinity in Palamite Theology,” 28.

38. Writing in Istina 3 (1974), Fr Jean-Philippe Houdret, O.C.D., had remarked that “[t]he doctrine of the Cappadocians on the divine names seems rather to oppose the Palamite thesis of a real distinction in God, in setting the distinction in the order of our knowledge.” Quoted in George Every, “The Study of Eastern Orthodoxy: Hesychasm,” Religion 9 (1979): 82. Chapter five considers in more detail the question of whether Palamism is a “real distinction” (a pragmatiki diakrisis) or only a “conceptual” one (a diakrisis kat’ epinoian).

39. Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky,” 174–75.

40. “The problem seems to be that Lossky (and Palamas before him), having begun with the essence-energies distinction as a basically epistemological tactic (God is knowable in energy and not in essence), has hardened it into a metaphysical division in the Godhead itself.” Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky,” 163.

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According to Williams, it is Dionysius’s adaptation of Proclan that is to blame for this Neoplatonic materialism, which explains why Williams devotes a great deal of attention to the Areopagite in the middle of his discussion of Palamas. Williams’s examination of Dionysius—whom Williams reads (at this point in this career) as little more than a Neoplatonist in Christian guise—begins with an account of ’s

Neoplatonic structure of ousia, zoi (the communication of ousia in relation with other

realities) and (the inferior participating reality). For Proclus, the uncircumscribed

ousia of the One is beyond all being and participation. Zoi represents the move away

from this primordial simplicity and indivisibility toward a lower order of beings, a move

which, in Proclus, yields the divine “henads” which mediate between the One and finite

beings. On Williams’s reading, the Dionysian proödoi (“processions”) or dynameis

(“powers”) serve the same mediatorial purpose, which means that, for Dionysius as for

Proclus, there is an intermediate realm of divine beings.41

Williams identifies problems with the Palamite conceptions of both essence and

energies which owe to Palamas’s inheritance via Dionysius of this Neoplatonic

framework. With respect to ousia, Williams claims that the logic of the Dionysian

framework inherited by Palamas entails the assertion that the divine ousia is beyond the

Trinitarian Persons (despite Palamas’s insistence to the contrary).42 That is, according to

Neoplatonist thought—in which the unified is superior to what is less unified—once the

ousia is identified as perfectly simple, indivisible, and imparticipable stuff, it must take

ontological priority over the differentiated divine Persons.43 Thus, the Trinitarian

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41. “. . . an intermediate order of multiple ‘divinities’ prior to the world, yet necessarily connected to this lower order (since their ‘purpose’ is solely mediation between the One and finite being).” Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 36.

42. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 33.

43. While acknowledging that Dionysius never uses the language of “henads”,

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Persons are not ultimate in God, since they are in a sense superseded by the simple essence. As Williams summarizes the dilemma, “[i]t seems that the notion of an absolutely transcendent divine interiority can be secured only at the cost of orthodox trinitarianism.”44

On the other hand, Williams claims that the doctrine of the energies both binds

God to creation and sunders divine unity. That is, if these mediating energies are seen as eternal mediating “adjuncts” of the divine being, “it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the world must be eternal, insofar as the dynameis are eternally engaged, by their very nature, in communicating the divine perfections to some second term or order of being.

God and the world appear to be bound up in a kind of organic unity.”45 Given an

“eternal plurality of mediating agencies,” must creation not constitute a co-eternal second term?46 Moreover, Williams judges that attempts to preserve the sense of creation’s contingency in this scheme come at the expense of divine unity since the distinction produces two eternal orders within the life of God: God as he is in se, and

God as participated by creatures. Williams sees this as a “considerable wedge” between the essence and the energies which threatens the unity or simplicity of God. What, he

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Williams argues that “the proödoi or dynameis of his system serve precisely the same end, the provision of some mechanism of mediation. First among the proödoi are the hypostases of the Trinity.” “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 36. Williams levels the same charge—i.e., that the ousia is prioritized over the Trinitarian Persons—against Lossky. See “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky,” 168. Williams’s critique is predicated on his assumption that Palamas’s distinction between the ousia and the energeia corresponds to that between the ousia and the hypostases, whereas “Palamas says only that there are these two distinctions, not that they are equivalent.” David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 270.

44. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 34.

45. Ibid., 37.

46. Ibid., 38.

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asks, could logically be said to unify the two orders, since, by definition it cannot be the ousia? Why, then, have we any right to call both “God”?47

Having criticized the wedge driven by Palamas between the essence and energies,

Williams proceeds to argue, in good Thomistic fashion, for their identification. In this way, he offers an alternative which he believes can accomplish Palamas’s goals while avoiding his philosophical confusions. He begins by observing that, in Aristotelian terms, all essences are strictly unknowable “in themselves,” since, as a formal and abstract term, there is strictly speaking nothing to know. For Williams, the unknowability

of God’s essence—in this sense—can be established on strictly Aristotelian terms. With

human persons as with God, we only ever know “substance-in-act,” that is, “the

properties of a thing experienced as affecting the knowing subject, the esse, the actual

existent in relation.”48 For Aristotle energeia meant nothing more than “actuality,” so that

we can say of all essences that they are only knowable through their energies, their act of

existing (i.e., in their actual existence). Thus, to say, as Palamas does, that our

knowledge of God is of his energeia rather than his ousia (alone) is, in Aristotelian terms,

to state the obvious.

On the Thomistic view advanced by Williams, the difference between God and

creatures is expressed not by the fact that God’s essence is uniquely unknowable, but in

terms of divine simplicity. That is, the difference between essence (what something is) and

existence (that something is) is logically discernible in composite creatures, but the same

cannot be said of God, who is the Source of existence. Williams follows Aquinas in

asserting that God’s essence is identical with his existence,49 thereby distinguishing the

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47. Ibid.

48. Ibid., 40.

49. As David Burrell notes, the clarity of this phrase should not obscure the fact that “existence” is being used analogously. Burrell observes that “an enquiry seeking to

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completely simple God from everything else, which is “composed of essence and esse (or

existence).”50 What is peculiar about our knowledge of God, then, is not that it is attained through the energies rather than the essence, but that God’s actus essendi—as

“wholly simple, uncircumscribed, self-subsistent, and infinite . . . can never be

experienced or understood in its fulness [sic] by the finite subject.”51 Thus, while God’s

actus essendi will be directly present to us in the beatific vision, this vision will not

amount to comprehension of “what-it-is-to-be-God.”52

This line of inquiry leads Williams to consider the beatific vision and what is

arguably the central issue: deification. The Williams of 1977 argues that participation, if

it is to avoid crassly materialistic overtones, must be understood simply in “intentional”

terms.53 That is, “the subject ‘becomes’ the object in so far as the object occupies and

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explain things’ existing must escape standard paradigms for explanation, so what explains their existing will not itself exist in the same fashion.” David B. Burrell, “Religious Life and Understanding: Grammar Exercised in Practice,” in Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein, ed. Jeffrey Stout and Robert MacSwain (London: SCM, 2004), 125.

50. David B. Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004), 6. Emphasis in original.

51. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 40.

52. Ibid., 41. Dom Sherwood defends the Western account of the beatific vision against Eastern charges of extrinsicism, arguing that, despite its gnoseological framework, “the intimacy of the union, in the context of such a doctrine, could not be expressed more forcefully.” Polycarp Sherwood, “Debate on Palamism: Glorianter Vultum Tuum, Christe Deus: Reflections on Reading Lossky’s ‘The Vision of God’,” St. Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1966): 198. Sherwood’s response is marred, however, by his mistaken characterization of the Eastern model of “vision- contemplation” as a “static framework.” Sherwood, like Williams, argues that Palamism has a crassly materialistic notion of participation, and that its logic inclines toward an exaltation of the one divine ousia above the revealed Persons. Like many other Western authors, Sherwood sees Palamas’s errors as resulting from the “extreme polarization of spirits in the Byzantine fourteenth century.” Sherwood, “Debate on Palamism,” 202.

53. Cf. Williams’s dissertation, where he also endorsed “intentional union” over against Palamite deification: “What is really needed here . . . is a doctrine of ‘intentional participation,’ becoming what one knows, in the sense that the object of knowledge completely occupies our consciousness (‘You are the music while the music lasts’) [the

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‘informs’ (in the strict sense) the subject.”54 Thus, over against the Eastern tradition,

Williams avers that “[t]he Western mystical tradition has resolutely insisted that the deification of man in grace is the identification of his will with God’s: what he effects is

what God effects.”55 Williams readily acknowledges that such “intentional” union will

fail to satisfy his Eastern interlocutors. Moreover, he grants that Western notions of the

knowledge of God have often been “excessively nominalist, extrinsic and conceptual,

giving too small a place to that which is fundamental to the revelation of God in Jesus,

his nature as self-gift, kenotic compassion and identification with the affliction of his

world.”56 Nonetheless, Williams finds that more “realist” accounts of participation create severe problems for “a rational and scriptural theology.”57

Williams concludes the article by claiming that Palamism has been most fruitful for those authors who have treated it with the least “.” He suggests that

———————————— quotation is from “The Dry Salvages,” the third of T. S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets]. The Palamite scheme is too concrete, too materialistic, to cope with the complexities of human subjectivity; and Lossky’s own analyses of personal knowledge and encounter, the ‘sortie de soi-même’ of self-forgetting love show that (whether he realised it or not) he was capable of going beyond the naïveté of his chosen authorities. His references to and defences of Palamism obtrude as a piece of imperfectly digested mythological thinking in an otherwise sensitive and nuanced synthesis.” Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky,” 184.

54. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 41.

55. Writing a half-decade later in an article on deification, Williams says that such “intentional union” occurs “when the formal object of will and understanding is God, so that God determines entirely what is loved and grasped by the soul.” “Deification,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. Gordon S. Wakefield (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), 107. Cf. Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, III:66. Chapter four argues that Williams’s later work moves away from this formal notion of participation toward an affirmation of the “real presence” of the active object in the act of the knowing subject.

56. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 44.

57. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 41. At the risk of reading too much into a single phrase, it strikes me that the difference between Williams and Palamas at this point might be (reductively) identified in the sense they would give to the relation between the “rational” and the “scriptural.”

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authors like Lossky, Stăniloae and Yannaras have effectively compensated for the problems of Palamism by privileging the “person-nature” schema over the “essence- energies” distinction. This “personalism” has enabled them to avoid the worst errors of

Palamas (e.g., exalting the essence over the Persons).

2.2. Williams’s Criticisms Set a Benchmark for Future Ecumenical Discussion of the Palamite

Distinction

Despite later developments in Williams’s thinking concerning the questions at hand, the article still merits consideration, first because it represents an important chapter in the history of ecumenical exchange, especially that of the Anglican-Orthodox dialogue begun in 1973. Williams’s role in the debate over Palamism during this period was to articulate long-standing Western concerns about both Dionysius and Palamas while defending the Augustinian-Thomistic tradition against charges of intellectualism and extrinsicism. The high profile attained by Williams’s article at the time (and since) no doubt reflects both its philosophical sophistication and the degree to which his argument encapsulated widely shared Western views. Second, with respect to Williams’s own thought, this article provides a baseline against which to measure later developments in his relationship with Orthodox theology and so is of significant interest for chapter four’s diachronic evaluation of his engagement with the Eastern tradition.

Before responding to Williams’s critiques, I want briefly to highlight some of the influence that Williams’s article has continued to exert, providing a touchstone for friends and foes alike.58 A measure of this enduring significance can be seen in the rehearsal of his criticisms by Catherine Mowry LaCugna. In God for Us (1991), LaCugna seeks to recover the connection between theologia and oikonomia, a connection she thinks

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58. E.g., David Bradshaw, arguing in favor of Palamism, treats Williams’s article as a summary of critical misgivings in his Aristotle East and West, 268–75. Williams’s article is also located as part of the stream of Western criticism by Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 125.

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has effectively been severed in both Eastern and Western theological traditions. She maps the Palamite distinction between essence and energies directly onto that of theologia and oikonomia, arguing that Palamas widens the gap between theologia and oikonomia by “postulating an unknowable, unnameable, imparticipable, divine essence located both beyond the divine persons and on the other side of an ontological divide from the creature and from the economy of salvation.”59 LaCugna cites Williams’s remarks on Palamas’s reification of ousia, and echoes his conclusion that the logic of

Palamism necessarily tends toward a unified essence prior to the divine Persons.60

Reading Palamas as exalting the unitary essence beyond the Persons, LaCugna sees the

Palamite distinction (ironically) as a Westernizing tendency (i.e., toward unity) in Greek theology (which had historically been more oriented toward the oikonomia).61

LaCugna pairs Williams’s critiques on the priority of the ousia with those of

Dorothea Wendebourg,62 who concluded that, for Palamism, the Trinitarian Persons are not only transcended by the unified essence, but are also a step removed from our salvation since the Persons belong to the unknowable “side” of God and so cannot enter

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59. LaCugna, God for Us, 194.

60. Ibid., 193.

61. In this LaCugna reflects the abiding influence of the interpretive scheme developed by Théodore de Régnon, which opposed the “Cappadocian East” (which moved from the three to the one) to the “Augustinian West” (which moved from the one to the three); although, as Michel Barnes notes, de Régnon himself never identified the “patristic” paradigm exclusively with the East. See Michel René Barnes, “De Régnon Reconsidered,” Augustinian Studies 26, no. 2 (1995): 51–79; Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 302–4. LaCugna says that “[i]n the end Palamism is strongly reminiscent of Augustine’s theology because the economy of redemption ceases to be the place where the uniqueness of the divine persons, as well as their taxis with respect to each other— from the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit—is revealed. . . . the divine persons are denied distinctive roles in the economy.” LaCugna, God for Us, 195.

62. Geist oder Energie: Zur Frage d. innergöttlichen Verankerung d. christlichen Lebens in d. byzantinischen Theologie (München: Kaiser, 1980).

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into communion with creatures.63 Consonant with Williams’s remarks about Dionysius,

Wendebourg claims that the saving divine energies, though “enhypostasized,” nevertheless function as intermediaries insulating the divine Persons from creation and redemption. This yields a three-term scheme of mediation—ousia-hypostases-energeia—in which the middle term (the Trinitarian Persons) serves no real function, suspended as it is between theologia and oikonomia.64 Duncan Reid explains:

This means that the energies threaten to replace the trinitarian hypostases as the

locus of our encounter with God. A gap appears to have opened between

salvation in terms of participation in the energies and the life of the inner Trinity,

whereby the Trinity becomes a matter of metaphysical information of no

practical, soteriological value about the inner life of God.65

LaCugna echoes Wendebourg’s verdict that “Palamism makes the Trinity soteriologically ‘Functionless’”66 before concluding that “Gregory has built a theology around an idea of ousia that not only cannot stand up to philosophical scrutiny, it also breaks the back of orthodox trinitarian theology.”67

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63. LaCugna, God for Us, 194, 197. If according to Palamas “there are in God essence, persons and energies,” then, Wendebourg asks, “what soteriological function can there be left to Father, Son, and Spirit? . . . is there any task left for [the Spirit] in the renewal, divinization of man? Is not all this being done by the divine energies? Indeed, the trinitarian persons have no soteriological functions.” Dorothea Wendebourg, “From the Cappadocian Fathers to Gregory Palamas: The Defeat of Trinitarian Theology,” Studia Patristica 17, no. 1 (1982): 196.

64. LaCugna, God for Us, 196.

65. Duncan Reid, “The Defeat of Trinitarian Theology: An Alternative View,” Pacifica 9 (October 1996): 294.

66. God for Us, 195.

67. LaCugna, God for Us, 194.

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Though a great deal of the next section’s response to Williams is also relevant to

LaCugna (given her rehearsal of his criticisms), it bears observing here that, at least with respect to Palamas, the claim that the theologia–oikonomia distinction entails the absolute

prioritization of divine unity is mistaken, predicated as it is on a reading of Palamas as

exalting the essence over the Persons. LaCugna is right to insist on the inseparability of

theologia and oikonomia, as she is to ask about “how the trinitarian pattern of salvation

history is to be correlated with the eternal being of God.”68 The danger, as reviewers

observed,69 is that in seeking to overcome the separation of oikonomia from theologia,

LaCugna risks effacing the distinction altogether. Equating unity with theologia, she

takes for granted that the recovery of Trinitarian faith will require an almost total

attention to the oikonomia at the expense of theologia. This approach leaves “no room for

speech about the transcendence of the trinitarian God as Trinity. . . . [For LaCugna] God

is transcendent as Father and immanent as Son and Spirit, and this finally means the

submersion of God’s transcendence in God’s oikonomia.”70 The real theological problem

to be addressed is not the distinction between theologia and oikonomia, but rather “the

overwhelming emphasis upon the unity of God, prior to the discussion of God’s

triunity.”71 While agreeing with LaCugna that such an emphasis on divine unity has

characterized much of the Western theological tradition, Reid objects to the charge that

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68. Ibid., 4.

69. See Robert P. Imbelli, “God for Us or God for God?” God for Us, Catherine Mowry LaCugna, Commonweal 120, no. 2 (29 January 1993): 23 and Aristotle Papanikolaou, “Book Reviews,” God for Us, Catherine Mowry LaCugna, Journal of Religion 73, no. 3 (July 1993): 437–38, as well as Duncan Reid’s article, “The Defeat of Trinitarian Theology: An Alternative View”.

70. Reid, “The Defeat of Trinitarian Theology: An Alternative View,” 291–92.

71. Ibid., 300.

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Palamism is guilty of the same over-emphasis.72 To the contrary, for Palamas, “the

Trinity is the essence of God, and the essence of God is a Trinity of persons.”73

3. Williams’s Article Misinterprets Dionysius and Palamas in Important Respects

In this and the next section (i.e., section four), I offer two types of response to

Williams’s article, though the distinction between them is not airtight. The present section addresses more circumscribed issues of interpretation in order to challenge questionable aspects of Williams’s readings of both Dionysius and Palamas. Since

Williams’s article voiced concerns characteristic of the Western response to Palamas, the fourth section turns to more “structural” differences between the Eastern and Western theological sensibilities in order to trace a few of the “fault lines” that divide the two vocabularies (or conceptual worlds). While Williams’s criticisms open naturally onto these larger differences, postponing the consideration of the larger questions to the next section provides a helpful degree of structure while also clarifying the broader ecumenical landscape in which both criticisms and responses are located.

3.1. Williams’s Methodology Mischaracterizes Palamas

Kallistos Ware notes that Williams’s article largely fails to situate Palamas in his historical context.74 In reading Palamas as offering a philosophical system, or

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72. Ibid., 292.

73. Ibid., 298. According to Reid, to insist on the unknowable essence is to say something about the “mystery of personhood.” Reid also responds to the charge that Palamas separates the divine Persons from the work of salvation, which is effected through the less-than-personal energies: “I believe this objection can be laid to rest if we recognise that the energies of God, while belonging to the whole Trinity, are not understood to be mediated by God in general, but specifically through the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit. They do not threaten to replace the hypostasis of the Spirit, as Wendebourg suggests, precisely because they are energies of the Spirit.” “The Defeat of Trinitarian Theology: An Alternative View,” 297. This point is supported by a close reading of chapter 75 of Chapters 150. There Palamas remarks that “[t]hree realities pertain to God: essence, energy, and the triad of divine hypostases.” Out of context, this would seem to support LaCugna’s reading of the hypostases as mediating between the essence and energies. Reading further, however, we find Palamas insisting that the energy through which believers are united to God is neither an impersonal energy nor the

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“philosophical structures,” Williams ignores the fact that Palamas was not a philosophical theologian, but rather a monastic theologian who affirmed the essence- energies distinction for experiential rather than philosophical reasons.75 This is not simply a

plea for critical lenience or an for philosophical sloppiness, but rather a

question about the mode and criteria of Williams’s analysis, which proceeds, in his words,

after the fashion of “strict logic.”76 Ware thus points to the traditional distinction

between discursive reason (Greek: dianoia or : ratio) and the higher order of

spiritual understanding (Greek: nous or Latin: intellectus). This distinction, according to

Ware, does not entail lapsing into obscurantism or irrationality. On the contrary, “[t]he

obscurantist is the one who makes his ratio the measure of the divine realm.”77

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essence of God, but rather the “uncreated energy of the Holy Spirit.” The Philokalia: The Complete Text, 4:380.

74. remarks that “it is notable that in the article attacking Palamas, Williams scarcely at all alludes to or defends Palamas’s own defence of the hesychastic experience of the uncreated light and the ‘theurgic’ and synergistic practice of the Jesus prayer.” “Christianity and Platonism in East and West,” in A Celebration of Living Theology: A Festschrift in Honour of Andrew Louth, ed. Justin A. Mihoc and Leonard Aldea (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 110 n2.

75. Ware, “The Debate About Palamism,” 58. See also Georges Florovsky, “Saint Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 5, no. 2 (1959): 119–31. Lossky says that the distinction between essence and energies “has no other goal than to defend the reality of , to leave open the door to mystical experience, outside of which there is no spiritual life in the true sense of that word.” Vladimir Lossky, “The Theology of Light in the Thought of St. Gregory Palamas,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird, with an introduction by John Meyendorff, reprint, 1974 (Crestwook, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 68. Cf. Vladimir Lossky, The Vision of God, trans. Asheleigh Moorhouse, preface by John Meyendorff (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983, c1963), 156. Similarly, Rossum insists that “Palamas’ theology has to be seen first of all as a ‘theology of experience,’ rather than as a philosophical theology or a ‘system.’” Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 368.

76. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 31. Against such an approach, Lossky appeals to the need “to see and judge this tradition otherwise than through the rigid concepts of an academic theology which is foreign to it.” Lossky, “The Theology of Light in the Thought of St. Gregory Palamas,” 69.

77. Ware, “The Debate About Palamism,” 50.

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In the Eastern perspective, the transition from ratio/dianoia to intellectus/nous is

aided by the use of antinomy, “the affirmation of two statements both of which convey

some meaning to [one’s] ratio, but which—regarded exclusively on the level of the

discursive reasoning—cannot be fully reconciled.”78 Such “fruitful contradictions”

discipline the intellect by insisting on the need to transcend human concepts—e.g., unity

and multiplicity—in their application to the divine.79 An antinomy is “generated by the recognized inadequacy of thinking to its subject or its tasks; it reveals the insufficiency of

the powers of human reason which is compelled to stop at a certain point, for it reaches a

precipice and an abyss, while at the same time it cannot help but go as far as that

point.”80 As Pavel Florensky notes, the mysterious “abyss” in the face of which human reason fails is not an idea but an experience:

The mysteries of religion are not secrets that one must not reveal. They are not

the passwords of conspirators, but inexpressible, unutterable, indescribable

experiences, which cannot be put into words except in the form of contradictions,

which are ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the same time. They are ‘mysteries that transcend

meaning.’81

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78. Ibid., 51.

79. Lossky remarks that the goal of antinomic theology “is not to forge a system of concepts, but to serve as a support for the human spirit in the contemplation of divine mysteries.” Lossky, “The Theology of Light in the Thought of St. Gregory Palamas,” 52.

80. Sergius Bulgakov, Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations, trans, ed, and with an introduction by Thomas Allan Smith (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2012), 105.

81. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, translated and annotated by Boris Jakim, with an introduction by Richard F. Gustafson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 117. Florensky goes on to say that “[f]rom the point of view of dogmatics, antinomies are inevitable. If sin exists . . . then our entire being, just like the whole world, is fragmented. . . . The existence of a multitude of dissonant schemes and theories, which are equally conscientious but proceed from different starting points, is the best proof that there are cracks in the world.” Ibid., 118.

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In other words, since antinomies are goads toward a spiritual understanding that outstrips the discursive intellect, they necessarily appear “irrational.” Florensky thus concludes that “Truth is an antinomy,” which brings together the cataphatic and apophatic in a self-consciously, self-effacing theological gesture.82 Williams himself later commends the need for something like antinomy under the concept of “paradox,” which he sees as a means for resisting conceptual closure.83 Something similar appears to be the function of antinomy, which posits the possibility of an experiential, rather than intellectual, reconciliation.84

The sense of methodological disconnect in Williams’s article is underscored by the fact that the goal of the Orthodox spiritual life, according to the traditional threefold division, is union («ενωσις, heno¯sis) with God.85 For Orthodox theology, the vision of God

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82. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, 117. On this point, A. N. Williams remarks that “antinomy furnishes a means of speaking about God that contains within itself an acknowledgment of the difficulties inherent in the enterprise. At first apparently brazen in its flouting of logical convention, antinomy . . . blatantly declares its own inadequacy.” “The Logic of Genre: Theological Method in East and West,” Theological Studies 60, no. 4 (December 1999): 687.

83. Tellingly, this comes in a sermon with a title (“A Ray of Darkness”) drawn from Pseudo-Dionysius. “[E]ven in banal contexts, we are aware of the fact that our pigeonholes for things, people, emotions and perceptions are often lagging well behind the fluidity of the real world, its subtle, rapid interactions, its puzzling quality. And whether it’s in theoretical or in poetry, we need to express some sense of this strange fact that our language doesn’t ‘keep up’ with the multiplicity, and interrelatedness and elusiveness of truth. In such a setting, we utter paradoxes not to mystify or avoid problems, but precisely to stop ourselves making things easy by pretending that some awkward or odd feature of our perception isn’t really there. We speak in paradoxes because we have to speak in a way that keeps a question alive.” “A Ray of Darkness,” 118–19.

84. By attesting to the inseparability, even unity, of two seemingly contradictory propositions, the antinomy “is a logical leap over the abyss, but it thereby also becomes something like a bridge over it.” Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 32. Cf. Ware, “The Debate About Palamism,” 46.

85. The three stages are: (1) purification/asceticism, i.e., the practice of the virtues, (2) illumination/the contemplation of nature, and (3) perfection/union/deification/the direct unmediated experience of God. For a detailed discussion of the three stages, see Dumitru Stăniloae, Orthodox Spirituality: A Practical

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is a mystical experience that transcends the limits of created being, thereby requiring the transfiguration (i.e., deification) of human nature by grace.86 In representing such a goal, it seems prejudicial to insist that theology must conform to the dictates of strict,

Aristotelian logic as opposed to seeking to transform those concepts in light of the demands of Scripture and tradition.87

A final methodological point concerns Williams’s suggestion that the dictates of strict philosophical logic should in some way “correct” the everyday language of faith in which we ascribe “actions” to God.88 Later chapters will explore further the intersection

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Guide for the Faithful and a Definitive Manual for the Scholar, translated from the original Romanian by Archimandrite Jerome (Newville) and Otilia Kloos, foreword by Alexander Golubov (South Canaan, Pa.: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2003).

86. Lossky, The Vision of God, 167–68.

87. See Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 109. On this point, David Burell maintains that revelation “makes us aware of the new philosophical moves which we must make.” Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 43. John McGuckin observes that in locating the category of relation (schesis) at the heart of the divine reality, Gregory Nazianzen “did much to weaken Aristotle’s relegation of that category as an incidental accident. Gregory’s insistence that the concept of individual subsistent persons (hypostaseis) in dynamic inter-relation (pericho¯re¯sis) was now the core of the religious-philosophical agenda (what emerged as the classical doctrine of the Holy Trinity after him) did much to propel the concept of personhood to the centre of the philosophical stage in the history of later western thought.” John A. McGuckin, “,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 490–91. Meyendorff makes a similar claim regarding Palamas, namely, that he transformed the impersonal Aristotelian dyad of nature-energy into the personal triad essence-hypostasis-energy. “The Holy Trinity in Palamite Theology,” 37.

88. “[A]lthough piety allows a great deal of latitude to language here, although, indeed, we may have no option in some circumstances but to employ a ‘mythological’ kind of talk about the ‘acts of God,’ we need to be fully aware of what we are doing, and of the necessary correctives of strict logic.” Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 31. Since I do not address this issue directly in the fourth chapter (which traces developments in Williams’s thought), it bears emphasizing that Williams’s views have changed significantly on this question. To give but one example, he wrote in 2002 of our need for the language of desire, however inappropriate such language might seem before the dictates of rigorous philosophy. “I think we need, for talking about the love of God in the light of Jesus, language strong enough to cope with the passion and intensity and relentlessness of the divine outreach towards our aloneness

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of Wittgensteinian philosophy and the Palamite distinction, but here I would register that this conception of philosophy’s role is quite at odds with Wittgenstein. We noted above the Wittgensteinian character of Williams’s concern that Palamism represented the “reification” of a grammatical or conceptual distinction. Such philosophical

“therapy”—which seeks to untie the knots in our thinking that result when unreflective bits of received wisdom pass over into metaphysical theorizing (and so mystification) beyond ordinary language—is quite in order according to Wittgenstein. That philosophy would attempt to discipline everyday religious language—undermining the validity of ordinary patterns of speech about God and divine action—however, would appear to run afoul of Wittgenstein’s sense that philosophy “leaves everything as it is”: “philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.”89 For Wittgenstein, we might say, philosophy helps uncover the grammar of our everyday religious notions, without thereby attempting to correct or supplant that grammar with a more “basic” philosophical account.

3.2. Dionysius Is Better Interpreted in the Context of Syriac Christianity and His

Transformation of Neoplatonism

Beyond these methodological issues, the article’s chief problems derive from

Williams’s readings of both Dionysius and Palamas. With respect to the former, the most egregious claims stem from the young Williams’s construal of Dionysius as plus

———————————— and lostness. And I am not quite sure that we have got any language other than ‘desire’ for that. We can make all the analogical qualifications we want, and I am quite prepared to say that I do not, for a moment, believe that God needs us to be happy. But God behaves as if He did.” Rowan Williams, “Sacramental Living,” The St. Peter’s Public Lectures, delivered at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne, 14 and 16 May 2002, Trinity Papers no. 32 (2002), 15, Http://www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au/Media/docs/TrinityPaper32-b1ef15dc-6fdc-4212– 81ed-c699ca1dd1f9–0.pdf.

89. PI §124.

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platonizans quam christianizans (“more a Platonist than a Christian”).90 As recent

scholarship has demonstrated, the opposition itself is misleading and based on an

interpretive framework that distorts the history of Christian theology, which is

ineluctably bound up with the appropriation of and interaction with philosophical

traditions. The (Neo)Platonic influence in particular is pervasive (e.g., the Aristotle

received by Aquinas was a thoroughly Neoplatonic one), which means that the

differences between the two theological vocabularies reflect less the choice between a

“pure” Christianity and one contaminated by Neoplatonism than two alternative streams

of Neoplatonic thought.91

In addition to the Neoplatonic influence of Proclus, Alexander Golitzin has

demonstrated that Dionysius’s writings evince a striking coherence when read in

continuity with Syriac Christian asceticism.92 Elements of these earlier Jewish traditions—preserved in Orthodox theology, liturgy and spirituality—were variously articulated by a range of Christian authors, from and Pseudo-

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90. Famously leveled by , this charge captures the suspicion toward the Areopagite common among Protestants. Though Dionysius was widely read and appreciated in the Catholic West—finding favor with medieval scholastics, the Rhineland mystics, and the Spanish writers of the Counter- (e.g., Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross)—nonetheless “it is an effectively fractured Dionysius that we find at the end of the Western , with larger or smaller chunks of his oeuvre tacked on to—or, as with Aquinas, assimilated with magisterial elegance into—an already well- established and secure theological Gestalt.” Alexander Golitzin, “Dionysius Areopagites: A Christian Mysticism?” in The Theophaneia School: Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, vol. 3, ed. Basil Lourié and Andrei Orlov, Scrinium: Revue de Patrologie, d’Hagiographie, Critique et d’Histoire Eccléliastique (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007), 129.

91. Wayne J. Hankey, “Misrepresenting Neoplatonism in Contemporary Christian Dionysian Polemic: Eriugena and Versus Vladimir Lossky and Jean-Luc Marion,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82, no. 4 (2008): 683–703. See also Milbank, “Christianity and Platonism in East and West,” 109 n2.

92. Golitzin observes that the roots of this ascetical literature, with its reflections on the Church as “temple” and locus of the theophany of Christ, likely go back to “the earliest forms and sites of Christianity: the Jewish-Christian villages and communities of Aramaic-speaking Palestine.” Golitzin, “A Christian Mysticism?” 177.

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Macarius through Dionysius and Maximus to Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory

Palamas. On this view Palamas is not the unfortunate inheritor of a Dionysian

Neoplatonism fundamentally foreign to Christian thought, but rather part of “a continuous, primarily monastic reading of the Areopagite which correctly understood the latter as himself drawing on prior currents in the ascetico-mystical, liturgical, and theological literature of the Christian East. Dionysius, in short, is properly understood as bracketed by the tradition out of which he came and within which he continued to be read.”93 Dionysius’s adaptation of Neoplatonism makes particular sense in this context of Syrian asceticism, since the emphasis on “ineffable rites” in and Proclus offered Dionysius a means for balancing the subjective experience of the Syrian ascetics with “the objective, visible liturgy of the Church through which God’s presence in Christ is mediated to us.”94 The late Neoplatonic denial of the soul’s inherent capacity to ascend to the One was thus a fitting idiom in which to stress the believer’s need for the mystagogy available in the ecclesiastical hierarchies.

That Dionysius transformed this Neoplatonic framework is evident in (inter alia) his conception of God. As in Neoplatonism, Dionysius’s God is totally “other,” beyond any and all categories of being and non-being, of the One and the Many. But as Golitzin underscores, this “gap” opens the Neoplatonic One to a Trinitarian reinterpretation

(since God is beyond any logical or numerical reckoning). There is no One beyond the

Trinity; rather, the One is the Trinity, such that “[u]nity and difference are simultaneous

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93. Alexander Golitzin, “Dionysius Areopagites in the Works of Saint Gregory Palamas: On the Question of a ‘Christological Corrective’ and Other Matters,” in The Theophaneia School: Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, vol. 3, ed. Basil Lourié and Andrei Orlov, Scrinium: Revue de Patrologie, d’Hagiographie, Critique et d’Histoire Eccléliastique (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007), 87.

94. Golitzin, “A Christian Mysticism?” 146.

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and intrinsic to the very esse of divinity.”95 For Dionysius, Golitzin maintains, the Trinity is “an irreducible given.”96

As Golitzin notes, this reading of Dionysius follows Lossky’s, so it is surprising that Williams’s article ignores Lossky’s response to the charge that Dionysian apophaticism implied “a conception of the One, transcendent to everything which can be named, and thus transcendent to the Trinitarian notions of Christian theology as well.”97 Lossky responds that

the rule of non-opposition . . . excludes every attempt to reduce the Trinity of

hypostases to a primordial, transpersonal Unity. . . . Denied in their opposition,

the two terms [i.e., Trinity and Unity] must be understood together, in a sort of

συ'νοψις [synopsis] or simultaneous vision which identifies by distinguishing. . . .

Thus true transcendence, which Christians alone can confess, belongs to the

‘Unitrinity,’ and this contradictory term must express the ‘synopsis’ of the One

and the Three, the object of Mystical Theology.98

Williams notably corrects his misreading of Dionysius in an article on Lossky and the via negativa written two years later. There he acknowledges that “[t]he God of the

Areopagite, exalted above το` »εν [“the One”], is clearly and unmistakeably [sic] the triune

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95. Alexander Golitzin, Mystagogy: A Monastic Reading of Dionysius Areopagita, Bucur) edited by Bogdan G. Bucur, ed. Bogdan Bucur, Cistercian Studies Series, no. 250 (Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications, 2013), 68.

96. Ibid., 72.

97. Vladimir Lossky, “Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird, with an introduction by John Meyendorff, reprint, 1974 (Crestwook, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 17.

98. Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird, with an introduction by John Meyendorff, reprint, 1974 (Crestwook, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 27–28.

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God of revelation; Dionysian apophasis never leads to a level of divine existence superior to the three persons.”99

3.2.1. The Dionysian Proödoi/Energeia Are “Neither Lesser Gods nor Less God”100.

Williams’s article on Palamism took issue not only with Dionysius’s account of divine transcendence, but also with the proödoi, which Williams thought were beholden to

Neoplatonism, prompting worries that they constituted an intermediate realm of semi- divine beings which, being both eternal and mediating, bound God essentially to creation. On the alternative, Syriac reading of Dionysius, however, things appear quite different.

For Dionysius, the relationship between God and creation is characterized by reciprocal ecstasies or acts of self-transcendence: “[a]s God comes out of Himself, exestekos, in a ‘departure from His own being’, kat’ekbasin tes ousias, in His processions

(proödoi) to create, sustain, and save the world, so we are called to an ekstasis, a departure from ourselves, as the act of our return (epistrophe) to Him.”101 This notion of God’s ekstasis, his “going out” from himself in “self-transcendence,” is first of all an affirmation of the radicalness of divine freedom, the freedom of God to give himself despite the ontological difference: “not only is God free from circumscription by any of our notions, but He is also thus free to reveal Himself, to become present to us when we do open up ourselves to becoming present to Him.”102 The ecstatic energies, then, are the Orthodox

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99. Rowan Williams, “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 8.

100. Golitzin, Mystagogy, 78.

101. Alexander Golitzin, “‘Suddenly, Christ’: The Place of Negative Theology in the Mystagogy of Dionysius Areopagites,” in Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard (: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 12–13. Despite a certain symmetry, the two ecstasies are far from equal, since “the power enabling our return to Him and firing our longing for Him is . . . the very same divine love which moved Him to call us and our world into being.” Ibid., 13.

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way of affirming the radicalness both of God’s transcendence and immanence,103 indeed of a transcendence into immanence. Olivier Clément explains that

God’s transcendence eludes our very idea of transcendence. God transcends his

own transcendence, so that he may not be lost in abstract nothingness, but may

give himself. The simultaneous overcoming of affirmation and negation already

outlines the antinomy of personal existence: the more it is hidden the more it is

given; the more it is given the more hidden it is. That is why the Fathers also

speak of God as inaccessible, of God beyond God, in terms of a springing forth, a

creative and redemptive leap outside his essence, following the eternal movement

of the divine energies, but also in order to communicate these to creatures by

personal actions, because the living God is a God who acts.104

God communicates himself through his energies, thereby bridging “the unfathomable gap between the uncreated God and God’s creation.”105

Drawing together the Dionysian proödoi and the Maximian logoi, Palamas uses

the language of “energies” to cover a broad range of realities: “[s]ome are contingent,

some necessary; some are temporal, some eternal; some are realities or energies, others

are activities, operations or attributes.”106 What unites this diverse group is that they are

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102. Golitzin, “‘Suddenly, Christ’,” 12.

103. Ware, The Orthodox Way, 22. This distinction is captured in Basil’s well- known quotation: “The energies are various, and the essence simple, but we say that we know our God from His energies, but do not undertake to approach near to His essence. His energies come down to us, but His essence remains beyond our reach. Epistle 234, NPNF, vol. 8, 274, quoted in Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 107.

104. Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Text and Commentary (New York: New City Press, 1995), 31–32.

105. Papanikolaou, “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood,” 359.

106. Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West, 273.

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all acts of divine self-manifestation, thereby signifying a mode of existence other than or

“outside” the essential.107 As Lossky says, the energies are “the outpourings of the divine

nature which cannot set bounds to itself, for God is more than essence. The energies

might be described as that mode of existence of the Trinity which is outside of its

inaccessible essence. God thus exists both in His essence and outside of His essence.”108

Dionysius and his later interpreters recognize a distinction between “God as He exists

within Himself and is known only to Himself, and God as He manifests Himself to others. The

former is the divine ousia, the latter the divine energies. It is important to note that both

are God, but differently conceived: God as unknowable and as knowable, as wholly

beyond us and as within our reach.”109

This doctrine construes the energies neither as created effects nor as lesser emanations, while also refusing the elevation of creation to a co-eternal second term.110

Pace Williams, then, the proödoi are emphatically not equivalent to the henads.111 To the contrary, Dionysius quite consciously “exorcises” Proclus’s intermediate beings.112

Golitzin thus concludes that “God is God both as the infinitely ‘other,’ the Three persons in unity, and as God ‘outside’ God, differentiated indivisibly and extended

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107. Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 54.

108. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 73.

109. Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 108.

110. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 74. To the first point, Golitzin highlights that the Dionysian processions “are neither lesser gods nor less God. They are instead God, as it were, in transit, transcendent communications, ‘imparticipably participated.’ God ad extra is fully God, yet the distinction remains.” Mystagogy, 78. Emphasis added.

111. Divine Names [DN] XI.6 953C–956A. Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, translation by Colm Luibheid foreword, et al., The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987).

112. Golitzin, Mystagogy, 77.

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‘ecstatically’ into immanence. This second mode, and second only in a certain logically subordinate sense, at once does away with the pagans’ emanations of intermediate and provides the foundations for human existence, knowledge, and hope of participation in God.”113

We can thus abandon the charge that Palamas conceives the divine essence as a kind of divine interiority cordoned off from view, or that the essence and energies are in any way substantive “parts” of the Godhead to be played off each other.114 The energies are not something other than God; they are God as he gives himself to be known.115 They

are God in a mode accessible to creaturely understanding, that is, as he communicates

himself ad extra. In other words, it is the same God “who at once abides ineffably

removed in his proper transcendence and perfectly present through his own act of ‘self-

transcendence,’ his procession.”116 Palamas can thus say that those who have been united

with God by grace “have received an energy identical to that of the deifying essence, and

possessing it in absolute entirety, reveal it through themselves.”117

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113. Golitzin, Mystagogy, 82.

114. “Essence and energies are not, for Palamas, two parts of God, as some modern critics still imagine, but two different modes of the existence of God, within His nature and outside His nature . . . As with the dogma of Trinity, this dogma of divine energies in no way detracts from the simplicity of God, as long as simplicity does not become a philosophical notion which claims to determine the indeterminable.” Lossky, The Vision of God, 157.

115. DN II.7.

116. Golitzin, Mystagogy, 73.

117. Saint Gregory Palamas, The Triads, with an introduction by John Meyendorff, translation by Nicholas Gendle, preface by Jaroslav Pelikan, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1983), III.i.33. Cf. Dionysius’s remark that “the entire wholeness is participated in by each of those who participate in it; none participates in only a part. It is rather like the case of a circle. The center point of the circle is shared by the surrounding radii. Or take the example of a seal. There are numerous impressions of the seal and these all have a share in the original prototype; it is the same whole seal in each of the impressions and none participates in only a part.” DN II.5.

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Though distinguishable,118 the essence and energies cannot be separated: “there is in essence and energy one uncreated divinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy

Spirit.”119 Palamas thus asserts that “it is possible to use the name of divine essence even for the energies,” and “it is impossible to consider energies as sorts of natures or beings different from the essence.”120 As Nikolaos Loudovikos explains, according to Palamas,

“divine energy can be called by the same term as divine essence, as it has the same essential characteristics with it, while it can be called differently as far as they represent different aspects of the one divinity. In other words, ‘the name God is common for divine essence and divine power and energy along with divine hypostases,’ . . . how could it be possible for anyone who knows these texts to seriously admit that he compromises divine unity or simplicity by distinguishing energies from essence?”121

Accordingly, the Western anxiety about a disjunction between the transcendent and the revealed God evaporates. The divine energies are not arbitrary acts potentially unconnected from the hidden divine “self,” but rather acts through which the divine character is faithfully manifest. “[T]here can be no question of God somehow hiding behind a façade of false energies.”122 While the divine essence remains

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118. Palamas says that “God also possesses that which is not essence.” The Philokalia: The Complete Text, 410 §135. Rossum observes that “Williams is right when he writes that this statement ‘is nonsense from an Aristotelian point of view.’ But, again, that is the whole point: Palamas’ God is not the God of Aristotle, but the living God of revelation in the history of salvation. He is the God who ‘has made darkness his abode’ (Ps 18:12). In other words, a personal God, and not a philosophical abstraction.” “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 369.

119. Ch. 16 in Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite, Rein Ferwerda (Binghamton, NY: Global Publications at SUNY Binghamton, 1999), 57.

120. Against Akindynos 2, 17, 86; 2, 14, 63; 3, 13, 42. Quoted in Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 125.

121. Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 126. Quoting Against Akindynos, 3, 13, 45; 5,3, 7. Cf. ch. 135 of Capita 150: “divine energy and divine essence belong to one God, or rather they are the same one God.”

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incomprehensible, God can be “truly known, and known truly as God, in his processions

. . . the gifts he makes of himself.”123 God does not “withhold” some part of himself; rather, the divine indivisibility means that God is “entirely manifest in every energy.”124

In each energy, Palamas says, “there is God in his wholeness being present in his creatures, imparting himself to them and absolutely participated in, according to the image of the sunbeam, in a little part of which we can see the sun in its wholeness.”125

Each of the energies is a door that opens, at least potentially, onto the limitless ocean of the divine mystery.

That God gives himself through the energies is further reflected by the close identification between the energies and the Spirit (though this is not exclusive, since the energies are common to the whole Trinity).126 Rather than displacing the Persons with

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122. Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 114.

123. Golitzin, Mystagogy, 75.

124. Triads III.ii.9. Quoting Gregory of Nyssa, Palamas affirms that “one divinity and the one God, ‘who is invisible by His essence becomes visible by His energies.’” Ch. 16 in Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite, 58. Lossky emphasizes that God “wholly reveals Himself in His energies, which yet in no way divide His nature into two parts . . . but signify two different modes of the divine existence.” The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 86. Emphasis added. Stăniloae remarks that “God himself is in each of these operations or energies, simultaneously whole, active, and beyond operation or movement.” Revelation and Knowledge of the Triune God, 125.

125. Against Akindynos 5, 27, 114; 5, 26, 110. Quoted in Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 126.

126. “. . . it is not grace but the Holy Spirit Himself who at the same time is sent from the Son and pours Himself out through the Son.” Triads III.1.3. Cf. ch. 75, One Hundred and Fifty Chapters; Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 86; Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 57; Ware, “God Hidden and Revealed: The Apophatic Way and the Essence-Energies Distinction,” 133; Reid, “The Defeat of Trinitarian Theology: An Alternative View,” 297; Duncan Reid, Energies of the Spirit: Trinitarian Models in Eastern Orthodox and Western Theology, American Academy of Religion Academy Series, no. 96 (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1997). At the same time, “while [God] is Himself the ‘deifying gift’, theopoion doron, He still transcends the relations He enters into. His gifts are His powers, dynameis, or energies, energeiai, but not His essence, ousia.” Golitzin, “‘Suddenly, Christ’,” 21. Cf. Milbank, “Christianity and Platonism in East and West,” 111.

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impersonal energies, as Wendebourg claims, Palamas maintains that the energies are given according to the Trinitarian taxis: “from the Father, through the Son, by the

Spirit. Thus, any energy signifies God’s presence in his hypostatic and essential wholeness, as there are three distinct personal ‘works’ (»εργα) in it. . . . In this way, the

essence-energies distinction underlines rather than undermines the meaning of

Trinitarian theology and Christology.”127 Moreover, according to Palamas, the basis for

such participation in the divine energies is the Incarnation, as Christ’s “theandric”

energy makes possible—as Williams later writes—“the interweaving (not fusion or

confusion) of the endless, divine resourcefulness of agency and love with the

particularities of a human life.”128 The Christ-event thus grounds Palamas’s

understanding of the energies as dialogical, with Christ’s human nature receiving his

divine energies. The result is what Loudovikos calls a “Christology of the energies.”129

According to Orthodox theology, Christ’s divine-human (theandric) activity—the “syn-

energetic” circulation of divine and human energies—is the model for humanity’s

deification understood as “an assimilation of God himself through the divine energies,

which descend from the Father and become participable in Christ, through the Spirit.”130

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127. Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 128.

128. Rowan Williams, “Icons and the Practice of Prayer,” Royal Academy of Arts Byzantium Lecture (2009), n.p.

129. “. . . in Christ we do not have a confusion of natures but a through the perfect perichoresis of the two natures, through the complete dialogue of created and uncreated energies in him. Christ’s theandric energy is nothing other than a dialogical syn-energy of his two natures that make them perfectly co-exist and collaborate.” Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 127.

130. Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 130. According to Dionysius in EH 1, Jesus “makes our life, disposition, and activity [energeia] something divine.” Quoted in Golitzin, “A Christian Mysticism?” 168. In Maximian terms, “the energies of the archetype fill up the image,” moving it toward conformity with the archetype’s mode of being: “[t]his is the return of the image to the primary image, of the thing to its logos; this is the deification of [humanity] and of the cosmos.” V. M. Zhivov, “The Mystagogia of Maximus the Confessor and the Development of the Byzantine Theory of the Image,” St.

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Thus, as we noted from the outset, the doctrine of the energies has its raison d’être in the affirmation of the possibility of deification after Christ’s example.131

The most common metaphor used by the patristic authors to speak of the distinction between the essence and its energies is that of the sun and its rays, which we saw Palamas employ above. The image highlights that the energies are not acts separable from Godself, created effects dependent on his will.132 Rather they are the uncreated

“overflow” of the essence, the eternal “radiance” or “splendor” of the Godhead.133 This

divine light is “the visible character of the divinity, of the energies in which God

communicates Himself and reveals Himself to those who have purified their hearts.”134

This theology of light135 is reflected in Gregory of Nazianzus’s well-known

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Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 31, no. 4 (1987): 372. Cf. Lossky’s remark that the “‘perichoresis’ or dynamic copenetration of what is created and uncreated in Christ finds its analogy in beings who are striving to become ‘gods by grace.’” Lossky, The Vision of God, 133.

131. Aristotle Papanikolaou notes that “[a]t the heart then of the Orthodox Christian tradition, and what separates it from other Christian traditions, is the notion of deification through the ‘energies’ of God, which are God.” “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood,” 357. Cf. Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 111.

132. Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 54. Following Palamas, Lossky remarks that even “[i]f the world had not been created, God would have always existed not only in His inaccessible essence, but also outside His essence.” Ibid., 55.

133. Bradshaw suggests that we might speak of this uncreated light as the “eternal, reciprocal glorification of the persons of the Godhead,” an act internal to divinity that is “imaged and replicated in the bestowal of the divine energies upon creatures.” Aristotle East and West, 273. Loudovikos observes that this language is not found in Palamas and that “the Cappadocians denied any ‘energetic’ activity within the Trinity, as otherwise the intra-Trinitarian unity could be conceived as something that is progressively achieved, rather than eternally constituted.” Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 128 n3. Torstein Tollefsen suggests the possibility of compromise between Bradshaw’s affirmation of intra-Trinitarian activity and Loudovikos’s denial of it by way of the Plotinian distinction between internal and external “activity” (energeia). See page 123 below.

134. Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 58.

135. This theology of light is particularly appropriate since the Transfiguration occupies a pivotal place in Palamas’s thought and was a central point of contention

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suggestion that, in view of the transcendence of God, we see only those things “around” the nature:

In Himself [God] sums up and contains all being, having neither beginning in

the past nor end in the future; like some great sea of being, limitless and

unbounded, transcending all conception of time and nature, only adumbrated by

the mind, and that very dimly and scantily—not from the things directly

concerning Him, but from the things around Him . . . by that part of it which we

cannot comprehend to move our wonder, and as an object of wonder to become

more an object of desire, and being desired to purity, and by purifying to make

us like God.136

According to Gregory, wonder moves us to desire, and then to purification and theosis.

This process of the self’s dilation is an endless one, which means that essence and

———————————— between Palamas and his opponents. What was the nature of the light seen by the three apostles on Mt. Tabor? Palamas’s opponents, Barlaam and Akindynos, maintained that this light was a created symbol, whereas Gregory insisted that it was a proleptic glimpse of the eschatological glory of God. The Hagioritic Tome thus concludes that, “If anyone maintains that the light which shone about the disciples on was an apparition and a symbol of the kind that now is and now is not, but has no real being and is an effect that not only does not surpass comprehension, but is inferior to it, he clearly contends against the doctrines of the saints. For the saints both in hymns and in their writings call this light ineffable, uncreated, eternal, timeless, unapproachable, boundless, infinite, limitless, invisible to angels and men, archetypal and unchanging beauty, the glory of God, the glory of Christ, the glory of the Spirit, the ray of Divinity and so forth.” The Philokalia: The Complete Text, 4: 422. Though seemingly an academic debate, Lossky emphasizes that the issue implicates “the nature of grace, the possibility of mystical experience and the reality of this experience, the possibility of seeing God and the nature of this vision, and finally, the possibility of deification in the real and not the metaphorical sense of this word.” Lossky, “The Theology of Light in the Thought of St. Gregory Palamas,” 60.

136. Oration 38.7. Quoted in Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West, 167. Tollefsen suggests that the same “ontological phenomenon” may be echoed (without positing direct influence) in ’s description of the One’s external activity using the image of “perfumed objects that diffuse scent ‘around them’ (περι` αυ’τα').” Torstein Theodor Tollefsen, Activity and Participation in Late Antique and Early Christian Thought, The Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 24.

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energies are not separated by a “fixed and permanent boundary” but rather by a kind of

“receding horizon,” as the self stretches out (epektasis) into eternity, discovering an infinite series of gracious self-manifestations proceeding from the inexhaustible depths of the divine mystery.137

3.3. Palamas Was Heir to a Radical Dionysian Apophaticism that Relativizes Human Intellection

In highlighting both the diversity of Neoplatonic thought and its continuing influence on figures like Aquinas, recent scholarship problematizes criticisms like

Williams’s which rather straightforwardly oppose Christianity to Neoplatonism. The relationship between the two traditions was complex and characterized by both similarities and differences. Like many earlier scholars, Williams’s article also aligns

Dionysius with Neoplatonism in a way that obscures the latter’s transformation of

Neoplatonic categories. In the last section I argued that this was case with respect to the proödoi, and it is equally true of the concept of “essence,” which figures centrally in

Williams’s critique.

The Palamite language of the unknowable “essence” represents a radical apophaticism, characteristic of the East, whose clearest spokesman was Dionysius.

According to this Dionysian apophaticism, the One is radically beyond being: “Since it is the Cause of all beings, we should posit and ascribe to it all the affirmations we make in regard to beings, and, more appropriately, we should negate all these affirmations, since it surpasses all being.”138 God, says Dionysius, “is not a facet of being. Rather, being is a

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137. The image of the receding horizon is Bradshaw’s. See “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 109. On the infinite character of our ascent to God, see Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 35; Vladimir Lossky, “Darkness and Light in the Knowledge of God,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird, with an introduction by John Meyendorff, reprint, 1974 (Crestwook, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 37. In chapter five, I advance a reading of the Palamite distinction that pivots away from a “spatial” conception (i.e., a boundary) and toward an interpretation both “temporal” and “grammatical.”

138. MT 1.2.

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facet of him. He is not contained in being, but being is contained in him. He does not possess being [in the sense of participating in being], but being possesses him. He is the eternity of being, the source and the measure of being. He precedes essence, being, and eternity.”139 God transcends being as its source, and so is literally no-thing140: “He is not.

Rather, he is the essence of being for the things which have being.”141

For Dionysius, the divine “essence” is completely uncoordinated with created

being—with its spatio-temporal parameters—and so is beyond naming altogether,

offering “no grip to take hold of it and to know what it is.”142 Since language and

thought belong to created existence, Dionysius avers that God is beyond the dialectic of

thought altogether.143 For Dionysius, nothing may be properly predicated of God in se,

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139. DN 5.8.

140. DN 1.5.

141. DN 5.4.

142. Maximus, Triads, ch. 5. Cf. John of , The Orthodox Faith, I.12.

143. “How can we [speak of the divine names] if the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge, if it abides beyond the reach of mind and of being, if it encompasses and circumscribes, embraces and anticipates all things while itself eluding their grasp and escaping from any perception, imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding? How can we enter upon this undertaking if the Godhead is superior to being and is unspeakable and unnameable?” DN 1.5. Cf. Maximus: “God is everything and nothing and above everything”: ho me¯den on to¯n onto¯n ale¯tho¯s, kai panta kyrios ¯on kai hyper panta ho theos.” PG 91, col. 1257. Quoted in Bulgakov, Unfading Light, 129. Cf. Maximus: “The one, unoriginate and incomprehensible, who fully has all power of being, excludes any thought of time and image, is inaccessible for anyone and cannot be known in natural representations by anything of what is. It is impossible for us to come to know the being of God in itself: he is not beginning, middle or end, or anything else of that which is known naturally as following from him. For he is unbounded, unmoved, unlimited, being immeasurably higher than every essence, power (potency) and activity (energy). . . . God is not essence (substance, ousia) as it is understood simply or in the sense that it is a principle; and he is not potency, as potency is understood simply or in the sense that it is mediating (a middle, mesote¯s); and he is not energy, as it is understood simply or in the sense that it is the goal of a motion pre- planned in conformity with potency and arising from essence. He is being, having essence and remaining above essence (ousiopoios kai hyperousios ontotes), having power and remaining above power, entirely filled with every activity and inexhaustibility, in a word, he is the active source of every essence, power, activity, beginning, middle and

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including “simple” and “one.”144 In other words, divine simplicity (as well as the other attributes) is conceived not simply according to the logic of negation (e.g., God is not composite) but rather according to the logic of remotion (i.e., God transcends the dialectic itself). That is, the Dionysian (and Eastern) conception of God’s transcendence requires the negation of both affirmation and negation: “the cause of all is . . . beyond every denial, beyond every assertion.”145 The One “falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor of being. . . . It is beyond assertion and denial.”146

This more radical Eastern apophaticism is “not the via negativa as this is traditionally understood in the West, which primarily serves to correct the true affirmations said of God.”147 Scholastic theologians utilized such “negative theology” as a logical corrective to the via positiva, which, though moving within the horizon of being, must be chastened by the recognition that God is not merely a being but “infinite Being”

(esse infinitum).148 The Western reception of this Dionysian apophaticism—which

“constituted an intellectual and experiential-mystical process, ‘not so much a conceptual act as a way of leading the soul beyond concepts into the darkness where God dwells’”— risks transposing it into mere .149

———————————— end. All that exists is called conceivable (nooumena) for it has principles for its own explanation; God, however, is called not conceivable (ou nooumenos) but they only believe in him on the basis of (ek) the conceivable; therefore nothing of that which is conceivable can in any respect enter into comparison with him.” Quoted in ibid.

144. John D. Jones, “An Absolutely Simple God? Frameworks for Reading Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite,” The Thomist 69 (2005): 380. Cf. Dionysius’s assertion that the One “is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness.” MT 5.

145. MT 1.2.

146. MT 5. Cf. Palamas, Triads III.ii.11. Cf. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700), The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 265.

147. John D. Jones, “An Absolutely Simple God?” 383–84.

148. Wayne J. Hankey, “Misrepresenting Neoplatonism,” n.p.

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While such negation is useful as far as it goes, for both Dionysius and Palamas it is insufficient unless situated within a larger dynamic of the union of the whole person with God.150 That is, the dialectic of positive and negative theology is itself surpassed through the gracious possibility of ecstatic self-transcendence. This means that apophaticism operates on two levels: the level of discourse (i.e., “negative theology”) and the higher level of experience, at which apophatic discourse is oriented not toward negation but toward union and participation.151 Within this broader “mystical-

experiential context,” apophatic language serves both as a “prelude to, and the language

accounting for, the experience of God.”152

The point can be clarified with reference to Stăniloae’s distinction of the three

“steps” of apophaticism: (1) “negative theology,” (2) “apophaticism at the height of

prayer,” and (3) “the apophaticism of the vision of the divine light.”153 According to

Stăniloae, “negative theology”—corresponding to Thomas’ “way of negation”—is an

intellectual corrective to , unsettling any claims to comprehension of

the divine. At the second step, “apophaticism at the height of prayer,” we confront the

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149. Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Theological Reception of Dionysian Apophatism in the Christian East and West: Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas,” The Downside Review 125 (2007): 139. The inset quotation is from Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West, 192.

150. Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Theological Reception of Dionysian Apophatism in the Christian East and West,” 140.

151. Dumitru Stăniloae argues for a theological synthesis between affirmation and negation, predicated on the recognition that this synthesis is based on “an experience which transcends both the terms of affirmation and of negation that express it. God possesses in himself both what corresponds to the terms of affirmation and what corresponds to the terms of negation, but he possesses these in a way which is absolutely superior to the terms themselves. And this is a matter of experience, not of mere speculation.” Stăniloae, Revelation and Knowledge of the Triune God, 111.

152. Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Theological Reception of Dionysian Apophatism in the Christian East and West,” 142.

153. Stăniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, 237ff.

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total inadequacy of our concepts of God and pursue an asceticism with respect to all images and theological language. This level is marked by a sense of absence and darkness, as we are progressively stripped bare of our conceptual bearings in speaking about God. For most, this step represents the height of spirituality attained in this life.

However, there is a third apophatic step—the goal of all the faithful in the eschaton, attainable already in this life—at which one receives the ineffable vision of God’s glory.

God is both the “object” of this vision and the means by which the vision becomes possible, since union with God is accomplished only through the gift of God’s uncreated grace. At this third level, we pass from a sense of absence and darkness into the super- luminous radiance of God’s presence. At such a moment, our language is “shouldered out,” not for want of illumination, but because of the superabundance of dazzling light.154 According to Dionysius, such supra-rational experience is both a knowing and an unknowing: “Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.”155

Palamas is heir to this radical Dionysian apophaticism, as is evident in his denial that either “essence” or “nature” can be said of God in the proper sense (i.e., they are said only as causal designations in the sense that God is productive of ousia in things).

Indeed, citing Dionysius, Palamas even says that “essence” designates one of God’s

powers.156 Palamas’s Dionysian apophaticism is apparent in a number of passages:

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154. This language is borrowed, though for quite different purposes, from Cora Diamond’s “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, Stanley Cavell, et al. (New York: Press, 2008), 98–116.

155. MT 3.

156. Triads III.ii.11.

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Every created nature is far removed from and completely foreign to the divine

nature. For if God is nature, other things are not nature; but if every other thing

is nature, He is not a nature, just as He is not a being if all other things are

beings. . . . He is not nature, because He transcends every nature; He is not a

being, because He transcends every being; and He is not nor does He possess a

form, because He transcends form.157

The nature beyond being, and beyond life and beyond god, and beyond good as

beyond good, etc, is neither conceived nor contemplated in any way at all

because it is apart from all things and more than unknowable and established

beyond the super-celestial minds [i.e., angels] by an incomprehensible power and

is always utterly unable to be grasped and ineffable to all. For it has no name in

the present age nor does it receive one in the age to come. . . . Anyone who has

knowledge of the truth beyond all truth, if he is to name it correctly cannot

legitimately name it ousia or nature. But on the other hand, since it is cause of all

. . . its name must be drawn from things but not in a proper sense. Thus, it must

be called ousia and nature, but properly the ousia-bestowing procession and

energy of God.158

Divine super-essentiality (te¯n hyperousiote¯ta te¯n theian) cannot be either named

with a word or understood or contemplated by any means at all; it surpasses

everything and is above cognition (hyperagno¯ston), it abides unattainable even for

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157. Chapter 78, One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, 4:382.

158. Chapter 106, One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, quoted in John D. Jones, “An Absolutely Simple God?” 391.

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the unbounded power of supercelestial minds, remaining completely and forever

incomprehensible and ineffable for all things. It cannot be named with any name

in a language (kata) of the present age or of the future; no word (logos) generated

in the soul or pronounced by the lips is able to express it; no feeling or thinking

(epaphe¯ tis aisthe¯te¯ ¯e noe¯ma) attains to it; it cannot be expressed by any image

(phantasia). Unless someone calls it the most incomprehensible totality of

negations (ex apophaseo¯n teleo¯tate¯n akatale¯psian), the most lofty abstraction

(hyperochikos aphairoumene¯n) from everything that is and everything that is said.

Therefore it is impossible, in fact (kyrio¯s), to name either the essence (ousia) itself

or its nature in the right way, acknowledging this truth to be above every truth.

Although at the same time it is the cause of everything, and everything exists

from it and on account of it, by existing before everything simply and

unboundedly (haplo¯s kai aperioristo¯s), it has pre-outlined in itself everything, and

it must be named in everything (ek panto¯n), but not in the proper sense (kyrio¯s).159

These lengthy quotations establish that Palamas stands firmly within an apophatic tradition according to which the “beyond-being being” [hyperousios ousia] of God transcends all creaturely opposition.160 On this view, “despite the grammatical form of hyperousios ousia, ousia is not a noun referring to a divine ‘essence’ . . . Rather, hyperousios

‘indicates’ the Godhead as uncoordinated with all and, thus, beyond all names whatsoever.”161 For Palamas, then, in contrast to both Augustine and Aquinas, the

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159. PG 150, col. 937, Gregorii Palamae dialogus qui inscribitur Theophanes sive de divinitatis et rerum divinarum communicabilitate et incommunicabilite. Quoted in Bulgakov, Unfading Light, 132.

160. The phrase “beyond-being being” is Jones’s translation. “An Absolutely Simple God?”

161. John D. Jones, “An Absolutely Simple God?” 391–92. Cf. , The Orthodox Faith, I.12: “Since the Divinity is incomprehensible, He must remain

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incomprehensibility of the divine “essence” is not merely a limitation of the present life, but extends to all creatures for eternity: “there is absolutely no creature that possesses the capacity to perceive the Creator’s nature.”162

Having already taken for granted the influence of a pernicious Neoplatonism,

Williams’s 1977 article simply assumes that Palamism conceives the divine essence univocally with respect to created essence, when in fact Palamas follows Dionysius in insisting that the divine “essence” is altogether beyond the dialectic of being and non- being. At this point, we can take with complete seriousness Williams’s remarks about the grammatical function of “essence” language. Rather than think of the divine essence as some “stuff” beyond our reach, the affirmation of God’s unknowability is a grammatical- liturgical reminder of the radical freedom and transcendence of God.

3.3.1. Apparent Tension between Dionysius and Palamas Can Be Mitigated by a

“Grammatical” Reading of “Essence”. If this reading of Palamas is correct, he has been badly misread by his critics, and, inquiring as to the cause of such misreading, we find that Palamas is neither absolutely clear about nor entirely consistent in adhering to this

Dionysian theological grammar. At points his language is plainly misleading: he does occasionally lapse into speaking in ways that picture the divine “essence” as some inaccessible thing—e.g., God does not “allow Himself to be seen in His superessential essence,” his super-essential essence is “beyond all contact”163 and “lies beyond in hidden

———————————— absolutely nameless. . . . But, since He is the cause of all things and possesses beforehand in Himself the reasons and causes of all, so He can be named after all things . . . in so far as He is the cause of all beings and of every essence, He is called ‘Being’ and ‘Essence.’” St John of Damascus, Writings, trans. Frederic H. Chase, reprint, 1958, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 37 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 194–95.

162. Chapter 94, One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, 4:391. Cf. John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith I.1-2.

163. Triads III.ii.14.

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places.”164 That Palamas speaks of the divine essence as “invisible”165 and

“imparticipable”166 reinforces the impression of its substantial character.

Whereas Dionysius assiduously avoids speaking of either ousia or physis in

reference to divinity,167 Palamas and other Eastern authors do regularly use these terms,

in apparent tension with their apophatic principles, according to which speech

concerning the essence in the abstract is nonsensical. Moreover, the analogy between the

divine essence-energies and created essences-energies, popular with Palamas 168 and

others, is absent from Dionysius since it seemingly relies on the assumption of

ontological continuity between created and divine “essences.” Strictly speaking, the

analogy ought to be avoided since the divine ousia is not subsumable within a formal

relationship (essence : energies) equally applicable to created essences. God’s radical

transcendence means that “there is no analogy between beings and the divine ‘ousia’ but

only between the beings and the divine energies.”169

It would seem that there is genuine tension here between Dionysius and Palamas.

Some of the language of “essence” in Palamas and others does give the appearance of a

substantial conception, and so stands in need of clarification. That said, the tension is

also significantly mitigated by the fact that much of this “essence” language can be seen

as exercising precisely the kind of “grammatical” or “regulative” function Williams

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164. Dialogue §37 in Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite, 76. This language echoes the image of Gregory of Nazianzus, who pictures the divine nature as abiding in the Holy of Holies, “within the first veil and . . . hidden by the cherubim.” Oration 28.3.

165. Triads III.ii.14.

166. Triads III.ii.13.

167. John D. Jones, “An Absolutely Simple God?” 393.

168. E.g., Triads III.i.24., ii.7 (citing Basil).

169. John D. Jones, “An Absolutely Simple God?” 401–2.

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proposes.170 An example of this “grammatical” understanding of essence can be seen in the term homoousios, which is not positing that Jesus and God the Father belong to the same genus, much less that they jointly occupy some esoteric divine “hinterland.”

Rather, it stipulates that language about Jesus of Nazareth should be governed by the

“grammar” of divinity (excepting the hypostatic propria). This “grammar” is itself

established by way of a theophanic-energetic logic according to which God is fully and

authentically present in each energetic act of self-manifestation while infinitely

transcending all of them.171 The central dynamic is one of identity-in-difference, of a self-

gift shadowed by the excess of inexhaustible plenitude. God gives himself to be known,

while remaining ineffably transcendent.

The homoousios, it seems to me, articulates something like this logic of identity-in-

difference. First, with respect to identity: early Christians believed, for soteriological

reasons, that God himself was immediately at work in Jesus’ actions. This identity of

activity, subsequently articulated as a doctrine of inseparable operations,172 arose from

the experiences of Christians for whom the “‘generative’ character of [Jesus’] story [was]

as radical as the generative significance of our language about the world’s source and

context, God.”173 That is, a “world-recreating” power comparable to the world-creating

power confessed of God was experienced by Christians in connection with the life and

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170. I develop this “grammatical” reading further in chapter five. See page 275.

171. Chapter seven examines this theophanic logic and its scriptural sources in more detail, but here we can observe that it involves the dual affirmation that the Old Testament prophets—e.g., Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel—genuinely saw the divine Face rather than something created (something less or other than God), and that no theophany is comprehensive, exhausting what there is to see and know of the Godhead.

172. Cf. John 5:19: “Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise.’”

173. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Revelation,” 138.

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death of Jesus. To believe, as they did, that Jesus did what only God could do indicated that Jesus shared in aspects of the Father’s existence.174 Homoousios, then, is less a premise asserting common “stuffness” shared by Jesus and the Father than a conclusion drawn from their shared activity/energeia.175 Jesus’ acts are understood as God’s own,

such that the shared divine energeia indicate . Christ’s actions are God’s

immediate work, so that “[s]peaking well of God is bound up with speaking well of

Christ in a strictly correlative manner.”176 The homoousios thus arises from an “energetic”

basis: “What is embodied and enacted in Christ, though occurring at a specific historical

moment and in a particular context, is nevertheless God’s own work and, as such,

eternal or timeless.”177 Christians thus confess that this human life is “the image (eiko¯n) of

the invisible God” (Col 1:15) which perfectly manifests the eternal divine self-gift.178

Seen in its grammatical capacity, homoousios does not represent careless

speculation concerning the “what-ness” of God. That is, the positive clarification of

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174. Cf. Mark 2:7: “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is ! Who can forgive but God alone?”

175. Athanasius thus appeals in his Orations to “the unity of action between Father and Son and hence to the truly divine nature of the Son’s redemptive and ‘deifying’ activity.” Quoted in Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 113.

176. Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine, foreword by Brian E. Daley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2011), 130.

177. John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 76. Cf. “God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ in such a way that “what is beheld is the transcendent power of divinity manifested precisely in the things external to the divine nature—in flesh, in darkness, and in death.” Ibid., 34.

178. Though space does not permit a full treatment of the question, it should be noted that, while manifesting the divine activity in a way continuous with earlier theophanies, Jesus also transforms the theophanic tradition, not least in the way he crystallizes a new sense of personal or hypostatic differentiation in the divine life. That is, Jesus is not simply the latest in a series of theophanies. To the contrary, that theophanic tradition is re-interpreted in the light of Christ, such that the Old Testament theophanies become “Christophanies.”

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scripture’s titles for Christ “does not inappropriately detract from the equally vital scriptural insistence that God’s nature is unknown to us. Homoousios is thus defended not by reference to a detailed understanding of what the term implies in itself, but by arguing that it is an important cipher for other terms and phrases.”179 Khaled Anatolios agrees, saying

Neither the council fathers of Nicaea nor Athanasius himself were working with

any determinate technical sense of ousia or homoousios. Moreover, they were not

attempting to signify the divine essence by directly invoking an objective

referent, whether the being of God or some creaturely analogue. The meaning of

homoousios thus resides not in its inherent capacity to invoke an objective referent

on its own, but rather in its assigned function of regulating how scriptural

language as a whole refers to God and Christ.180

We might say, then, that homoousios is less an answer to the “what?” question (“what is

God?”) than the “who?” question, insisting that the life of Jesus of Nazareth is definitive for our conception of divinity.181 Homoousios affirms that “what we see in Christ, as proclaimed by the apostles, is what it is to be God, yet other than the God whom Christ calls upon as Father and makes known through, and is himself made known by, the

Holy Spirit.”182 Such a grammatical reading of the language of “essence” mitigates

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179. Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 142–43.

180. Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine, 128.

181. Therefore, we should place “all talk about the Word on the uncreated ‘side’ of the boundary,” and the whole “nexus” of scriptural terms should be read “in the direction of the radical ontological correlativity of Father and Son.” Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 143; Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine, 128.

182. Behr, The Mystery of Christ, 174.

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much, if not all, of the tension perceived between homoousios and Dionysian apophaticism, and it arguably does the same for Palamism.

3.3.2. Palamism and Personalism Are Complementary. A second line of objection (in addition to the tension with Dionysius) can be located in Williams’s repeated suggestion that personalism can effectively do the work of the essence-energies distinction without its attendant philosophical confusion—that is, that it would be better to attend to the divine Subject rather than the divine ousia.183 Clearly, such personalist language appealed

to Palamas, as it has to several twentieth-century Eastern Orthodox theologians (e.g.,

Lossky, Stăniloae, Yannaras). The kinship that many of these theologians have discerned

between personalism and the essence-energies distinction suggests, however, not that one

model should eclipse or supplant the other—since personalism seems hardly less

susceptible to misunderstanding when taken in isolation—but that the respective accents

of the two models actually complement one another.184

While granting the merits of personalist discourse, we can observe that the

essence-energies distinction complements personalism in its greater accent on (1) the

ontological distinction, and (2) the depth of union between God and humanity, both of

which are relatively under-served by personalism. First, personalism alone risks

assimilating the divine “Persons” to a univocal concept of “person,” and so conceiving

the Trinity as a community of “individuals.”185 On one hand, there are certain “formal”

comparisons that can be made between created and uncreated “persons”—for example,

both “essences” are concretized, made real, insofar as they subsist hypostatically.186 But

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183. Rowan Williams, “Commentary,” 42.

184. Personalism helps guard against readings of the distinction that would set the essence in opposition to the energies (by uniting them hypostatically) or produce impersonal notions of divinity.

185. Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 408. Williams notes that “God and the Church are not “two examples of life in ‘communion.’” Tokens of Trust, 137.

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leaving the comparison there—without registering that the Trinitarian Persons are infinite and that the divine nature they hypostatize is so radically transcendent that even to speak of it as a “nature” is misleading—risks giving the impression that created and uncreated “persons” belong to a common genus.187 The danger here parallels that of reading the divine “super-essence” as belonging to the class of “essences.” By insisting on the uniquely “unknowable” character of the divine “essence,” the Palamite distinction underscores the ontological distinction between uncreated and created.

The second element registered more forcefully by the essence-energies distinction than by personalism is, perhaps surprisingly, the depth of communion offered by God to humanity. The distinction’s contribution here can be clarified with help from Maximus the Confessor, who distinguished two forms of energies belonging to the same essence or nature: those that are homogeneous to the nature of the person who causes the energy and those that are heterogenous. Christos Yannaras explains Maximus’s distinction, saying:

There are . . . energies which are manifested in a manner homogeneous (of the

same kind, of the same character, of the same quality) with the nature of the one

acting. There are also energies which are revealed by means of essences of a kind

different from the nature of the one acting. The human voice, for instance,

articulate expression, is an energy of reason homogeneous with the nature of

man. But [there] can also be a disclosure of the energy of the reason by means of

essences “heterogeneous” to the nature of man the ability of other essences to be

formed into reason, such as writing, colour, marble, music.188

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186. Stăniloae, Revelation and Knowledge of the Triune God, 129.

187. Stăniloae registers this note of continuity-in-discontinuity by observing that, “If each person is a mystery which defies definition, the divine Person is the infinite mystery.” Dumitru Stăniloae, “Jesus Christ, Incarnate Logos of God, Source of Freedom and Unity,” The Ecumenical Review 26, no. 3 (July 1974): 405.

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Maximus’s distinction posits the very analogue between created and uncreated Persons that we have just examined, though it adheres to the regulative notion articulated above—that is, it attends to the person-revealing energies rather than the essence in isolation. Moreover, in light of Maximus’s other writings, it is evident that distinguishing the two forms of energies also draws out the distinction, and not only the analogy, between created and uncreated persons since only an uncreated Person can be wholly present in each of the energies and, in the case of homogeneous energies, present in a transfiguring way. That is, the Church’s experience of the deifying divine grace witnesses to God’s homogeneous energy as an “ecstatic self-offering of nature in terms of personal otherness.”189 Theophanies, the vision of the divine light, and ultimately deification are, then, the signs of an energy homogeneous (i.e., not merely heterogeneous) to the divine nature. Such deifying homogeneous energy—uncreated grace—is proper only to divine Persons.

Maximus’s distinction further underscores what is missing from the Western framework from an Eastern Orthodox point of view. Both East and West posit the intra- trinitarian procession of the Son and Spirit from the Father (though disagreeing about the filioque); both also confess the “procession” or emanation of created being from the divinity. Where the first is “essential” (“from the ousia of the Father”), the latter is non- essential and freely willed. Both traditions thus have a notion of “heterogeneous” energies, which regards creation as a form of divine self-gift which constitutes the otherness of created reality.190 On the Eastern view, however, what is still missing in the

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188. Yannaras, Elements of Faith, 44.

189. Christos Yannaras, “The Distinction Between Essence and Energies and Its Importance for Theology,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 19, no. 4 (1975): 237.

190. As W. Norris Clarke has argued, the Thomistic conception of the person is receptive to its own “completion” if one see personal acts as self-communicative, such that God’s operatio are understood as a revelation of God’s esse. See his Person and Being,

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Augustinian-Thomistic perspective is any conceptual room for “homogenous” energies, the deifying, uncreated grace of Orthodox theology. These are what we have been calling the divine energies, a kind of third “procession,” if you will, mediate to the other two.

Though not the essence, these homogeneous energies proceed from and so depend on the essence; they do not possess existence independently from the essence. These energies are “enhypostatic,” expressing, manifesting and communicating the divine

Persons. The human voice expresses one’s existence in a unique, personally inflected way, without being identical to the person. Analogously, the divine light shines forth the

Trinitarian love without being either identical to any of the Persons or reducible to a less-than-personal created effect. Absent such a notion, it is unsurprising that East and

West are divided over how to conceive of participation and deification. In the next section I consider some of these persistent, “structural” differences between the two vocabularies.

4. The Debate Over Palamism Reveals “Structural” Differences between Eastern and

Western Theological Vocabularies

Williams’s article represents much of the prevailing Western view of Palamism and so helpfully locates several of the key points of divergence between the Eastern and

Western theological vocabularies. Accordingly, the foregoing consideration of criticisms and responses takes us beyond focused questions of interpretation to a consideration of the deeper differences between the two conceptual worlds, each with its own spiritual- theological Gestalt. In this section, I broaden the scope of my investigation in order to clarify a sense of these underlying “fault lines” with the aim of promoting greater awareness: first of where ecumenical similarities and differences lie, and second of the

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The Aquinas Lecture (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1993), esp. 5–13. That is, God’s actions (or energies) can themselves be seen as self-manifestations, as theophanies. This goes some distance toward the Eastern understanding of the divine energies. I am indebted to Ethan Smith for drawing this connection to my attention.

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possibility that the two traditions might fruitfully be construed precisely as alternative vocabularies—each with its respective strengths and weaknesses—rather than as rival representations. Rather than seeking to demonstrate the superiority of either tradition, I hope to cultivate mutual recognition and an awareness both of the resources each vocabulary affords and the aporia with which each wrestles.191 I will focus on three key areas of difference: participation, the role of the intellect and divine simplicity.

4.1. The Doctrine of the Divine Energeia Reflects the Difference Between Eastern and Western

Traditions with Respect to Participation

The tradition of speaking of God’s energeiai (’ενε'ργεια) is fundamentally indebted

to Scripture, where Paul’s usage of the language establishes a basis for a “synergistic

ontology.”192 As Bradshaw highlights, in Scripture energeia can be imparted, but must

also be received. Thus, while God’s activity imparts the energy to do His will, “this

energy must be expressed or ‘worked out’ in order to be effective.”193 On Paul’s view,

Bradshaw concludes, “synergy, the cooperation of God and man, is neither a

symmetrical relation nor one in which the divine overpowers and replaces the human. It

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191. Indeed, I rather suspect that the question of which tradition appears more compelling would mostly be a matter of the tradition to which one belongs, since criteria for such judgments would be largely internal to the tradition of inquiry. For more on traditional encounter and negotiation, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).

192. Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 104. Bradshaw shows that Paul reserves the language of energeia—i.e., energeia (“energy” or “activity”) and energein (“to energize”)—for the activity of spiritual agents, who are capable of imparting energy to another agent, i.e., of “entering as a force into others.” Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 101; David Bradshaw, “The Divine Energies in the New Testament,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 50, no. 3 (2006): 198; David Bradshaw, “The Divine Glory and the Divine Energies,” Faith and Philosophy 23, no. 3 (July 2006): 283. The accent is not on external control, but rather cooperation. Bradshaw thus renders the relevant verbal sense as “to be active in a way that imparts energy or calls it forth from a potency already present.” “The Divine Energies in the New Testament,” 216.

193. Bradshaw, “The Divine Glory and the Divine Energies,” 283.

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is rather one in which the human becomes fully human by embracing the divine.”194 The

New Testament innovation, then, was to express this traditional understanding of divine activity in the language of energeia, which in turn provides an important precedent for the Greek Fathers’ later conception of the divine energeia.195

The New Testament usage was reinforced for the patristic authors by the

influence of Aristotle, who spoke of energeia both as actuality and as an activity revelatory

of essence. These two uses would be differently configured by the Byzantine and Latin

mainstreams based on different formulations of the triad ousia, energeia, and dynamis. In

its in the middle ages, the West accented the sense of energeia as

“actuality,” locating the fundamental contrast between energeia and dynamis in order to

contrast the ousia that has actuality (energeia) with what merely has potentiality

(dynamis).196 This understanding of Aristotle laid the groundwork for Aquinas’s equation

of God’s ousia with energeia, since, as with Aristotle’s Prime Mover, the divine essence is

pure actuality in the sense of having no unrealized potentiality.197 The simplest way of

drawing the contrast with the East would be to say that Byzantine theology reflected a

greater emphasis on Aristotle’s second understanding of energeia, that is, as self-

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194. Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 106.

195. Bradshaw, “The Divine Energies in the New Testament,” 191. Bradshaw acknowledges that Paul “does not explicitly distinguish the divine energy from the divine essence or being (ου’σι'α).” Nonetheless, “that there is such a distinction can hardly be doubted, for the divine energy is shared with creatures, and the same cannot be said of the divine essence. Scripture has its own way of pointing to this distinction, as in the contrast between God’s ‘face’ and ‘backside’ in Ex 33, or the discussion of the divine glory and its communication to the disciples in Jn 17. To appreciate fully the Scriptural basis of the essence/energies distinction, one must take into account the many ways in which Scripture speaks of God as both known and unknown, both open to participation and wholly beyond it.” Ibid., 222. Lossky remarked that the “structure” of the essence- energies distinction was implied in the “paradox of the Christian revelation.” Cf. Lossky, “Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology,” 14–15.

196. Reid, Energies of the Spirit, 10.

197. Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 96.

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communicating activity. Thus, the East tended to regard energeia (“energy”) and dynamis

(“power”) as basically synonymous, accenting the distinction between the ousia and its revelation through activity (energeia or dynamis).

This way of formulating the contrast has the virtue of simplicity, but a fuller picture can be gleaned from Torstein Tollefsen’s monograph, Activity and Participation, which traces the twin concepts of the title in non-Christian thought (chiefly Aristotle and

Plotinus) and then in the Byzantine theological tradition running through the

Cappadocians, Dionysius, Maximus and Palamas. According to Tollefsen, this tradition of Eastern theology, like Neoplatonism, actually accommodated both of Aristotle’s understandings of energeia through the “doctrine of double activity.” Here it is important to note that the terms under consideration (i.e., essence, activity and participation) belonged to a broader philosophical-cum-theological discourse aimed in part at addressing the relation between “higher and lower reality, God and what comes ‘after’

God.”198 The question of how to articulate this relation was common to both

Neoplatonism and Christianity, though Tollefsen assiduously avoids strong claims as to

Neoplatonism’s influence on Christianity.199 He argues instead that “the Christian application of the terminology and conceptual schemes of activity and participation is a further development of a general philosophical concern in the specific context of

Christian topics.”200

Tollefsen’s discussion takes Plotinus’s “doctrine of double activity” as an illuminating point of comparison with later Christian thought. In Ennead 5, Plotinus

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198. Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 3.

199. Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 33. “This is a quite intricate matter, and I am rather critical about assertions of influence and dependence. I make the claim, however, that the two ‘movements’ coped with problems of a similar kind.” Ibid., 212.

200. Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 13.

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addresses the question of how the transcendent One (the “Intellectual Object”) produces the second principle, Mind (Nous; the “Intellectual-Principle”). To the question of how anything can arise from the One’s state of perfect rest, he responds:

There is in everything the Act of the Essence and the Act going out from the

Essence: the first Act is the thing itself in its realized identity, the second Act is an

inevitably following outgo from the first, an emanation distinct from the thing

itself. Thus even in fire there is the warmth comported by its essential nature and

there is the warmth going instantaneously outward from that characterizing heat

by the fact that the fire, remaining unchangeably fire, utters the Act native to its

essential reality. So it is in the divine also: or rather we have there the earlier form

of the double act: the divine remains in its own unchanging being, but from its

perfection and from the Act included in its nature there emanates the secondary

or issuing Act which — as the output of a mighty power, the mightiest there is —

attains to Real Being as second to that which stands above all Being. That

transcendent was the potentiality of the All; this secondary is the All made actual.

(Ennead 5.4.2)

In everything, Plotinus says, there is an “internal” activity of the essence—its actuality or the act existing—and an “external” activity that goes out from the essence.201 For purposes of comparison, we can highlight that, in the case of the One, Plotinus conceives this external or derived activity as (1) incidental, (2) following necessarily from the its internal activity, and (3) producing something ontologically different from and lesser than the One.202

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201. Ibid., 21–22.

202. Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 22. Tollefsen observes that in this sense, the One, “unlike the Aristotelian God, is somehow a creator—not in the Christian sense,

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Together with Neoplatonism’s exitus-reditus scheme, this doctrine of double

activity became a commonplace “in the intellectual climate of late antiquity.”203 At the

same time, the Christian use of such terminology also owes to the fact that “notions of

procession and conversion were already present in Christian speculation from other and

earlier sources.”204 The Cappadocians thus employed the notion of double activity, as

well as the exitus-reditus scheme, though with important differences from Plotinus.205

The Cappadocians agreed with Plotinus in teaching that the divine essence was beyond comprehension, though unlike him they identified this essence with the triadic being of God, which required the radical transformation of the doctrine of double activity. The Cappadocians employed the language of “internal” activity to speak of

“that which pertains to the being of the Godhead as such,” while “[t]he term ‘external’ . .

. [was] applied in two senses, namely, concerning the ‘structuring’ of the divinity

(theologically), and concerning God’s activity towards created otherness, in creating, preserving, and making provisions for its being and salvation (economically).”206 Despite the similarity in terminology (“external activity”), Tollefsen stresses that “we should not think that the internal/external activity within the sphere of the Godhead and the external activity beyond the divine being occur in an identical manner. Internal/external acts within the sphere of the divine being itself must have an immediacy that external divine acts beyond God’s being cannot have since they are directed to the establishment of what is other than God.”207 Accordingly, with respect to the relations of “generation”

———————————— but in the sense that all lower strata of being results from its internal energeia.” Ibid., 24.

203. Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 33.

204. Ibid.

205. Ibid., 34.

206. Ibid., 47–48.

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and “procession,” the activity in question can be seen as simultaneously external and

internal: “external” in the sense that they spring from the monarchia of the Father;

internal in the sense that they belong to the divine being itself, though the Cappadocians

refused to understand the divine essence “along Aristotelian or Plotinian lines as being

identical with these activities.”208

Unsurprisingly, both “external” activities required the transformation of the

pagan conception. Perhaps the most fundamental of these differences was the

Trinitarian transformation already noted, together with the sense that Christian theology

conceives the hypostases as Persons, such that the natural energeiai of the divine essence become personal acts.209 The Plotinian system of necessary, ontologically subordinate emanation needed to be adapted to reflect two Christian doctrines: “firstly, the institution of a divine triad of consubstantial hypostases, and secondly, the creation of beings other than God.”210 Thus “Gregory had to consider and work with the suppositions that: firstly, there should be natural continuity within the sphere of the divine, but without essential subordination; secondly, there can be no natural continuity between God and creation; and finally, God is a creator by a certain modified act of will.”211

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207. Ibid., 58.

208. Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 35. Later Christian writers, such as Maximus, eschewed speaking of the Son’s generation and the Spirit’s spiration as “external activities,” thus simplifying this double sense of “external activity.”

209. Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 214.

210. Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 64. “The Plotinian One does not will the second (and the third) hypostases, and therefore these hypostases occur incidentally below it. The Gregorian God wills the second (and the third) hypostases, and because of this direct act of will, the Son (and the Spirit) are on the level of the Father. To Gregory, the second (and the third) hypostases are of the same essence, i.e. with the first.” Ibid., 65.

211. Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 49.

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The Cappadocian distinction between internal and external activity represents a clear anticipation of Palamism since, for the Cappadocians, “[w]e know God from His activities and these come down to us, while His essence remains unapproachable. We must distinguish, consequently, between what God is in Himself and His activities ad extra.”212 Tollefsen finds the same understanding of activity and participation in both

Dionysius213 and Maximus, leading him to conclude that “[i]n its contents there is not any perspicuous deviation between the doctrines of earlier Christian thinkers and

Gregory Palamas.”214

Tollefsen’s work thus represents a strong rebuttal to the charge that Palamas was an innovator. It also illuminates Palamas’s conception of participation, which Williams

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212. Ibid., 36–37.

213. “It seems to me quite probable that a doctrine of double activity (much like Plotinus’) or of remaining–proceeding–converting (much like Proclus’) represents the causal scheme behind Dionysius’ allusions to the mystery of the establishment of the Christian Trinity.” Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 70.

214. Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 197. He continues, “Even if the different strategies Palamas suggests for the clarification of the relation and distinction may not be absolutely satisfactory, I cannot see that his philosophical point is unsound. In any case, if it is unsound, then both the Neoplatonist and the Christian traditions suffer the same blow.” A little later, he observes that “[t]he only major point that makes Palamas’ thought different, is that he attempts to use a vocabulary that highlights the difference between essence and activity.” Ibid., 200. Loudovikos remarks, along similar lines, that “A whole river of Greek Patristic texts flows through [Palamas’s] work, starting with the Cappadocians, along with Athanasius, Cyril, , Maximus and John Damascene, and ending with the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils postulating the distinction between uncreated essence and uncreated energies, and defining the latter as the multiple ‘names’ of God (Basil), or ‘processions’ (Dionysius), or ‘participations’ (Dionysius and Maximus), or as ‘divinity’ (Gregory of Nyssa, Anastasius of Sinai), or as the uncreated ‘things around God’ (Maximus and Palamas), or as ‘natural symbols’ of God, i.e., of the same uncreated nature with God (Palamas with reference to Maximus), or as ‘continual and eternal glory’ (John Damascene), or as ‘philanthropy and providence and goodness of God’ (Palamas with reference to Gregory of Nyssa), or as ‘wisdom and power and art’ of God (Basil), or, finally, as the ‘divine logoi of things’ (reference to Maximus again).” Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 124.

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and others have maintained was naïvely materialistic and “insupportably ‘realist.’”215

First, Joost van Rossum argues that “participate,” which literally means “to grasp a part,” is likely a misleading translation here since “the Greek verb µετε'χειν [metechein, lit.

“to have with”] means to ‘share,’ or to ‘communicate with.’”216 The language of energeia is closely bound up with such sharing, expressing both self-communicating activity and the possibility through the energies of authentic communion. Significantly, this term

(metechein) is used of the Eucharist in 1 Corinthians 10 (vv. 17, 21, 30). Though this usage at first appears to present a more “substantial” or “materialist” picture of participation (i.e., taking part of the Eucharist bread), Paul’s emphasis is on the fact that what is participated is undivided (v. 17: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread”; v. 21: You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.”).217 The antinomical relation pictured by Paul, in which Christ’s body is distributed without partition, is captured in the Eucharistic anaphora of the of St , in which the priest says: “The

Lamb of God is broken and distributed, broken yet not divided, ever eaten yet never consumed, but sanctifies those who partake [του`ς µετε'χοντας, tous metechontas].”218

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215. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 44. Cf. Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky,” 167; Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 59; and Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, III: 67.

216. Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 379.

217. This connection between participation and Eucharist is also found in Palamas. Cf. Triads I.iii.18–19, II.iii.26 and Against Akindynos 6.12.28, 4.9.16. See Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 129.

218. The Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the Saints John Chrysostom, The Greek text together with a translation into English, issued with the blessing of His All-Holiness the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I on the initiative of His Eminence Archbishop Gregorios of Thyateira and Great Britain for use in the Churches of the Archdiocese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 41.

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According to Tollefsen, the basic meaning of “energetic” language is activity, so that “the essential aspect of participation is that God executes His ‘activity’ in the created sphere.”219 This active-dynamic (as opposed to substantial) understanding of

Palamite participation is supported by Palamas’s connection of the language of energeia

with Maximus’s logoi, which articulate the divine “intentions” or “wills” for creatures.220

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219. Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 7. “I have come to the conclusion that participation is mainly used in Christian thought to denote God’s activity in what is not God. Beings are said to participate in God because He is present in creatures by being active in them, by operating in them. This way of understanding is relevant in cosmology, incarnational theology, and soteriology.” Ibid., 210. Thus Maximus, in Chapters on Knowledge I.47, says that the natural energy of creatures comes to rest when God actualizes the divine energy in created beings. Similarly, he defines a clean heart as “one which has not at all any natural movement in any way whatever.” Ibid., II.81, in Saint Maximus the Confessor, Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, translation and notes by George C. Berthold, introduction by Jaroslav Pelikan, preface by Irénée-Henri Dalmais, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1985).

220. “The divine activity understood as logoi of this kind is essence-making, life- making, and wisdom-making. By this activity beings are made and preserved. All of this seems to make quite good sense, and is so far in accordance with St Maximus’ doctrine of logoi.” Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 191. These Maximian logoi are the inner “principles” or divine “ideas” of beings realized dialogically and eschatologically with free creatures. See Nikolaos Loudovikos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity, trans. Elizabeth Theokritoff (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2010). “The term ‘logoi of beings’ is not translatable in English. Logos means ‘constitutive principle,’ ‘inner principle,’ ‘essential principle,’ ‘rationale,’ ‘reason’ or simply ‘word.’ Identified with God’s living will, the uncreated logoi are acts (’ενε'ργειαι) of his loving divine will in constant dialogue with creation: logos means always dia-logos (dialogue) in the Greek patristic tradition and particularly in St Maximus the Confessor’s thought. Logos is uncreated but distinct from uncreated divine being. It is personal (enhypostatos) not in the sense that it is a being itself, but in the sense that it is the volitive expression of a personal being who moves his essence to act ad extra. Actus does not mean here, as in the Aquinatian tradition, the real and active existence of God himself, but his work and ‘world’ outside of himself. This is a very crucial and substantial difference between the Christian East and West.” Nikolaos Loudovikos, “Ontology Celebrated: Remarks of an Orthodox on Radical Orthodoxy,” in Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy, ed. Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 147. On the dialogical and eschatological character of the logoi, Loudovikos remarks, “By the logoi, . . . God creates, that is proposes to beings their own essences and an ontological dialogue follows. If essence is thus given, its ‘mode of existence’ is only the result of this dialogue between the logos-word of God and the logos-word of man. That means that the final esse of created beings is unknown, indeterminate, because it is the eschatological result of a long dialogue between God and man, a dialogue which culminates in the cross and the resurrection of Christ.” Ibid., 148. Cf. Ian A. McFarland, The Divine Image: Envisioning

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The energies, then, are that through which God’s qualities are made visible in creatures and by which each creature comes to realize its corresponding divine will (logos) in higher and higher degrees.221 This connection between energeia and the logoi argues against a “substantial” interpretation of participation, since God’s will, though unique to each creature, is hardly divided or somehow parceled out among beings. In sum, then, we can conclude that for the mainstream of the Greek-Byzantine theological tradition participation is understood not as the lower reality’s “possessing a part” of the higher, but rather as the activity of the higher reality in the lower, to which it is wholly present.222

———————————— the Invisible God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 37.

221. “In the thought of the Greek Fathers the divine ideas are more dynamic, intentional in character. Their place is not in the essence, but in ‘that which is after the essence,’ the divine energies: for the ideas are to be identified with the will or wills (θελη'µα`τα) which determine the different modes according to which created beings participate in the creative energies.” Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 95. observes that this conception of the energies amounts to a rejection of the Platonic notion of static divine ideas or universals, since “each creature, and not each species or genus, has its corresponding uncreated, divine energy or will.” “Notes on the Palamite Controversy and Related Topics – Part I,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 6, no. 2 (Winter 1960–61): 189. Each creature, then, participates in the divine energies in a unique way according to its own capacity: “Divinity is fully manifested and entirely present in the δυνα'µεις, but created beings participate therein according to the proportion or analogy proper to each . . . The hierarchy of Dionysius does not in any way limit the fulness of union. At each step of the ladder, union with God is fully realized, but this fulness is not uniform: it is personal.” Lossky, “Darkness and Light in the Knowledge of God,” 41.

222. In this connection we could compare Plotinus, who, according to Tollefsen, “avoids the vulgar notion of participation with its materialistic connotations. Intelligible principles do not correspond to bodily beings, like bread, for instance, that may be cut into pieces and received bit by bit by participants. Whenever intelligible principles are present, they are present as a whole. They are not localized in extended space, but spatial bodies find the principles wherever bodies are located and then receive the whole of the intelligible principle into themselves according to the limitations found within their own constitution. The principle is received by the power executed by it, a power that is not separated from the principle, but rather a power of the activity ad extra of the principle that is made present according to the receptive capacity of the recipient.” Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 30–31.

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4.2. The Difference between Eastern and Western Construals of the Intellect’s Role Owes to Their

Reception of Alternative Streams of Neoplatonic Thought

The differences between the Eastern and Western traditions are also illuminated through the contrast between the conception of the intellect in Aristotelian and Platonic theology. On one hand, and ethics have an intellectualist tenor, since the human intellect is able to achieve partial isomorphism with the Prime Mover as first cause.223 By contrast, the first principle of Platonic theology is transcendent, unknowable, “the source of being for other things, while itself ‘beyond being.’ Yet because it is also the Good, all things in some inchoate way seek it.”224 Part of the genius of Plotinus was to harmonize these principles, identifying the Platonic One (or Good) as the first principle and the Aristotelian Prime Mover as the second, Intellect.225 Thus the

Plotinian One, as the giver of form, is itself formless—“no-thing, not any particular being

because it is the source of all particular being.”226 Yet in the overflow of its goodness, the

One gives rise to Intellect, which is present in all things “as their being, intelligibility,

life, and other perfections.”227

This Plotinian synthesis was received differently in the East and West, with each

tradition identifying the separate Plotinian hypostases with the one God in a distinct

way. In the East, the two principles were largely preserved, though transformed in order

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223. Thomas Nagel, “Aristotle on ,” 17, no. 3 (1972): 252– 59; Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 98.

224. Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 99.

225. “The One of Plotinus is not an intellect or a self-thinking thought, like the Aristotelian God. The subject and object of thought coincide in the Aristotelian God as it does in the Mind of Plotinus’ system, but even so these two entities have a certain dual character that the One definitely transcends.” Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 22.

226. Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 99.

227. Ibid.

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to speak of the two modes of God’s existence, namely, as transcendent in the essence and immanent through the energies. In the West, in part owing to a strict notion of simplicity, the two principles were identified with one another.228 Here too, God’s incomprehensibility was affirmed, though in continuity with the negative theology of the

“ontology of pure being” identified with Porphyry rather than the more radical apophaticism of the henological tradition (“the One”).229

4.2.1. Augustine’s Intellectualism Reflects the Influence of Plotinian-Porphyrean

Neoplatonism. Phillip Cary controversially argues that Augustine is the prominent exception to the apophaticism of the ontotheological (in the sense that God is identified with Being) tradition, seemingly denying the divine incomprehensibility altogether.230

Apparently the first Latin theologian to argue that the Platonic Forms should be located in the divine Mind, Augustine is idiosyncratic in the tradition, according to Cary, for his insistence that these divine Ideas, identical to the divine essence, are completely intelligible to the human mind.231 Without attempting to adjudicate the merits of the historical argument, Cary’s thesis does sharpen the sense of Western intellectualism in

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228. On the divine simplicity, see section 4.3 below, page 146.

229. Wayne J. Hankey, “Aquinas, Plato, and Neoplatonism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 55–64. While I have more to say about this below, here we can note that God is unknowable for the former tradition (i.e., “pure being”) because of human finitude whereas in the more radical apophatic tradition to which both Dionysius and Palamas belong, God’s essence is unknowable even to the angels. On this latter view, divinity is completely “uncoordinated” from all created existence.

230. For a perspective at odds with Cary, see Lewis Ayres and Michel R. Barnes, “God,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, general editor Allan D. Fitzgerald, associate editors John Cavadini and et al. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 1999), 384–90. Ayres remarks that “[t]hroughout his career Augustine insists on God’s ultimate incomprehensibility. For Augustine, we can and should come to a comprehension of what God is not, but coming to a sense of what God is, is highly difficult.” Ibid., 389.

231. Phillip Cary, Augustine’s of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55.

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the wake of Augustine. Moreover, Cary’s conclusions, though contested, receive support from Wayne Hankey’s observation that the combination of (1) Augustine’s locating the divine ideas “in” the mind of the Creator, (2) his adherence to the doctrine of simplicity as identity, and (3) his identification of philosophy and religious life, threatens to produce an interpretation “which would allow direct access to God by the knowledge of the ideas in the divine mind. . . . When such knowledge of God becomes ordinary, and a step in philosophical method, the distinction of grace and nature appears to collapse.”232

Cary explains that this represents a truncation of the Plotinian hierarchy:

Plotinus’s universe has four levels: One, Mind, Soul and Bodies. Chop off the

highest of these, and you get something very much like Augustine’s three levels:

God, soul, and bodies (with God being identified as the divine Mind). . . . the

really striking thing, for our purposes, is what Augustine omits: Plotinus’s

concept of the One either disappears or else melts into the divine Mind. For it is

very clear that in locating the Ideas in the Mind of God and insisting on their

intelligibility, Augustine is identifying the Christian God with the Plotinian level

of Mind rather than the One.233

The pinnacle of the Plotinian ascent was thus flattened, and greater accent placed on the rational Intellect rather than on the unknowable One.234 “Flattening” or “telescoping”

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232. “Ratio, Reason, ,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, general editor Allan D. Fitzgerald, associate editors John Cavadini and et al. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 1999), 699. Hankey continues, “The problem here is both Augustine’s and ours.”

233. Cary, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self, 56. See also Bradshaw, “The Concept of the Divine Energies,” 115.

234. Golitzin observes that this “identification of the Trinity with, effectively, the Neoplatonists’ Νου^ς would have been anathema for Dionysius, as indeed it was for his predecessors.” Et Introibo Ad Altare Dei, 52 n52.

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Plotinus, in this way, “Augustine establishes a landing in reason and rational self- consciousness, where Plotinus, determinedly ascending, does not stop.”235

In one sense, Augustine was surely right to transform the vertically subordinated trinity of Plotinus into the “horizontal trinity of equal substantial relations.”236 More questionable is the persistently intellectualist tenor of the Augustinian ascent, which reaches its goal when faith passes to understanding conceived as intellectual vision.237

Richard Crouse thus observes that

Augustine’s Christian Platonism assigns an enhanced role and scope to intellect.

Certainly, in pagan Platonism, nous has a high place in the divine hierarchy and

in the human soul, yet the ascent to God demands a faculty of soul beyond

intellect, where union is sought by way of the religious of the mysteries,

above understanding. For Augustine, there is no such faculty. . . . ultimately,

union with the triune God is a contemplative union in memory, understanding

and love. Thus, faith is, for Augustine, not a distinct faculty, nor a substitute for

intellect, but the salvation of intellect. It is not the contradiction or the

destruction of Platonism, but its conversion and redemption.238

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235. Wayne J. Hankey, “Ratio, Reason, Rationalism,” 699.

236. Ibid.

237. Wayne J. Hankey, “Ratio, Reason, Rationalism,” 696. Cary concurs, concluding that “Beatific vision, in short, is simply the fullness of intellectual vision.” Cary, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self, 54.

238. Robert Crouse, “Paucis Mutatis Verbis: St. Augustine’s Platonism,” in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 42. Richard Sorabji agrees, “For Plotinus the highest stage of mystical experience was never intellectual . . . for Augustine the highest stage always remained intellectual, since it always involved a vision of the truth.” Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 170. Quoted in Wayne J. Hankey, “Stephen Menn’s Cartesian Augustine: Metaphysical and Ahistorically Modern,” Animus 3 (1998): 205 n101,

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Though Augustinian reason only finds its proper end when united with love, “self- certain reason never departs.”239 Thus, while Hankey rejects the strict attribution of the term “rationalist” to Augustine’s thought—in the sense that God could already be comprehended by human reason—he ultimately judges Augustine’s account of human nature and its end to be intellectualist: “Augustine stresses the union of intellect and love so that vision is possession.”240

This represents an important Augustinian transformation of Plotinus (and

Porphyry),241 for whom union with the One produces multiple selves: the lower self which achieves self-reflexive union with the Nous and the higher self which is united with the One beyond reason and self-knowledge.242 Self-identity is thus unresolved for

Plotinus, whose higher and lower selves “remain irreducibly beside one another because both the One and also the substantial Being of Intellectual self-relation are models and causes of its identity, freedom and authentic existence.”243 By identifying the Plotinian

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Http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/Articles/Volume%203/hankey3.pdf.

239. Wayne J. Hankey, “Ratio, Reason, Rationalism,” 701. In an earlier article, Hankey argued that “Knowledge is finally for Augustine what makes us happy. We seek union with the Good in contemplation. Vision is the realization of what love seeks; love is a steadfast perceiving. . . . The contemplation, or wisdom, which makes us happy is knowledge of all things in the divine Word.” Wayne J. Hankey, “Stephen Menn’s Cartesian Augustine,” 207.

240. Wayne J. Hankey, “Ratio, Reason, Rationalism,” 701. Emphasis added.

241. See Frederick Van Fleteren, “Porphyry,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, general editor Allan D. Fitzgerald, associate editors John Cavadini and et al. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 1999), 661–63.

242. “Ultimately the One and the individual belong together; returning to the One, the individual returns to itself. But awareness, when we are with the One, is beyond reason and intellectual self-reflexion. There, the individual is returned to itself and also ‘he is not himself.’ Certainly, there, self-knowledge and apprehension of the One cannot be held together. We are beyond being and self-knowledge because the One is itself beyond being and reflexive knowing.” Wayne J. Hankey, “Stephen Menn’s Cartesian Augustine,” 203.

243. Wayne J. Hankey, “Stephen Menn’s Cartesian Augustine,” 204.

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One and Mind, Augustine effects a theological transformation that enables him to “unify the self and to bring it together with God in self-knowledge more completely than

Plotinus.”244 Accordingly, Hankey says, “[t]he fundamental difference between

Augustine and Plotinus is that Augustine is able to carry this self-reflexivity all the way through. It is carried further within the individual self so that reflexivity becomes a positive relation of remembering, knowing and loving on which much else can be established. It is also carried through to the absolute First Principle so that self- knowledge and our knowledge of God as other do not need to be opposed.”245

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244. Ibid.

245. Wayne J. Hankey, “Stephen Menn’s Cartesian Augustine,” 205–6. One of the most contested questions in Augustinian scholarship over the last two decades concerns the relation of Augustine to Descartes’s Meditations. Charles Taylor well-known remark that “[o]n the way from Plato to Descartes stands Augustine” has proved a contentious one. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 127. On one side, Williams, his student Lewis Ayres, John Milbank (under their influence) and Michael Hanby (under Milbank’s influence) have argued for a “postmodern critical ” that distances Augustine from Descartes. See Milbank’s “‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’: A Short Summa in Forty Two Responses to Unasked Questions,” Modern Theology 7, no. 3 (April 1991): 225–37; Michael Hanby, “Augustine and Descartes: An Overlooked Chapter in the Story of Modern Origins,” Modern Theology 19, no. 4 (October 2003): 455–82.; Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, Radical Orthodoxy Series (London ; New York: Routledge, 2003). In two important articles, Williams attempted to extricate Augustine from this linkage with the Cartesian foundations of modernity: “I believe that the connection made between Augustine and the consciousness of ‘modernity’ is a serious error, resting on a superficial reading of his work—especially the De trin.” Rowan Williams, “Sapientia and the Trinity,” 317–18. Williams’s interpretation of Augustine rejects the possibility of substantial self-identity: “What gradually becomes plain in these books is that the mind cannot contemplate eternal truth as an object in itself: it can encounter it only through a particular kind of self-reflection. And this self-reflection likewise cannot be the perception of mind itself as object; it exists only as an awareness of the mind’s working, the mind’s movement.” Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Self- Knowledge in the De Trinitate,” 122. Jean-Luc Marion’s interpretation of the relationship is similar. He acknowledges the link between the Cartesian cogito and Augustine, but maintains that Descartes’s conception of it is quite different than Augustine’s. See Hankey’s discussion of Marion, Wayne J. Hankey, “Stephen Menn’s Cartesian Augustine,” 191–96. On the other side, Stephen Menn, Hankey and Zbigniew Janowski have all contended that there are strong connections between Descartes and Augustine. Janowski’s work in particular appears to have established the literary relationship beyond serious doubt, though how the relationship is to be interpreted remains debated. See Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge

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Augustine’s influence is deeply felt in the later Western tendency to conceive the ascent to God in predominantly intellectual terms. Recent scholarship has continued to draw out further nuance in Augustine’s mature theology, but my present concern has less to do with reevaluating Augustine’s own thought than with the reception of his legacy. That legacy itself remains contested, of course, but one can, I think, safely conclude that through two related theses—that is, that the knowledge of God is knowledge of the divine essence and that the visio Dei is reserved for the next life—

Augustine’s De Trinitate established a trajectory in the West that eventually eclipsed much of the pre-Augustinian theology common to both Latin and Greek worlds. As

Bogdan Bucur explains, “on questions such as the exegesis of Biblical theophanies, the visio Dei, the relation of grace and nature, Augustine was the originator of a new (at times even revolutionary) theological line, different from that of his predecessors in the

Greek and Latin traditions.”246 The ’s condemnation in 1241 of the

view that “the Divine essence in itself will not be seen by any man or angel” marked the

triumph in the Western tradition of the Augustinian trajectory over such mystical and

liturgical survivals.247

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University Press, 1998); Zbigniew Janowski, Cartesian : Descartes’ Quest for Certitude, International Archives of the History of Ideas = (Dordrecht ; Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2000); and particularly Zbigniew Janowski, Augustinian Cartesian Index: Texts and Commentary (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004).

246. Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Theological Reception of Dionysian Apophatism in the Christian East and West,” 134. Bucur argues that this “Greek” consensus survived both in “the ongoing liturgical-hymnologic tradition of the Western Church” and in the writings of , Cassian and Eriugena. Ibid., 135. I examine further the radicalness of Augustine’s interpretation of biblical theophanies in chapter three.

247. “University of Paris: Condemnation of Errors, 1241,” Medieval Sourcebook. Emphasis added. As the corollary, the condemnation continues: “we firmly believe and assert that God in His essence or substance will be seen by the angels and all saints, and is seen by glorified spirits.”

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4.2.2. Aquinas’s Inheritance of Porphyrean Neoplatonism Distorts His Interpretation of

Dionysius. Aquinas exhibits both continuity and discontinuity with Augustine, for while preserving the language of divine “intelligibility,” he also mitigates Augustine’s intellectualism and the sense of kinship, or adequation, between the soul and God.248 For

Aquinas, complete knowledge of God is impossible for creatures, not because God is

unknowable, but “because God’s Being or Essence is infinite and no creature is able to

know him in an ‘infinite manner.’”249 This qualification owes in part to Aquinas’s

appropriation of the Neoplatonic “negative theology of pure being,” which, having

originated with Porphyry, probably came to Aquinas through and others.250

At the same time, Aquinas preserves the twofold Augustinian pattern of

portraying eternal beatitude in predominantly intellectual terms251 and as a vision of the

divine essence: since the ultimate perfection of the rational creature is to be found in that

which is the principle of its being . . . it must be absolutely granted that the blessed see

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248. Aquinas thus avers that “what is supremely knowable in itself [i.e., God], may not be knowable to a particular intellect, on account of the excess of the intelligible object above the intellect.” ST I.12.1. Hereafter, citations of Aquinas’s works will be included parenthetically in the text.

249. Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 370. Peter Weigel remarks that, for Thomas, “there is no possibility of comprehensive knowledge, where a concept completely and accurately represents the divine being. Given that God is infinite and that creatures are ontologically (and hence intellectually) finite, this is hardly surprising. The complete contents of the essence of God are unknowable to finite beings.” Peter Weigel, Aquinas on Simplicity: An Investigation Into the Foundations of His Philosophical Theology (Oxford ; New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 179.

250. Wayne J. Hankey, “Misrepresenting Neoplatonism,” 15.

251. “[H]appiness essentially consists in understanding rather than in an act of will (i.e. desire, or love, or delight).” III.26.11. Quoted in Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 138. Rossum writes that “Thomas was not a rationalist. He had a strong sense of the divine mystery which cannot be grasped by the human ratio, and he often gave evidence of an ‘apophatic’ approach. This being said, the essential difference between Thomas and Palamas must not be denied either. Thomas’ theology cannot be called ‘rationalism,’ but it may be characterized as ‘intellectualism.’ And Palamas’ theology is a theology of experience or a ‘mystical theology.’” Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 379.

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the essence of God” (ST I.12.1). God is not “beyond being” as for Dionysius; rather, as

Étienne Gilson remarked, for Thomas “God is the superesse because He is superlatively being: the Esse pure and simple.”252 As supreme Being, God is supremely intelligible in himself (Super Sent. IV.49.2.1 ad 13; ST I.12.1); God’s infinity is not that of matter unlimited by form, and so unknowable, but rather that of infinite form unlimited by matter and therefore supremely knowable. That he is not known by humans in this life

owes to the feebleness of our intellects, which possess a “natural aptitude [only] for

material objects” (ST I.86.2 ad 2). In the future life, this defect will be removed by the

state of glory, and we will be able to see the divine Essence, “but without being able to

comprehend Him” (ST I.86.2 ad 2). One can imagine God as an overwhelmingly bright

light. The fact that our unaided sense of sight is at present unequal to the vision does not

invalidate the “proportionateness” of the sense of sight to the sublime vision.253 That is,

the sense of sight, rather than the sense of smell, is proportionate to the task, even if

sensory weakness prevents its attainment. In this sense, for Aquinas as for Augustine, the

human intellect is proportioned to the knowledge of God (ST I.12.1), though, because of

the weakness in our human capacity, the proportionateness of the intellect to God

cannot be fully realized in this life (ST I.88.1). As Aquinas says, the fact that God is not

understood is “owing to our defect: wherefore that He be seen by us after being unseen

is owing to a change not in Him but in us” (Super Sent. IV.49.2.1 ad 13). In short, the

question of vision is one of capacity rather than principle. Where the Dionysian usage of

the prefix “super” (‘υπερ-, hyper-) served to place God beyond his attributes (according to

the logic of remotion), Aquinas’s use assumes fundamental continuity, indicating only

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252. Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. L.K. Shook (New York: Random House, 1956), 141. Quoted in Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Theological Reception of Dionysian Apophatism in the Christian East and West,” 135.

253. Or, in Aquinas’s image, the supremely visible sun cannot be seen by the bat by reason of its excess of light (ST I.12.1).

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“excess” by pointing to “the ‘highest’ way in which these attributes characterize God:

‘secundum modum altiorem’ or ‘eminentiori modo.’”254

By way of situating Aquinas more clearly with respect to Neoplatonism,255 Wayne

Hankey has argued that much recent scholarship, under the influence of Heidegger, has mistakenly opposed either Aquinas considered as an onto-theologian to a recovered

Dionysian Neoplatonism (i.e., Aquinas vs. Neoplatonism), or Aquinas and Neoplatonism together to the onto-theology of later Thomism (i.e., Aquinas vs. onto-theology). By contrast, Hankey argues that Aquinas should be understood as both a Neoplatonist and as significantly onto-theological.256 This conclusion is based on recent scholarship into the history of Neoplatonism, which has clarified two streams in the Neoplatonic tradition: (1) the more Platonic henological tradition, owing principally to Plotinus and

Proclus, which posited the One beyond both being and non-being, and (2) the more

Aristotelian “metaphysics of pure being” or “negative theology of being,” associated with

Porphyry, which conceived the First Principle as pure being, einai or esse.257 According to this latter tradition, God was understood not as a being, but as infinite being (esse

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254. Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Theological Reception of Dionysian Apophatism in the Christian East and West,” 137.

255. This is a topic addressed by a vast and complicated body of literature, from which I will draw only a few of the most relevant threads.

256. Citing Jean-Marc Narbonne’s Hénologie, ontologie et Ereignis: Plotin, Proclus, Heidegger, Hankey remarks that “Narbonne rightly admits that, in a significant way, the structure of Thomas’ theology is onto-theological. If Thomas’ theology is presented so as to deny this, or adjusted so as to escape Heidegger’s history accepted as beyond questioning—tactics adopted by many—, his teaching is badly distorted.” “Aquinas’ Doctrine of God Between Ontology and Henology,” Colloque La Philosophie et la Question de Dieu. Histoire, Développement, Perspectives (Université Laval, 2003), 2, Http://www.dal.ca/content/dam/dalhousie/pdf/fass/Classics/Hankey/Dieu%20Laval.p df.

257. Wayne J. Hankey, “Why Heidegger’s ‘History’ of Metaphysics is Dead,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 78, no. 3 (2004): 425–43. The terms are taken from Jean-Marc Narbonne, Hénologie, Ontologie et Ereignis: Plotin, Proclus, Heidegger, L’Âne d’Or (Paris: Belles lettres, 2001).

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infinitum). Though in some ways attempting to reconcile the two traditions, Aquinas ultimately stands within the latter (i.e., the ontology of pure being), siding with

Aristotle, Augustine and Porphyry against Proclus and the Platonici. Thus, as we saw above, Thomas joins Augustine against Dionysius in asserting “the necessity of direct vision of God’s essence for human happiness.”258 Aquinas elsewhere attempts to read

Dionysius into the ontological stream,259 arguing, for example, that Dionysius’s First is a

form of esse.260

This background supports John D. Jones’s suggestion that, in the Western

framework articulated by Aquinas, the difference between God and created beings, as

radical as it may seem, “is still entitative in character as a difference between two orders

of beings: God as the uncreated being and all other beings as created. That is, God is

understood with reference to the same metaphysical categories that apply to beings.”261

This can be seen, for example, in the way that God’s simplicity is defined in opposition

to—as the absence of—creaturely composition. Seen from a certain angle, the methodical

assumption of the analogia entis encompasses both Creator and creature, binding them

together in the same ontological frame. (Indeed, that is the point of the analogy.) Or, to

change images, we might say that the “ladder” of analogy reaches all the way to the

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258. Wayne J. Hankey, “Aquinas’ Doctrine of God Between Ontology and Henology,” 12.

259. Hankey concludes, “There must be real doubt as to whether this is a right view and a correct location of Dionysius. If it is not, then Dionysius must be united with Proclus instead of with Aristotle. Nicholas of Cusa, and several of those between Aquinas and him, reached this conclusion, and I join myself with Jean Trouillard, Eric Perl, and other twentieth-century Neoplatonists, in agreeing with them.” “Misrepresenting Neoplatonism,” n.p. Cf. Wayne J. Hankey, “Aquinas, Plato, and Neoplatonism,” n.p.

260. Wayne J. Hankey, “Aquinas and the Platonists,” in Aquinas and the Platonists, in The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages: A Doxographic Approach, ed. Stephen Gersh and Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen (Berlin; New York: W. de Gruyter, 2002), n.p.

261. John D. Jones, “An Absolutely Simple God?” 380–81.

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“top” (i.e., the divine essence), even if (at present) we lack the intellectual strength to make the climb. There is thus a kind of “metaphysical and epistemological continuity between God and beings that is rooted in the analogy of being (ens) and extends to essence. Indeed, in the absence of such an analogical continuity, there would be no possibility of a science about God and, thus, no possibility of providing a rational grounding of beings in God as the first cause.”262 To quote Rudi te Velde (for purposes quite different than his own), for Thomas, God and beings “are different from one another in what they have in common, the one has being in identity with its essence, the

other has being as distinct from its essence.”263 This continuity grounds Aquinas’s

conception of the divine names, which, despite qualification, are still said to truly name

the divine essence.264

Aquinas’s reception of the more radical Dionysian apophaticism265 was also

moderated by the distinction between res significata and modus significandi.266 As with

Albert the Great before him, Aquinas uses this distinction to affirm that the divine names

properly designate God while simultaneously acknowledging their inadequacy to the

subject (i.e., God). In other words, when it comes to God, Aquinas wants to say that the

disjunction between subject and predicate is not absolute, but relative, such that

negation applies only to the way in which attributes are signified (modus significandi), not

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262. Ibid., 381.

263. Rudi A. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas, Studien und Texte Zur Geistesgeschichte Des Mittelalters, vol. 46 (Leiden; New York: E.J. Brill, 1995), 116.

264. John D. Jones, “An Absolutely Simple God?” 388. “In particular, whatever the divine essence might be, we truly say that there is a divine essence and existence even if we do not know what it is.” Ibid.

265. See section 3.3 above, page 105.

266. Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Theological Reception of Dionysian Apophatism in the Christian East and West,” 136.

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to the signified attributes themselves (res significata).267 We can rest assured that we have the right words, even if we have no idea how those words apply to God.268 This distinction founders, however, because it attempts to preserve the analogical application of a word to God while completely severing the meaning (res significata) of the word from its various creaturely uses (modus significandi). Completely unmoored from such creaturely contexts of meaningful use, however, “there can be no access to the meaning of a term . . . The result can only be that we lose our hold on the meanings of words as we use them of God.”269

While Thomas thus nuances the Augustinian legacy, his remains a predominantly intellectualist account which emphasizes that the divine essence becomes an intelligible species for the knowing mind. Hankey thus observes that “the ultimate account of human knowing for Aquinas comes not from Dionysius but from Augustine and the doctrine of the beatific vision he bequeathed the .”270 As a result,

Dionysius’s more radical apophatic views are misinterpreted as conforming with

Aquinas’s own configuration of the legacy of the Aristotelian and Augustinian metaphysics of being. The resulting epistemology reflects an “exalted ,” in which the human way of knowing is preserved even when God’s essence is the “object”:

“Presence, vision, essence, theoria are ultimate for Aquinas. At the end of doctrine

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267. Ibid., 136–37.

268. According to David Burrell, Aquinas leads us to conclude that while we predicate perfections of God, we do so “with no indication of how these perfections are possessed by him.” Aquinas: God and Action (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 73. Precisely because we must eschew any “straightforward grasp of the res significata,” we must rely on our ability to make astute judgments as regulated by our community. Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective, 122.

269. Susannah Ticciati, A New Apophaticism: Augustine and the Redemption of Signs, Studies in Systematic Theology (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2013), 38.

270. Wayne J. Hankey, “Aquinas’ Doctrine of God Between Ontology and Henology,” 11.

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. . . the ontology of pure being prevails . . . The human does not pass into the divine but an addition is made to its powers so that they can reach beyond themselves to knowledge.”271

The intellectual tenor of this account is further underscored by Thomas’s ambivalence toward the body. In considering St Paul’s rapture—in which Aquinas believes Paul saw the essence of God—Thomas insists that such transitory ecstasies require complete withdrawal from the senses, since the divine essence “cannot be seen . .

. through any cognitive power other than the intellect” (ST II-II.175.4).272 Moreover, in marked contrast with the hesychast insistence on the full participation of the body in the eschatological vision of the Lord’s “visible theophany,”273 Thomas’s account is much more ambivalent, seemingly torn between a that would regard the separated soul as fundamentally incomplete, and an emphasis on a substantial soul that already attains the perfect joy of the visio Dei as soon as it is separated from the body.274

On one hand, Thomas repeatedly stresses the interconnectedness of soul and body. It is “unnatural,” he says, for the soul to be without the body (SCG 4.79), and the separated soul is imperfect, a fragment of the whole person (ST 1.75.4 ad 2).275 On the

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271. Ibid., 13.

272. Cf. SCG III, 46, 2: “the mind which sees the divine substance must be completely cut off from the bodily senses, either by death or by ecstasy.” Quoted in Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 138.

273. DN 1.4.

274. Loudovikos argues that “it is obvious that when Thomas claims that ‘man’s ultimate felicity consists only in the contemplation of God’ (SCG III, 37, 8-9) it is difficult for him to combine his perfectly holistic anthropology with his anthropology of participation. . . . Any possibility of a transformation of the bodily senses, so familiar in the Greek Patristic tradition, is completely lacking here.” “Striving for Participation,” 138.

275. “Now the soul when separated from the body is, in a way, imperfect: even as any part is when severed from its whole: and the soul is naturally part of human nature. Therefore man cannot obtain ultimate happiness, unless his soul be reunited to his body:

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other hand, Thomas elsewhere concludes that the soul is capable of the visio Dei as soon as it departs from the body, since it was only inhibited from such vision for as long as it was “united to a corruptible body” (SCG 4.91.1). In addition to the intellect’s limitation, then, the earthly body itself appears as an obstacle to the vision of God:

God cannot be seen in His essence by a mere human being, except he be separated

from this mortal life. . . . our soul, as long as we live in this life, has its being in

corporeal matter; hence naturally it knows only what has a form in matter, or

what can be known by such a form. Now it is evident that the Divine essence

cannot be known through the nature of material things. . . . Hence it is

impossible for the soul of man in this life to see the essence of God. This can be

seen in the fact that the more our soul is abstracted from corporeal things, the

more it is capable of receiving abstract intelligible things” (ST I.12.11, emphasis

added).

Loudovikos thus concludes that, for Thomas, the main reason for the intellect’s weakness—its inability to see God—is “its connection with the body.”276

———————————— and this is all the more true, seeing that as we have shown man cannot reach ultimate happiness in this life” (SCG 4.79). “Hence a hand, or a foot, is not called a hypostasis, or a person; nor, likewise, is the soul alone so called, since it is a part of the human species” (ST 1.75.4 ad 2).

276. “Striving for Participation,” 138. Loudovikos asks how such an account, in which “any visit of the created/supernatural grace/light in this life has as its main goal our deliverance from the body,” can be squared with Chalcedonian Christology: “Is the communication of idioms possible if the human body cannot be transformed, starting in this life?” Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 144. Rossum argues that, at this point, Aquinas’s anthropology is Platonic and dualistic (at least in this context) in contrast to the more holistic anthropology of Palamas, in which, “when the human being is united with God, he becomes himself pneuma.” Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 370, 381. Rossum suggests that “[w]e could formulate the teaching of Orthodox patristic theology on grace as follows: Gratia non tollit naturam, sed transfigurat eam: Grace does not abolish (human) nature, but transforms or transfigures it.” Ibid., 381.

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In light of such passages, it comes as little surprise that Thomas argues that the body is not strictly necessary for eternal happiness: “Wherefore, since man’s perfect

Happiness consists in the vision of the Divine Essence, it does not depend on the body.

Consequently, without the body the soul can be happy” (ST I-II.4.5). After being separated from the body, the soul “has perfect being, and . . . consequently it can have a perfect operation; although [without the body] it has not the perfect specific nature” (ad

2). The resurrected body, strictly unnecessary for beatitude, is, however, a fitting expression of the soul’s joy, which “overflows into the body, as far as possible” (ad 4).

Though at rest in its enjoyment of God, the soul still desires bodily expression, such that the “resumption” of the body increases not the intensity of blessedness but its extent (ad

5). As Caroline Walker Bynum summarizes the issue, “Aquinas suggests that soul is a self that carries all our structure and integrity packed into it; it is thus in perfect joy when it attains visio Dei. The body we will achieve at the resurrection is only an expression of its glory—an expression that must indeed be kept under rather strict control by soul if it is not to slip away again into changeability or murkiness.”277

4.3. Divine Simplicity Is Differently Conceived in Eastern and Western Traditions

4.3.1. Divine Simplicity in the West Is Construed as Identity. Both Augustine and

Aquinas regard divine simplicity in terms of identity,278 requiring “the radical identification of all ontological features of God with the divine essence.”279 The fact that

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277. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in , 200–1336, Lectures on the History of , no. 15 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 268–69.

278. See ST I q3. E.g., “nevertheless in the form itself, there is nothing besides itself. And so, since God is absolute form, or rather absolute being, He can be in no way composite” (ST I, q3, a7).

279. Weigel, Aquinas on Simplicity, 178. Weigel later explains that “[s]implicity requires that all positive realities or characteristics predicated of God be identical with one another and with the whole of God’s being. Aquinas is also in the position, among other things, of having to identify God with God’s act of existence.” Ibid., 223.

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“whatever is said of God is identical to his essence” entails as a corollary that “whatever is not identical to the essence must be created since otherwise there would be accidents in God.”280 The “middle ground” of divine-human communion represented in the East by the energies is precluded by this logic of simplicity, which yields only two terms: divine and created essences. The problem, as Peter Weigel acknowledges, is that this philosophical conception of divine simplicity, together with the notion of immutability it implies, “appear[s] to be systematically inconsistent with other things traditionally predicated of God.”281

While the language of divine simplicity would come to be understood in predominantly centripetal terms and with respect to questions concerning De Deo Uno—

that is, as drawing all the attributes inward toward identity in the monadic essence—

Lewis Ayres shows that Augustine first appealed to the simplicity of God’s Being in

developing his account of God as Trinity, thereby providing “a way of articulating the

fundamental principles of Nicene theology.”282 Thus, for Augustine, “God, or the Good,

is simple, and what is begotten (not ‘created’) by the Good is equally simple. Thus the

Father begets the Son, but this is the generation of a simple being by a simple being, and

thus the two are coeternal, simple, and immutable.”283 At the same time, Augustine

bequeathed tradition with an epigrammatic summary of the divine simplicity that would

prove immensely influential: “A being is simple when it just ‘is’ what it ‘has’ (‘sed ideo

simplex dicitur, quoniam quod habet hoc est’), or because it cannot possess anything that it

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280. John D. Jones, “An Absolutely Simple God?” 387.

281. Weigel, Aquinas on Simplicity, 223.

282. Ayres and Barnes, “God,” 388.

283. Ayres and Barnes, “God,” 389. In short, “[t]he Father is thus presented as the source of the shared divine simplicity.” Ibid.

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could lose (‘. . . natura dicitur simplex, cui nonsit aliquid habere, quod vel possit ammittere; vel aliud sit habens, aliud quod habet’).”284

On this view, the relationship between God and creatures is a causal rather than an essential or energetic one—God is “their efficient and exemplary cause.”285 An undeniable degree of extrinsicism characterizes this Western framework, a fact acknowledged by many Western authors (and of course criticized by Eastern writers).286

Christos Yannaras, articulating the view of many Eastern critics, argues that, by omitting the divine energies, the Western conception prevents the possibility of true deification:

God is defined only in terms of His essence; whatever is not essence does not

belong to God; it is a creature of God, the result of divine essence. Consequently,

the energies of God are either identified with the essence, which is active (actus

purus), or else any external manifestation of theirs is regarded as necessarily

‘heteroessential,’ i.e. a created result of the divine cause. This means that, in the

final analysis, the theosis of man, his participation in the divine life, is

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284. Ayres and Barnes, “God,” 389.

285. ST I.3.8 ad 1: “The Godhead is called the being of all things, as their efficient and exemplary cause, but not as being their essence.” Cf. Super Sent. I Dist. 8 q1 a2: “God is the esse of all things not essentially, but causally.” See also Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West, 245.

286. See LaCugna, who acknowledges some measure of extrinsicism, saying, “Grace in the Western view is to a certain degree an extrinsic self-communication of God even though it brings about a genuine ontological change in the recipient.” God for Us, 188. In his article on Palamism, Williams also asks “whether Western notions of the knowledge of God have not, indeed, been very excessively nominalist, extrinsic and conceptual, giving too small a place to that which is fundamental to the revelation of God in Jesus, his nature as self-gift.” “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 44. As Bradshaw observes, attempted to moderate this extrinsicism, though not without difficulty: “We are told that by a created, supernatural habitus or disposition God truly gives Himself to the creature and comes to serve the soul ‘as if’ a form. But how can this be, when the divine essence cannot be participated, and only the divine essence is God?” Aristotle East and West, 258.

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impossible.287

The same issue is raised by Rossum, who highlights Thomas’s preference in the Summa for the verb conjungere rather than unire: “‘Union’ with God means for him ‘conjunction’ with God. Thus Thomas’ language already reveals a special concern for stressing that

God and human beings always remain distinct from one another, even when some form of communion or participation in God is possible.”288

This notion of simplicity, together with his reception of a Neoplatonized

Aristotle,289 significantly shaped Aquinas’s reception of Dionysius. Thus, where

Dionysius refers the divine names to God’s processions (proödoi), for Aquinas “we are naming the source of the procession, which, given divine simplicity, is identical to the divine essence.”290 Moreover, when interpreting the Areopagite on the procession of God into creatures—meaning thereby “the procession of creatures from God—Aquinas can only construe the relation as one of “exemplary causality: the divine essence, which is the likeness of all creatures, is communicated to creatures through a created likeness.”291

The divine essence is not communicated to the creatures that proceed, but it

remains uncommunicated and unparticipated; but his likeness, by which he gives

to creatures, is propagated and multiplied. In a certain way, the divinity through

its likeness and not through essence proceeds into creatures and is in a certain

way multiplied in them. In this way, the procession of creatures can be called a

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287. Yannaras, “The Distinction Between Essence and Energies and Its Importance for Theology,” 242.

288. Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 369.

289. Wayne J. Hankey, “Aquinas, Plato, and Neoplatonism.”

290. John D. Jones, “An Absolutely Simple God?” 390.

291. Ibid., 399.

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divine differentiation.292

In other words, Thomas concludes that since (1) participation means “having a part” of something, and (2) the divine essence is absolutely simple, there can be no real participation in God.293 Creatures participate in a created similitude or “likeness” of the divine essence.294 That this similitude is created follows from the fact that it is internally characterized by the composition of essence and esse “which defines each creature as [an] effect of God.”295 This created similitude is “multiplied and distinguished into many and

diverse effects, each of them bearing a likeness in a distinct and partial way.”296 To

Orthodox eyes, this represents a significant departure from the notion of deification.

Loudovikos thus describes the created similitude in which creatures participate as

“God’s protective wall, . . . the analogical locus of divino-human encounter, where God

can be touched while left untouchable—while the creatures passively reflect his glory.”297

At the same time, it is also possible to find threads in Thomas’s thought that

stand in some tension with, or at least complexify, this notion of absolute simplicity. As

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292. In de divinis nominibus 2.3. Quoted in John D. Jones, “An Absolutely Simple God?” 399. Cf. Aquinas: “And by saying that the Godhead is the ‘being of all,’ he declares that all things derive from God a likeness to the divine being.” SCG I.26.

293. In de hebd., lect. 2, n.24. See Rudi A. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality, 11.

294. Rudi A. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality, 94.

295. Ibid., 95.

296. Ibid., 94.

297. Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 144–45. Loudovikos raises a similar question with respect to the created nature of the “light of glory” [lumen gloriae]. According to Thomas, the eschatological visio dei gloriae requires a “similitude of God on the part of the visual faculty, namely, the light of glory strengthening the intellect to see God” (ST I.12.2). The question then, according to Loudovikos, is “how can [one] see even the slightest part of [the] divine essence, if it is obviously impossible to overcome his created limits through a limit that is merely created like him?” Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 143.

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Rossum observes, Thomas’s “realism” with respect to the divine ideas suggests a possible point of comparison with Palamas.298 For Thomas, the “reasons” (rationes) of the divine attributes have their first foundation in God himself” (habent proximum fundamentum in re quae Deus est).299 How can the objective existence of these divine attributes be reconciled with the divine simplicity? According to Thomas, these names signify one thing (i.e.,

God) under many and different aspects, precisely because our created intellects understand God from the diversity of created reality. The many aspects of the divine perfections are not “empty and vain” (ST I.13.4 ad 2) but they nonetheless “pre-exist in

God unitedly and simply” (1.13.4). Rossum finds Thomas’s apophatic response reminiscent of Palamas’s claim that “the divine energies exist in God’s ‘transcendent essence’ . . . in a ‘unique and simple way.’”300

In similar fashion, Rudi te Velde’s exposition of Thomistic participation seems to weave together both the plurality of the divine ideas (logoi), their ultimate identity with the essence, and their relationship to creation in a way redolent of the Palamite conception. On te Velde’s reading of Aquinas,

God’s creative essence (= power) receives its measure and multiple determination

from God’s intellect which knows the infinite perfection of the divine essence

under all aspects in which it is imitable by other things. Thus God’s essence as

known by God under a multiple aspect is the idea of all things according to each

proper mode of being. . . . each idea is the divine essence known by God as the

likeness or model of this or that thing. The ideas should not be seen as so many

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298. Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 378.

299. I Sent, d2, q1, a3 (sol ad 3). Cf. ST I.13.4, ad 2. Quoted in Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 378.

300. Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 378. Rossum’s quotations are from Triads III.2.25.

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‘mental pictures’ in God’s mind representing the possible essences of things.

Their multiplicity does not stand apart from the one essence.301

Te Velde’s reading distinguishes between the divine essence as it is “in identity with itself

(ut essentia)” and as it is “known (ut intellecta), that is to say, as articulated and differentiated in God’s knowledge according to the particular aspects under which this universal essence can be imitated by another being.”302 In other words, te Velde thinks that Thomas would distinguish the unknowable essence in se from the diversity of God’s intentions for and self-revelations in creation. While significant differences remain— owing in part to the philosophical demands of Thomas’s scholastic milieu and his reception of the divided Neoplatonic legacy—this last formulation represents a trajectory in Thomistic thought more amenable to Palamism.

Several writers have also highlighted the pneumatological commitments that

Thomas and Palamas share:303 both aver that the Spirit gives Herself through Her gifts— thereby avoiding any approach that would separate the Person from the gifts—and

Thomas, like Palamas, is capable of affirming the immediacy of union with the Spirit, stressing that “by grace we are joined to God himself, with nothing created intervening”

(Super Sent. I.14.3). Comparing the two, Bruce Marshall acknowledges that, on the one hand, grace in Aquinas is aliquid creatum, “something created,” since “there must be a sense in which ‘the gift is distinguished essentially from the giver,’ as the created from the uncreated.”304 On the other hand, Marshall insists that “‘created grace’ is not at all a

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301. Rudi A. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality, 113.

302. Ibid., 115.

303. See Bruce D. Marshall, “Action and Person: Do Palamas and Aquinas Agree About the Spirit?” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 39 (1995): 379–408 and Reid, Energies of the Spirit.

304. Marshall, “Action and Person,” 387–88.

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reality interposed between the uncreated person of the Spirit and the created persons in whom the Spirit dwells. . . . the gift of ‘created grace’ does not inhibit direct contact between the Spirit and us, but is rather the effect that the Spirit necessarily achieves in order to bring about such contact.”305 Marshall suggests that rather than picturing such

“created grace” as the mortar between two bricks, binding them together while preventing genuine contact, we might better picture it as “the impression a signet ring makes in soft wax—the change in the wax itself which the ring brings about in order to establish direct contact with the wax, and without which the wax cannot actually come into full contact with the ring.”306 All metaphors have their limitations, of course, but it

seems that despite its claim to immediacy Marshall’s image betrays a lingering

extrinsicism insofar as the signet ring works on and not in the wax.

The question remains: if “the divine essence cannot be participated, and only the

divine essence is God,” how can we conceive of participation in God in a way that is not

simply intellectual?307 It is not at all clear how, given the terms of Thomas’s conceptual

framework, God can truly give himself. But if that framework continues to strike many

Eastern theologians as relatively intellectualist and extrinsic, there are also indications

that Aquinas himself chafed against it, seeking to affirm a stronger sense of

participation. Loudovikos thus argues that Thomas, after constructing a near-perfect

“onto-theo-logic”308 in the Summa Contra Gentiles, found himself in the

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305. Ibid., 388.

306. Ibid.

307. Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West, 258. Bradshaw continues, “We can understand how it is possible in the case of the beatific vision, for that is an intellectual relationship, and the divine essence can (like any other essence) serve as an intelligible species. The indwelling of God through grace, however, is not a matter of the divine essence serving as an intelligible species.” Ibid.

308. On the use of this term, Loudovikos remarks, “I define, partially with Jean- Luc Marion but also against him, what I prefer to call the onto-theo-logic, as the, up to a

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needing to “correct” that theo-logic, putting it in “a sort of unconscious suspension” in order to affirm an ontology of participation.309 Loudovikos has identified what he sees as a theo-logical problem in Thomas, namely that the latter’s philosophical account of divine simplicity—according to which “God’s will is his essence” (SCG I.73)—precludes

the possibility of genuine involvement with creation: “It therefore seems at first sight

obvious that it is impossible for this theo-logic to admit any divine act/operation/energy

going ad extra, as this would mean composition in God, in the sense that there is a

potency in him . . . Here the perfection of essence cages in the will in a theo-logical

way.”310 As a result, Aquinas’s early onto-theo-logic threatens to “swallow[] existence up

and forbid[] any existential freedom of God to act without its permission.”311 In

Loudovikos’s judgment, the problem “does not lie in the fact that for onto-logical

reasons we must admit that act, existence, will, operation, essence, love are identical in

God; the problem is that we cannot confine God to this theo-logic.”312

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point, submission of Trinitarian theology to metaphysics in order to draw a better expression of God’s unity on it, in a way that theology ultimately becomes theo-logic, (i.e., what metaphysics would like to admit and support).” “Striving for Participation,” 134.

309. Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 134. Loudovikos sees Palamas and Thomas tracing contrasting methodological paths: “if the structure of Palamite thought is to proceed from existence through an ontology of participation to Trinitarian theology, the deep structure of Thomist thought is to proceed from logic, through Trinitarian onto-theo-logic to existence.” Ibid.

310. Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 135–36. Cf. SCG I.73.5.

311. Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 136. Loudovikos remarks, “God is not left free to really desire something that is ‘inferior’ to him—a position that also, of course, ignores the fact that what God loves is, in a way that escapes onto-theo-logic, more valuable for him than his essence. Paradoxically, theo-logic here seems also to insert a curious complementarity between being and willing-to-being in God, which smacks of narcissism that entraps God in a sort of psychological vicious circle: is there any real otherness outside God?” Ibid., 137.

312. Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 137.

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Loudovikos points to Thomas’s use of the language of “power” as an indication of this tension in his thought between the demands of scholastic theo-logic and his desire to affirm an ontology of participation. In discussing the divine omnipresence in Summa

Theologica I.8, Thomas concludes that “God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works. For an agent must be joined to that wherein it acts immediately and touch it by its power”

(I.8.1). God “acts immediately in all things” by his power (I.8.1 ad 3), and though remaining indivisible, the divine power “can extend itself to one or to many, to a small thing, or to a great one, [and] in this way it is in one or in many places, and in a small or large place” (I.8.2 ad 2). By such power, Aquinas says, “the agent is related and applied to an external thing; thus by power an agent may be said to be present to another” (I.8.3 ad 3). Such passages call to mind Tollefsen’s suggestion that participation be construed as the activity of the higher in the lower. They also prompt us to ask (with Loudovikos),

“What is this divine essential power (since in both SCG and ST divine power is identified with divine essence), which acts immediately in all things, i.e. ad exra and touches them directly, and it is God himself who acts through it, thus existing in all things, and making all things subject to him through it?”313 Loudovikos finds a similar “suspension” of strict theo-logic in Thomas’s claim that God’s will concerning things ad extra is not always necessary.314 Loudovikos strikingly concludes:

It is obvious that here we have a clear distinction between essence-energies, or

essence-will, identical to that of Palamas and of the Greek Fathers in general,

which seems unthinkable in SCG. The onto-theo-logical frame has strictly

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313. Ibid., 141.

314. “Hence, since the goodness of God is perfect, and can exist without other things inasmuch as no perfection can accrue to Him from them, it follows that His willing things apart from Himself is not absolutely necessary” (ST I.19.3).

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remained the same, but a happy ‘contradiction’ suspends it, in order to show

both its truth and its limits. The divine power/action is now, on the one hand,

identical to the essence/substance (onto-theo-logically), but, on the other hand, it

acts outside it, without any ontological danger of a possible elimination of God’s

being or its simplicity. It is also clear that this divine power/action is, of course,

uncreated, as it is totally identical with divine essence—but at the same time it

touches created beings without this action being changed into created! God’s will

cares ‘unnecessarily’ for created beings, without disturbing his ‘necessary’ will, or

distracting it from its devotion to the fullness of divine essence. A fully ‘Palamite’

Thomas thus emerges.315

On this reading, though Thomas’s scholastic milieu required him to begin from a

Trinitarian onto-theo-logic, he found himself striving for an ontology of participation that required that theo-logic’s suspension.316

4.3.2. Divine Simplicity in the East Is Construed as Unity. The prevalence of the ontology of pure being in the “scholastic” tradition meant that divine simplicity in the

West was understood to require the identity of all divine names with the essence. In both the “Neoplatonic” and “Byzantine”317 frameworks, however, simplicity does not stand over against creaturely composition, owing to a much more radical apophaticism. That is, the Eastern understanding of divine simplicity reflects Dionysian apophaticism in that

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315. Loudovikos, “Striving for Participation,” 141.

316. Ibid., 147.

317. The typology of terms is Jones’s. In light of Hankey’s work, the “Neoplatonic” should be understood to refer to the “henological” tradition. Indeed, given the historical developments highlighted by Hankey, Jones’s distinctions—between “scholastic” and “Neoplatonic” on one hand and between “Byzantine” and “Neoplatonic” on the other hand—need to be qualified since the influence of Neoplatonism on both scholastic and Byzantine traditions was significantly more complex.

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simplicity is conceived not (or not simply) as the negation of composition, but rather as

God’s transcendence of the simple-composite dialectic altogether. As we saw above, this is what enabled Dionysius to re-conceive the Neoplatonic One as the Christian Trinity.

While excluding outright division and composition, then, “simplicity” in the Byzantine framework does not preclude all distinction or differentiation in God.318 Ware notes that the distinction between essence and energies, not unlike that between essence and hypostases, need not overthrow the divine simplicity.319 Accordingly, he suggests that it might be better to speak of “an organic or organized unity, an inter-personal unity” in

God320 in which the eternal distinctions “are eternally united without division.”321

Basil of Caesarea was among the first to articulate this notion of simplicity not as strict identity but as inter-personal unity. Against Eunomius, who held that all non- privative predicates were both identical in meaning and should be referred to the divine essence, Basil objected on both accounts: to the assumption that the divine ousia can be known,322 and to the claim that the divine simplicity entails the reduction of all

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318. Lossky notes that the doctrine of simplicity, “like every doctrinal statement about God . . . can only be expressed in terms of an antinomy: it does not exclude distinction, but can admit neither separation nor division of the divine being.” Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 78.

319. Palamas himself draws a connection between opponents who would deny the distinction of the Persons and those who deny the distinction between the essence and energies. See chapter 126 of his One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, The Philokalia: The Complete Text, 4:406. See also A. N. Williams, who argues that “the distinction no more violates simplicity . . . than does the distinction between essence and hypostases in trinitarian theology. . . . those who would raise this point apparently fail to notice that precisely the same objection can be lodged against classical trinitarian doctrine, if one fails to take seriously what have been called the grammatical rules governing the use of doctrine.” “The Logic of Genre,” 685, 695.

320. Ware, “God Hidden and Revealed: The Apophatic Way and the Essence- Energies Distinction,” 135.

321. John D. Jones, “An Absolutely Simple God?” 389.

322. For Basil, simplicity does not mean that the divine essence is identical with the divine attributes; since we do not and cannot know God’s essence, we are not

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predicates to identity. To Basil, such an identification would “reduce[] the intricacy and richness of Christian worship to a single idea, endlessly repeated.”323 Accordingly, he rejected as senseless the notion that all the various attributes were, in reality, equivalent

(that God’s goodness is identical to his omnipotence, will, justice, and so on).324 Instead,

Basil suggests that God’s characteristic attributes can be pictured as powers surrounding and manifesting the divine nature—that is, a set of “coextensive properties predicated of the divine substance,” where simplicity does not entail their identity but rather rules out the notion that an attribute could name only part of God.325 As Basil sees it, collapsing the diverse, nonreducible attributes “into” the divine essence would render the essence composite. So rather than understanding divine simplicity as a centripetal concept, Basil sees it as centrifugal, “pushing” the names “outside” or “around” the divine substance

———————————— entitled to proclaim it identical with anything. The best we can do is to speak of God’s particular characteristics. See Lewis Ayres and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, “,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 469.

323. Ayres and Radde-Gallwitz, “Basil of Caesarea,” 468.

324. Thus, Andrew Radde-Gallwitz argues that the theological epistemology developed by Basil in response to Eunomius is primarily “a negative doctrine of simplicity, that is, an account of what simplicity does not imply: it does not imply the identity thesis.” Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 113.

325. Radde-Gallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity, 158. Palamas remarks that “no intelligent man would say that the essential goodness and life are the superessential essence of God. The essential characteristic is not the essence which possesses the essential characteristics. As the great Denys says, ‘When we call the superessential Mystery “God” or “life” or “essence,” we have in mind only the providential powers produced from the imparticipable God.’ These, then, are the essential powers; as to the Superessential . . . that is the Reality which possesses these powers and gathers them into unity in itself.” Triads III.i.23. See also ii.7, 9, and 11. Bradshaw summarizes the point: “Even God’s greatness, power, wisdom, goodness, providence, and justice are ‘merely’ divine energies, in the sense that they are determinate patterns or forms of divine activity. God Himself remains ineffably beyond them. He is never to be equated with (in the sense of brought fully under) any conceptual determination, including even these, which are the highest that any human language can bestow.” Bradshaw, “The Divine Glory and the Divine Energies,” 291.

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(peri tên ousian or physin) into an undivided unity.326

Gregory of Nyssa built on Basil’s framework, arguing somewhat counterintuitively that the divine simplicity actually entails that God has multiple properties, since the perfect virtues, unmixed with their opposites, are “reciprocally entailing.” As Andrew Radde-Gallwitz explains, the state of being unmixed “is one of

Gregory’s fundamental ways of describing the state of being simple. So, if God is good and God is simple, then God’s goodness is unmixed with its opposite—and, consequently, God is also powerful, just, wise, and so forth.”327 Simplicity is thus seen to entail not the reduction of various attributes to identity, but rather the state of unmixed divine perfection. From this vantage point, the Western charge that the Palamite distinction violates the divine simplicity begs the question of how simplicity is to be defined.328 Thus, Ware speaks for many Eastern writers in characterizing the Western insistence on construing simplicity as identity as “a rational, philosophical notion of divine simplicity . . . [which] fail[s] to allow properly for the fact that in God the

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326. Radde-Gallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity, 161. Palamas cites a similar argument in chapter 124 of the One Hundred and Fifty Chapters. Given the nonreducibility of the various natural attributes, he believes that referring them to the essence would render the divinity composite. See The Philokalia: The Complete Text, 4:405.

327. Radde-Gallwitz, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity, 212.

328. Cf. Trethowan, “Irrationality in Theology and the Palamite Distinction,” 21. Lossky remarks that “[t]here is nothing more exasperating than a simpliste notion of the divine simplicity,” which he describes as a kind of “theological insensibility before the fundamental mysteries of faith.” The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 78 n2. Wendebourg recognizes that enforcing such a rigid notion of divine simplicity would also create problems for the doctrine of the Trinity, noting, “Metaphysical notions like that of divine simplicity cannot contradict these fundamental data, but rather have to be interpreted according to them, as is being done in the case of the doctrine of the Trinity. The distinction of essence and energies in God is equally ontologically real as the one of Father, Son, and Spirit.” “From the Cappadocian Fathers to Gregory Palamas,” 196.

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opposites coincide; he transcends our man-made conceptions of unity and multiplicity, which cannot be applied to him without qualification.”329

The claim that Palamism violates the divine simplicity does not figure prominently in Williams’s 1977, a fact made all the more striking since Illtyd Trethowan, one of his mentors, made the charge in the very same issue of Eastern Churches Review,330 and Williams himself had levelled the accusation five years earlier in an article on

Christos Yannaras’s theology of personhood.331 In fact, Williams himself later defends something akin to the Eastern notion of simplicity as “dialectical unity,” though with an eye to the Trinity rather than the energies: “the divine indivisibility is the interweaving of otherness, not a kind of .”332 Citing Dionysius with approval, Williams later notes that unity and plurality in the divine life are not assimilable to creaturely unity and plurality.333 Pairing this insight with Hegel, Williams suggests a “transcription of the doctrine of the divine simplicity into the terms of a process” through which we come to understand particulars in light of the “background context” holding them together.334 In light of this revised conception, Williams concludes that the traditional grammar of simplicity is “flawed to the extent that it thinks divine simplicity as the pure negation of complexity and thus thinks the divine predicates in static, discrete and world-dependent ways.”335

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329. Ware, “The Debate About Palamism,” 51. Cf. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 78 and The Vision of God, 158.

330. Trethowan, “Irrationality in Theology and the Palamite Distinction,” 21.

331. Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood,” 424.

332. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 134.

333. Ibid.

334. Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 39.

335. Ibid.

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From the Eastern vantage point, the prevailing Western conception of simplicity thus represents something of a truncation at both ends of the Palamite distinction (and so also of the divine-human relation). On one hand, the Western view—in which the beatific vision has as its object the divine essence, even if not comprehension thereof— appears to Eastern sensibilities as markedly less apophatic, since on the Eastern view the divine “essence” is “beyond” all definition or finite coordination. For the West,

Augustine sets the theological stage in his pronounced emphasis on the intellect and its capacity to attain a vision of the divine essence. Though qualified in important respects by Thomas (and many contemporary retrievals of both Augustine and Aquinas), this enduring feature of the tradition has abetted some of the worst tendencies toward intellectualism in the history of Western theology. Moreover, while Thomas labored against the grain of this inherited Augustinian intellectualism in some ways, he remained constrained not only by his explicit commitments but by the tacit assumptions of the conceptual vocabulary with which he worked. On the other hand, the Western approach, lacking a “middle term” to constitute a “realm of reciprocity,” also seems to construe the divine-human relation in somewhat extrinsic terms. The Western notion of an “intentional union” with God, conceived in predominantly intellectual terms, thus strikes Eastern interpreters as lacking in concreteness and reality.336

5. Conclusion

Williams’s 1977 criticisms of Palamas articulated long-standing Western concerns about the essence-energies distinction. The sophistication and range of Williams’s criticisms, together with the history of ecumenical exchange that constitutes their background context, have prompted a wide-ranging response, in which I have sought

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336. Bruce Marshall argues that neither the distinction between “entitative” and “intentional” participation—drawn by Charles Journet—nor “[the] claim that deification takes place through participation of the latter rather than the former sort, finds any direct support in Aquinas.” “Action and Person,” 393 fn38.

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not only to contest particular interpretations of Dionysius and Palamas but also to consider some of the “fault lines” along which the differences between the two traditions are most apparent. Rather than view the two traditions on the model of competing representations in a zero-sum contest, I have suggested that they might be more fruitfully construed as alternative vocabularies, each well suited to particular tasks, contexts and communities, but also capable of learning from and nourishing the other.337 Accordingly, I have highlighted points of comparison where I believe the

Western vocabulary can be enriched by the East, a posture of ecumenical hospitality and receptivity that is particularly suited to Williams’s sensibility. For, as Williams would remind us, the central problem is how to bring myself into question: “Healing the Body of Christ, in Paul's perspective, seems to be a long job, one in which everyone involved is summoned to self-scrutiny in their relations with others.”338

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337. This is not to abandon the possibility of constructive, critical dialogue, but rather to dispel the atmosphere of defensiveness in which such dialogue might be conducted.

338. Rowan Williams, “On Being a Human Body,” Sewanee Theological Review 42, no. 4 (1999): 411.

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CHAPTER III

DEMYTHOLOGIZING THEOPHANY AND THE ABSENCE OF THE SIGN

He placed Himself in the order of signs. –David Jones1

The last chapter argued that the differences between the Eastern and Western theological traditions—brought into relief by the debate over Palamism—might be construed as a difference between two “language games” or “vocabularies.” On this view, each vocabulary has developed conceptual resources and capacities adapted to its own context(s) and forms of life. Both the present chapter and chapter four develop this thesis concerning the two theological vocabularies by attending to the themes of presence and absence, union and disjunction, in Williams’s writings.2 As we saw in

chapter two, Williams’s 1977 criticism of the Palamite distinction owed in part to his

view that the distinction represents a kind of “mythological” thinking, both with respect

to talk about participation and the “acts of God.”3 That is, the Palamite understanding

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1. Quoting Maurice de la Taille’s description of Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist. “Art and ,” in Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 179.

2. Chapters six and seven return to related questions of theophany and anthropomorphism, which they consider in light of divine body traditions in ancient Jewish and Christian mysticism (chapter six) and the mystagogical function of mystical- poetic language in particular communities (chapter seven).

3. As discussed in the last chapter, with respect to God’s actions, Williams notes that on the Thomistic understanding, “strictly speaking, action is predicated of God only in the category of ousia, since it is ultimately that whereby he is such as he is. And

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of participation struck Williams as too concrete and materialistic, while talk of God’s

“actions” risks giving the impression of sequence in the divine life.

In the next chapter, I demonstrate that Williams’s understanding of Thomistic participation undergoes significant change, partly as a result of his ongoing engagement with the Orthodox doctrine of the energies. By the 21st century, Williams moves away from a strictly formal notion of “intentional” participation and toward a much “thicker” conception which affirms the “real presence” of the object in the subject. The present chapter’s focus, then, is the countervailing current in Williams’s thought, which generated a marked hesitancy with respect to Williams’s embrace of a fully participatory logic.

That is, in this chapter I highlight elements common in Williams’s work that contribute to a posture of theological austerity that prizes themes of stripping and absence and so problematizes the possibility of vision and presence.

The chapter consists of three sections. The first section considers the interrelationship between Augustine’s epistemology, semiotics, and his controversial

“demythologizing” interpretation of the Old Testament theophanies. This prepares the way for an examination of Williams’s interpretation of Augustine’s semiotics which, coupled with Williams’s reading of John of the Cross (inter alios), conduces to the

centrality of the themes of absence and deferral in Williams’s own theology. I suggest

that this produces an unresolved tension in Williams’s thought between an Eastern

Orthodox emphasis on presence, theophany and manifestation and a certain Western

idiom of absence accustomed to correlating presence and possession, vision and

objectification. The chapter’s third and final section considers the problematic extremes

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although piety allows a great deal of latitude to language here, although, indeed, we may have no option in some circumstances but to employ a ‘mythological’ kind of talk about the ‘acts of God,’ we need to be fully aware of what we are doing, and of the necessary correctives of strict logic.” “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 31. Cf. Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky,” 184.

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to which this idiom of absence can lead by examining Michel de Certeau’s work on mysticism. The chapter’s conclusion articulates the difference between the vocabularies by way of their respective interpretations of the Emmaus story.

1. Augustinian “Demythologization” Disjoins Sign and Signified

Williams’s criticism of Palamas as mythological is in part4 indebted to his appreciation for the work of , whose process of “demythologization” has, according to Williams, been frequently misunderstood.5 The “ruling maxim” of the program of demythologization, Robert Jenson says, is that “no stories can properly be told about eternity.” Thus, “a ‘myth’ is any sequential narrative pretending to be about deity, and ‘demythologizing’ means identifying the impact of such a narrative in such a fashion as to obviate its claim as narrative.”6 Williams’s critique of Palamism—and, we

might add, his comments about theophanies and the early liturgical conceptions of the

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4. We might count both Bonhoeffer and Wittgenstein among the other influences to which this criticism of mythological thinking owes. The former wrote, “It’s not only the ‘mythological’ concepts, such as , ascension, and so on (which are not in principle separable from the concepts of God, faith, etc.), but ‘religious’ concepts generally, which are problematic. You can’t as Bultmann supposes, separate God and miracle, but you must be able to interpret and proclaim both in a ‘non-religious’ sense. Bultmann’s approach is fundamentally still a liberal one (i.e. abridging the gospel), whereas I’m trying to think theologically.” , Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Fuller and Frank Clark, reprint, 1953 (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997), 285. For his part, Wittgenstein was critical of philosophy’s temptation to reify its terms, thereby converting a grammatical investigation into a factual one. Duncan Richter helpfully draws together several such remarks of Wittgenstein: “In BB (p. 35) [Wittgenstein] writes that: ‘. . . the characteristic of a metaphysical question [is] that we express an unclarity about the grammar of words in the form of a scientific question.’ In Z, §458 he writes: ‘The essential thing about metaphysics: it obliterates the distinction between factual and conceptual investigations.’ In RPP I, §949, he repeats the idea that: ‘A metaphysical question is always in appearance a factual one, although the problem is a conceptual one.’” Richter, “Wittgenstein on Ethics, Nonsense, and Metaphysics,” 124.

5. Rowan Williams, “Looking for Jesus and Finding Christ,” in Biblical Concepts and Our World, ed. D.Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr, Claremont Studies in the (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 144.

6. Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997–99), I: 169.

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Trinity—draws on a similar sense of the impropriety of narrative (sequence) to the divine life.

Williams’s inclination toward demythologization has been abetted by the immense influence of Augustine, whom Jenson links with Bultmann insofar as both oppose the “eschatological” to the “historical.”7 For Augustine, this opposition is reflective of a binary logic that structures much of his thinking. Before considering that logic directly, however, I look at a related area of Augustine’s thought in which the logic is operative, in part because Williams himself connects Augustine and Bultmann at this point: namely, Augustine’s revolutionary interpretation of the Old Testament theophanies, which Williams describes as reflecting a “demythologizing concern.”8

1.1. Augustine’s Disjunctive Semiotics Is Reflected in His “Demythologization” of Biblical

Theophanies

Bogdan Bucur observes that “what all authors before Augustine share, throughout Syriac, Greek, and pre-Augustinian Latin Christianity, is a tradition of interpreting the theophanies as ‘Christophanies’.”9 That is, the self-manifestations of

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7. Ibid.

8. Williams acknowledges that Augustine’s discussion of theophanies moves “decisively away from earlier assumptions, especially in the Eastern Christian world,” but he judges this appropriate since such earlier views “seem to [Augustine] to retain a residual belief in the unique transcendence of the Father; [Augustine] insists, in contrast, that all the divine persons share the same transcendence—so that the Old Testament theophanies, even when they may be appropriated to one or other person, are invariably examples of God using created mediation to communicate with human senses.” Rowan Williams, “Trinitate, De,” 847.

9. Bogdan G. Bucur, “Theophanies and Vision of God in Augustine’s De Trinitate,” 77. See also Bogdan G. Bucur, “Exegesis of Biblical Theophanies in Byzantine Hymnography: Rewritten Bible?” Theological Studies 68 (2007): 92–112 and Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Mountain of the Lord: Sinai, Zion, and Eden in Byzantine Hymnographic Exegesis,” in Symbola Caelestis: Le Symbolisme Liturgique et Paraliturgique dans le Monde Chrétien, ed. B. Lourié and A. Orlov (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2009), 129–72. Bucur provides extensive documentation of this “Christophanic” interpretation in Byzantine hymnography. That the theophanies were universally interpreted as Christophanies does not, however, entail the flattening of differences between various accounts. For example,

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God in the Old Testament—e.g., to Abraham, to Jacob at Peniel, to Moses at Sinai—were understood as appearances of the Son, in which he was “directly present and directly active in the lineaments of the visible form of an angel, human being, and so forth.”10

The Christological interpretation of these theophanies became an important line of

argument in establishing both Jesus’ distinction from the Father (over against and

modalists) as well as the connection between the Church and the Old Testament (over

against Marcionites).11 It affirmed the plain sense of the text, the possibility of immediate spiritual experience, and the continuity of Christological content between divine manifestations across the Testaments. This approach to Scripture as configured around the theophanies gave a distinctive shape to much early Christian exegesis, asceticism and mysticism.12

If the theophanic approach represents the “fiery heart” of Eastern theology13—

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Robin Jensen summarizes the diversity of views among four authors: Justin, , Irenaeus, and . “Theophany and the Invisible God in Early Christian Theology and Art,” in God in Early Christian Thought: Essays in Memory of Lloyd G. Patterson, ed. Andrew B. McGowan and Brian E. Daley & Timothy J. Gaden (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2009), 287.

10. Bogdan G. Bucur, “Theophanies and Vision of God in Augustine’s De Trinitate,” 77. This tradition of Christological interpretation is preserved in Byzantine iconography, which (inter alia) represents Christ creating Adam and Eve, and appearing to Moses in the burning bush and to Daniel as the Ancient of Days.

11. Jensen, “Theophany and the Invisible God in Early Christian Theology and Art,” 287.

12. The preservation of these currents in later Byzantine thought and practice prompted Golitzin to remark that this theophanic outlook “permeates Orthodox tradition throughout, informing its dogmatic theology and its liturgy. That Jesus, Mary’s son, is the very One who appeared to Moses and the prophets—this is the consistent witness of the ante-Nicene Fathers, and remains foundational throughout the fourth- century, Trinitarian controversies and the later Christological disputes.” Golitzin, “Theophaneia,” xviii. Cf. Bogdan G. Bucur, “Theophanies and Vision of God in Augustine’s De Trinitate,” 92.

13. Bogdan G. Bucur, “Theophanies and Vision of God in Augustine’s De Trinitate,” 92.

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and was preserved through an identifiable tradition found in the writings of (inter alios)

Dionysius, Maximus, John of Damascus, , and, ultimately, Gregory

Palamas—it became peripheral for the West, owing to the unparalleled influence of

Augustine. Augustine’s demythologizing interpretation constitutes a pivotal moment in the separation of our two theological vocabularies. Accordingly, many Eastern interpreters have lamented Augustine’s “demythologization” of the theophanies, for in addition to shifting the theophanies from the center to the periphery of Christian tradition, Augustine also abandoned the “christological interpretation of the transformative experience shared by ‘our fathers,’ the patriarchs and prophets.”14 That is, by attributing the theophanies to the whole Trinity, Augustine moves away from the earlier stress (again, shared by Latin, Greek and Syriac authors) on both the

Christological content of the theophanies as well as their transformative character.

For Augustine, the theophanies no longer represent the revelation of the transfiguring glory of Christ, but rather the Trinity’s use of created matter as a means of communication.15 Articulated in the opening books of De Trinitate, Augustine’s interpretation of the theophanies, forged in polemical engagement with the Latin

Homoians, effected a revolution in how the theophanies were understood. The

Homoians defined divinity as necessarily invisible, and so regarded the appearance of the Son in the theophanies and incarnation as an indication of his subordinate status,

“proof that the Son is not true God.”16 The Son’s visibility was thus taken as evidence of his essential differentiation from the Father.17 Other pro-Nicene authors responded by

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14. Ibid., 73.

15. Ibid., 80.

16. Michel René Barnes, “The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity: Mt. 5:8 in Augustine’s Trinitarian Theology of 400,” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 (July 2003): 336.

17. Bogdan G. Bucur, “Theophanies and Vision of God in Augustine’s De

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distinguishing between the Son’s essence, according to which he remains invisible, and his will, according to which he condescends to the weakness of human perception.18

Augustine affirmed the invisibility of the Son’s divinity and the distinction between natura and the species produced by the divine will, but he found this solution inadequate to refute the Homoians.19 Whereas other interpreters, as well as the theophanic outlook itself, distinguished the invisible and visible realms in order to unite them—thereby interpreting the visible as the manifestation of the invisible—Augustine sundered the two when it came to interpreting the theophanies. He “solves the paradoxical coexistence of what is visible and what is invisible in the theophany by severing the ontological link between the two, so that the species is no longer ‘owned’ by the subject of the natura.”20

That is, is no longer immediately present in the Old Testament theophanies, but rather communicates through the mediation of created effects.21 No

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Trinitate,” 74.

18. Ibid., 76.

19. Barnes, “The Visible Christ,” 335.

20. Bogdan G. Bucur, “Theophanies and Vision of God in Augustine’s De Trinitate,” 76. Kari Kloos notes that this represents a change from Augustine’s earlier affirmation of the traditional Christological interpretation: “Written ca. 394, the anti- Manichean treatise Contra Adimantum presents Augustine’s only claim that the Son appeared in the theophanies. As such, it provides a striking contrast to Augustine’s later works; after De Trinitate (begun ca. 399), Augustine no longer attributes a theophany to the Son, but rather he speaks of the divinitas or the triune God working and being manifested in the theophanies.” Christ, Creation, and the Vision of God: Augustine’s Transformation of Early Christian Theophany Interpretation, The Bible in Ancient Christianity, vol. 7 (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2011), 117.

21. Anatolios, like Williams, describes this as Augustine’s “demythologizing” of the theophanies: “[t]he opening books of De Trinitate engage this project by demythologizing the Old Testament appearances within the framework of Augustine’s symbolic theology. The key move is to assert that these theophanies are merely ‘signs’ or ‘similitudines,’ rather than immediate manifestations of the divine persons.” “Divine Semiotics and the Way to the Triune God in Augustine’s De Trinitate,” in God in Early Christian Thought: Essays in Memory of Lloyd G. Patterson, ed. Andrew B. McGowan and Brian E. Daley & Timothy J. Gaden, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 94 (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2009), 176.

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longer “theophanies” in any true sense, these Old Testament events become

“angelophanies” or mere “symbolophanies.”22 As Barnes summarizes it, “What appeared in the Old Testament theophanies was created matter being used as an instrument of communication by the Trinity. What was seen was not God; it was an instrument of

God’s presence.”23

1.2. Augustine’s Disjunctive Semiotics Governs His Epistemology and Christology

Augustine’s interpretation of the theophanies reflects larger currents in his thought, particularly with respect to semiotics and epistemology. It is foundational for

Augustine that “knowing” is a form of “seeing,” whether with the physical eyes or the intellect.24 Since faith, however, is “the of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1), faith cannot itself be a form of knowledge.25 This yields a faith-knowledge dualism, which is for Augustine bound up with a series of other oppositions—history-eschatology, purification-contemplation, and the knowledge of

Christ under the aspects of forma servi and forma dei. These oppositions can, in turn, be seen to operate according to the fundamental, binary logic of signa-res (“signs and things”).26

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22. Alexander Golitzin, “‘The Demons Suggest an Illusion of God’s Glory in a Form’: Controversy Over the Divine Body and Vision of Glory in Some Late Fourth, Early Fifth Century Monastic Literature,” in The Theophaneia School: Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, vol. 3, ed. Basil Lourié and Andrei Orlov, Scrinium: Revue de Patrologie, d’Hagiographie, Critique et d’Histoire Eccléliastique (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007), 73.

23. Barnes, “The Visible Christ,” 346.

24. Ibid., 343.

25. Ibid., 344.

26. Anatolios, “Divine Semiotics”. Augustine’s can be found in De dialectica 5.7, which defines res as “something which is either sensed or understood or hidden,” and signum as “something sensed which shows (ostendit) the mind something else beyond this sense” (cf. doc. Chr. 2.2.1; Origen, comm. in Rom. 4.2; PG 14:968). Quoted in Michael Cameron, “Sign,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia,

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These pairs adhere to an eschatological dualism, according to which the latter terms—res, knowledge, sight, and contemplation of the forma dei—are reserved for the eschaton. On this account, “faith is precisely the assent to the referentiality of the similitudines,” or signa,27 and history entails the purification of our faith as it learns to make this referential ascent from sign to signified.28 According to this dialectic, the theophanies were historical signs that did not make God available to be seen.29 God cannot be seen short of the eschaton, either by physical eyes or the mind.30 This enables

Augustine to refute the Homoians by insisting just as forcefully on the invisibility of divinity.

The same dialectic is evident in Augustine’s understanding of the Incarnation, which also employed a created instrument (i.e., Christ’s human nature) as a sign that referred to the divine presence. What is visible in the Son is only his humanity, the forma servi: “He appeared outwardly in the bodily creature, who inwardly in His spiritual nature is always hidden from the eyes of mortals.”31 In other words, the Son in his divinity is just as hidden as the Father.32 Accordingly, “the Son is not a revelation of the divine in any direct, available-to-the-senses, way; the Son is not divinity-insofar-as-it-may-be-

———————————— general editor Allan D. Fitzgerald, associate editors John Cavadini and et al. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 1999), 794.

27. Anatolios, “Divine Semiotics,” 174.

28. Anatolios, “Divine Semiotics,” 175 n31. Anatolios remarks that “the purification by faith, which clings to symbolic ‘signs,’ leads to the contemplation of sight, which attains to the divine reality.” Ibid., 169.

29. Barnes, “The Visible Christ,” 344.

30. Ibid., 343.

31. Trin. II.5.10. Cf. Barnes: “all that is visible in the Son is the ‘form of servant’ or the ‘form of man’; before taking on the ‘form of servant’ and taking on a human existence the Son was invisible, since he was only in the ‘form of God.’” “The Visible Christ,” 335.

32. Trin. II.8-9.

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perceived; the Son, as divine, is not the occasion of human faith (the Son, as human, is).”33 The significance of Christ, then, is as the mediator between signa and res, faith and sight.34 Encompassing both sides of the dialectic, Jesus is both sign and signified and so a symbol of himself in the sense that his visible humanity refers to his invisible divinity.35

It appears that Augustine’s continued reflections on the Incarnation moved him away from this earlier, extremely “disjunctive” or “indicative” view of signs and toward a more “conjuctive” or “mediative” view.36 Locating this change during the 390s—that is, surprisingly, prior to the change in his interpretation of theophanies—Michael Cameron sees the transition between the two views playing out over the course of :

Book 1’s Platonic-friendly sign structure sharply distinguished signs from their

spiritual reality; but later we also find a second structure that conjoined them.

This second kind of sign works intimately with the realities it represents, and

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33. Barnes, “The Visible Christ,” 335.

34. Augustine thus says that “form of a servant inhered in the unity of the person of the Son” (Trin. II.7.12). Cf. “Divine Semiotics,” 171.

35. Anatolios, “Divine Semiotics,” 178. Anatolios draws from this Christological grounding the lesson that an emphasis on the difference between signa and res, faith and historical sight-knowledge, needs to be complemented with an awareness that the two terms are less sheer opposites than distinctions within a continuum. Anatolios thus argues that Barnes over-emphasizes the difference and finds evidence for the continuity reflected in the fact that Augustine applies the language of “sight” to both historical faith and eschatological sight—e.g., distinguishing between “seeing in mirror” and “seeing face to face.” “Divine Semiotics,” 173. On the other hand, he also concedes that, for Augustine, there is a real disjunction between the forma servi and forma dei: “the visible Christ (that is, what we call ‘the Christ of history’) is and is not the object of ‘sight.’ He is the object of sight, by definition, since we are speaking of the ‘visible’ Christ. But he is not the object of the ‘visio’ of contemplation.” Ibid. See also Johannes Brachtendorf, “Orthodoxy Without Augustine,” Ars Disputandi 6, no. 1 (2006): 301.

36. See Michael Cameron’s Christ Meets Me Everywhere: Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis, Oxford Studies in (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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indeed mediates what it signifies in a way that is analogous to how the human

Christ mediated his divinity. . . . Despite On Christian Teaching’s stated intention

to distinguish signs and things, mediative signs keep intruding on the discussion

about indicative signs.37

In other words, Augustine’s earlier “disjunctive” view proved inadequate to his developing Christological and sacramental reflections. Strictly speaking, Augustine defined as a species of sign: “signs are called sacraments when they have reference to divine things.”38 But where his semiotics produced a merely “indicative”

Eucharistic theology—according to which the elements cannot be res but only sacred signs pointing beyond themselves—his reflections on Christ and the Eucharist spurred him toward greater sacramental realism.39

According to Cameron, this later, “conjunctive” understanding of signification refuses the separation of signum and res. Rather, a reality from the spiritual world is bound to its sign “in such a way that, despite their incommensurability, the effective understanding of the reality depend[s] on the particularity of the sign.”40 Cameron thus argues against a reading of Augustine’s Christology that would make Christ’s humanity an “obsolescent sign.” For while he admits that Augustine relativizes Christ’s humanity vis-à-vis his divinity, he does not think it is surpassed (at least not in this life).41 Moreover,

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37. Cameron, Christ Meets Me Everywhere, 231.

38. Ep. 138.7. Quoted in Pamela Jackson, “Eucharist,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, general editor Allan D. Fitzgerald, associate editors John Cavadini and et al. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 1999), 333.

39. Augustine “explicitly states that when the word (of the eucharistic prayer) is added to the bread and wine, they become the body and blood of Christ (s. 229.2), thus expressing a realistic theology of the Eucharist.” Jackson, “Eucharist,” 334.

40. Cameron, “Sign,” 795.

41. Cameron, Christ Meets Me Everywhere, 228.

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since the relation between Christ’s humanity and divinity is not “chemically pure” as it is in his semiotics, Cameron argues that the signa-res binary is inappropriate as a model for

Augustine’s Christology.42

At the same time, Cameron’s own description of Augustine’s Christology is strongly reminiscent of the latter’s (disjunctive) semiotics, with Christ’s humanity

“orienting and carrying [one] toward the divine person.”43 That is, Christ’s humanity refers, though it remains a necessary material condition for faith’s referential movement: one “arrive[s] at Christ’s divinity by actively ‘passing along’ (transire) his humanity in a perpetual movement that never ends. His flesh is dynamic and essential only as united to his divinity; by itself the flesh was worth nothing.”44 Cameron may be right to argue that this is more than merely an “indicative” relation, but he is less persuasive in demonstrating that Christ’s position as mediator between God and humanity entails that his humanity can be said to “convey and mediate” his own divinity.45 It seems at least as plausible that, for Augustine, Christ’s divinity remains completely inaccessible until the eschaton, at which point the vision of Jesus becomes transparent to that of the

Trinitarian essence and Jesus’ humanity simply drops out of view. Despite the value given by this “conjunctive dimension” to particular material conditions as the occasion for faith’s purification, then, res and signa still remain divided eschatologically. There can be no historical manifestation—no authentic divine presence in history—since res is only attainable eschatologically and then by supplanting materiality. Moreover, while the

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42. Ibid., 228–29.

43. Ibid., 229.

44. Cameron, Christ Meets Me Everywhere, 229. Emphasis in original.

45. Christ Meets Me Everywhere, 229. The conclusion that follows immediately is no less dubious: “So even if Augustine’s Paul seems to ‘forget’ Christ the human being, what he actually forgets is the illusion that Christ’s humanity is anything apart from his divinity. Flesh means nothing in itself, but flesh joined to spirit conveys divinity itself.” Ibid.

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humanity of Christ remains an indispensable occasion for historical semiosis, Cameron fails to address whether Jesus’ humanity has abiding eschatological significance. And even on Cameron’s more charitable reading, the conjunctive understanding would only apply to Christ and the sacraments, not the theophanies.

This points up the fact that the primary function of Augustinian signs is to refer to rather than to manifest. It remains very much an open question whether Christ’s humanity, like the other theophanies, is for Augustine more than merely a similitudo, “a referential sight.”46 (Though, as Cameron argues, the answer to that question may also have changed over time.) Augustine thus says that the ascension represents the withdrawal of Christ’s visible nature in order to provoke the referential move: “He withdrew from them in the body, since he was held by them in faith. That indeed is why the Lord absented himself in the body from the whole church, and ascended into heaven, for the building up of faith.”47 As Anatolios remarks, the ascension thus

“initiat[es] us into the knowledge that his human visibility was a reference to his divine invisibility which is ‘the ultimate vision that suffices for us.’ True faith in Christ, then, is precisely a matter of seeing the referentiality of the forma servi of Christ to the forma dei.”48

We can conclude that Augustine’s semiotics relativizes the value of all created effects,

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46. Anatolios, “Divine Semiotics,” 174. Kari Kloos disagrees with the more “symbolic” (i.e., referential) reading given by Barnes and Anatolios, suggesting that “Augustine’s use of inhabitantis . . . suggests that his understanding of God’s presence in the theophanies is real, not merely symbolized by the creature used in the theophany.” Christ, Creation, and the Vision of God, 122. Nonetheless, she still sees this “real presence” as qualified by the insistence that “the Word can only appear and be seen if mediated by a visible creature.” Ibid. Affirming that the Word is present “in the mediating creature,” however, fails to efface the level of created mediation, which is precisely the question at issue. That is, according to Kloos’s Augustine, one cannot say that Moses, Elijah and Ezekiel saw the LORD. Cf. Kloos: “While the Word is not seen in himself, Augustine can claim that the Word is seen as present in the mediating creature.” Ibid., 123.

47. Serm. 235.4. Quoted in Arthur A. Just, ed., Luke, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 382.

48. Anatolios, “Divine Semiotics,” 175.

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even as it makes an act of faith—predicated on a material base in the senses—

“fundamental to our salvation” insofar as sensation provides the occasion for an ascent to the “unseen signified.”49 That ascent terminates, for Augustine, in an eschatological vision of the Son, who, seen under the aspect of the forma dei, “will become transparent to the vision of the Trinity.”50

In sum, Augustine’s “demythologizing” interpretation of the Old Testament theophanies is bound up with a constellation of oppositions that expresses “a dialectic that is at once a principle of theological method, a conception of history as it relates to eschatology, a christological epistemology and a reading of the christological drama of salvation. It is a dialectic that . . . is encompassed by the person and work of Christ.”51

Accordingly, “[b]y the year 400 Augustine had come to understand that in this life we were incapable of a vision of God—that we were now incapable of direct knowledge of the truth.”52 In this life, we see only signa, which are not God but signs referring to God:

“[t]he list of such signs runs, on the one hand, from all of history to, on the other, the

Church and the Eucharist.”53

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49. Barnes, “The Visible Christ,” 344.

50. Barnes, “The Visible Christ,” 335. Cf. “The Son’s ‘two forms’ thus correspond to two alternative epistemological acts and objects: form of servant or of man corresponds to the material object of perception of both believers and non-believers; form of God corresponds to the spiritual and immaterial object of perception at the end-time of those who have believed.” Barnes, “The Visible Christ,” 334.

51. Anatolios, “Divine Semiotics,” 176.

52. Barnes, “The Visible Christ,” 342. “The most important point to be made is this: there is a connection between Augustine’s development of a doctrine of the primacy of faith as the discipline of virtue and as the basis for ‘knowledge’ about God and his development of the doctrine that the divinity of the Son is made manifest only at the end-time and that there are, properly speaking, no theophanies of the Son (or of any other Person of the Trinity).” Ibid. Golitzin remarks that “[t]he visio dei gloriae is thus completely transferred to the eschaton.” “‘The Demons Suggest an Illusion of God’s Glory in a Form’,” 53. Cf. Bogdan G. Bucur, “Theophanies and Vision of God in Augustine’s De Trinitate,” 81.

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2. The Centrality of Absence in Williams’s Theology Risks Foreclosing the Possibility

of Presence

During the 1980s and 1990s, Williams wrote several important essays on

Augustine, and I suggest that these essays reflect a period in which Williams was processing questions of participation (to be considered in the next chapter) alongside an

Augustine semiotics which, in potentia, threatened to underwrite a disjunctive logic of sign and reality.54 In short, the two trajectories diverge, and one (the participatory) risks being eclipsed. On one hand, as I discuss in the next chapter, Williams’s understanding of Thomistic participation undergoes significant change—partly as a result of his ongoing engagement with the Orthodox doctrine of the energies—moving away from strictly formal “intentional” participation and toward a more “thickly” participatory logic. On the other hand, Williams’s interpretation of Augustinian semiotics, coupled with his reading of John of the Cross (inter alios), tend in the countervailing direction, one conducive to an emphasis on disjunction, absence and deferral. As John Milbank observes, the result is a perspective that problematizes participation: “we confront God not as participants, but in a naked stripping of all self-imaging (seen, questionably, as almost necessarily delusory) and self-standing (as if we could ever be in some sort of zero- sum rivalry with God, even from the point of view of spiritual experience) and then

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53. Barnes, “The Visible Christ,” 346.

54. Augustine became a bête noire for many twentieth-century Eastern Orthodox theologians, who laid all manner of theological and philosophical problems at his feet. While much of this was overheated polemic, we have seen that genuine tensions do exist between the theological vocabularies East and West. Williams has often sought to integrate his appreciation for both vocabularies, occasionally by re-narrating what is seen as central to each tradition. With respect to Augustine and Aquinas, this has, in part, taken the form of revisionist scholarship that challenges intellectualist interpretations by highlighting the inseparability of knowledge and love. With respect to Eastern Orthodoxy, Williams has encouraged a shift—if not of the center of gravity, at least of the focus of Western attention and engagement—away from Palamas and theophany and toward the kenotic sophiology of Bulgakov.

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await the divine voice and verdict in a total solitude and darkness (which can sound very non-ecclesial).”55 This disjunctive logic, represented by the accent on absence in much of

Williams’s work, threatens to eclipse, or at least overshadow, Williams’s affirmations of

(paradoxical) divine presence. The tension between the two theological vocabularies is thus manifest in Williams’s struggle56 to reconcile his growing appreciation for participation with a Western idiom of absence and a wariness about the correlation of presence and possession, vision and objectification.57 We will see in the next chapter that

Williams moves toward an increasingly participatory logic. The present chapter presses the question of whether Williams’s newfound appreciation for participation and presence are wholly compatible with the prevalence of this idiom of absence.58

2.1. Absence Dominates Williams’s Treatment of Augustine’s Semiotics

Williams has integrated Augustine’s semiotics with his own reflections on signification and desire in order to offer a sophisticated account of Christian signification in light of the ontological distinction between Creator and creation. In an influential essay,59 Williams explored Augustine’s semiotics as drawing together the

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55. Milbank, “Christianity and Platonism in East and West,” 110 n2.

56. Milbank suggests that this tension is manifest in Williams’s “hesitation . . . about embracing [a] full participatory metaphysics.” Milbank, “Christianity and Platonism in East and West,” 110 n2.

57. Despite their shared wariness about univocal presence, Williams is quite critical of Derrida, employing Hegel to question ’s sacralizing of the void. “The risk of a negative theology in abstraction, the identification of the sacred with the void, is the purchase it gives to a depoliticized—or even anti-political—aesthetic, in which there is a subtle but unmistakable suggestion that social and linguistic order is what we need to be delivered from, and that a particular kind of artistic practice can so deliver.” Rowan Williams, “Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity,” in Wrestling with Angels, ed. Mike Higton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 31. The difference turns on Williams’s affirmation of a paradoxical divine presence, which refuses to evacuate completely the realm of history and embodied social exchange.

58. Milbank, “Christianity and Platonism in East and West,” 110 n2.

59. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire”. In her recent book, A New

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latter’s theory of language and his theological anthropology. Williams emphasizes that

Augustine’s semiotics is three-fold, including not only the sign and the signified, but also the subject for whom the sign signifies. The person must necessarily be included in any complete account of signification, and in this way Williams argues that De doctrina christiana superimposes the well-known uti-frui (use-enjoyment) distinction onto that between signum (sign) and res (thing)—the former (uti-frui) representing the moral

dimension of human life, and the latter (signum-res) the linguistic. Aligning the two distinctions—linguistic and moral-erotic—allows Augustine to “link[] what he has to say about language with what he has to say about beings who ‘mean’ and about the fundamentally desirous nature of those beings—a link which is undoubtedly the most original and interesting feature of the treatise.”60

For Augustine, God is the ultimate “referent” anchoring both semiotic and moral relations: “God is res, and, in respect of him, all else is signum; God alone is to be enjoyed

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Apophaticism, Susannah Ticciati draws heavily on Williams’s interpretation of Augustine—in dialogue with the semiotics of J. L. Austin and C. S. Peirce (as interpreted by Peter Ochs)—in order to develop a sophisticated account of Augustine’s semiotics. Ticciati argues that at his best Augustine saw that, since God cannot appear as another sign alongside others, the “divine difference” can only be made manifest indirectly by the transformation of creaturely semiosis, which is restored to triadicity (subject-sign- signified) by reference to the infinite “background” of the divine. Ticciati, A New Apophaticism, 13, 16. I have lingering questions about such semiotic approaches, but Ticciati’s argument is framed against the background of two excellent insights. First, she notes that recent work in apophatic theology has taken as its starting point the doctrine of creation. When contrasted with the Dionysian sense that apophatic theology is centered in the revelation of Jesus Christ (cf. Ep. 3), we can see the roots of two very different understandings of apophaticism. For more on this contrast, see Ethan Smith’s forthcoming dissertation, The Praise of Glory: Apophatic Theology and Transformational Mysticism. Second, Ticciati notes that some of the best recent advocates for apophatic theology—Denys Turner, Nicholas Lash and David Burrell—have occasionally lapsed into confusion by suggesting that they could employ language in order to gesture beyond the limits of language, thereby construing those limits as limitations. For more on the “resolute” critique of such language as articulated by recent interpreters of Wittgenstein, see chapter five below. For a fully developed criticism of the “irresolute” language of much recent philosophical theology, see the aforementioned dissertation by Smith.

60. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 139.

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in and for himself, and in respect of him all else is to be used.”61 Williams sees Augustine developing a double account of God as the unrepresentable, infinite ground of signification and desire, both of which are construed in light of the ontological distinction.62 That is, since God is not one object among others, he cannot appear as simply one more “sign” or “object” of desire. We might observe that Williams’s interpretation here underscores why the Old Testament theophanies could not truly have been theophanies: God cannot appear as an “object” of vision. Rather, he is the

“background,” the ultimate context in which human activities are anchored and potentially come to be ecstatically oriented. God is, as it were, one “level” removed from our significative operations both linguistic and erotic. He is that which “makes sense” of our attempts to make sense. Or, to borrow a phrase from Cornelius Ernst quoted by

Williams, God is “the Meaning of meaning,” the Good in which every good participates, the Logos that unites the manifold logoi.

By referring everything to the infinite God in this way, Williams highlights that

Augustine’s moral semiotics “decenters” the knowing subject: “God alone is the end of desire; and that entails that there is no finality, no ‘closure,’ no settled or intrinsic meaning in the world we inhabit.”63 Expanding the network of our significant relations

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61. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 140. “God alone is res, “requiring no context or interpretation” because He himself is the “context” of everything, and so “paradoxically not a res at all in the strict sense, not one in a series.” Ibid., 139.

62. “God is that to which every action in some sense refers, that which every action manifests or fails to manifest; and, as such, an agent who cannot be compared with other agents.” Rowan Williams, “God,” 78.

63. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 140. Cf. “Augustine is then obliged by his commitment to the incarnate Christ to deny that the incorruptible and immaterial can ever as such be an object for the cognition of material, historical and desirous beings. Only in the non-finality of historical relationships and historical ‘satisfaction,’ and in the consequent restlessness that keeps us active and attentive is unchanging truth to be touched.” Ibid., 145.

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indefinitely, God opens us to the possibility of change and the construction of new meanings. These are the familiar contours of Williams’s “apophatic anthropology” discussed in chapter one—e.g., restlessness, temporality, sense-making, epistemological humility, openness to the other, lack of closure—and Williams proceeds to highlight this anthropology throughout his treatment of De doctrina christiana. Thus he argues that, by

anchoring the signa of language in God as res, Augustine underscores that “we live in a

world of restless fluidities in meaning: all terms and all the objects they name are capable

of opening out beyond themselves, coming to speak of a wider context, and so refusing

to stay still under our attempts to comprehend or systematize or (for these go together)

idolize.”64 The inseparability of knowledge and love for Augustine binds this linguistic

restlessness and indeterminacy to the “open desire” fundamental to human life.65

Accordingly, linguistic difficulty and ambiguity serve as a reminder, helping to preserve

“our openness to the final, non-representable end of desire.”66 Language and desire are

both open-ended, unfinished and unfinishable. The fact that we have only linguistic

signa in respect of the unrepresentable God means that we cannot fix or foreclose the

meaning of any worldly res, nor can any worldly state of affairs “be allowed to terminate

human desire.”67

In light of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, Williams argues that the language of

God “comes in” not as a solution, as one agency alongside others, but rather as “the

‘what-comes-next,’ the turn of a situation towards change, that makes the chronicles of

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64. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 141.

65. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 148. Attention to the inseparability of knowledge and love is also a central theme in Williams’s 2001 Aquinas Lecture, “What Does Love Know?”.

66. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 143.

67. Ibid., 145.

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created time more than a record of imprisonment.”68 On this account, grace is manifest in whatever opens me to newness, to the making of new connections and relations. Thus, by grace “we know that we live entirely in a world of signs” and so are “set free for the restlessness that is our destiny as rational creatures.”69 God is the inexhaustibly generative “background” that opens history and language onto the possibilities of an undetermined future: “Whatever makes the world new and makes me strange to myself, forcing me to see my contingency, my participation in the world’s uncontrollable flux: this is God, the one God, because there is only one reality that ultimately and creatively escapes our grasp and vision in this way.”70 I would suggest that the restlessness endemic to this account of semiosis appears to reflect a more “indicative” or “referential” conception of linguistic signs rather than a “mediative” or “symbolic” understanding.

What prevents this view from spinning into abstract formalism, according to

Williams, is Augustine’s Christological anchorage of the entire semiotic operation.71

Williams thus suggests that in the fundamental narrative of Jesus we find a

“methodological clue to how we think.”72 That is, in the potentially infinite relatedness of the present-though-absent Jesus, we find a picture of the restless “universal fluidity”

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68. Rowan Williams, “Making It Strange,” 30.

69. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 141.

70. Rowan Williams, “A Ray of Darkness,” 121.

71. Commenting on J. M. Le Blond’s Les conversions de s. Augustine (1950), Williams says that “Augustine’s deepest and most significant ‘conversion,’” according to Le Blond, “is that from Gottesmystik to Christusmystik, meaning not that the incarnate Christ somehow replaces the transcendent divine nature for Augustine as an object of contemplation, but that the sense of Christ as the path to and the form of transfiguring and participatory knowledge of the transcendent God becomes ever more pervasive, more obviously an organizing principle.” Rowan Williams, “Augustine’s Christology: Its Spirituality and ,” in In the Shadow of the Incarnation: Essays on Jesus Christ in the Early Church in Honor of Brian E. Daley, S.J., ed. Peter W. Martens (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 176.

72. Rowan Williams, “God,” 80.

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of language, where signs “ceaselessly recombine to generate new moments” of significance.73 In this fashion, human desire is broken open—i.e., freed from “the threat of an of signs”—through its attention to scriptural signs, which lead us to the preeminent signs, namely, Christ’s cross and resurrection.74 It is the priority of Christ’s

“non-worldly” love that grounds the sign-relation in reality:

The omnipresence of metaphor . . . is ‘controlled,’ not by a breakthrough into

clear metaphysical knowledge (though Augustine constantly struggles with the

pull towards this resolution, not always successfully), but by a central metaphor

to which the whole world of signs can be related, a sign of what all signs are. The

Word incarnate and crucified represents the absence and deferral that is basic to

signum as such, and represents also, crucially, the fact that absence and deferral

are the means whereby God engages our desire so that it is freed from its own

pull towards finishing, towards presence and possession.75

We see here Williams’s equation of presence with both possession and closure, which makes intelligible his emphasis on “absence and deferral.” Later chapters will contend that the theophanic-scriptural tradition defies this equation between presence and possession, vision and objectification. For our present purposes, what is perhaps most

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73. Rowan Williams, “Making Representations: Religious Faith and the Habits of Language,” Gifford Lectures (2013).

74. “The life, death and are res in the world’s history, yet they are signum in a unique sense; they are God’s speech, and so, like our speech, defined by what they teach, what they point to.” Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 141.

75. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 148. It is rather surprising to find Williams describing the cross and resurrection as a “metaphor,” though I suspect that what he means is clarified by what follows, such that he has in mind something like “sign.” In other words, as a “central metaphor,” the narrative of Christ is “a sign of what all signs are.”

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striking is that, for Williams, the cross demonstrates that, basic to all signs, is absence and deferral. Signs indicate; they are not what they signify, and they cannot deliver on the promise of presence. The network of linguistic relations necessary to “fix” the meanings of our words is itself in flux, subject to processes of revision and repositioning that prevent the foreclosure of sense. And because any individual sign finds meaning as part of a whole linguistic network, every local act of signification is woven into a tapestry of life and language and so cannot be secured without ultimately implicating larger and larger contexts, until finally the question becomes that of the entirety of the linguistic world, that is, one of “infinite relatedness.”76 This means that the “presence” of the signified appears only within a larger network of always-deferred meanings, of absences.

This has concrete implications for how Williams thinks about finite creaturely existence, and it also shapes how he understands the divine “presence” as itself a presence-in- absence.

Williams’s article on Augustine’s semiotics (1989) was the first in a trio of essays77

that helped establish a revisionist interpretation in Augustinian scholarship termed

“postmodern Augustinianism.”78 This interpretation has sought to acquit Augustine of

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76. Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 36.

77. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire”; Rowan Williams, “Sapientia and the Trinity”; Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in the De Trinitate”.

78. See Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism”. For a critical account of aspects of this scholarship, see Wayne Hankey, “ReChristianizing Augustine Postmodern Style: Readings by Jacques Derrida, Robert Dodaro, Jean-Luc Marion, Rowan Williams, Lewis Ayres and John Milbank,” Animus 2 (1 December 1997), Wayne Hankey, “The Postmodern Retrieval of Neoplatonism in Jean-Luc Marion and John Milbank and the Origins of Western Subjectivity in Augustine and Eriugena,” Hermathena 165 (Winter 1998): 9–70, and Wayne Hankey, “Self-Knowledge and God as Other in Augustine: Problems for a Postmodern Retrieval,” Bochumer Philosophisches Jahrbuch Für Antike und Mittalter 4 (1999): 83–127. Hankey explains that “[t]he postmodern theological reading must exclude from Augustine: (1) the union of substance and subjectivity, (2) intellectual individualism independent of communitarian praxis, (3) self-presence as rational certainty simultaneously established against and

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several charges leveled against him, both by Eastern Orthodox writers and Western critics, especially the suggestion that a comparison between Augustine’s de Trinitate and

Descartes’s Meditations reveals Augustine to be something of a proto-Cartesian.79 To separate Augustine from Descartes, Williams argues that Augustine’s theology defends neither substantial self-identity/self-presence nor autonomous philosophical reason.80

The relationship between Augustine and Descartes is a vexed and controversial one, and it is beyond my present scope to wade into the details.81 It is enough for my purpose to note that Williams himself is invested in, and has helped shape, the debate.

Without attempting to adjudicate the debate concerning Augustine’s legacy, then, and leaving the substance of Williams’s related theological commitments to one side, I would briefly highlight Hankey’s criticism of Williams’s “postmodern

———————————— constituting objectivity, (4) the unity of the normative and the rational which holds together knowledge and love and (5) the union of self-relation and the relation to God as other.” Wayne Hankey, “Self-Knowledge and God as Other in Augustine,” n.p.

79. Rowan Williams, “Sapientia and the Trinity,” 317–18.

80. Williams remarks, “What gradually becomes plain in these books is that the mind cannot contemplate eternal truth as an object in itself: it can encounter it only through a particular kind of self-reflection. And this self-reflection likewise cannot be the perception of mind itself as object; it exists only as an awareness of the mind’s working, the mind’s movement.” Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in the De Trinitate,” 122. Hankey notes, “[c]rucial to the Christian postmodern purpose is preventing the use of Augustine’s thinking in order to found an autonomous philosophical reason. So, it will be essential that nothing theoretical can be carried out of Augustine’s conversio, his itinerarium in deum.” Wayne J. Hankey, “Stephen Menn’s Cartesian Augustine,” 191.

81. On one side, Williams, his student Lewis Ayres, John Milbank (under their influence) and Michael Hanby (under Milbank’s influence) have argued for a “postmodern critical Augustinianism.” See Milbank’s “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism”; Hanby, “Augustine and Descartes”.; Hanby, Augustine and Modernity. On the other side, Stephen Menn, Hankey and Zbigniew Janowski have all argued for literary connections between Descartes and Augustine. Janowski’s work in particular appears to have established this relationship beyond serious doubt, though its interpretation remains debated. See Menn, Descartes and Augustine; Janowski, Cartesian Theodicy: Descartes’ Quest for Certitude; and particularly Janowski, Augustinian Cartesian Index.

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Augustinianism.” Hankey’s trenchant criticisms of Williams’s anachronistic ascription of his views to Augustine is a significant contribution to the debate in question, but Hankey is of interest to our present inquiry as a corroborating witness concerning the connection in Williams’s work between Augustine’s influence and the themes of distance and absence. In brief, Hankey argues that Williams’s opposition to autonomous reason, drawn from his “antagonism to modernity,” produces several further oppositions that are problematic as faithful interpretations of Augustine. Since these oppositions touch on the possibility (or impossibility) of union between humanity and God, they also bear on the overarching problem of presence in Williams’s thought.

The most relevant of Hankey’s criticisms, then, is that Williams “opposes Creator and creature” so sharply that union between them is altogether precluded.82 Thus,

Williams says that ours is “a trinitarian life appropriate to the created order, as against the trinitarian life appropriate to eternity. . . . [our sapientia] does not terminate in a vision of ourselves as timeless spirit but in the recognition of our created distance from

God.”83 Again, Williams maintains that since “we are ontologically incapable of being sapientia as God is, our task is to let the process of our mortal existence be transformed by the self-knowledge of grace which is our proper wisdom.”84 The goal of creaturely wisdom is here construed not in terms of union but as the ever-increasing recognition of our finitude and of the distance separating us from God’s perfect sapientia. The point is echoed in a later essay, in which Williams explains that the goal of our desire is not God so much as understanding our own desire. Williams sees Augustine reworking the Plotinian understanding of eros for the One, transforming it “into an eros directed to the

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82. Wayne J. Hankey, “Stephen Menn’s Cartesian Augustine,” 198.

83. Rowan Williams, “Sapientia and the Trinity,” 325–26.

84. Ibid., 327.

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understanding of eros itself. God cannot be sought without the seeker seeking and finding, wanting and holding to, the creaturely incompleteness, the exigence and expectancy, that eros represents. Before we can rightly want God, we must know and want our wanting nature. To desire the creator, we must first desire to be creatures.”85 By

reframing the discussion around desire, Hankey thus sees Williams shifting the question

from knowledge to love as “endless quest.”86

2.2. Williams’s Treatment of the Dereliction Demonstrates the Centrality of Absence in His

Theology

Having seen how Williams’s interpretation of Augustine is inflected with questions of presence and absence, we can turn to his more explicit consideration of the same themes. For Williams, the ontological distinction means that the divine can never be immediately present in history. Since God is not another signum alongside others, he

cannot be directly imaged. Rather, God is “found” only in the absence of images. He is

paradoxically “present” only aniconically and in absence,87 in “the relentless stripping

away from faith of egotistical or triumphalistic expectations.”88

Wedding Augustinian semiotics to a postmodern suspicion of presence, Williams

effectively opposes created signs to the unrepresentable God, and so also opposes

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85. Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in the De Trinitate,” 133.

86. Wayne J. Hankey, “Stephen Menn’s Cartesian Augustine,” 198. As Hankey observes, Williams describes sapientia as “love in search of an object.” “Sapientia and the Trinity,” 328. In a later essay, Williams remarks that, “[s]o far from being directed towards a solipsistic interiority, [in de Trinitate] we are given an account of mental life in which the fundamental category is lack of and quest for an other to love; the moral will is realized only in and as will for another’s good. Outside this, it is wholly void.” “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in the De Trinitate,” 125–26.

87. Rowan Williams, “Between the Cherubim,” in On Christian Theology, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 195.

88. Dostoevsky, 10.

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theophanies as contrary to the logic of the crucifixion. Rather than an icon of the divine, then, humanity must be effaced in order for the divine to “appear”: “the manifestation of

God’s reconciling work occurs in the place of human defeat and dereliction, so that there can be no confusion between human success and divine action.”89 Christ’s dereliction thus plays a central role in Williams’s theology and spirituality, providing not only the concrete ground for language about God as Trinity but also the paradigm for discipleship. The cross demonstrates, says Williams, that “the life of God comes to its fullness in the world solely by the death, the stripping, of the human—the human, that is, conceived as something solid in itself, as the finite negation or contradiction of the divine.”90

Even when employing the language of “excess,” Williams stresses not what overwhelms and overflows, but what is absent, missing, unfulfilled. Reflecting on the crucifixion, Williams speaks of Christ’s love as “deflected” from its object. Ultimately, he says, Christ

must love the absence of a love that is given to him as if from a consoling or

satisfying other, because he must love the excess of the Father’s love, that which

escapes simply being a mirror of his own identity. The Son’s love must enact the

Father’s, not simply reflect it back to him; so on Calvary it acts in an experienced

darkness with respect to the knowledge or feeling of a divine other.91

Otherness and non-finality are central to Williams’s theological idiom, and the

dereliction exemplifies both, encapsulating the kenotic rhythms that flow from the

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89. Rowan Williams, “The Church as Sacrament,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 10, no. 1 (February 2010): 7.

90. Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 45.

91. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 121–22.

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Trinitarian life to the believer’s life in Christ. Williams describes the movement of self- giving love that animates both “orders” as love’s “deflection” (cf. semiotic deferral), the endless circulation of love in which the beloved appears not as a “determinate other” in

whom love terminates, but as “an absent love that will not stand still to be consolingly

viewed.”92 It strikes me that this last phrase, in particular, speaks to the difference

emphases between the two vocabularies. Whereas both agree that the divine

manifestation does not “stand still” so as to be possessed or comprehended, the East is

disinclined to construe this mobility as absence.

This endless dynamic of deflection, inscribed into creaturely existence both

linguistically and erotically, is grounded in the divine life such that the absence and

deferrals of language are an echo of the circulations of love across the “distance” of the

Godhead:

God is intrinsically that life which exists only and necessarily in the act of

‘bestowal,’ in a self-alienation that makes possible the freedom and love of an

other that is at the same time itself in otherness. The extremity of the relation

between God and the God-forsaken Jesus is our way in to this claim for the life of

God-as-such: the divine life is what sustains itself as unqualified unity across the

greatest completeness of alienation that can be imagined; and so appears as

unqualified gift or (as I have been calling it) bestowal. The gulf between Father

and crucified Son, between Father in heaven and Son in hell, now appears as the

immeasurable measure of the way divine love ‘leaves’ itself, travels infinitely from

itself (from self-possession, self-presence). Here there can be no identity prior to

differentiation: the only identity in question is precisely the total and eternal self-

bestowal that constitutes the other.93

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92. Ibid., 121.

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The divine life spans the greatest imaginable distance, and so entails the fundamental affirmation not of sameness but of “identity-in-difference—indeed, identity in distance or in absence.”94 In short, the divine life is defined as what makes possible this story of alienation and consummation, crucifixion and resurrection.95 That is, Christians understand the Trinity as the unity that embraces and reconciles the most profound absence and death.

The eternal “deflections” of the divine life are bodied forth in history by the crucified Christ’s “alienation” from the Father, which also epitomizes the human self

“decentered” by its engagement with the infinite God. Emptied of all self-seeking desire,

Jesus epitomizes the self opened “on to the dimension of a love that is always directed to but never determined by a specific other.”96 Thus, on the cross the Son confronts the absence of the Father, absent as a “determinate other” and so not available to offer consolation or satisfaction.

On the cross, Jesus is left without any perceptible consolation or sense of support

from the Father; the Father, we might say, has ceased to be in any way a

graspable other for the subjectivity of Jesus. And in this emptying out of the sense

of the Father as the term of any kind of gratification, what is achieved is the total

reconciliation of humanity with God. When the negation of all determinate

consolation is arrived at, what is ‘left’ is the purpose and act of God.97

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93. Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Difference,” 81.

94. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Ontology,” 158.

95. Ibid., 159–60.

96. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 120.

97. Ibid., 121.

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The Father, as unrepresentable, is necessarily absent, and in facing up to the absence of all particular consolations, Jesus embodies a posture of pure receptivity, or perhaps more fittingly of prayer.

Following Augustine, Williams argues that Jesus is the supreme signum because his death discloses the insufficiency, even meaninglessness, of all other signs taken on their own. Christ is recognized as “supremely signum,” not by a fullness of presence but

by an “emptiness of meaning and power,” which serves to destabilize our human

tendency to fantasy and finality.

The cross in particular, and the incarnate life in general, display the distance

between God and creation in displaying their union. How is God present in the

world? in a death, in weakness, inactivity, negation, the infirma divinitas . . . the

weak God lying at our feet. It is the ‘void’—in worldly terms—of Christ incarnate

and crucified that establishes the difference of God; it is this emptiness of meaning

and power that makes Christ supremely signum. He is God’s speech because he is

worldly ‘silence’ . . . The unbridgeable distance between the eternal res and all

earthly representation opens up through this ‘anti-representation’ that is the

cross; yet in the recognition of distance is also buried the apprehension of gift or

revelation. Here is an event that, in itself and in its long-term effect in the

formation of the Church, speaks of or re-creation, of grace; in

challenging our ‘possessing’ of objects or events, challenging our urge to ‘enjoy’

the world, and so too the urge to close the question of meaning, it rescues us

from the stasis of pride . . .98

The “failure” of the crucified Christ—who had “nothing in his appearance that we

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98. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 144.

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should desire him” (Isa 53:2)—frustrates our attempts to project our fantasies of gratification onto him. He “renders himself absent as a simple terminus of piety.”99 The crucified One resolutely refuses to be an idol that satisfies our desires, “as if only by this failure of all that has been fantasized and longed for can he at last ‘say’ what is to be said; as if the silence of his dying is the only rhetoric for his gospel.”100 Williams thus elaborates the ontological distinction in concert with the scriptural and traditional opposition between the humility of God and human pride.101 The result is a paradoxical logic of inversion: God’s difference from the world cannot be directly represented. There can be no manifestation, no appearance of the divine. Rather, God’s speech is heard only when human ego and self-assertion are silenced; God’s paradoxical “presence” is found only in absence.

The God who is absent cannot be made to underwrite my self-righteous illusions or to authorize my agenda. Accordingly, the cross disrupts and unsettles confident speech, bringing our habitual patterns of thinking under the judgment of an ultimately comprehensive context. “Jesus crucified is our central image of the strangeness of God, consuming what comes close to it. . . . He now stands for the strangeness of God. He is the ‘ray of darkness’ in the world of religious fantasy. He is that which interrupts and disturbs and remakes the world.”102 The “disruptive darkness” of Mt Sinai is now seen

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99. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 128.

100. Rowan Williams, “Resurrection and Peace: More on New Testament Ethics,” in On Christian Theology (Oxford, UK ; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 270.

101. E.g., “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor 1:20b–25).

102. Rowan Williams, “A Ray of Darkness,” 122.

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on the mount of Golgotha, not as the darkness “of obscurity or confused ignorance, but the darkness of sheer resistance to the finite mind on the part of the divine.”103

On Williams’s view, the possibility of theological illumination is to be found not in “visions or ecstasies” but in “the sense of being drawn into a central magnetic area of obscurity. . . . Illumination is an entry into that ‘contradiction’ at the heart of Christian belief represented by Jesus on the cross.”104 Like Gregory of Nyssa, Williams identifies the cloud of Sinai, the vertiginous darkness of the divine presence into which Moses gazed, as the “ray of darkness” that shines forth from Christ’s cross. But whereas

Byzantine theology characteristically speaks of this complex according to the iconic logic of excess and manifestation—according to which the cross paradoxically reveals God’s

Glory clothed in humility, thereby uniting light and darkness—Williams’s account inclines toward the dialectical logic of the ontological distinction.

Williams links this disruptive dissolution of language to John of the Cross’s

“night of the spirit.” Since “God is no determinate object,” the self’s movement into the divine life means the loss of any determinate object of desire. As Williams describes it, this “privation of specific, determinate goods for my subjectivity produces the sense of a dissolution of selfhood itself—the appalling darkness, suffering and disorientation evoked in the treatise on the night of the spirit.”105 Thus Williams holds up the dereliction as the paradigm of the “objectless darkness at the centre of Christian prayer” which the faithful must learn to see as “the living of the relation between ‘Father’ and

‘Son.”106 In that “midnight of emptiness,” the Spirit purifies our affections and

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103. Rowan Williams, “Author’s Introduction,” xiii.

104. Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 181.

105. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 120–21.

106. Ibid., 125.

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attachments. Yet even the transfiguring action of God to which this is preliminary is

“experienced as darkness, for the most part.”107 The choice, according to Williams

(reading John of the Cross), is between seeking mystical experience or seeking God: “If you want God, then you must be prepared to let go of all, absolutely all, substitute satisfactions, intellectual and emotional.”108

2.3. Williams’s Treatment of the Empty Tomb Demonstrates the Centrality of Absence in His

Theology

The absence of the Father at the crucifixion parallels the Son’s absence in the resurrection: the “necessary first moment in the resurrection event is one of absence and loss.”109 This sense of absence owes in part to the fact that the resurrection, as the

“hinge” between old and new creations, stands beyond the reach of history and language. It is “every bit as strange and unique as the creation of the world from nothing.”110 Accordingly, the resurrection “does not and cannot belong to history: it is not an event, with a before and after, occupying a determinate bit of time between Friday and Sunday.”111 Williams thus insists that a theology of the risen Jesus, like any theology

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107. Ibid.

108. Rowan Williams, “‘The Dark Night’,” 97.

109. Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 77. Williams understands Certeau as making a similar point: “God’s act is never identified with a segment of history that will stand still under scrutiny. . . . The founder has disappeared, surrendered himself to the absent Father, become part of the divine absence itself, so that, in the Church, there is never a single all-sufficient source of authority in which and in which alone the founding reality is decisively embodied. At every point in the Christian narrative, meaning recedes from anything that might be read off the immediate and contingent and appears only in the ways in which the whole of a story consistently evokes the absence that makes space for us.” “God,” 81.

110. Myers, Christ the Stranger, 30.

111. Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 89. Cf. G. W. H. Lampe and D. M. MacKinnon, The Resurrection: A Dialogue, ed. William Purcell, reprint, 1966 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 64.

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cognizant of the truth that God is not a “determinate object” in the world, must always be a negative theology, “obliged to confess its conceptual and imaginative poverty.”112

As the emblem of the resurrection, the empty tomb is central to Williams’s reflections on the resurrection.113 Characteristically, Williams emphasizes that the empty tomb prevents foreclosing on the significance of Jesus’ narrative.114 It is “the image of an

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112. Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 84.

113. The primary texts include Resurrection, “Between the Cherubim”, and “Resurrection and Peace: More on New Testament Ethics”. Summarizing the main lines of his resurrection reflections—i.e., empty tomb, transformed community, and the universal offer of forgiveness—Williams says that “[t]he resurrection of Jesus may be (as I for one believe) at least the empty tomb, but it is most importantly the overcoming of the loss, the death-of-identity, in the experience of those who had followed and then abandoned Jesus, and the proclamation to his executioners of hope or salvation through their victim.” “Resurrection and Peace: More on New Testament Ethics,” 271. This last sentiment in particular owes to the influence of Sebastian Moore’s The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger (1977), on which Williams’s Resurrection might be read as an extended meditation, wedded to Girard and Hegel. Owing to Moore, Williams says that Jesus represents the “pure victim” who returns, in the Church’s preaching, to his judges in order to judge judgement. That is, as the pure victim—“essentially and archetypally victim” (Resurrection, 9)—he transcends the cycle of retributive violence and exclusion by becoming the merciful, vindicating judge who “rejects the world’s rejections, and causes the rejected to become accepted” (99). This line of interpretation verges on becoming overly formal, as with the suggestion that our freedom for self-discovery requires the presence of the “pure victim,” a “symbolic figure who transcends the order of human violence, a figure first to be identified with my victim, then with myself, in a continuing process of mediation and reinterpretation . . . And the gospel of the resurrection offers Jesus crucified as such a figure” (19). The impression of such a formal or idealistic character is abetted by the relative reticence, even skepticism, evinced in some of Williams’s writing. Thus, near the end of Resurrection, he entertains an austere historical reconstruction—according to which the report of the empty tomb prompted the disciples to break bread together, and this experience gave rise in turn to the conviction of Jesus’ resurrection—which he describes as both “attractive and plausible,” before rejecting it as dubious for just that reason (106–107). He goes on to describe his personal view of the resurrection as “fairly ‘objectivist’ . . . taking seriously the empty tomb as a sign of God’s historical act of raising Jesus ‘as a person’ (as a ‘body,’ in some sense).” I take the use of quotation marks here as an indication of the extraordinary characteristic of Jesus’ resurrected body and the inadequacy of the term “person,” but the overall impression is rather more equivocal than what I take to be Williams’s own beliefs.

114. Cf. “[Jesus’ life] . . . was crowned by a strange and elusive event which declared this life not to be over. This human life is declared to be God’s, to belong with God; that is, it is shown to share in the radical creative energy that generates all things. Thus its meaningfulness is not restricted by historical circumstance.” Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 43.

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absence, an image of the failure of images, which is also an absence that confirms the reality of a creative liberty, an agency not sealed and closed, but still obstinately engaged with a material environment and an historical process.”115 The significance of Jesus’ life and death cannot be confined to the past. In the resurrection, Jesus’ past identity is raised and restored such that it can now be brought into relation with every problem and with every present.116 The particularity of Jesus’ life thus becomes the touchstone for relation with God, “a universal symbol, the focus and pivot of a fresh and transforming interpretation of all human reality.”117

In returning to his followers, the risen Jesus equally articulates both the strangeness and the acceptance of God. First, the enigmatic and elusive Jesus who meets his disciples in the “apparition stories” reflects the disorientation and confusion of those disciples’ lives and language. The risen Jesus returns as an unsettling and unrecognized stranger,118 the one who is “still and forever other.”119 Easter thus means “coming to the

memory of Jesus, looking for consolation, and finding a memory that hurts and judges,

that sets a distance, even an alienation between me and my hope, my Saviour.”120 The

resurrection “frees Jesus from our projections and expectations,”121 which means that the

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115. Rowan Williams, “Between the Cherubim,” 196. Williams links the resurrection narratives to “the Jewish proscription of idolatry, in a new and distinctive key,” suggesting that the theological import that emerges from the combination of the empty tomb tradition and the confusion and uncertainty of the “apparition stories” points to the danger of ideological closure. Ibid., 187.

116. Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 35. Cf. “The knowledge that Jesus is with God is the knowledge that his life has broken its historical boundaries; it is not limited by the set of relationships within which it was lived in the first century.” Ibid., 55.

117. Rowan Williams, “Between the Cherubim,” 188; Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 20.

118. Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 75.

119. Ibid.

120. Ibid., 74.

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resurrected Christ cannot be “absorbed” by any cause, even the Church’s—the risen

Christ “is not there for the legitimation of any particular programme.”122 The freedom of the Risen One—including the freedom to judge and transform the Church—precludes such ideological appropriation.123

As with the absence of the Father, then, the Son’s absence indicates his unavailability as an idol to be manipulated or possessed. The church cannot absorb the full significance of Jesus’ resurrection, but it can manifest it, becoming “the place where he is shown.”124 Jesus thus embodies God’s communication “not only of words or information but of new life.”125 The event of his death and resurrection have “created a

different sort of human community” which connects his followers “not only to Jesus but

to one another in a new way.”126 The apparition stories, then, serve a transitional

purpose, helping to establish Jesus’ ongoing presence with the community as his life is

“interwoven” with theirs, paradigmatically in the Eucharist.127

Williams describes the new creation, no less than the “original” creation, as “an

act of utter withdrawal.”128 Uniting the empty space between the two white-clad figures

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121. Ibid., 82.

122. Rowan Williams, “Between the Cherubim,” 192.

123. Ibid.

124. Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 56.

125. Rowan Williams, “Afterword,” in The Blackwell Companion to , ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 497.

126. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Pluralism,” 172.

127. Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 92.

128. Rowan Williams, “Sacraments of the New Society,” in On Christian Theology, reprint, 1996 (Oxford, UK ; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 216. Williams’s discussion here centers on the question of divine power. “Death is the beginning of the new order, and this divine dispossession points back to questions about the very nature of the creative act itself, as more like renunciation than dominance.” Ibid.

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in the tomb with that between the two thieves and the absence “between the cherubim” on the mercy-seat of the ark, Williams underscores that God is found in aniconic absence, the “non-space” of divine freedom:

In our history, the only possibility of knowing God as God is to face the silence,

at least sometimes, the absence between the cherubim; only by doing so can we

learn to look to a God who is free to forgive and re-create because he is not

bound by our imaginings. The ‘mercy-seat’ is what it is, the place of

reconciliation, because here we make no claim on God, place no restriction on

him by our guilt-conditioned fancies, but only stand before him in trust and

expectancy. While we still live in history, our images of God are always shaped

by our past, our memory; how then shall we meet the God who is free from all

this, free to give us a future, without the silence of the sanctuary, without the

moments when we face the emptiness between our words and images?129

The particular history of Jesus culminates in this silence which articulates the freedom and forgiveness of God. Accordingly, “[a]ll our prayer is nourished from these two sources—silence and the reading of the gospel.”130

In sum, Williams suggests that beginning from the empty tomb—from “what seems a grave, a void”—enables Christians to find themselves drawn away from the dramas of an egoistic self and toward the world’s suffering.131 Only by facing up to the

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129. Rowan Williams, “Holy Space,” in Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1994), 101 See also Rowan Williams, “Between the Cherubim”.

130. Rowan Williams, “Holy Space,” 103.

131. Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 41. Cf. “Growth is in the passionate constancy of returning to what seems a grave, a void, to the dim recollection of a possibility of love, in the hope of hearing one’s name spoken out of the emptiness.” Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 41.

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tragic darkness can we be stripped of our selfish illusions and so opened to the possibility of compassion (i.e., the capacity to “suffer with” and so to love).132 God’s activity, says Williams, just is that opening of every situation to newness and transformation. But the necessary first step—which Williams finds in T. S. Eliot—is to abandon the search for meaning in the world:

Give up the futile struggle to dominate and organise the chaos of the world in

systems and mythologies, and realise that the empty destitution of confronting

darkness is the only way in which love can begin: because only if we are honest

about the world can we see the choices that confront us. Either there is only

destruction and death, or there is destruction and death that we take into

ourselves, so as to let it burn away our self-obsession and so make room for active

love, compassion, mutual giving, life in communion.133

According to Williams, it is through our consent to “making out of chaos a network of compassion” that God’s compassion and redemption are manifest in history.134

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132. ““Understood thus, the resurrection becomes the moment which overthrows an idolatrous view of grace, idolatrous because it sees grace as serving my needs as I define them.” Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 80.

133. Rowan Williams, “Lazarus,” 218.

134. Rowan Williams, “Lazarus,” 218–19. Williams, somewhat surprisingly, describes the Reformation, together with “many aspects of the Counter-Reformation,” as “a crucial move towards adulthood in the history of Christian understanding: not by any means that all that went before was infantile, but that here is an articulate and decisive rejection of certain pervasive kinds of infantilism—fantasies of gratification, undifferentiated dependence, the effort to please (and thus ‘harness’) a parental authority. Every proper proclamation of the Easter gospel, pointing to a hidden and elusive Christ with whom we can never simply and unconditionally identify, represents the same challenge, the same rejection, the same call to ‘adulthood.’ The resurrection calls forward into a life that is genuinely new and effectively changed by a grace which both displaces the ego from its central and domineering position and grounds the self more and more profoundly in the accepting love of the Father.” Resurrection, 80. One hears echoes of Bonhoeffer’s well-known remarks about a world “come of age” and “religionless Christianity.”

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3. A Comparison with Certeau Illuminates the Pitfalls of a Disjunctive Emphasis on

Absence

For Williams, the possibility of presence in history is fraught with problems.

According to Williams, historical existence is populated with linguistic signs marked by absence and deferral, and the shape of such existence is discernible in the dynamic of cross and resurrection itself. Hence, the ultimate paradox of Christianity, “Christ’s cross as God’s glory,” which inscribes God’s absence in the world and “defines the glory of

God ‘outside’ the world.”135 Unsurprisingly, then, we find that Williams’s interpretation of God’s absence in history precludes the possibility of theophany, since the latter entails the sense of a “pure ‘presence’” available only in the eschaton:

it is precisely mortality itself, limit, incompletion, absence, that is the speech of

Wisdom with us. A world of mortality can only be theophanic (in the sense of

pure ‘presence’) if its mortal elements are erased . . . But whatever the religious

significance of such ‘timeless’ moments, it is not here that Wisdom is active in the

transformation of the world, but in the presence-in-absence of Christ hastening

towards his death and calling us after. Wisdom is mortal for and with us not to

destroy but to affirm and then transfigure the world in which we actually live, the

world of body, time and language, absence and desire. There is indeed a requies

promised to the people of God, the ‘presence’ of heaven and the vision of God’s

face; but by definition this cannot now be talked about except in the

mythological language of future hope (as if it were a future state like other future

states, like what I shall feel tomorrow). It is the presence of God at our own end,

our death, the end of time for us, and in some sense the end of desire in fruitio;

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135. Rowan Williams, “Poetic and Religious Imagination,” Theology 80 (May 1977): 185.

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not, therefore, for possession now in the language of belief, or any other

language.136

There are several striking features here, perhaps foremost among them the sense of marked opposition between the absence of history and the “presence” of the theophanic.

Such moments are “timeless” and so cannot transform but only destroy the mortal and historical.

Having identified the conceptual current in Williams’s work that tends toward a disjunctive logic and the root metaphor of absence, the present section considers the problematic extremes to which this idiom of absence can lead by examining Michel de

Certeau’s work on mysticism. Williams explicitly invokes Certeau’s work in a 2005 essay, arguing that Christianity “rests on an absent body,” and that at its core is a

“foundational absence.”137 Moreover, there are significant affinities between the two authors (though there are also telling differences in emphasis).138 Themes of absence, otherness and desire are fundamental for both authors, and both highlight the

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136. Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 149.

137. Rowan Williams, “God,” 80, 89.

138. These similarities are hardly exclusive, nor do they conclusively establish Certeau’s influence on Williams at an earlier point. For our purposes, the similarities are suggestive enough to warrant closer comparison, an impression reinforced by Williams’s explicit appropriation of Certeau’s notion of absence for thinking both about Christianity and theological anthropology. F. C. Bauerschmidt explains the significance of Certeau’s thought for generally. “In many ways the work of Certeau displays a sensibility which seems characteristically postmodern: an awareness of the inescapableness of linguistic representation, an overturning of traditional hierarchies of presence and absence, a recognition of the shattering of meta-narratives, and, perhaps above all, a concern with otherness. Yet unlike many postmodern thinkers, Certeau’s sensibilities are profoundly marked by Christian faith and traditions, making his thought of particular interest to theologians, even though he himself seems to have come to view theology as one of those provisions which must be left behind on the journey to Away-From-Here.” Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, “Michel de Certeau: Introduction,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. , Blackwell Readings in Modern Theology (Oxford ; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 135.

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foundational nature of praxis and contend that the Gospel’s “verification” is found not in any objective reference but in the changed relations it makes possible among Christ’s followers. Finally, both assert the centrality of the empty tomb and argue for an

“apophatic anthropology” in which the created other is inscribed in the “non-place” of the self as a sign of the truly Other.139 Since Certeau’s work represents a particularly clear and influential example of the way absence has been thematized in one particular stream of Western theology and philosophy, a closer examination of his views helps to illuminate the drift of certain features of Williams’s thought. In a sense, Certeau occupies the “place” toward which much in Williams’s work tends. At the same time, a clear understanding of the terminus of this idiom of absence also suggests the benefit to

Williams’s theology of having this trajectory mitigated by countervailing elements pushing toward a greater recognition of presence and participation.

3.1. Certeau’s Disjunctive Account of Christian “Mysticism” Assumes the Priority of Absence

Certeau maintains that “Christianity was founded upon the loss of a body—the loss of the body of Jesus Christ,” and that this “founding disappearance” of Jesus’s body, compounded with the loss of the “body” of Israel, is what gives Christianity its universal character.140 This initial privation imparted to Christianity a fecund but restless desire that generates “institutions and discourse that are the effects of substitutes for that absence.”141 Insofar as Jesus may be said to be present to his followers, that presence is

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139. P. Sheldrake, “Unending Desire: De Certeau’s ‘Mystics’,” Way Supplement 102 (2001): 44.

140. “A founding disappearance indeed: it defines the Christian experience in relation to the assurance that holds the Jewish people anchored in their biological and social reality. . . . The Christian word takes on ‘Catholic’ (universal) and ‘Pentecostal’ (spiritual) form only when it is separated from its ethnic origin and a certain heredity.” Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith, Religion and (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 81. Though an admittedly complex issue, the supercessionist implications of Certeau’s sentiment are difficult to ignore.

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decidedly paradoxical. Whereas he was previously here, he now “remain[s] inaccessibly elsewhere.”142 Like a text, the “mystical body” of Christ is “structured by dissemination,” and its presence in the Church must be continually “invented” through community discourse and practices.143 Jesus is the absent “author” who therefore “authorizes” multiple, non-identical elaborations: “There is a close bond between the absence of Jesus

(dead and not present) and the birth of the Christian language (objective and faithful testimony of his survival).”144

On the one hand, Christ’s self-effacement is what makes possible these subsequent, non-identical performances. That is, the Christ-event is “disseminated in a multiplicity of interpretations,” which it “permits” and makes possible through its own disappearance.145 On the other hand, while Christian discourse and experiences are effects which, in ramifying Christ’s meaning, manifest something of the significance of his life, they are also new in which the inaugural event is lost.146 “What the event makes possible is different each time, as a new remoteness from the event and a new way of erasing it.”147 That is, the Jesus event makes possible its own erasure or

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141. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 81.

142. Cf. Jesus “had to be ‘here’ in order that it might be possible for him to be ‘not here’ but ‘elsewhere’; he had to be present so that his disappearance might become the sign of a different future (Matthew 28: 1–8).” Michel de Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward, reprint, 1971, Blackwell Readings in Modern Theology (Oxford ; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 151.

143. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 82.

144. Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” 145.

145. Ibid., 143.

146. “. . . the event is lost precisely in what it authorizes. . . . the founder disappears; he is impossible to grasp and ‘hold,’ to the extent that he is incorporated and takes on meaning in a plurality of ‘Christian’ experiences, operations, discoveries, and inventions.” Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” 145–46.

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disappearance from a field of novel reinterpretations that take inspiration from but in no way preserve “that which is lacking.”148 Again, Certeau says, “Our relation to the origin is in the function of its increasing absence. The beginning is more and more hidden by the multiple creations which reveal its significance.”149

This restless drive to compensate rhetorically for the divine absence is central to

Certeau’s account of the phenomenon of modern “mysticism.” In The Mystic Fable and several other essays, Certeau argues that the “mysticism” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fashioned for itself a “mystical tradition,”150 and that the development of the mystical language of absence and “dark nights” reflected both a subjective state of spiritual absence and loss on the part of the authors and their perception of the “global situation” in the West, which was characterized by social, cultural and religious fragmentation.151 Where once Christians had confidently heard

God’s speech through the sacred cosmos, holy Church and revealed Word, those

“institutions of meaning” were now unraveling; the sacred cosmos had been shattered and their confidence in Church and Scripture were equally shaken.152 For many of them, this sense of dislocation was echoed by the fact that, as conversos, they suffered social marginalization.153

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147. Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” 145.

148. Ibid., 145, 150.

149. Ibid., 146–47.

150. Michel de Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, foreword by Wlad Godzich, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 17 (Minneapolis: University of Press, 1986), 82.

151. Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 81. Cf. “Unending Desire,” 42.

152. Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 86.

153. Ibid.

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According to Certeau, the silence or absence of God from these traditional loci was perceived by the mystics as a void to be filled, and he regards their writings as both a reflection of and a response to this lack, as they attempt to rhetorically establish a dialogue through their writing.154 Certeau explains that these mystics possessed a creative liberty owing in part to their outsider status as conversos, “midway between two religious traditions,” a standing that gave them the sense of independence from authority they needed “to become the major initiators of a new mode of discourse freed from dogmatic redundancy.”155 As relative outsiders, the mystics could call into question earlier systems of meaning with pretensions to finality or closure.156 Like Certeau’s

analysis of the resistant “tactics” of other marginalized groups, he emphasizes that the

mystics were not setting up alternative totalizing systems or places (lieu) of power, but

rather creating discursive spaces (espaces): “Contemporaneous to the act of creation,

outside an unreadable history, ‘utopian’ space having provided a new faculty of reason a

no-place in which to exercise its ability to create a world as text—a mystic space is

constituted, outside the fields of knowledge.”157 This new linguistic practice destabilizes

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154. Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 88. With the collapse of the classical loci for encounter with God, Certeau emphasizes that the conventions for a new discursive space in which to hear from God had to be produced. Ibid., 91. He draws the establishment of this new discursive space and its practices together with the themes of desire and absence, situating them within the orbit of the mystic’s will: “In this respect, the volo manifests and founds what no longer comes naturally—a contract of language which, because it has no property, takes the form of the lack and the desire of the other. Corresponding to the establishment by a volo of a ‘convention’ among addressees that functions to set them apart from non-addressees, there is a need on the part of the addresser (or the author) to found the place at which he speaks.” Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 92.

155. Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 84–85.

156. Sheldrake, “Unending Desire,” 45.

157. Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 89.

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the tradition, providing “not a new content, new institutions, or new Scriptures, but the conversion of relationships with respect to each institution.”158

Certeau is wary of the drive toward totalizing systems and the exclusion of alterity. Accordingly, he identifies the claim to “pure presence” with a craving for possession and the temptation toward idolatry. Only in denying us the possibility for such idolatrous presence does the Gospel release us to a liberating and generative absence.

Indeed, there is the disappearance of an “idol” which would freeze our view and

give us the truth in a singularity. There is a fading away of any ‘primitive’ object

capable of being delimited by a knowledge and possessed as in an ownership.

There is a loss of anything “essential” immediately given in the image or in the

voice. On the contrary, the “kenosis” of presence gives rise to a plural, communitarian

language. A series of places, works, or historical formations which the absence of

Jesus has made possible are the only traces of the incarnate God, and may leave

free, within the present, a different place for the inventions which we risk.159

That we must resist the lure of possession and closure means that the heart of the

Christian call is to “the movement of perpetual departure.”160 That is, “[t]he Christian

movement is always the recognizing of a particular situation and the necessity of a new

step forward.”161 A particular place is required for the departure, but only in

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158. Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” 154.

159. Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” 147. Emphasis in original.

160. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 299. As Philip Sheldrake says, the call is “to journey with no security apart from a story of Christ that is to be ‘practised’ rather than objectively stated.” “Unending Desire,” 44. Sheldrake suggests that “[t]his approach to Christianity as a journey, practice or action, with its emphasis on variety rather than organization or a dogmatic order, was explicitly drawn from de Certeau's membership of the Jesuit Order and original immersion in Ignatian spirituality.” Ibid., 40.

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withdrawing, departing, can we recognize “the enclosure implicit in the initial position. .

. . Boundaries are the place of the Christian work, and their displacements are the result of this work.”162 As Certeau says, “He or she is mystic who cannot stop walking and, with the certainty of what is lacking, knows of every place and object that it is not that; one cannot stay there nor be content with that. Desire creates an excess. Places are exceeded, passed, lost behind it. It makes one go further, elsewhere. It lives nowhere.”163

The necessity of perpetual departure is equally incumbent on the individual

Christian, whose identity is no more stable than the tradition’s. Unlike the modern

“self,” Certeau pictures a “siteless” self, which he compares to the mobile, semiotic sign, less something than a space of intersecting and overlapping relations: “Analogous to the linguistic signs of utterance, these terms do not refer to an object or entity (they are not referential or denominative), but to the agency of discourse itself. ‘I’ is an ‘empty’ form that simply announces the speaker. It is a ‘siteless site . . .”164

These, then, in Williams’s view, are Certeau’s most significant contributions to contemporary theology: his account of Christianity’s foundational absence and his notion of the contemplative self as “siteless,” “non-territorial,” a “non-place” in virtue of its relation with God.165 In short, neither the tradition nor the individual Christian has a stable identity, a secure place on which to stand. What each has is a place from which to depart perpetually, in encounter with otherness and the finally Other. As Williams

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161. Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” 151.

162. Ibid.

163. Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 299.

164. Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 90.

165. Williams highlights the significance of this non-territorial conception of the mystical consciousness in “’s Other Poet: and the Threshold Between Worlds,” Welsh Writing in English 8 (2003): 119.

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explains it, “The encounter with God, paradigmatically seen in the life and language of the ‘mystic,’ always moves us towards a non-place: the mystic’s actual worldly identity becomes an inscription of otherness—in the dissolution or paradox of the mystic’s language and in the sense of mystical awareness as the growth towards a joy generated by nothing but the life of the other in the self.”166

The affinities between the two authors are striking, even if Certeau eventually concluded that Christianity itself was something to be left behind on the journey. In addition to a shared postmodern sensibility, Williams, like Certeau, is quite interested in the great , John of the Cross167 and Teresa of Avila,168 and that likely for similar reasons. That is, Certeau’s interest in the history of mysticism, as Sheldrake explains, “arose from the parallels he perceived between this period and his own time when the word, especially of Scripture, could no longer be spoken to believers in the old ways. The world was increasingly seen as opaque and unreadable. . . . he understood himself to be speaking in a twentieth-century world where institutional Christianity was no longer the place of definitive meaning. A critical question for de Certeau concerned how we can continue to believe in the absence of a distinctively Christian place.”169

Williams confronts many of the same realities, having come to theology during the

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166. Rowan Williams, “God,” 82. Williams later explains that this understanding of the self as a “non-place,” which follows from an accounting of our non-competitive relation with God, “challenges a territorial account of the self, in such a way that the created other finds place in my self, and my ‘interest’ is shifted from an individual focus to one that prescribes reciprocity and involvement.” Ibid., 87.

167. The Wound of Knowledge; “Dark Night, Darkness”; “The Deflections of Desire”; and passim.

168. Rowan Williams, Teresa of Avila, Outstanding Christian Thinkers (Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse Pub., 1991).

169. Sheldrake, “Unending Desire,” 41, 43.

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height of “death of God” theology and faced the challenges of the Anglican Church as scholar, bishop and archbishop.

It is unsurprising, then, that Williams, like Certeau, has found the language of absence an effective idiom and that for a number of reasons. First, it speaks to the perceived absence of the divine in the modern “disenchanted” world. In keeping with

Williams’s tragic moral vision, this idiom of absence acknowledges the widespread feeling of loss before attempting to recover some manner of paradoxical presence.

Second, this vocabulary accepts the dissemination, even dissolution, of the divine presence from privileged sites of revelation, thereby underscoring the potential of the everyday, the mundane, as a space in which dialogue with the divine can be established.

And perhaps most powerfully, in the wake of Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology, the vocabulary of absence inscribes a suspicion of the controlling gaze of modern philosophical and theological discourse, and so of the linkage between the “metaphysics of presence” and socio-political regimes of power and control.

Once more, I am not attempting to indict Williams on the basis of Certeau’s views, though they do share many of the same sensibilities. On the contrary, I believe that Williams is innocent of the extremes to which Certeau pushes the language of absence. Accordingly, I contend that there are pitfalls associated with certain theological accounts that prioritize absence, that these risks are not wholly reconciled by Williams’s juxtaposition of the vocabularies of presence and absence, and that other conceptual resources already present in Williams’s work might help clarify the issues at stake.

3.2. Certeau’s Account of Christian “Mysticism” Risks “Hypostatizing” Absence

The first issue concerns Certeau’s reading of mysticism itself, at least if his remarks about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mysticism are taken to represent the entire “mystical tradition.” As we just saw, Certeau construes the relationship between

Jesus and the Church rather competitively, so that future elaboration requires the effacement, even the disappearance, of the original. The same rivalry characterizes

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Certeau’s account of mysticism, which he regards as in some sense opposed to history, diversity and particularity. Mysticism is “the anti-Babel,” straining to escape finitude and unify humanity through the invention of an ahistorical language.170 On this view, mysticism represents the attempt to cross the ontological divide, and Certeau’s understanding of the of mystical vision illustrates the destructive implications of following that contrastive, disjunctive logic to its extreme, insofar as attaining to the divine entails the annihilation of the human.

In brief, since God is not a particular object to be seen, Certeau suggests that mysticism sunders the act of seeing and the things seen. We are then confronted with an ultimate choice between abandoning the possibility of beatific vision (as Williams at times appears inclined to do, since it seems to posit the erasure of a recognizably human life of exchange and difficulty) or abandoning the world of history and particularity.

This, according to Certeau, is the path of the mystics who claim that “the more vision there is, the less there are of things seen; that the one grows to the degree that the other is effaced.”171 God is no particular thing, so Certeau explains that the ultimate perfection of mystical vision is a “white ecstasy” in which nothing in particular is seen.172 Pure mystical vision is unlimited, allowing nothing to obstruct its gaze, which means that it

“coincides with the disappearance of things seen,” of objects which would limit vision’s expansion.173 Such vision seeks “an ultimate obliteration of all things in the ‘universal

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170. Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” 88.

171. Michel de Certeau, “White Ecstasy,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward, Blackwell Readings in Modern Theology (Oxford ; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 155.

172. I am grateful to Ethan Smith for drawing my attention to this essay and its worrisome interpretation of mystical vision.

173. Certeau, “White Ecstasy,” 155–56. Cf. “Scripture says that one cannot see God without dying. No doubt it means by this that seeing presupposes the annihilation of all things seen.” Ibid., 156.

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and confused’ light of vision,” an “unfolding of presence” so full that it signals the end of our world: “the whiteness that is beyond all division, the ecstasy that kills consciousness and extinguishes all spectacles, an illuminated death.”174 Even the distinction between God and self is dissolved in this “dazzling blindness.”175 In short, mystical vision, according to Certeau, strives to realize a pure, unmediated and static presence that would mean the end of all difference and history. Such an account of vision realized, presence attained, is a cause of terror for Certeau (as well as for Williams, whose “non-teleological eschatology” witnesses to his wariness of such finality).176 The question, then, becomes whether the Western beatific vision or the Eastern vision of the divine light, and so deification, must necessarily be pictured in these terms.

As a matter of historical judgment, I have neither the expertise nor the desire to contest Certeau’s interpretation of the specific period of Western mysticism he examines.

What is striking, however, is how poorly his account of this “white ecstasy” fares as a comprehensive description of Christian mysticism and spirituality. For example, a notably different view of mystical vision is articulated in the Eastern Orthodox

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174. Certeau, “White Ecstasy,” 157–58.

175. “As [the mystics] explain it, the subject and the object of this verb [i.e., seeing] are unstable; they pivot around the verb. We can say, ‘we see God’ or ‘God sees us.’ It comes to the same thing. The subject and the object can replace each other, interchangeable and unstable, inhaled by a domineering verb.” Certeau, “White Ecstasy,” 157.

176. I have not addressed Williams’s eschatology in detail, nor do I have the space to do so. I would observe that, for Williams, eschatology has less to do with the promise of future consolation and resolution than with the possibility of a future resourced by the inexhaustible creative energy of God. In characteristic fashion, this means that eschatology is less a promised consolation than a standing challenge to the present in the form of the fantasies and projection of human desire. Accordingly, Williams is highly suspicious about traditional, “linear” accounts of eschatology: “if there is no single, ‘linear’ story of God’s liberative action (a story bound to give unique power and definitional force to the human group that appropriates it), there is no movement to a last end, a millennium—only a confidence that, within the divine matrix, nothing is ultimately lost.” Rowan Williams, “On Being Creatures,” 65.

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spirituality expressed in Dumitru Stăniloae’s Orthodox Spirituality. Stăniloae’s account of the mystical ascent differs markedly from Certeau’s in several key respects, including that, for Stăniloae, (1) created realities (logoi) are not annihilated by the ascent, but remain eternally significant,177 (2) the mystic (and Christian) remains forever unconfused with God,178 and (3) the infinity of the divine self-manifestation means that the mystical élan is eternally inexhaustible, never terminated by the arrival of an exhaustive divine presence.179

Second, while there are tremendously fruitful aspects to Certeau’s account—e.g., his development of the notion of a transforming praxis that “permits” or “makes possible” new, non-identical patterns of action which “verify” and extend that event— there are reasons to be wary about other elements of his articulation of Christianity’s foundational absence. Certeau emphasizes that elaborations of the Gospel multiply in proportion to the “disappearance,” “loss” or “fading away” of Jesus himself.180 Jesus’

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177. “. . . in the life to come we will eternally contemplate in God, accompanied by ever new experiences, the logoi of all things, in a perfect unity. . . . the moral and intellectual effort of man during the course of earthly life and in general creation with its logoi and the relations they impose, appear to us as having not only a passing role, but an eternal value. We will be in the ages with the logoi of all things; we will profit and be perfected, by the moral and intellectual endeavors on earth.” Orthodox Spirituality, 354.

178. Stăniloae remarks that the deified person “is as God, yes even god, but not God. He is a dependent god, to say in another way that he is a ‘god by participation.’ The consciousness of this dependence excludes the pantheistic identification of man with God.” Orthodox Spirituality, 373.

179. “But the ontological distance between creature and Creator being infinite, this way of drawing near to God in likeness will never end, or this work of his being moulded according to the divine archetype; so never will he arrive at knowing God as He knows Himself. This road is full of the pilgrims of eternity, strung out according to their ontological distance from God, and according to their voluntary efforts.” Orthodox Spirituality, 357.

180. To give one among many examples, Certeau argues that Jesus inaugurates a historical dynamic “in which, each time, to ‘permit’ means to ‘disappear’ and, at last, to die. . . . the mark of spiritual truth is henceforward the effective relation between the fading away of a singularity and that which it makes possible.” Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” 151.

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absence is fundamental to these future performances.181 He thus describes the initial event of Jesus as an “inter-locution: something said-between, implied by all the Christian languages but given by no one of them.”182 Future elaborations are completely

“alienated” from their authorizing “truth,” which they neither preserve nor deliver.183

This reading makes temporal and spatial distance correlative, since, according to

Certeau, our increasing temporal remove from the inaugural event of Jesus entails “its increasing absence.”184 In short, Certeau’s account goes beyond simply challenging conceptions that assume the possibility of transparency or pure presence, pressing toward an affirmative statement of the absence of Jesus. The overwhelming impression, then, is that there is something which has been withdrawn, something inaccessible to us and from which we are at an increasing remove. The specter of pure, unmediated presence is exorcised through an opposing insistence on the reality of its absence.

At an innocuous level, Certeau’s language affirms that Jesus is not simply or undialectically present in any future performance which draws inspiration or power from his name. The significance of Jesus’ life as a matter of limited historical specificity “dies” in order to be raised to more universal import. Absent as a piece of finite history, it is resurrected as a matter of faith. Such a rendering, however—which would leave ample room for Christian talk of Jesus as present in various ways (e.g., as a source of inspiration, head of the Church, giver of the Spirit)—is scarcely adequate to the magnitude of Certeau’s affirmative emphasis on the absence of faith’s object. In other words, I think we can see something other than an innocent difference between

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181. Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” 145.

182. Ibid.

183. Ibid., 145–46.

184. Ibid., 146–47.

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theological vocabularies insofar as a dogmatic over-emphasis on absence risks falling into confusion.

To make clear the potential confusion in Certeau’s account, one common to a range of postmodern and deconstructive thinkers, we could turn to an epigram from

Wittgenstein: “All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols. And that means not creating a new one—for instance as in ‘absence of an idol.’”185 As Martin Stone observes,

this remark underscores the fact that, “in setting its face against fundamental illusions,

philosophy is apt to produce new ones.”186 In this case, philosophy and theology rightly

set themselves against the myth of a pure presence, of an illusory immediacy that

promises total comprehension and possession (with respect to theology proper, the

meaning of our language, etc.). But if such immediacy is illusory or confused rather than false, the proper response is not refutation—a posture that gives too much standing to its interlocutor—but rather the simple recognition capable of dispelling the illusion’s attraction.187 In other words, I suggest that Certeau’s insistence on Christ’s absence risks recapitulating the general misstep of deconstructive philosophy (and theology), namely, to give in to the temptation to give a theoretical account of how things must be, thereby

(ironically) preserving the idol of substantial presence it sought to destroy by

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185. “Big Typescript Sections 86–93” in Philosophical Occasions, §88. I am indebted to Martin Stone both for directing me to this remark and for developing its significance in the present context. “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 83–117.

186. Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” 110.

187. On this point, Stone suggests a distinction between theoretical and practical negativity. “One way philosophy goes wrong, Wittgenstein would be saying, is by giving the impression that what is required is a theoretical negation, something that has the effect of a denial. Philosophy’s appropriate destructiveness is practical: its aim, as Rush Rhees remembers Wittgenstein to have said, is not to get the reader to believe something but to do something he is so far unwilling to do.” Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” 111.

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substituting its mirror image, namely, an idol of “substantial absence.”188 Both and deconstruction say too much in undertaking to give an account—from outside our everyday use—of the very possibility (or impossibility) of presence (or meaning, or Truth).189 The fact that we then feel ourselves beset by a false choice—either the myth of immediacy or the total indeterminacy of pure absence—indicates that the genuine philosophical problem is the picture that bewitches both the positivist and the deconstructivist, namely, that there is a gap between sign and meaning, truth and event, and that this gap can be bridged by philosophy absolutely, which is to say in abstraction from our life with signs (i.e., contexts of intelligible use).190 The trick is to see that refusing either position (or both) does not commit one to the other.

I think Williams is largely innocent of this confusion, and his own sharp critique of Derridean deconstruction suggests that he is aware of the dangers.191 Nonetheless, there are facets of his work that trend in this direction, and the primacy that he gives to absence as a root metaphor invites the question of whether, at times, he denies too much.

While I have highlighted the heavy accent Williams places on the theme of divine absence, his work is not without a countervailing emphasis on presence, paradoxical though that presence may be. This is particularly, though not exclusively, true of his

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188. Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” 95, 111. Cf. “Wittgenstein writes out of a sense that the philosophical attempt to exorcize illusion is continuously—one might say internally—at risk of giving the following impression: that to rid oneself of a false notion of presence (e.g., a mental act of meaning that traverses the future use) must be to embrace a substantial notion of absence (“there are no facts”). But to embrace such a notion is, on Wittgenstein’s view, to embrace a kindred philosophical illusion, and indeed, an illusion that is not significantly different from the one that was to be exorcized.” Ibid., 99.

189. Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” 107.

190. Ibid., 106.

191. Rowan Williams, “Hegel and the Gods of Postmodernity,” 31.

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pastoral and popular writings in what Williams calls the “celebratory” mode.192

Williams’s thus highlights the importance of a theology of the risen body for the Church’s sacramental life193 and asserts Christ’s “literal and material presence” in the Church.194 The same Eucharistic focus seems in view in Williams’s

comment, noted above, that the apparition stories form a kind of bridge asserting Jesus’

ongoing presence, “the interweaving of his life with the life of his community.”195 Thus,

“the good news of the resurrection involves the affirmation that grace does not become

abstract with the event of Jesus’ physical death.”196

The distinction between Williams’s “critical”197 and “celebratory” output suggests a comparison between the austerity of the remarks quoted above regarding the empty tomb and one of Williams’s Easter sermons, where the empty tomb is not simply a marker of absence but a door to renewed presence: “So with the two disciples, we look this morning into the empty tomb as if through an open door. On the other side is a world drenched with light, God’s beauty shining through; yet it’s our own world we are seeing, seeing it as God made it to be, seeing ourselves as God made us to be. We are walking

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192. In the “Prologue” to On Christian Theology, Williams draws a methodological distinction between three theological modes: celebratory, critical and communicative. He says that theology operating in the celebratory mode “attempt[s] to draw out and display connections of thought and image so as to exhibit the fullest possible range of significance in the language used.” Rowan Williams, “Prologue,” xiii.

193. Rowan Williams, “No Life, Here – No Joy, Terror or Tears (Response to Bishop Spong’s Statement),” , 17 July 1998, n.p.

194. Rowan Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany,” 252. Cf. Rowan Williams, “Sacramental Living,” 15.

195. Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 92.

196. Ibid., 93.

197. In the “Prologue” to On Christian Theology, Williams says, “[t]his nagging at fundamental meanings is what constitutes a critical theology, alert to its own inner tensions or irresolutions.” “Prologue,” xv.

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into daylight.”198 The same liturgical focus guides Williams’s examination of the divine presence manifest in icons, which, he says, illuminates the relationship of “the self- diffusing God whose action . . . soaked through the material so that there was indeed a

‘real presence’ . . . of God within creation.”199 This divergence raises the further question of how far his use of these vocabularies of presence and absence may (or can) be reconciled. Admittedly, Williams is more occasional than systematic in his writings, but the unresolved tension suggests a reason why Williams has been hesitant to articulate his participatory logic more vigorously. It also raises questions about the compatibility of these trajectories in his work. With Milbank, then, we might reasonably ask when hearing Williams’s defenses of presence, participation and synergistic prayer, whether

“all of that [is] really compatible with Williams’ more ‘Barthian’ and ‘ultra-apophatic’ moments, which risk hypostasising the negative.”200

4. Conclusion: On the Road to Emmaus

I conclude by sketching an illuminating contrast between the theological vocabulary of absence and an alternative rooted in the “theophanic” tradition, developing this contrast by means of a comparative reading of the Emmaus narrative

(Luke 24:13ff.). First, an important note of qualification: while the contrast I elaborate aligns in some ways with characteristic affinities in Eastern and Western theology, neither tradition speaks with a single voice.201 This is apparent in my use of Jean-Luc

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198. Rowan Williams, “Into Daylight,” in Choose Life: Christmas and Easter Sermons in (London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013), 126.

199. Rowan Williams, “Icons and the Practice of Prayer,” n.p. Williams goes on to claim that this divine presence is “intensified . . . in baptized people—even more intensified in those who took their seriously and became saints; and supremely intensified in Jesus Christ.” Ibid.

200. Milbank, “Christianity and Platonism in East and West,” 110 n2.

201. The point is underscored by the fact that I illustrate the two interpretations

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Marion in particular, who suggests that the phenomenological tradition, with its attention to what appears to consciousness, represents a Western alternative to the absence-centric approach.202

On one hand, the absence-centric interpretation of Emmaus reads the Emmaus story as indicating the transition from the manifest presence of Jesus’s physical body to the mediation of Eucharist. In other words, Emmaus marks the moment of withdrawal,

after which the body of Jesus, now inaccessible, is “substituted” by a kind of mediated

presence. On this view, the narrative serves to legitimize this new mediated condition in

which the Church adapts to the absence of Jesus’ body. There is much to commend this

interpretation. But there is also the subtle risk of reading the withdrawal of Jesus’ human

body as the withdrawal (in some sense) of the divine presence, even if this presence is

subsequently restored in the Eucharist. More clearly, one could understand this view as

implying that the presence of Jesus’ body represented a primitive stage of immediacy

and transparency, from which the Church constitutes a “fall” into the mediation of signs

and symbols. The problem with such interpretations, in part, is that, in arguing against immediacy, they may give the impression that immediacy needs to be refuted rather than dispelled, and so is false rather than confused. To put it simply, if mediation is truly basic, then we’re not being denied immediacy; it’s nothing but an illusion, an appealing temptation. Innocuously, we can agree that there is a very real change in the “modality”

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202. In this connection, we might also compare Anthony Godzieba’s remarks on the continuity, even intensification, between the Incarnation and resurrection. Godzieba’s impulse here runs counter to that of the absence-centric idiom: “The grammar of Resurrection is impossible without the grammar of Incarnation. Indeed, the grammar of Resurrection is the intensification of the grammar of Incarnation. And the doctrine of the Incarnation, in one of its most fundamental meanings, is the recognition and celebration of the capacity of the material and the particular to mediate divine presence.” Anthony Godzieba, “‘Stay with Us...’ (Lk. 24:29)—‘Come, Lord Jesus’ (Rev. 22:20): Incarnation, Eschatology, and Theology’s Sweet Predicament,” Theological Studies 67, no. 4 (2006): 788.

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of God’s presence—quite obviously, the Eucharistic elements are not the same as the body of Jesus. And if talk of Jesus’ “absence” indicates only the fact that his body is no longer straightforwardly present, there can be no disagreement. The question is whether the language of absence, and so the interpretation of the narrative as a whole, trades on this unobjectionable, ordinary observation in order to assert something more, namely, that there is something we can’t access.

A different reading might take the first view’s emphasis on mediation as implying that whatever the form of God’s self-revelation in a new energetic modality, that revelation must be recognized by the eyes of faith. So, while there are certainly differences between the Incarnation and other theophanies, the burden of recognition is similar to them all. This is no less true, for example, of the human body of Jesus than of the

Eucharistic elements. Rather than suggest that the Church stands at an epistemic disadvantage, then, John Behr contends that “there is no historical distance at all between those disciples back then and us. We are not at a disadvantage by not ‘being there’ two thousand years ago. ‘Being there’ did not help the disciples, and we delude ourselves if we think that we would have known better. . . . The disciples came to know

Christ as the crucified and risen Lord who, himself, opens the Scriptures and breaks the bread. It is exactly this that now happens in the Church. In the Church, we are still on the road to Emmaus.”203

Marion’s consideration of the story highlights this dynamic of recognition, while also reflecting a phenomenological approach that emphasizes presence rather than absence and withdrawal. Marion begins by asking whether faith, as the commonplace definition understands it, is a compensation for the lack of “intuitions” needed to

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203. John Behr, Becoming Human: Meditations on Christian Anthropology in Word and Image, designed by Amber Schley Iragui (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013), 14–15.

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validate our concepts of God. “Faith, according to this way of thinking, would serve, for better or worse, to compensate faulty intuition . . . I believe because, in spite of everything, I want to hold as true that which does not offer intuitive data sufficient to impose itself by itself. I believe in order to recapture the intuition, which God and Christ cannot or will not give to me, of their presence.”204 The problem, says Marion, is that this view is blasphemous, making the believer out as a heroic “knight of faith” and picturing God and Christ either as impotent or perverse.205

In contrast, Marion suggests that the lack is not one of intuition, but of concepts, such that faith registers the confrontation of intuition’s excess in relation to our concepts

(i.e., the inadequacy of our concepts to what is given).206 The problem is not that we have not been given enough to see, but that we are rendered blind to what floods our eyes by the inadequacy of our concepts. “God does not measure out stingily his intuitive manifestation, as if he wanted to mask himself at the moment of showing himself. But we do not offer concepts capable of handling a gift without measure and, overwhelmed, dazzled, and submerged by his glory, we no longer see anything.”207 The disciples on the road to Emmaus, Marion notes, did not lack the intuition of facts concerning Jesus’ death. Rather they lacked the concepts to understand that death: “Every intuition gives itself to them, but their concepts catch nothing of this.”208

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204. Jean-Luc Marion, “‘They Recognized Him; and He Became Invisible to Them’,” Modern Theology 18, no. 2 (April 2002): 145.

205. “. . . it is blasphemous because God and Christ become in this context either impotent (incapable in fact of fulfilling the Revelation that they promise), or perverse judges (who, in masking them- selves, expose me to unbelief by condemning me to a faith without reason).” Marion, “‘They Recognized Him’,” 146.

206. Marion, “‘They Recognized Him’,” 146.

207. Ibid., 148.

208. Marion, “‘They Recognized Him’,” 147. Marion explains that, until the two disciples received adequate concepts, they saw nothing: “They see nothing—in the sense

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According to Marion, “when the concept at last matches the intuition, the phenomenon bursts forth with its superabundant glory.”209 In the case of theology, this moment of conceptual adaptation requires revelation because of the sheer excess of

God’s thoughts to unaided human reason.210 Marion’s conclusion links seeing and believing, insisting once more that faith marks the excess of what we have been given and the inability of our concepts to “keep up.”

What we lack in order to believe is quite simply one with what we lack in order to

see. Faith does not compensate, either here or anywhere else, for a defect of

visibility: on the contrary, it allows reception of the intelligence of the

———————————— that one sees nothing in a game of chess if one does not know how to play; they hear nothing—in the sense that one hears nothing (except noise) in a conversation if one does not know the language in which it is being conducted.” Ibid. He goes on to compare this event to the transfiguration before the disciples on Mt. Tabor. Like Emmaus, on Tabor one reads about “a phenomenon intuitively certified, yet missed conceptually .” Ibid. Cora Diamond addresses an analogous (though mundane) experience when she writes of “the experience of the mind’s not being able to encompass something which it encounters.” “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Reading Cavell, ed. Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh (London; New York: Routledge, 2006), 98–99. In such moments, we confront the “difficulty of reality,” that is, reality’s apparent resistance to “one’s ordinary mode of life, including one’s ordinary modes of thinking.” Ibid., 105. To appreciate this difficulty is “to feel oneself being shouldered out of how one thinks, how one is apparently supposed to think, or to have a sense of the inability of thought to encompass what it is attempting to reach.” Ibid. She highlights instances of goodness or beauty as possessing this capacity to “throw us” and of striking us as “not being fittable in with the world as one understands it”: “they can give us the sense that this should not be, that we cannot fit it into the understanding we have of what the world is like. It is wholly inexplicable that it should be; and yet it is.” Ibid., 105–106.

209. Marion, “‘They Recognized Him’,” 149.

210. Marion, “‘They Recognized Him’,” 149. Marion makes his point by reference to Peter’s “good ”: “And, when Peter finally gives him the name (the concept) of Christ, Son of God, Jesus immediately points out to him that such a word, name and concept could come to him neither by ‘flesh, nor by blood,’ but only by ‘revelation’ from the Father himself (Matthew 16:17)—so much does man lack the ability to produce, from himself, the concept adequate to what the intuition nevertheless unceasingly gives him to see—precisely, the Christ. Standing before the Christ in glory, in agony, or resurrected, it is always words (and thus concepts) that we lack in order to say what we see, in short to see that with which intuition floods our eyes.” Marion, “‘They Recognized Him’,” 148.

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phenomenon and the strength to bear the glare of its brilliance. Faith does not

manage the deficit of evidence—it alone renders the gaze apt to see the excess of

the preeminent saturated phenomenon, the Revelation. Thus we must not

oppose the episode of the two disciples on the way to Emmaus to that of Christ’s

manifestation to the Apostles, which immediately follows it. For, here again, the

difficulty in believing is explicitly equivalent to a difficulty in believing what one

sees already but does not admit (and it is not in the least a difficulty in imagining

what one does not see).211

Like the disciples, we need to ask Christ to stay with us, to teach us his “words,” for only then will we have the concepts needed to “constitute the intuition . . . into a complete phenomenon.”212 The point, says Marion, is that the Christian recognition of Christ is made possible by situating all our intuition into “the significations of God.”213 In other

words, for Marion the Emmaus story is less about absence than excess. Christian

concepts and significations are not the compensatory sign of an absence, but the

indication of a dazzling, saturated presence.

Marion’s emphasis on brilliance and glory coheres with an approach to the

narrative informed by the “theophanic” tradition.214 Read in the light of the Old

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211. Marion, “‘They Recognized Him’,” 150–51.

212. Ibid., 151.

213. Ibid.

214. For the sense in which I am using this term, see the “Introduction,” page CR. On this theophanic reading, we might compare the revelation that the disciples’ companion is not merely a man but the Lord with similar encounters had by Abraham (Gen 18), Jacob (Gen 32), Manoah (Jdg 13) and Tobit (Tob 12). The story of Manoah seems particularly apt since it involves a shared meal between a couple and a mysterious , whose name is “too wonderful” to be disclosed. The angel’s identity as the Lord’s messenger is ultimately revealed in the course of a meal/sacrifice, whereupon he immediately ascends out of sight in the flames of the altar.

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Testament narratives of theophany—which involved the unpredictable, though always potential, disclosure of the divine presence—the Emmaus story appears as less focused on the Eucharistic consolation for the absent body of Jesus than on the new modality of

God’s continuing presence, distinct to the New Testament era, and the promise of reliable access and availability in the Eucharistic meal. That is, it emphasizes that Jesus is the one whose presence has been manifest in this tradition of theophanies, and that now the same Jesus makes his presence reliably available to his followers in the Church and its Eucharist.

Bogdan Bucur has recently advanced such a “theophanic” reading of the

Emmaus story in the context of the theophanic texts and related “glory” traditions in

Second Temple Judaism. Bucur concludes that Luke likely understood the entry of the risen Christ into glory “as a permanent recovery of the luminous state of Adam in Eden, a state experienced only ephemerally by elect individuals. In a manner reminiscent of similar traditions about Moses and King David, the lack of recognition on the part of

Jesus’ two disciples is caused by the fundamental incompatibility between the ‘already’ glorified state of the risen Christ and the ‘not yet’ glorified state of the two disciples.”215

On this reading, the Emmaus story underscores the Church’s continuing need for the liturgical cultivation of “noetic vision”216 capable of recognizing the glorious presence of the risen Christ in her midst.217

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215. Bogdan Bucur, “Blinded by Invisible Light: Revisiting the Emmaus Story (Luke 24,13–35),” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 90, no. 4 (2014): 686.

216. On the theme of “noetic vision” in early Christianity, see Dragos Andrei Giulea, Pre-Nicene Christology in Paschal Contexts: The Case of the Divine Noetic Anthropos, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2014), 270–90.

217. Bucur suggests a fascinating parallel with Genesis 3, with which the Emmaus story shares a number of textual parallels. The Emmaus story would thus constitute a reversal of the Genesis story, “the un-doing of what went wrong in Eden.” Bogdan Bucur, “Blinded by Invisible Light,” 700. Cf. “Unlike Adam and Eve, who tasted the fruit of knowledge in the wrong way, at the wrong time, and from the wrong

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Chapter six will put more “flesh” on this outline by providing a more detailed examination of the “theophanic” tradition. At present, having traced the centrality of absence in Williams’s thought and the pitfalls of taking such an idiom to its extreme, the next chapter considers the contrasting tendency: namely, the development in Williams toward an increasingly participatory theo-logic.

———————————— provider, the disciples receive it from the very hand of Lord. Their eyes are opened – not to recognize the loss of glory, but to recognize the glorified Christ. The disciples are, in other words, made again ‘compatible’ with God – albeit not yet completely: the vision cannot be sustained for more than an instant, and the risen Jesus, although present, becomes invisible to them.” Ibid., 702.

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CHAPTER IV

FROM INTENTIONAL PARTICIPATION TO “REAL PRESENCE”:

THE DEVELOPMENT OF WILLIAMS’S VIEW OF PARTICIPATION

Despite Williams’s significant appreciation for Eastern Orthodoxy, the 1977 article witnesses to a significant gulf then separating him from much contemporary

Orthodox theology for which the Palamite distinction is fundamental. Beginning from this point of partial estrangement, the present chapter traces developments in Williams’s thinking about the essence-energies distinction—and the related question of participation—suggesting that in recent decades Williams has become much more amenable to (or at least less intolerant of) the Palamite vocabulary.

In addition to tracing this development in Williams’s work, the present chapter also extends my thesis concerning the two “vocabularies” of the Eastern and Western theological traditions by arguing that Williams’s writings evince both a dynamic tension and fruitful encounter between the two vocabularies.1 In these terms, Williams’s early opposition to Palamism can be seen as an expression of the view that the Western theological vocabulary should be judged superior to that of Byzantine theology. His

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1. Ben Myers suggests that the irresolution of Williams’s various influences reflects central commitments in Williams’s theological method: “Williams feels sharply the tensions between these different traditions, but he wants to sustain the tensions in his own thought, to resist the easy of a capitulation from one side to the other. How can we share and exchange meaning while allowing another tradition to be as strange and as particular as it really is? That is the question that drives his restless expeditions into the imagination of the Christian east.” Christ the Stranger, 19.

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changing views have meant that this oppositional tone has largely given way to a posture of mutual interrogation and cross-pollination, as both theological vocabularies have come to inhabit Williams’s thought in a fruitful, mutually illuminating relationship.

Accordingly, I suggest that Williams’s engagement with Orthodox theology likely figured in the transformation of his understanding of participation as his Thomistic philosophical theology later came to inform (rather than critique) his understanding of the Palamite distinction. I contend that this alignment or convergence has helped

Williams to become more (or at least more explicitly) non-dualistic in his thinking. Where

his early work assumed a degree of competition or at least incompatibility between

divine and human activity—which prevented him from being able to envision a non-

materialist alternative to strictly “intentional” participation—his later work has

expounded a much “thicker” notion of participation predicated on a more non-dual

imaginary.

Following Williams’s own distinction between theological “modes,” one discerns

that the Western vocabulary predominates in Williams’s critical-academic work, while

the Eastern vocabulary has proven more apt in celebratory-liturgical contexts. At the

same time, this is not an airtight division, as is clear from the convergence in Williams’s

work between the Eastern doctrine of the energies and a revised view of Thomistic

participation. Several factors have likely contributed to this new alignment in

vocabularies. First, Williams’s increased visibility and responsibilities as an Anglican

bishop and then archbishop brought expanded opportunities for pastoral reflection, for

which the Eastern vocabulary of energeia proved especially apt. Second, Williams’s continued ecumenical engagement with Orthodox theology and the Orthodox Church, especially as archbishop, afforded him ongoing opportunities not only to question but to

be questioned by the Byzantine theological tradition. This involved Williams in a process

that itself embodies several of his central spiritual commitments—e.g., to dialogue,

mutual recognition, humility and self-scrutiny. Third, the attention Williams has given

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to aesthetics and to both artistic and linguistic “representation”2 over the last fifteen

years has provided an impetus for rethinking his earlier, stricter understanding of

participation, and so also for reevaluating the language of energeia.

The present chapter traces chronologically Williams’s remarks about Palamism,

the doctrine of energies and participation since the 1977 article. In brief, I contend that

Williams shifted away from his earlier defense of strictly “intentional” participation and

that in recent decades he has arrived at a “thicker,” more participatory logic in which

something like “real presence” figures centrally. This underlying development is

manifest differently depending on the audience, but the two expressions of the

development are two sides of the same coin. On one hand, Williams’s conceptual

development is evident in his popular and pastoral writings through his increased

employment of the language of energeia, while in his critical-academic work it appears as

a revised conception of participation.

1. Williams’s Conception of Participation Has Developed from Formal “Intentional”

Participation toward “Real Presence”

Williams’s first book, The Wound of Knowledge (1979), examines the history of

Christian spirituality, emphasizing the ways in which our easy certainties and

assumptions with respect to faith are challenged by “the intractable strangeness of the

ground of belief.”3 In Christ crucified we discover a God who “enters a world of

confusion and ambiguity and works in contradiction,”4 which means that,

epistemologically, the cross functions not only as the final control and measure of

Christian speech, but also its great “irritant,” unsettling and destabilizing any attempts

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2. Williams uses the term “representation” in a technical sense. See The Edge of Words, 22.

3. Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 11.

4. Ibid., 14.

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at closure.5 This results in a “restless spirituality,’ always liable to criticism and change . .

. one charged with a systemic suspicion of images and concepts of God, the world and self.”6 For such a “restless spirituality”—which reflects the apophatic anthropology and ascetic spirituality discussed in chapter one—the possibility of the visio Dei is rendered highly suspect since it appears to reflect the desire for closure, finality and comprehension. Such desires for satisfaction must be systematically denied if they are to be “reduced to faith.”7

Williams’s résumé of Christian spirituality is heavily indebted to the desert fathers and mothers, especially in its stress on ascesis (“discipline”) and aphairesis

(“stripping,” “putting away”) as preparatory for union with God.8 Such union or incorporation—characterized in terms of “sheer elusiveness”9—however, is still largely characterized in intentional terms: “The end of the believer’s life is knowledge of God in conformity to God. Knowledge of God is not a subject’s conceptual grasp of an object, it is sharing what God is, more boldly you might say, sharing God’s ‘experience.’ God is known in and by the exercise of crucifying compassion; if we are like him in that, we know him.”10 Knowledge of God follows from acting as God acts, a notion which reads

Thomistic “intentional union” in light of an emphasis on praxis and perhaps also

Maximus’ energetic participation. Thus, while the unitive dimension remains fairly

“intentional,” Williams stresses the concrete and participatory dimensions of life in the

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5. Ibid., 15.

6. Ibid., 77.

7. Ibid., 183.

8. See also his Where God Happens.

9. Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 182.

10. Ibid., 23–24.

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spirit, though his view of participation remains rather formal: “knowledge is

participation, in which the knower is molded to take the form of what is known.”11

Williams finds common purpose between East and West in an emphasis on

“substantive” transformation—which he thinks is attainable through a full account of

“intentional union”—even approving the term “deification” to describe this final end,

understood not as a “quasi-physical participation” (cf. his criticism of Palamas) but as

“enjoying the divine relation of Son to Father, sharing the divine life. In this sense, it

could be argued that any Christian theology worth the name will need a doctrine of

‘deification.’”12 Williams distinguishes this active, relational and intentional account of

union from what he regards as the passive, static, and substantial view centered on a

particular account of vision. Commenting on Gregory of Nyssa’s definition of human

nature as “self-transcending,” Williams clarifies that “knowledge of God can only be seen

as personal, relational, evolving; a project for human life. It does not culminate in

‘vision’ but in the love of servant, friend, disciple and, ultimately, child. Its

contemplative gaze is something both receptive and responsive, an attention which is

content not to understand nor in any way possess.”13 Spiritual illumination is emphatically not found in “rare mystical trances, visions or ecstasies,” but rather in learning to act as God acts—“in love, in poverty, in compassion.”14 Such a life of discipleship is the vision of God.15

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11. Ibid., 176.

12. Ibid., 59.

13. Ibid., 77.

14. Ibid., 181, 64.

15. “The vision of God is discipleship.” Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 71.

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While Williams’s account retains clear affinities with Eastern theology, Maximus in particular, he risks highlighting the practical-ethical dimension at the expense of mystical-transformational concerns. Some Eastern writers would no doubt discern here a characteristically Western tendency to reduce the theological to “intellectual, ethical and social categories.”16 This is perhaps to overstate the case, though a certain emphasis on the ethical is evident in much Western theology. In either case, it comes as no surprise to find that Williams’s view of Palamism remains close to that of the article published two years earlier. He continues to maintain that Palamism is “fraught with serious logical problems” and that it formalizes the looser usage of the Cappadocians.17 And, as before, he cautions against construing the essence-energies distinction as a metaphysical theory.18 In contrast to the earlier article, however, and perhaps in light of Ware’s response, Williams makes greater allowance for the setting of Palamas’s writings, the ad hoc character of the distinction, and the effect of the distinction in defending the

Byzantine Church from the dangers posed by excessive rationalism. Moreover, he recognizes that, for Palamas, the distinction reflected the difference between “conceptual and moral or relational knowledge of God,” though he once again concludes that this aim can be more adequately achieved through personalism.19

The next notable chapter in Williams’s engagement with Palamism and

Orthodox theology came in a series of dictionary articles written for twin volumes published in 1983: The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality and The Westminster

Dictionary of Christian Theology. One continues to find the conjunction, characteristic of

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16. Eve Tibbs, “The Relationship of Sacramental Life to Religious Education,” Praxis 4, no. 1 (May 2004): 9.

17. Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 64–65.

18. Ibid., 65.

19. Ibid.

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Williams’s early work, of a willingness to highlight (or forge) common ground between the two traditions, especially concerning apophaticism, alongside reservations about the

Platonic influence on Byzantine theology generally and Palamism more specifically.

Thus, in an article on “religious imagery,” Williams highlights both continuity between the apophatic approaches of Dionysius and Aquinas and the need he sees for Thomas to purge Dionysius’s method “of its more heavily Platonic elements.”20

In the article on “deification” for the volume on spirituality, Williams sketches another account of similarity-in-difference by distinguishing between two strands in the patristic understanding of theosis. The first strand, drawing on dominant Platonic conventions, “thinks primarily in terms of a communication of divine attributes,” while the second understands deification “in terms of participating in an intra-divine relationship.”21 Williams finds the first of these strands more common in the East, while the latter he believes, largely owing to Augustine’s influence, has predominated in the

West. The Platonic understanding of participation remains the disputed issue, with

Williams uniting his description of the Augustinian stress on incorporation into Christ with that of an intentional union through which “the powers of the mens (the whole process of our inner life) come to have God for their object.”22 Williams says that such deification occurs, as Thomas Aquinas would later elaborate, “when the formal object of will and understanding is God, so that God determines entirely what is loved and grasped by the soul (this is what is sometimes called ‘intentional’ union).”23

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20. Rowan Williams, “Imagery, Religious,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Alan Richardson and John S. Bowden (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), 282.

21. Rowan Williams, “Deification,” 106.

22. Rowan Williams, “Deification,” 107. In such union, “[i]t is God who then defines and determines the soul’s active reality, so that the soul reflecting upon itself cannot but see God. This is ‘deification’ by means of perfect relation with God.” Ibid.

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In contrast to this formal, Western-Augustinian model, Williams emphasizes that the Eastern understanding, exemplified by Maximus and Gregory of Nyssa, stresses that deification means “taking on the characteristic modes of activity of God (compassion, self-surrender) rather than simply sharing a set of abstract and static attributes

(incorruptibility, etc.).”24 This dynamic tradition comes to its culmination in Palamas, and Williams highlights the connection between the realism of the Palamite system and

“the transfiguration of the whole person,” according to which “the saint’s spiritualized senses can perceive the uncreated light (the light seen at Jesus’ transfiguration), and the saint’s body may itself radiate the same light.”25 After briefly acknowledging that “[t]he

Western tradition has generally preferred Augustine’s approach, systematized by

Thomas Aquinas,” Williams extends his earlier gestures toward reconciliation, though once again in terms of an intentional union. He concludes that the Western approach

“does not at all preclude a theology of comprehensive ‘substantial’ transformation, the reconstruction of the human spirit at its very roots—indeed, properly understood, the concept of ‘intentional’ union demands and presses toward such a theology.”26

Williams also contributed an article on the theme of darkness and the “dark night” to the same dictionary of spirituality, where one again finds both Williams’s admiration for Eastern apophaticism and reservations toward Palamism. Williams begins by noting that “darkness” serves as a “metaphor both for the unfathomable

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23. Rowan Williams, “Deification,” 107.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Though not altogether surprising, given his work on Lossky (e.g., his 1975 dissertation), a level of increased openness also seems reflected by Williams’s observation that there has been an “extraordinary and fruitful ‘retrieval’ of Maximus and Palamas by writers of the calibre of Stăniloae and Lossky.” That “retrieval” is placed in quotations is, of course, related to Williams’s argument about the novelty and originality involved in such retrievals, particularly Lossky’s. “Deification,” 107.

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transcendence of God and for the blindness of the human understanding confronted by

God.”27 After observing that Gregory of Nyssa is the first to combine the “cloud” of

Exodus with the “night” of the Song of Songs—thereby suggesting that it is in such darkness that love is consummated—Williams claims that Dionysius gave “fullest expression to the idea that darkness is itself both the condition and the quality of true knowledge of God.”28 Having summarized the tradition to this point, Williams offers a thinly veiled critique of Palamism: “No attempt to resolve [the paradox] even by supposing that there is both a communicable and an incommunicable ‘part’ of God will do. The illumination is itself a revelation of the dimensions of inconclusiveness, challenge and questioning in all talking about what we refer to as God.”29 Williams’s use of the language of “parts” perpetuates the Western misunderstanding of Palamas and his twentieth-century interpreters (though without naming Palamas directly). Williams once again distinguishes between Eastern apophaticism—which he greatly admires, especially in its negative, aphairetic (stripping away) aspect—and the adequacy of the Palamite vocabulary in which that apophaticism has frequently been articulated.30

Whatever the proximate cause, Williams’s interpretation of Palamism had by this point moved toward a greater recognition of the latter’s liturgical and doxological

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27. Rowan Williams, “Dark Night, Darkness,” 103.

28. Ibid., 103–4.

29. Ibid., 104.

30. I once again quote John Milbank’s claim that one tendency in Williams’s thought is toward an austere, “Barthian” perspective, “which also involves a certain reading of John of the Cross, linked to an advocacy of the spirituality of the English Benedictine tradition. With this latter perspective, we confront God not as participants, but in a naked stripping of all self-imaging (seen, questionably, as almost necessarily delusory) and self-standing (as if we could ever be in some sort of zero-sum rivalry with God, even from the point of view of spiritual experience) and then await the divine voice and verdict in a total solitude and darkness (which can sound very non-ecclesial).” “Christianity and Platonism in East and West,” 110 n2.

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character. That perhaps helps explain why most of Williams’s explicit engagement with

Orthodox theology in the subsequent years—particularly with the language of the divine energies—surfaces in writings that are less academic than popular and pastoral.

Departing from my chronological account, this shift can be clarified further by way of the methodological distinctions Williams himself draws in the prologue to On Christian

Theology (2000). There he distinguishes between three theological modes—celebratory, communicative and critical—each of which is inadequate apart from the others.

According to Williams, Eastern Orthodox theology predominantly operates in the

“celebratory” mode, which “attempt[s] to draw out and display connections of thought and image so as to exhibit the fullest possible range of significance in the language used.”31 “Communicative” theology experiments with theological language in order to engage its current environment, while “critical” theology turns its scrutiny inward to produce a theology “alert to its own inner tensions or irresolutions.”32 Williams notes that negative theology is one of the basic forms of critical theology insofar as it helps to disabuse us of the idea “that we could secure a firm grip upon definitions of the divine.”33 While negative theology can be corrosive of faith, its rightful function is to

bring us to “a rediscovery of the celebratory by hinting at the gratuitous mysteriousness

of what theology deals with, the sense of a language trying unsuccessfully to keep up

with a datum that is in excess of any foresight, any imagined comprehensive structure.”34

Williams concludes by arguing that the theological enterprise should be mobile, shifting

restlessly between the three modes in order to reflect the “eschatological impulse” at

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31. Rowan Williams, “Prologue,” xiii.

32. Ibid., xv.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

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theology’s heart.35

This is a flexible and illuminating model for thinking about theology’s varied tasks. Applying Williams’s taxonomy to his own work, the first thing to note is that the division between critical and celebratory roughly corresponds to that between negative and positive theology and to the respective weight given in each mode to the Western and Eastern vocabularies. That is, Williams’s critical-academic theology is more decisively informed by the “negative” and philosophical theology of Augustine and

Aquinas—frequently developed by clarifying the implications of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo—whereas his more celebratory-pastoral writings are more heavily infused with the influence of Eastern Orthodoxy.

Of course, no schema is perfect, and one might reasonably press for further clarification about Williams’s use of “negative theology.” Specifically, is this terminology meant to distinguish “negative theology” from apophaticism more broadly, or does it tacitly identify the two? This lack of clarity leaves the location and character of the apophatic unaddressed, which produces an inadequate account of the simultaneity of the celebratory and the apophatic. Williams is certainly aware of the issue,36 and it may well be that such simultaneity is in keeping with his methodological intentions. Nonetheless, the schema as it stands obscures the (largely Orthodox) sense that the highest apophaticism is identified with the doxological-liturgical. That is, the highest apophatic moment is one of superabundant revelation the excess of which dazzles us, outstripping our concepts and leaving us in reverent wonder. This Byzantine understanding locates the apophatic principally in the context of liturgy, most clearly in the heavenly silence

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35. Ibid., xvi.

36. Rowan Williams, “Lossky, the Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology,” 4.

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that surrounds the throne of Glory, which is simultaneously the revelation of the crucified Lamb.37

Despite this subtle reservation, Williams’s methodological reflections suggest that there have been important shifts in his thinking about the nature and task of theology. It would appear that he has come to regard as more circumscribed the role of a critical, philosophical theology, including the “necessary correctives of strict logic” he discussed in his 1977 article on Palamism. Such critical theology has its place, but it now represents only one of theology’s interdependent modes. Whereas the earlier essay wielded philosophy against Palamism, indicting the latter for its failure to measure up to the rigorous bar of Aristotelian logic, his later remarks on methodology indicate an awareness that Palamism might be seen not as a rival (metaphysical) theory but rather as doxological—that is, as theology operating in a different theological mode.38

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37. I am greatly indebted to Ethan Smith for helping to sharpen my understanding of the scriptural and Dionysian dimensions of this point. See his forthcoming dissertation, The Praise of Glory: Apophatic Theology and Transformational Mysticism. On this perspective, Dionysius describes an ascent that “rises from what is below up to the transcendent, and the more it climbs, the more language falters, and when it has passed up and beyond the ascent, it will turn silent completely, since it will finally be at one with him who is indescribable.” MT 3. Andrew Louth draws out the same connection between the apophatic and liturgy in Maximus’ theology: “acknowledgement of the divine radiance of the face of Christ draws us into apophatic theology, since the dazzling radiance of the face of Christ is beyond affirmation and can only be regarded in silent—apophatic—wonder.” Louth, “From Doctrine of Christ to Icon of Christ,” 266–67. In similar fashion, Olivier Clément refers to “the path of ‘unknowing’ that is not an intellectual path (for negation is denied just as much as affirmation) but is pure adoration.” Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 30.

38. In passing I will mention that this distinction is similar to that made by Jean- Luc Marion in his “In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of ‘Negative Theology’,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, The Series in the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 20–53. We might also compare Williams’s remarks with A. N. Williams’s claim that the difference between East and West has less to do with matters of logic—e.g., the West has too much, the East has too little—than with a difference in theological genre. Borrowing a distinction drawn by Barth between “regular” and “irregular theology,” Williams suggests that each tradition has tended to favor one form of theology while disregarding the other genre and its attendant structures. A. N. Williams, “The Logic of Genre,” 699–707.

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Returning to chronological considerations with these conceptual distinctions, we might follow Williams’s work as it runs along two tracks: the pastoral-popular and the critical-academic. There is less critical engagement with Orthodoxy in the late 1980s and

1990s, as Williams’s academic interests largely pursued issues in dialogue with other interlocutors. Of particular note during these years, however, is an edited volume of

Bulgakov’s political and aesthetic writings.39 While Williams’s academic writings turned in other directions, the marks of Orthodox theology continue to surface in his pastoral writings, especially in a recurring appreciation for the language of mystery, paradox (cf. antinomy) and energies. Accordingly, it appears that at least some of Williams’s earlier antipathy to Palamism was blunted by his own essays in the celebratory mode, for which the language of energies proved particularly well-suited. Rather than coming to see the essence-energies distinction as philosophically persuasive, then, Williams recognized that the distinction was never meant as a philosophical explanation, which freed him to employ the language when working in the liturgical-doxological mode. At the same time, this “energetic” language appears to have exerted pressure on his view of participation, which became progressively less intellectual and more “substantive,” prompting a revision in his interpretation of Thomas.

Williams’s pastoral emphasis on paradox and apophatic mystery owes to the continuing influence of Lossky, but also to Balthasar, whose emphasis on the mysterious paradox of the cross40 dovetailed with the kenoticism already thematized under the

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39. Sergius Bulgakov, Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology, texts edited & introduced by Rowan Williams (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999). Of somewhat lesser note is his article on “Eastern Orthodox Theology” in The Modern Theologians (1997), which presents an even-handed summary of the twentieth-century history of Orthodox theology from Soloviev through Stăniloae.

40. E.g., “The paradox must be allowed to stand: in the undiminished humanity of Jesus, the whole power and glory of God are made present to us.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, translated with an introduction by Aidan Nichols (Edinburgh, Scotland: T&T Clark, 1990), 33.

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diverse influences of Lossky, Bulgakov and MacKinnon. This fusion of influences is manifest in one of Williams’s sermons from the early 1990s, written while Bishop of

Monmouth.41 Whereas the 1977 article was deeply suspicious of Dionysius, the sermon takes as its title one of the Areopagite’s signature phrases, “The Ray of Darkness.” True to Dionysius, the sermon develops a series of apophatic concerns, beginning with the mundane experience of linguistic lag, the inability of our speech to keep pace with our experience. For Williams, such mundane experiences of the world’s elusiveness are a faint echo of the far more disorienting strangeness of God which throws the whole of our lives and language off balance. Borrowing the Dionysian image, Williams speaks of the

“disruptive darkness” of God that “brings on a kind of vertigo; it may make me a stranger to myself, to everything I have ever taken for granted. . . . I can’t keep up with what is happening because the language I usually speak has been challenged at its heart.”42 Williams had earlier connected this Dionysian image of the divine darkness with the English Cloud of Unknowing, “the darkness of God which can be passed through only by the ‘dart of longing love.’”43 The end of the sermon combines them once more, concluding that, “in the story of cross and resurrection, darkness and light, terror and joy, loss and fullness are woven together in one word of grace and promise. The ray of darkness is not different from the dart of love.”44

In addition to this sermonic deployment, Williams’s continued engagement with

Eastern Orthodoxy produced the aforementioned edited volume of the writings of

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41. The sermon is included in Open to Judgment (1994) (published in the U.S. as A Ray of Darkness), a collection of sermons and addresses given while Williams was the .

42. Rowan Williams, “A Ray of Darkness,” 120.

43. Rowan Williams, “Dark Night, Darkness,” 104.

44. Rowan Williams, “A Ray of Darkness,” 124.

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Bulgakov,45 two brief popular reflections on icons,46 a monograph on Dostoevky’s understanding of the relationship of faith to fiction,47 and a host of other lectures and addresses drawing on Eastern wisdom. Tellingly, the language of energies has found increasing play in many of these venues. In a 2005 interview, he thus expresses his concern that “a lot of our theology has lost that extraordinarily vivid or exhilarating sense of the world penetrated by divine energy in the classical theological terms.”48

Referring to the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of the energies, he surprisingly claims that the same notion is to be found in Augustine and Thomas,49 going on to suggest that such a notion of God’s energy or action as sustaining all of reality helps makes sense of .50

Williams’s 2004 Easter sermon draws heavily on the doctrine of the divine light or energies that radiate into the world, calling this teaching “[o]ne of the most important contributions” of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. As one sees in the human figures in icons—which Williams describes as visual commentary on the Church’s teaching about

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45. Bulgakov, Sergii Bulgakov.

46. Ponder These Things: Praying with Icons of the Virgin (Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press, 2002); The Dwelling of the Light.

47. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky.

48. Rowan Williams, “Belief and Theology,” 7.

49. “It’s in Augustine, it’s in Thomas, it’s very clearly in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, where you have precisely that sense of what they call the ‘divine energy’ penetrating creation so everything is in that sense shot through with the grandeur of God, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said.” “Belief and Theology,” 7.

50. “[I]f what is sustaining every reality is the energy, the action, of God, then is it so difficult to believe that from God’s point of view and not ours, there are bits of the universal order where the fabric is thinner, where the coming together of certain conditions makes it possible for the act of God to be a little more transparent? And when we talk of miracle, it’s that. . . . So I think you have to start by trying to get hold of the implication of that picture of a universe in which the glory and energy of God is always pretty near the surface, and in certain circumstances very near the surface.” Rowan Williams, “Belief and Theology,” 8.

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the new life in Christ—the divine light inhabits this ordinary world, “shining in the faces of Christian people” and making them transparent to “another world that has come to life in the middle of this one.”51 In words reminiscent of the Palamite emphasis on the body, Williams observes that “[o]rdinary humanity, ordinary physical reality, your bodily life and mine are being transfigured from within by the presence of God’s glory.”52 Williams emphasizes that this transformation extends beyond our bodies, as

Jesus enlightens “the whole landscape of our life and our reality.”53 Williams concludes the sermon by underscoring this connection between the divine energies and the idea of a transformed vision of the world. The empty tomb becomes an open door, through which we see “a world drenched with light, God’s beauty shining through; yet it’s our own world we are seeing, seeing it as God made it to be, seeing ourselves as God made us to be.”54

Unsurprisingly, Williams also discusses the divine energies in his small book on praying with icons of Christ, published in 2004.55 Noting that the apostles in the icon of the Transfiguration are shielding their eyes, Williams cites the Eastern Christian teaching that “the light that flows from Jesus here is not a ‘created’ light—it isn’t a phenomenon of this world, caused by factors within the universe, but a direct encounter with the action of God which alters the whole face of creation precisely because it isn’t

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51. Rowan Williams, “Into Daylight,” 123.

52. Rowan Williams, “Into Daylight,” 123. As Williams says in his 2009 Easter sermon, “Because of Jesus’ death and rising from the dead, our resurrection has started, and our citizenship in heaven has begun. There is a hidden seed of glory within us, gradually coming to its fullness.” “The Hidden Seed of Glory,” in Choose Life: Christmas and Easter Sermons in Canterbury Cathedral (London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013), 172–73.

53. Rowan Williams, “Into Daylight,” 125.

54. Ibid., 126.

55. Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light.

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just another thing in creation.”56 Once again Williams emphasizes that the divine energies are bound up with a remaking of ourselves and our world, a theme he underscores again in his 2011 Easter sermon, in which he says that the event of the resurrection “breaks open the shell of the world we thought we knew and projects us into the new and mysterious realm in which victorious mercy and inexhaustible love make the rules.”57

Finally, Williams deploys similar Eastern themes in his 2009 Royal Academy of

Arts Byzantium Lecture, “Icons and the Practice of Prayer,” in which he examines the role of the icon in Eastern Orthodox liturgy, discussing along the way both the iconoclast and hesychast controversies. Of particular interest is the fact that Williams appears to move beyond simple exposition toward an endorsement of some notion of the divine energies. Turning to the lecture in detail, we find Williams’s first mention of the doctrine of the energies in connection with Maximus, whom Williams has long preferred to Palamas. Williams acknowledges that Maximus affirmed the essence-energies distinction, and his gloss on the energies provides an important clue about Williams’s own appropriation of the doctrine. Rather than emphasizing the energies in connection with theosis, Williams typically inclines toward the language of divine energies when discussing God’s presence or immanence in creation. Williams thus explains that

Maximus affirmed that the divine energy, “in its plural, manifest, interweaving forms, was what percolated through the entire material universe just in virtue of creation, and was raised to an almost immeasurably higher power in the lives of holy people and to its supreme state of intensity in the incarnate humanity of Jesus Christ.”58 Again, with an

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56. Ibid., 13.

57. Rowan Williams, “Happiness or Joy?” in Choose Life: Christmas and Easter Sermons in Canterbury Cathedral (London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013), 198.

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eye toward presence and participation, Williams places an emphasis on “the relationship of an active, outpouring, self-diffusing God whose action, as you might say, soaked through the material so that there was indeed a ‘real presence’—and I use the words advisedly—of God within creation, and, by the work of grace and the Holy Spirit, an intensified presence of God in baptized people—even more intensified in those who took their baptism seriously and became saints; and supremely intensified in Jesus Christ.”59

This account of the “saturating” of the material world by the “energetic” presence of God is well suited to an account of the nature and function of icons. Thus, against the iconoclast accusation—that icons must either seek to portray divinity, which is impossible, or to portray Jesus’ humanity apart from his divinity, which is Nestorian—

Williams explains that the icon aims, not to represent God, but to represent “the effect of

God on and in the material world.”60 By depicting the “saturated” humanity of Christ and those in communion with him by the power of the Spirit, the icon manifests the

“theandric reality—the interweaving (not fusion or confusion) of the endless, divine resourcefulness of agency and love with the particularities of a human life.”61

In his summary of the hesychast controversy, Williams strikingly aligns himself with Palamas with respect to the doctrine of the energies, observing that Palamas’s argument ran “very much along the lines that we’ve already noted” (i.e., that Palamas’s understanding of the energies was similar to that being elaborated by Williams).

However, in aligning Palamas’s views with his own, Williams ends up misrepresenting him. Explaining Palamas’s argument, Williams says that the light seen by the hesychasts

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58. Rowan Williams, “Icons and the Practice of Prayer,” n.p.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid.

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was “the effect of God’s action, ‘uncreated’ in the sense that it sprang directly from the act of God and nothing else and so it was not a claim to see the essence or the nature of

God or the face of God in a literalist, materialist way.”62 Two problems emerge in this passage. First, Williams’s summary is evasive on the controverted issue, since

“uncreated” for Palamas means that the energies are God in the mode of his self- communication—a claim not adequately captured by Williams’s suggestion that

“uncreated” means that they “sprang directly from the act of God.” Williams’s language implies a distinction between what springs from God’s action and the divine action itself, thereby identifying the energies as effects of the divine action. Of course, from Palamas’s perspective, Williams is quite correct to reject the possibility of seeing the divine essence or nature. For this tradition, however, God’s “face” is associated not with the essence, but with the energies, denoting as it does the visibility or manifestation of the divine.63 These remarks also betray a continuing reticence with respect to the biblical materialism and anthropomorphism to which Palamism is indebted. Thus, Williams glosses Palamas’ conclusions in a manner more amenable to his own views, a clear sign that Palamas has been converted from opponent to ally.

Williams proceeds to suggest that a link can be found between the iconoclast and hesychast controversies in the emphasis each distills with respect to the transforming

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62. Ibid.

63. For the relation of “the Face” to Christianity, see C. L. Seow, “Face,” in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 322–25; Andrei Orlov, “Exodus 33 on God’s Face: A Lesson from the Enochic Tradition,” in From to Merkabah Mysticism: Studies in the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha, reprint, 2000 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 311– 25; Andrei A. Orlov, The Enoch-Metatron Tradition, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005); Andrei Orlov, “The Face as the Heavenly Counterpart of the Visionary in the Slavonic Ladder of Jacob,” in From Apocalypticism to Merkabah Mysticism: Studies in the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 399–419; Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Divine Face and the Angels of the Face: Jewish Apocalyptic Themes in Early Christology and Pneumatology,” in Apocalyptic Themes in Early Christianity, ed. Robert Daly, S. J. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 143–53.

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power of the energies.

The person depicted [in the icon] is someone receptive to, saturated with divine

light, divine energy. The person praying exposes themselves to an action, to the

possibility of transfiguration of the same kind. The person, in other words, who

stands in front of the icon is not the only one doing the looking. Such a person is

being seen, being acted upon . . . The icon, therefore, is not a passive bit of

decoration but an active presence.64

The icon, in other words, serves as both “the way and the means”65 of transformation within the broader context of an “exposure to the divine energy” within the church.66

That is, the icon “shows what it sets out to achieve. It shows a transformed humanity

radiant with a light not of this world. It aims to communicate that light to the beholder

and make that light real in the beholder.”67

This popular and sermonic deployment of the language of energies parallels the

academic employment of a “thicker” understanding of participation. It may be that this

development owes in part to a subtle pressure exerted by Williams’s liturgical

deployment of the language of energies. Either way, it is clear that his thinking has

moved toward a significantly less intellectual and more “substantive” account of

participation as indicating the “real presence” of the other. The change is a significant

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64. Rowan Williams, “Icons and the Practice of Prayer,” n.p.

65. Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, trans. Anthony Gythiel and selections translated by Elizabeth Meyendorff (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992), 22.

66. Rowan Williams, “Icons and the Practice of Prayer,” n.p.

67. Ibid.

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one, and can be drawn clearly by comparing remarks from the 1977 article and The

Wound of Knowledge (1979) with his more recent reflections on knowledge and language.

In the last chapter we saw that Williams found Palamas guilty of “a realist and near-materialist idea of participation which leads to grave terminological incoherences,”68 a concern he reiterates in The Wound of Knowledge.69 The only alternative to such a materialist conception, as the young Williams saw it, was “intentional” participation—that is, formal participation through knowledge: “the subject ‘becomes’ the object in so far as the object occupies and ‘informs’ (in the strict sense) the subject.”70 The knowing subject “participates” in the known object through an act of knowledge.71

The young Williams was keenly aware that this intentional conception of participation would fail to satisfy his Orthodox interlocutors, but he saw no satisfactory alternative. In contrast, Williams’s recent work in aesthetics has helped clarify a third possibility, “thicker” than intentional participation without lapsing into materialism.72

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68. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 42.

69. Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 59. Williams lodged the same charge against Lossky in his dissertation: “In short, it is practically impossible to extract a consistent account of what participation ’εν ’ενε'ργεια means from Lossky’s writings and lectures. On the one hand, we have a model of the energies communicating ‘God’ or ‘divinity’ or the divine ‘life’—that is, the divine ‘nature’ as active and outgoing; on the other, we have a very serious terminological confusion, and a naively materialist idea of participation which impels Lossky to deny, implicitly or explicitly, that we ever really come into contact with the divine nature at all, since it is, properly, the incommunicable which is ‘possessed’ only by the persons of the Trinity.” “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky,” 166–67.

70. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 41.

71. Cf. “. . . knowledge is participation, in which the knower is molded to take the form of what is known.” Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 176.

72. I have in view several of Williams’s works written since 2000, including Lost Icons (2000), Williams’s 2001 Lecture, The Dwelling of the Light (2004), Grace and Necessity (2005), Icons and the Practice of Prayer (2009), and his 2013 Gifford Lectures, published as The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (2014). See chapter eight

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This aesthetic understanding recognizes the possibility of something more than knowledge, something Williams readily calls “real presence.”

In chapter one I noted that Williams’s 2001 Aquinas Lecture, “What Does Love

Know?” highlights the inseparability of knowledge and love as a way of reflecting on identity and difference. Williams argues that “the presence of what is known in us as knowers is always complemented by the presence of what is loved in us as lovers.”73

Though joined in this way, knowledge and love “move” in contrary directions:

“knowledge is about the continuity between subject and object, love is about the discontinuity. Knowing is the other coming to be in the subject, love is the acknowledgment that the other remains other, even in the subject.”74 The unitive aspect is still framed as an act of knowledge, but the language for that participatory element is much more vital, described as the active presence of a particular life in another.75 As

Williams says, Thomas is applying to God “the clearest language he can about how subjects both internalise and never absorb radically other realities.”76 This language of presence, internalization, and the coming to be of one life in another represents a more robust understanding of Thomistic participation.

Williams continued to deploy this revised conception of participation over the next decade. It is apparent, for example, in his 2005 book on aesthetics: “The relation between knower and known envisaged here is remarkably similar to the ‘participation’

———————————— for a more detailed discussion of Williams’s aesthetics.

73. Rowan Williams, “What Does Love Know?” 264.

74. Ibid., 264–65.

75. “So the object of understanding lives again in us as the active product of the mind—the verbum, the inner word, that is the fruit of the encounter between mind and object. . . . understanding is the life of one reality in another.” Rowan Williams, “What Does Love Know?” 262.

76. Rowan Williams, “What Does Love Know?” 266.

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spoken of in the more traditional idiom of scholastic and Platonic thinking. There is some activity which, beginning in the object known, continues to exercise a characteristic mode of life in another medium: the material in which it is first embodied does not exhaust the formal life that is at work.”77 In a discussion of human dignity in his Theos Lecture of 2012, Williams makes this revised notion of participation a central element of personal existence: “in relationship each of us has a presence or a meaning in someone else’s existence. We live in another’s life. . . . We are talking about a reality in which people enter into the experience, the aspiration, the sense of self, of others. And that capacity to live in the life of another—to have a life in someone else’s life—is part of the implication of this profound mysteriousness about personal reality.”78 Finally,

Williams’s 2013 Gifford Lectures explore this new understanding of participation in depth. I return to Williams’s Giffords in the next chapter and again in chapter eight.

Here I would highlight the usage of this deeper sense of participation, apparent in

Williams’s description of “representation” as language that seeks to express “the presence in another mode of what we’re talking about.” Going beyond strict description as the correspondent mapping of a particular set of “facts,” representation “absorb[s] the life of what is encountered at a level that makes it possible both to recognize and to represent that life in another form.”79

I have suggested that this revised conception of participation parallels Williams’s popular and sermonic deployment of the language of energies. Williams’s recent academic writing has seldom engaged directly with Palamas, with a few exceptions. For present purposes, it is noteworthy that, as recently as 2002, Williams’s reservations about

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77. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love, Clark Lectures (London: Continuum, 2005), 138.

78. Rowan Williams, “The Person and the Individual,” n.p.

79. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 60.

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Palamism appeared paramount. In an important essay seeking to extend the application of negative theology to the trinitarian relations (in order to avoid polarizing the hidden essence and revealed persons), Williams contrasts his approach—which centers on an exposition of John of the Cross’s “trinitarian theology of negation”—with one in which the divine essence, understood as an unknowable, inaccessible core, is “the real locus of the negative moment.”80 Though somewhat vague, Williams’s language calls to mind his earlier critiques of Palamism, an impression reinforced by his suggestion that this alternative approach risks both exalting the divine essence above the divine persons and dividing God’s life “into the bit you can see and the bit you can’t see.”81 The briefness of the remark leaves it unclear whether Williams intends this remark as an accurate characterization of Palamism or as something of an intervention aimed at forestalling possible (mis)readings of Palamas. Williams at least regards such as view as a live interpretive option, one apparently made possible by a degree of imprecision in

Palamas’s writings. Either way, it would seem to suggest that Williams is less wary of the language of the divine energies than of the dangers of “mythologizing” Palamas by reifying the divine essence. That is, his greatest concern about Palamism remains the possibility of a particular mythological picture that would sunder God’s historical manifestation from an inaccessible divine hinterland.

2. Conclusion

In sum, this chronological survey has demonstrated that Williams’s thinking has developed away from a formal understanding of strictly “intentional” participation toward a more thickly participatory logic involving the active presence of the object in the

act of the subject. This conceptual change is reflected in Williams’s academic writings

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80. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire,” 117.

81. Ibid., 116.

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through his deployment of a revised conception of participation and in his more pastoral and popular works in his recourse to the language of energies. In short, even as he remains chary of “mythological” readings of Palamism which threaten to reify the divine essence, Williams has become more amenable to an “energetic” reading of Palamas convergent with a revised understanding of Thomistic participation.

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CHAPTER V

WITTGENSTEIN AND PALAMISM:

REALISM-ANTIREALISM AND A “RESOLUTE” READING OF THE PALAMITE DISTINCTION

Almost two decades ago, Williams suggested that Orthodox theology could benefit from engagement with Wittgenstein.1 Taking its cues from Williams’s recent

work, the present chapter examines that claim by developing further the fruitfulness of

two Wittgensteinian “conversations” for articulating points of convergence between

these Eastern and Western non-dualisms. First, I suggest that the Wittgensteinian

perspective on the realism-antirealism debate illuminates the question of whether

Palamism represents a “real distinction” (pragmatiki diakrisis) or merely a “conceptual”

one (diakrisis kat’epinoian, i.e., according to human thinking or conceptualization).

Second, in harmony with Williams’s recent reflections, and drawing on the work of

several interpreters of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, I advance a “resolute” reading of the

essence-energies distinction as a compelling contemporary interpretation of Palamas.

Regarding Palamism as in some sense also a picture of language, this reading attempts

to dispel the attraction felt toward theological and linguistic essentialism. For both

theology and language, I contend that the Palamite emphasis on the “ineffable essence”

encodes a vital dynamic that might help dissolve the lure of essentialism by suggesting

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1. Rowan Williams, “Eastern Orthodox Theology,” 512.

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that nothing determinate has been removed from our purview, and that our attention must be recalled away from essentialist speculation and toward the concrete, ongoing history of God’s self-revelations.

1. The Wittgensteinian Perspective on the Realism-Antirealism Debate Clarifies the

Argument over whether Palamism Is a “Real” or “Conceptual” Distinction

Chapter two observed that Williams, like many critics of the Palamite distinction, argued that Palamas hardened the Cappadocians’ logical or epistemological distinction between essence and energies into an ontological one.2 These critics thus maintain that

Palamas’s “real distinction” between the essence and energies is unfaithful to the

Cappadocians, who located the distinction only in the order of human knowledge or

conceptualization.3 Others, like John Milbank, have suggested that Palamas himself

probably intended something closer to a formal (rather than real) distinction.4

Orthodox theologians have defended the ontological reality of the distinction

over against such claims.5 Kallistos Ware thus responds that “the Orthodox tradition

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2. Rowan Williams, “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 44.

3. This argument was advanced across the four Istina articles that examined Palamism from the Thomist perspective, including that of Fr Jean-Philippe Houdret, O.C.D.: The Cappadocians “affirm the distinction between what is unknowable in God (his essence in itself) and that which is knowable (his attributes) in virtue of his operations. The doctrine of the Cappadocians on the divine names seems rather to oppose the Palamite thesis of a real distinction in God, in setting the distinction in the order of our knowledge.” Istina 3 (1974), p. 270. Quoted in Every, “The Study of Eastern Orthodoxy: Hesychasm,” 82.

4. “Any denial that actus ad extra and actus ad intra are in reality identical and in no way really distinct (Aquinas’ position), must involve either a real or a between the two. I think that it is clear that Palamas intended indeed nothing as crude as the former, but nonetheless something like the latter.” John Milbank, “Ecumenical Orthodoxy—A Response to Nicholas Loudovikos,” in Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy, ed. Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 160–61. Others have argued that Palamas’s earliest disciples quickly abandoned his “real distinction” in favor of the saner “conceptual distinction.” For a response to this suggestion, see Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 371.

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does indeed regard the distinction in objective and not merely subjective terms. The distinction is a real one, a pragmatiki diakrisis, and not merely a notional one, a diakrisis kat’ epinoian.”6 And both Lossky and Meyendorff insist that the distinction’s reality is necessary to secure both God’s transcendence and the reality of human communion with

God.7

This debate is clearly another facet of the fundamental division between the

Eastern and Western traditions over the nature of God and the energeia. Accordingly, several commentators have highlighted the debate’s importance. While denying any

“gap” between “theology” and “economy,” Meyendorff thus says that the “real distinction” prevents theology from rendering the divine Essence “immanent to the created order.”8 Meyendorff’s student, Joost van Rossum, argues that the contested

“reality” of the distinction presses the conclusion that “‘Palamism’ and ‘Thomism’ do represent different doctrines of God. In the system of Thomas we see a God who, like the God of St Augustine’s De Trinitate, is conceived of as a ‘substance,’ that is, as a

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5. Florovsky argues that “[t]hese two dimensions, that of being and that of acting, are different, and must be clearly distinguished. Of course, this distinction in no way compromises the ‘Divine simplicity.’ Yet, it is a real distinction, and not just a logical device.” “Saint Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” 130.

6. Ware, “God Hidden and Revealed: The Apophatic Way and the Essence- Energies Distinction,” 134.

7. Lossky cautions that “[i]f we deny the real distinction between essence and energy, we cannot fix any very clear borderline between the procession of the divine persons and the creation of the world; both the one and the other will be equally acts of the divine nature.” Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 73–74. Meyendorff says that “[t]he real distinction between the transcendent essence of God and the uncreated energies through which He communicates Himself to creatures is the palamite [sic] way of affirming that both the transcendence and the communion are real.” Meyendorff, “The Holy Trinity in Palamite Theology,” 31. Emphasis in original.

8. Meyendorff, “The Holy Trinity in Palamite Theology,” 40–41. He goes on to observe that,“At this point, one discovers probably the real and ultimate difference between palamism [sic] and the Latin tradition which culminated in thomism [sic].” Ibid., 41.

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philosophical concept. For Palamas, on the other hand, God is more than just ‘essence’ or ‘substance.’ Palamas does not worry about the fact that, according to our human logic, this would imply some composition in God.”9 LaCugna agrees concerning the magnitude of the debate, though from the other side of the issue. She judges the two traditions “irreconcilable on this point—Meyendorff claims that there is a ‘real distinction’ between theology and economy . . . For a Western theologian this assertion creates grave metaphysical problems. If theologia and oikonomia are ontologically distinct, then the defeat of trinitarian theology is total.”10 The motivations on both sides of the debate are understandable. The Orthodox insistence on the distinction’s reality reflects a desire to distinguish God from God’s actions (e.g., creation), though without positing a separation. Western critics contend that while we distinguish God from God’s actions in our ordinary religious speech, God’s simplicity demands that, at the end of the day, the distinction be surrendered.

The shape of this argument is reminiscent of the realism- debate in the philosophy of language, a fact that suggests the possibility of their fruitful comparison.

Accordingly, I begin by sketching the outline of a broadly Wittgensteinian critique of the entire realism-idealism debate before returning to consider how this conversation might help clarify the question of the Palamite distinction’s “reality.”

The sheer intractability of the realism-idealism debate has suggested to many observers that both parties in fact share a false assumption11—in this case, a particular

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9. Rossum, “Deification in Palamas and Aquinas,” 373.

10. LaCugna, God for Us, 196.

11. Fergus Kerr, “Idealism and Realism: An Old Controversy Dissolved,” in Christ, Ethics, and Tragedy: Essays in Honour of Donald MacKinnon, ed. Kenneth Surin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21.

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vision of the self as a detached, “monological observer.”12 Charles Taylor notes that this high valuation of objectivity was borne of a quite salutary effort to overcome projection and the mingling of personal prejudice in certain undertakings. The problem arises when this to which certain individuals might aspire in the context of particular tasks is “forgotten as a norm,” becoming instead a theoretical account of the subject’s status.13 Having forgotten the self’s “immersion in the world,” a gap is introduced that divides language from life, word from world.14 That the gap must now be bridged means that an account of the knowing subject as a detached observer generates a problem about “representation,” that is, how our words correspond (or fail to correspond) to reality.15 Transposed from a norm to a theory, the notion that knowledge is nothing but having a correct representation of an independent reality led to picturing every linguistic practice as a description of physical objects or states of affairs.16 In other words, we are adjusted in all our activities to “a highly designative view of meaning,” in which “words have meaning because they stand for things.”17

On this view, the realism-idealism debate is an argument over the correspondence of our language to an independent reality in which both sides assume

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12. Charles Taylor, “Theories of Meaning,” in Human Agency and Language, Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 290. Kerr observes that “Heidegger, much more clearly than Wittgenstein, places the realism versus idealism dispute in the context of attempts to reconcile the Cartesian ‘isolated subject’ with the ‘world.’” “Idealism and Realism,” 25.

13. Taylor, “Theories of Meaning,” 291. Emphasis added.

14. Kerr, “Idealism and Realism,” 23.

15. For more on representation, see ch. 3 of ’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, reprint, 1970 (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).

16. Cf. , Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, translated [from the German] by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), §40.

17. Taylor, “Theories of Meaning,” 250.

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the detached location of the subject—“the view from sideways on”18—and so also the possibility of a language-independent account of reality appropriate to verification or adjudication. Though often read as an anti-realist, Wittgenstein encourages his readers to refuse the terms in which the debate is framed, bypassing the problem of realism versus idealism by “dissipat[ing] the illusion that language is a peculiar kind of picture of the world.”19 For Wittgenstein, the question is not how our words map or fail to map to an independent reality because “there is no independent reality,” no access to the state of things apart from our knowledge of it.20 Reminding us of our life with language in the world, Wittgenstein brings his reader to see that the gap “is not bridged, for it never existed in the first place. If all this is correct, or nearly so, the realist versus anti-realist dispute has evaporated.”21

The meaning of our words, then, is not a matter of their correspondence to an observer-independent state of affairs, but rather the work they do for us, how they

articulate our concerns “within a certain context of other concerns, and the practices in

which they are pursued.”22 Accordingly, this view of meaning locates the subject of

language as an “embodied social agent” already engaged by means of language with the

world and others.23 Just as the designative model was predicated on a picture of the

subject as a detached observer, for Wittgenstein, “recovering a sense of the place of the

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18. The phrase is John McDowell’s. See his Mind and World, 35.

19. Kerr, “Idealism and Realism,” 23.

20. Taylor, “Theories of Meaning,” 277.

21. Kerr, “Idealism and Realism,” 27.

22. Taylor, “Theories of Meaning,” 277. Cf. Wittgenstein: “If someone says, ‘I know that that’s a tree’ I may answer: ‘Yes, that is a sentence. An English sentence. And what is it supposed to be doing?’” (On Certainty, §352).

23. The term is Martin Benjamin’s from his Philosophy & This Actual World.

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subject in the world . . . render[s] the controversy superfluous.”24 Kerr summarizes the thrust of Wittgenstein’s discussion, concluding that, “if the world is always already inhabited, so to speak, and mostly by means of practices which stand in no need of theorization, the subject is no longer torn between awarding priority either to things or to ideas. The traditional basis for the realism versus idealism dispute evaporates.”25

Realism and idealism share an illusory picture of the knowing subject, but

querying that assumption does not commit Wittgenstein to any theoretical position on the

very possibility of meaning or truth, “an account, that is, from outside (or from beneath)

our everyday use of such normative notions as ‘accord.’”26 For Wittgenstein, realism and

idealism are each “an everyday form of words gone astray” and so “two sides of the same

philosophical coin.”27 Dissolving the illusion to which both fall victim, then, enables one

to return both parties’ words to their everyday, unmysterious uses, which do not require

an explicit theory of meaning.

Read in light of this debate in the philosophy of language, the controversy over

the “reality” of the Palamite distinction takes on an entirely new aspect, in which both

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24. Kerr, “Idealism and Realism,” 24. Taylor echoes this idea, arguing that insights about the constitutive function of language “undermine the other major feature of theories in the contemporary Anglo-Saxon world: their assumption of the observer’s stance. For the type of understanding needed when we have to grasp the articulating- constitutive uses of words is not available from the stance of a fully disengaged observer.” “Theories of Meaning,” 279–80.

25. Kerr, “Idealism and Realism,” 26. The recovery of a subject of language already engaged with the world and others, then, is bound up also with a rediscovery of other kinds and functions of language (e.g., constitutive and invocative). See Kerr, “Idealism and Realism,” 30, and Taylor, “Theories of Meaning”. Representation or designation is an enormously important function of language, but it is not foundational. Rather it depends “a whole network of activities within which connections between words and things such as reference arise in the first place.” Kerr, “Idealism and Realism,” 28.

26. Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” 107.

27. Ibid., 108.

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sides appear enthralled to the compulsion to explain theoretically—to give a philosophical account—how religious language about God and divine action, both scriptural and doxological, can be mapped to the divine life. As with the realism-idealism debate, the first step in the dialectic was the introduction of the religious language “considered by itself,” in abstraction from a meaningful context of use. That is, the function of such language, its role in the whole of the believer’s life with language, is bracketed out and a

“gap” opened between religious language and God. At one level, the ground for this controversy was also prepared by dualistic accounts of God and the world which implied that our language confronts the problem of bridging a gap, of representing the divine. (I return to this question below.)

This sense of difficulty increases when Western critics challenged the “reality” of the distinction by locating it only as a matter of epinoia, of human “conceptualization.”28

This argument suggests that a distinction kat’epinoian is ideational, limited to the human mind. It fails to bridge the gap between word and world, and so needs finally to be transcended. According to John Behr, however, the Cappadocians understood epinoia

not as concepts distinct from an independent reality, or as the arbitrary products of

human invention, but rather as the means through which humans reflectively constitute

their engagement with reality.29 For the Cappadocians, such reflection does not concern

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28. I would also register the parallel here with Wittgenstein’s private language argument. Kerr notes that “[o]nce the gap between the subject and the world has opened up . . . the only thing of which the subject can be certain appears to be something ‘inner’ – ‘private,’ as Wittgenstein would say.” Kerr, “Idealism and Realism,” 25. With respect to Palamism, it would seem that critics of the distinction have made a formally similar move by restricting essence-energies language to human conceptualization.

29. In fact, Behr observes, it was Eunomius who conceived of the knowledge of God as the correlation of word and object. According to Basil, Eunomius misunderstood the term ‘conception’ or ‘concept’ (’επι'νοια) as involving an unreal notion, “destined to dissolve back into nothing after they have been spoken.” The Nicene Faith, The Formation of Christian Theology (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s seminary Press, 2004), 290, 285.

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the divine essence itself, but rather “the way in which it appears to us, the manner in which it presents or reveals itself, in other words, its activity (’ενε'ργεια).”30 Elaborating on the complex logic of the energies, Behr explains that the “inaccessibility” of the essence does not mean that some object is being withheld or that there is something to know other than the energies. Rather, this “inaccessibility” indicates that the divine essence

“transcends each particular activity and the sum of all its activities. . . . None of these terms . . . denote the very being or essence of God, and so there is no reason to regard any one of these aspect[s] as more constitutive of his being than any other: ‘There is no single name which suffices to embrace the whole nature of God and expresses it satisfactorily’ (Eun. 1.10).”31

On my reading, the debate over the “reality” of the Palamite distinction begins when its critics introduce a gap, confining the distinction to the side of human ideas: “as finite humans we may distinguish between God’s essence and activity, but in reality no such distinction exists.” Unfortunately, the Orthodox response threatens to capitulate to the theoretical tone of the argument by positing something like correspondence. In other words, I worry that Meyendorff and Lossky’s defense of a “real distinction,” like realism generally, risks giving too much ground to their opponents by assuming the very same gap between religious language and God.32 Let me be clear that I am not saying that the distinction itself is misguided. Rather, I am suggesting that any attempt to explain the distinction risks saying too much and so capitulating to a picture of the self as somehow able to independently verify the foundations of its language. That said, if

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30. Behr, The Nicene Faith, 286.

31. Ibid., 288–89.

32. Though a minority position, there are Orthodox theologians who suggest that the language of “real distinction” goes too far. Tollefsen thus says that he is “not very fond” of Meyendorff’s term. “I feel it somehow makes the distinction between essence and activity too radical.” Tollefsen, Activity and Participation, 214.

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Meyendorff is denying only that the distinction possesses a purely ideal character, one

could regard his affirmation of Palamism’s “reality” simply as an insistence on its

indispensability to Orthodox spiritual life. That is, the distinction needs no theoretical

accounting; it is enough that the underlying logic of the distinction—that is, the

theophanic logic of something like personal, “polymorphous” manifestation33—is shown

in Christian scripture, prayer and liturgy.34

2. A Wittgensteinian Critique of Essentialism and the “Resolute Reading” of the

Tractatus Can Inform a “Non-Mythological” Interpretation of Palamism, Especially

Understood as a Model of Language

2.1. The Palamite Distinction Can Be Read as a Critique of Essentialism

As I noted in chapter two, Williams’s most serious criticisms of Palamism were

focused on Palamas’s understanding of “essence” (ousia). In particular, Williams (and

other Westerners) worried that the Palamite language of an “ineffable” or “inaccessible”

divine essence could be read “mythologically”—that is, as a spatial distinction involving

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33. The term is Elliot Wolfson’s. See his Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

34. This is not to deny the importance of reflection and thoughtfulness, but it is to restore primacy to our life with language. As Kerr notes, “the suggestion is that the realist’s concern for objective knowledge of things in themselves is entangled with the idealist’s insistence that knowledge of things has to be knowledge of them as they are conceived by us. Either way, so Wittgenstein is suggesting, ‘the real thing,’ das Eigentliche, is marginalized: ‘life’ is overlooked in this dispute over ‘things’ and ‘ideas.’” Kerr, “Idealism and Realism,” 22. It is also to reverse Williams’s 1977 remark about the latitude given to piety over against the “necessary correctives of strict logic” (though I worry that I have unduly flogged this comment already). “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” 31. I understand Lossky to be making a similar point when he remarks that “the dogma of the real distinction between essence and energies” is “imposed on our minds by the antinomy of God unknowable and knowable, incommunicable and communicable, transcendent and immanent.” “The Theology of Light in the Thought of St. Gregory Palamas,” 68. In other words, Orthodox Christian life with scripture and liturgy has impressed the structure of the distinction on the level of theological reflection by showing a God who is both transcendent and immanent, indeed a God who “transcends his own transcendence.” Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 31.

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an inaccessible interiority in the life of God, a divine hinterland cordoned off from view.35 Chapter two acknowledged that Palamas is less than clear at times, and can give the impression of a substantial “essence,” of a region in God that remains eternally beyond our reach. In this section, I argue that Williams’s most recent interaction with

Palamism demonstrates a remarkable openness to regarding the Palamite distinction more charitably by gesturing toward a “non-mythological” (i.e., non-spatialized) reading of the distinction. I pursue such a reading by extending Williams’s work in connection with two Wittgensteinian discussions—first the Wittgensteinian critique of “essentialism” in language (section 2.1) and second, the so-called “resolute reading” of the Tractatus

(section 2.2)—which I suggest might sharpen an interpretation of the Palamite vocabulary that is simultaneously faithful to the deep logic of Dionysian apophaticism and responsive to the contemporary theological context.

Context is central to Wittgenstein’s vision of language. As Stanley Cavell remarks, for Wittgenstein, “mutual understanding, and hence language, depends upon nothing more and nothing less than shared forms of life, call it our mutual attunement or agreement in our criteria.”36 The stability of language rests not on personal acts of interpretation or arcane essences, but our “mutual attunement” with others, our life together with language as it is woven into the fabric of our sundry practices and activities. Wittgenstein learned this principle that language and context are interdependent—the so-called “context principle”—from Frege, who stressed that a

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35. Williams uses the perjorative “mythological” in various ways and contexts, but we might summarize its sense by observing that the characteristic operations of “mythological” thinking are reifying or spatialization on one hand and temporalization on the other. CR; cross reference.

36. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 168.

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word’s meaning was found only in the context of a proposition.37 In other words, one quickly gets into muddles thinking that words “carry” their meanings with them, and that sentences are “built up” from these discrete building blocks of sense.38 The significance of the context principle is apparent from its connection to his well-known observation that “meaning is use,”39 and to his later writings’s generalization of the principle to include not only words but sentences (and their role within the context of circumstances of significant use, or—as Wittgenstein prefers to call them—“language games”).40 The context principle commends a vision of language in which a word’s

“meaning” is not secured by the mental presence of an occult essence or of a “universal” that in some way determines in advance the word’s appropriate deployment in particular

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37. “[W]e ought always to keep before our eyes a complete proposition. Only in a proposition have the words really a meaning.” Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, p. 71, quoted in James Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” Philosophical Investigations 21, no. 3 (July 1998): 233. Conant highlights Wittgenstein’s reformulation of this context principle in §3.3 of the Tractatus: “Only the proposition has sense; only in the context of a proposition has a name meaning.” Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” 236.

38. To illustrate his point, Frege used the example, “Trieste is no Vienna,” in which the proper name of a city is being used as a “concept-expression.” If one insists that words “carry” their meanings, then “Vienna” will surely be read as a proper name. If we reflect on the context in which one might utter such a sentence, however, “we will see that ‘Vienna’ here could mean something like ‘metropolis’ (or perhaps even beautiful or majestic metropolis) – and thus the sign ‘Vienna’ used in this way should be expressed in a proper logical symbolism by a completely different kind of symbol than that which we would use to express the occurrence of the word ‘Vienna’ in the sentence ‘Vienna is the capital of Austria.’” Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” 234.

39. “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” PI §43. Conant notes that context here does not simply add another layer of nuance to the word’s “essential” meaning, but rather that in many cases there simply “isn’t anything which can properly count as asking the question ‘What do the words [which have been spoken] mean?’ apart from a simultaneous consideration of questions such as ‘When was it said?’, ‘Where?’, ‘By whom?’, ‘To whom?’, etc.” “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” 239.

40. Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” 233.

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future contexts.41 Rather, “meaning” is displayed in, distributed across, a word’s various contexts of use.42

There are important connections between this critique of linguistic essentialism and Williams’s most recent engagement with the Palamite distinction, which he construes as a kind of anticipated critique of essentialism in another vocabulary. This most recent interaction with Palamism, contributed to a 2009 volume on ecumenical dialogue between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy, is remarkable for several reasons. First, it is Williams’s most substantive engagement with Palamism since his 1977 article. Just as importantly, it represents a new willingness to see Palamism in more creative and suggestive terms, not simply as a faulty metaphysic, but as a vision of the fluidities of both revelation and language. Williams’s essay reflects on the imaginative convergence, especially with regard to language, between Radical Orthodoxy and

Orthodox theology. Taking Bulgakov and Yannaras as representatives, Williams thus argues that “there is a clear strand in Eastern Orthodox thinking, a strand with some patristic antecedents . . . which offers a creative model for the theological grounding of the sort of linguistic theory argued for by Radical Orthodoxy.”43 This Palamite theory of language refuses “the primitive gulf between substance reality and verbal

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41. This sense that a word’s future uses must in some mysterious sense already be present, particularly in the sense of the mental self-presence of meaning, goes by the name “platonism.” Martin Stone explains one of Wittgenstein’s well-known images for such “platonism” and its attraction in securing a word’s meaning: “Obviously, if a grasped meaning is to have this sort of bearing on bits of future behavior, the platonist reasons, it must be that to grasp the meaning of a sign is to present oneself, in some sense, with its future use. And that is what the platonist’s imagery is meant to capture: to grasp the meaning of a sign is mentally to hitch oneself to an indefinitely long rail that traverses the future career of the sign and thus determines, for any of one’s future linguistic performances, whether it keeps faith with the meaning one has grasped.” Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” 96.

42. This is the place of Wittgenstein’s concept of a “family resemblance.” See PI §67.

43. Rowan Williams, “Commentary,” 41.

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representation,” insisting instead that we cannot get “behind” our linguistic representation.44 At the same time, this is not to say that our language doesn’t answer to anything but our ideas and conventions. In short, Williams suggests that, in thinking about language with “appropriate complexity,” Palamas is a valuable interlocutor.45

Drawing on the work of A. F. Losev, Williams suggests that the Palamite framework, operating in tandem with Dionysian apophaticism, can “provide a tacit link between knowledge of God . . . and a theory of speech . . . that will avoid the pitfalls of arbitrary labelling, magical emanation or Kantian redundancy.”46 According to Williams, the idea of the name as an “energy” in Palamas’s sense is particularly fruitful.

It allows us to say that the name is not an essence or the emanation of an essence

or the exhaustive presence of an essence; essences, in the sense of definitive

encapsulations of identity, do not belong in language. Naming allows the subject

(avoiding for the moment the freighted word ‘essence’) to be apprehended as

mobile, plural, engaged, constituted as an active subject in its complex relations

(though this is not the same as saying that it is constituted by the agency of

others). It asserts a particular kind of indeterminacy—not an empty potentiality,

but a range of possible identities-in-the-other. In relation to the Palamite doctrine

of the relations between God and creation, it is a way of saying that God truly

‘becomes’ the God of Israel and of believers in Jesus, without thereby saying that

God is incompletely God without creation. It is a conceptual tightrope, which

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44. Ibid., 40.

45. Rowan Williams, “Commentary,” 40. Williams still thinks that “Palamas’ own presentation of the distinction presents a good many problems of conceptual clarity,” but that “modern retrievals of it (especially by Yannaras) have taken the matter further.” Ibid., 42.

46. Rowan Williams, “Commentary,” 43.

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Western as well as Eastern theology has had to negotiate.47

That the “energies” might be understood as “names” is a quite naturally connection, since the East regards the divine names as “energies” or “icons” of God located “around” the unknowable essence.48 According to Bulgakov, each of the divine names is an imprint of the one Name of God. The names are thus “verbal icons of Divinity; they are an incarnation of Divine energies; they are theophanies, bearing the imprint of Divine revelation.”49

As a model of language, then, the Palamite distinction envisions a complex relation between a name and “reality,” in which the name is neither simply the presentation of pure, “glaring” presence nor wholly arbitrary, entirely separable from that reality. This identity-in-difference, or presence-in-otherness, holds together the sense in which a name stands in genuine relation to what it names without thereby

“committing us to some magical or otherwise manipulative doctrine of the name as embodied essence.”50 In other words, the subject’s unity is manifest in the multiplicity of its relations.

On this reading, “[t]he apophatic is not a primitive mystery overcome in representation; it is more that which repeatedly asserts itself in the very process of representation in time—the uncovering by speech itself of what is not yet represented, which will in turn reveal more of the un-represented.”51 In other words, Williams links

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47. Ibid., 42.

48. Bulgakov says that “every revelation of God, every theophany, is a new predicate, a new name for the ineffable and unnameable. . . the Divine energy itself speaks about itself in man, is revealed in the word, and the word, the naming of God, turns out to be the human incarnation of this energy as it were.” Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 116, 118.

49. Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 126.

50. Rowan Williams, “Commentary,” 42.

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the personalist emphasis of Palamism with the critique of essentialism in language, according to which “the fluidity and continuity together of acts of naming are what enables us to conceive of a unity in subjects that is real, not just ideal.”52 For Losev,

Williams says, the ideal unity of a thing, an identity fixed by a static essence, is a fiction.

The apophatic dimension of language is not “some inner, hidden territory, but the sheer mobility, the capacity for different relations, characteristic of the subject involved in action and engagement in time.”53 Rather than fixed essences, then, such a discourse deals with “histories of multiple representation unified by some sort of continuity in energeia. Only in this can we secure an adequate or precise intelligible form (eidos) of substance.”54 The “spatialized” reading of the divine “essence”—that is, as a fixed, inaccessible core of identity dualistically opposed to the energies—gives way to the sense that what can be known of God’s “essence” is diffused, distributed energetically through the history of God’s self-manifestations.

This “energetic” vision of language is one in which both the name and personal activity stand in the icon-relation of image-archetype. The logic of that iconic or epiphanic relation is one of simultaneous immanence and transcendence. In each case, there is a manifestation in another mode of a person’s life, which yet transcends any given appearance. There is more to a person than her name, her activities or her icon, but each genuinely communicates something of her reality, her presence.

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51. Ibid., 43.

52. Ibid., 42.

53. Rowan Williams, “Commentary,” 42. Losev thus “rejects any Ding-an-sich language, insisting that the phenomenon as yavlenie, revelation, is the ultimate object of knowledge; every intelligible life is ‘embodied’ life, that is, life in engagement with other lives.” Ibid.

54. Rowan Williams, “Commentary,” 43. Williams goes on to say that “[t]he language of art is symbolic dialectic at its height, language or representation most adequately in harmony with the unifying energeia.” Ibid.

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2.2. A Resolute Reading of the Tractatus and the Palamite Distinction

The comparison between Palamism and the philosophy of language can be extended further in dialogue with a recent interpretive debate over the meaning of

Wittgenstein’s early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921).55 The debate—which concerns how to construe the conception of philosophy to which the book is committed—centers on a passage near the end of the book:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understand me finally

recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has climbed out through them, on

them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has

climbed up on it.).56

In particular, the disagreement turns on how “seriously” to take Wittgenstein’s claim that the book’s propositions should be recognized as “nonsense,” or rather how their status as “nonsense” should be understood. Upon investigation, what at first blush appears to be a fairly esoteric debate about a question of limited scope turns out to implicate a set of issues related to ineffability and logical impossibility, which are themselves of significant interest to philosophical theology.57

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55. Silver Bronzo observes that “the resolute reading has occupied a central position in the Wittgenstein scholarship of the last two decades.” “The Resolute Reading and Its Critics: An Introduction to the Literature,” Wittgenstein-Studien 3 (2012): 46.

56. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [TLP] 6.54; amended translation. Quoted in Bronzo, “The Resolute Reading and Its Critics,” 47.

57. Conant highlights some of the historical theological interest in logical necessity as it relates to God in his essay “The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus,” Philosophical Topics 20, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 115–80.

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2.2.1. The Resolute Reading of the Tractatus. One side of this debate is represented by the “standard reading,”58 whose proponents hold that Wittgenstein’s “elucidatory propositions,” while strictly speaking “nonsensical,” are “nonetheless capable of conveying ineffable insights into the nature of reality, thought, and language.”59 On this view, there are two kinds of nonsense: in addition to mere nonsense (gibberish), philosophy can identify “a second, more philosophically interesting, kind of nonsense: the nonsense that arises when a proposition, in virtue of the meanings that have been assigned to its constitutive parts, transgresses the criteria specified by a theory of meaning, and thus manages to express a logically illegitimate kind of content.”60 In other words, the standard reading asserts that through the deliberate construction of nonsensical propositions—propositions in which the logical units contradict or seem to logically “repel” one another—it is possible to glimpse the underlying features of logic and reality.61 Genuine propositions cannot express these underlying metaphysical

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58. According to resolute readers, this standard reading was “inaugurated by Anscombe’s Introduction to the Tractatus (Anscombe 1959) and has occupied a dominant position in scholarship on the work ever since.” Bronzo, “The Resolute Reading and Its Critics,” 51.

59. Bronzo, “The Resolute Reading and Its Critics,” 47.

60. Ibid., 48.

61. Frege thus suggested that there is a kind of nonsense produced by the “impermissible combination of logical categories—a kind of nonsense which results because it ‘makes no sense to fit together’ the parts which we are attempting to combine.” James Conant, “A Prolegomena to the Reading of Later Wittgenstein,” in The Legacy of Wittgenstein: or Deconstruction, ed. Ludwig Nagl and Chantal Mouffe (Frankfurt am Main; New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 101. Conant goes on to discuss ’s example of such nonsense: “Chairman Mao is rare.” On the standard view, this proposition fails to signify (i.e., is nonsensical) because it violates logic, improperly combining a proper name with a second-level function. On the resolute reading, the notion of logical repulsion here—the idea of symbolic contradiction—arises from the temptation to “smuggle” into the present context other meanings (and so other imagined uses). Recalling the context principle, linguistic signs (i.e., the orthographic units, “Chairman,” “Mao”) only become symbols (i.e., logical units) in relation to the context of the proposition and its use. No combination of signs is illegitimate. If the words are unintelligible, that owes not to the string of words but to

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insights directly, but they can nevertheless gesture toward these features “by virtue of their intelligibility—that is, by virtue of one or another aspect of their logical form, which they share with the reality that they are consequently capable of depicting either truly or falsely.”62 The standard view thus assumes an isomorphism between the structures of language and world, such that the deliberate violation of the logical syntax of language—propositions “composed from intelligible elements in unintelligible ways”— enables one to gesture beyond the surface of our language-world in order to glimpse some aspect of “the ineffable essence of language, thought and reality.”63

Critics of the standard account and its ineffabilist reading argue that such a view of “substantial nonsense” is confused since it envisions propositions that are both nonsensical and communicative (i.e., nonsensical in a way that shows the reader something that cannot be put into words). The confusion is apparent in the standard reading’s requirement of “a substantially nonsensical proposition [which] would have to be (qua nonsense) a string of signs that fails to symbolize, and yet (qua substantial) be composed of symbols rather than mere signs—symbols whose identification presupposes that the string of sings as a whole must symbolize in a particular way, that is, say something.”64 In other words, to be subject to an identifiably illegitimate combination, the sentence’s words (as discrete, linguistic signs) must already be symbols (logical units), carrying a determinate sense capable of repelling another word’s sense. But this is to

———————————— the speaker’s failure to give his words meaning (i.e., a meaningful context of use). Cf. Wittgenstein: “their meaning is not determined by the situation, yet stands in need of such determination.” On Certainty §348.

62. Stephen Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, Sections 243–315 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., 3.

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contradict the context principle, according to which signs only become symbols when given an intelligible context (in both a sentence and a context of use).

On the standard view, such substantially nonsensical propositions are required to communicate the ineffable truths that comprise Wittgenstein’s special kind of theory—a

“a body of doctrines that cannot be said but only shown.”65 The standard reading thus draws support from Wittgenstein’s distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown, though it arguably takes “showing” to be a “funny kind of saying,” a sort of sotto voce between full-throated speech and the silence of true nonsense.66 Resolute readers respond that this amounts to “an irresolute waffl[ing] between wanting to claim that the content of that which is shown cannot be said (because that’s what Wittgenstein says) and wanting to hint at what the content in question is (in ways that, in effect, turn it into a kind of quasi-sayable quasi-content).”67

On the other side of the debate, those who criticize the standard reading have advanced a “resolute reading” of the Tractatus—“resolute” because they claim that their reading unflinchingly faces the full weight of Wittgenstein’s description of his propositions as “nonsense.”68 The resolute reading thinks “substantial nonsense” confused, holding that Wittgenstein recognized “only one species of nonsense—mere gibberish; from the point of view of logic, mere nonsense is the only kind of nonsense

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65. Bronzo, “The Resolute Reading and Its Critics,” 50.

66. James Conant and Cora Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely: Reply to Meredith Williams and Peter Sullivan,” in Wittgenstein’s Lasting Significance, ed. Max Kölbel and Bernhard Weiss (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 66.

67. Ibid.

68. Diamond says of the “irresolute reading,” “I call that chickening out. It involves holding that the things we speak about are members of this or that logical category, really and truly, only we cannot say so. That they are is represented in language in another way.” Cora Diamond, “Throwing Away the Ladder,” in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 194.

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there is.”69 This “austere” view of nonsense follows from the context principle discussed above, since, if words do not carry their meaning with them into a sentence—that is, do not already possess meaning as a discrete bits of sense—then they cannot contradict one another prior to the proposition itself being given some meaningful use. Accordingly, on the resolute reading, no combination of signs is illegitimate.70

The resolute reading thus argues that the standard reading rests on a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein’s conception of logic. On the standard view, the logical features of our language-world are conceived as rules, the violation of which reveals their structure.71 In contrast, resolute readers emphasize that, for Wittgenstein, the “logic” of our language (what he later calls “grammar”) is not a grid of rules superimposed on language, something that could be violated or transgressed.72 On the contrary, Wittgenstein holds that “there is nothing wrong with any possible combination

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69. Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, Sections 243–315, 2. Cf. “The Resolute Reading and Its Critics,” 47. Cf. Wittgenstein’s remark: “When a sentence is called senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless. But a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation.” PI §500. Conant observes that, “[a]long with these two different conceptions of nonsense go two different conceptions of elucidation: according to the substantial conception, the task of elucidation is to ‘show’ something which cannot be said; according to the austere conception, it is to show that we are prone to an illusion of meaning something when we mean nothing.” “Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and Early Wittgenstein,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 177.

70. Wittgenstein says, “Everything which is possible in logic is also permitted.” TLP §5.473. Conant and Diamond thus remark that “if a sign is possible, it is also capable of signifying.” “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely,” 60.

71. Something like this point has been made by Wittgensteinian Thomists like David Burrell and Denys Turner who argue, for example, that composition is a formal feature of our isomorphic language-world, and so it is possible to gesture toward the divine simplicity by conceiving the violation of that compositionality. Cf. “The nature of God escapes us not simply because we lack descriptive resources but because the form of our language reflects (and manifests) a composite ontological structure.” David B. Burrell, “Beyond a Theory of Analogy,” Proceedings of American Catholic Philosophical Association 46 (1972): 119. I am indebted to Ethan Smith for showing me this point.

72. Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” 249.

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of signs into a sentence.”73 Any potential nonsensicality of our words arises not from the string of words but from the speaker’s failure to give her words sense (i.e., to give them a meaningful context of use). Conant explains, “If a sentence is nonsense, this is not because it is trying but failing to make sense (by breaking a rule of logic), but because we have failed to make sense with it: ‘the sentence is nonsensical because we have failed to make an arbitrary determination of sense, not because the symbol in itself is unpermissible’

(§5.473).”74 The problem is not one of incompatible meanings (as though the discrete words’ already-present meanings were jostling against one another), but rather the lack of determinate meaning.75

Wittgenstein suggested that confusion concerning logical impossibility arises in part from a mistaken analogy with physical impossibility: “The logical impossibility of fitting the two pieces seems of the same order as the physical impossibility, only more impossible!”76 Physical impossibility does appear as a limitation; that is, there is something, some scenario or task, which one can envision but cannot do. To disambiguate logical from physical impossibility, to “throw away the ladder,” then, means overcoming our attraction to the idea that there is something determinate which we cannot logically do, something we cannot reach but toward which we can gesture.77

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73. Diamond, “Throwing Away the Ladder,” 196.

74. Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” 245. Conant’s emphases.

75. Cf. Wittgenstein: “their meaning is not determined by the situation, yet stands in need of such determination.” On Certainty §348.

76. Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932–1935, p. 146. Quoted in Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” 247 n23.

77. Already in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein set his face against such a conception of, as it were, substantial nonsense – that is to say, nonsense which appears to result from there being something we cannot do.” Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” 244–45. Cf. Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, Sections 243–315, 8.

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The standard reading thus appears to be predicated on “a seemingly clear picture of something you cannot do: namely, put these perfectly genuine logical features of reality into words.”78 From this perspective, the attempt to gesture “beyond” the limits of logical thought conceives logic in spatial or geometric terms. The “limits” of logical thought are construed not as limits but as “limitations” on the model of a geographical barrier, on the other side of which lies a region of illogical thought or ineffable content.

One is thus inclined to think that “just as there is something which is traversing the limit

(and thus moving into the region which lies beyond the territory circumscribed by the limit), so, too, there must be something which counts as transgressing ‘the limits of thought’ (and thus thinking outside or beyond the region of thinking ‘circumscribed’ by the of logic).”79

In the Preface of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein addresses the spatialization of this picture directly:

[I]n order to draw a limit to thought we should have to be able to think both

sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be

thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on

the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.80

In other words, the limits of language are the limits of thought, beyond which is simply nonsense (i.e., gibberish). Mulhall summarizes the point well:

if the limits of sense are the limits of intelligibility, then nothing whatever lies

beyond them; they are not boundaries fencing us off from a further determinate

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78. Diamond, “Throwing Away the Ladder,” 195.

79. Conant and Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely,” 51.

80. Conant, “The Search for Logically Alien Thought,” 115.

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or determinable region, and so not limitations upon our capacity to think or

speak. To recognize that the only species of nonsense is gibberish is, accordingly,

to recognize that the limits of sense are not limitations; to acknowledge them as

limits rather than limitations is precisely a matter of acknowledging that there is

nothing (no specifiable thing, no conceivable task or activity) that we cannot

do.81

Wittgenstein’s aim, according to this resolute reading, is to wean his readers away from the notion that there are any ineffable truths—truths conceived precisely as some determinate but unspeakable content.82 What must be surrendered is precisely this grammar of “what”-ness, of some inaccessible, ineffable content. This is not to say that there is nothing “outside” or other than understanding, but rather that the whole notion of an “outside” to thought—by picturing that otherness as just another territory— minimizes the difference, and so is itself a rung in the ladder ultimately to be cast aside.

As Diamond says, “To achieve the relevant sort of increasingly refined awareness of the logic of our language is not to grasp a content of any sort. ‘What can be shown cannot be said’ (§4.1212): to take the difference between saying and showing deeply enough is not to give up on showing but to give up on picturing it as a ‘what’.”83

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81. Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, Sections 243–315, 8.

82. On this reading, the most subtle and tenacious version of this illusion is the standard reading itself, according to which, “even after recognizing that genuinely ineffable truths must lie beyond the limits of language and thought, we continue to think that they might be hinted at or gestured towards, and so that we might see beyond those limits, by the deliberate construction of self-destructing pieces of nonsense.” Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, Sections 243–315, 4.

83. Conant and Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely,” 67.

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Finally, the resolute readers conceive the task of philosophy as principally therapeutic, helping to identify where and how “we succumb to the temptation of thinking that we can somehow reach beyond the limits of language and thought.”84 If philosophy may be said to give “knowledge” on this view, it is “not knowledge of empirical facts or metaphysical super-facts, but knowledge of ourselves—of our tendency to fall into certain forms of illusion of meaning, and to imagine that a philosophical perspective permits us to evade the responsibility that we have for the way in which we speak and act.”85

2.2.2. A “Resolute” Reading of the Palamite Distinction. Knowledge of ourselves and our responsibility, of the finitude of our epistemological condition (which we might call a kind of epistemological humility), a surrender of the grammar of “what”-ness for ultimate otherness—these are the fruits borne by the resolute reading. And in these terms

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84. Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, Sections 243–315, 5. Martin Stone describes how such a therapeutic grammatical intervention might proceed not by way of refutation but by the patient consideration, along with one’s interlocutor, of possible meanings that might be given their words: “How can one demonstrate to someone who insists that what they want to say is terribly queer (and even impossible to express) that the difficulty lies not in the sense of what they say but in the lack of it? One method, pursued in the Investigations, is to try to bring one’s interlocutor to see, by reference to various contexts of the significant use of expressions, that their purpose in speaking—their ‘wish to say something metaphysical’—requires that they refuse such accounts of what they might mean on the grounds that what they say would then make perfect sense (i.e., they would be saying something obviously right or obviously wrong).” Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” 109. Conant describes the skeptic, who, presented with a grammatical investigation, will find “that either he is making perfect sense but failing to ask the question he wants, or that it remains unclear which of the many things he can mean by his words he wants to mean. Wittgenstein’s aim, in assembling these reminders, is not to refute the skeptic (i.e. to establish the truth of the negation of what he claims), but to query the sense of his claim: to force on him the question, given what his words can mean, what he means by them. . . . The aim is to offer a perspicuous representation of the various things he might mean by his words in order to show him that, in wanting to occupy more than one of the available alternatives at once and yet none in particular at a time, he is possessed of an incoherent desire with respect to his words.” “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” 250.

85. Bronzo, “The Resolute Reading and Its Critics,” 49.

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advocacy for a convergence with Palamism may seem less baffling. Indeed, together with the above discussion of essentialism, this material commends a “resolute” reading of the

Palamite distinction, not as a foreign imposition but as a formulation of the distinction that might help clarify and sharpen dynamics already present in the Orthodox tradition.

A “resolute” reading of the essence-energies distinction regards the Palamite doctrine as in some sense “grammatical” or “regulative.”86 That is, on the “resolute” reading the distinction does not give us a straightforward and exhaustive description of the divine life, but rather articulates certain features of our discourse about God. In this sense, the distinction appears as a way of encoding an antidote to our fixation with

“essence” (both theological and linguistic) understood as a fixed identity located in an arcane interiority. Admittedly, when seen through the lens of modern epistemological anxiety, the distinction can appear to suggest that there is a divine (or linguistic) interiority to which we are not granted access. Closer attention, however, reveals that the distinction actually subverts this “spatialized” picture in two related ways. First, though framed in terms (e.g., “essence”) constantly subject to misunderstanding, the distinction’s dynamic use in the practices of the tradition actually undermines dualistic,

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86. By this I mean that the doctrine largely exercises a second-order function, helping to guide and inform first-order Christian discourse and practice. Cf. Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology. In terms of the above discussion, such a “regulative” reading conceives the distinction on the model of Wittgensteinian rules rather than logic (which the resolute reading distinguishes). That is, there are certain actions we would identify as violating a grammatical rule, as failing to follow the rule, say, of speech in accord with the Palamite distinction. On the resolute reading, however, Wittgenstein aims to help us see that if the “laws” of logic are the limits of thought, no meaningful content can be given to talk of “what” is outside of language and thought (i.e., “ineffable,” “unthinkable”). There are also connections that could be developed with Karen Kilby’s discussion of the regulative function of the doctrine of the Trinity, which she observes “had its origins in the need to ensure the right reading of Scripture, the right kind of thinking about Christ in relation to the Father (and even more to rule out certain wrong versions of each).” Kilby proposes that the doctrine “is useful and meaningful only in so far as it retains its connections to these origins.” Karen Kilby, “Is an Apophatic Trinitarianism Possible?” International Journal of Systematic Theology 12, no. 1 (January 2010): 70.

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“spatialized” readings by systematically denying the opposition between essence and energies. Against the temptation to read the distinction as imposing a stark either-or choice—that is, either one is talking about the essence or one is talking about the energies, the fact that the energies are distinguishable though not separable from the essence means that when we talk about God’s energetic self-manifestations, we are talking about God’s essence in the mode in which it is given to be known. That is, when we talk about God’s historical acts of self-revelation, we really are talking about God (not something other or less than God), without thereby diminishing the transcendence of

God to every relation and manifestation.87

Second, this non-dual, resolute reading is reinforced by the radical Dionysian apophaticism inherited by Palamas, which denies that the divine “essence” is really an

“essence” at all.88 John of Damascus thus says that God “does not belong to the class of

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87. John 14:7-9: “‘If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.’ Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.’”

88. “How can we [speak of the divine names] if the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge, if it abides beyond the reach of mind and of being, if it encompasses and circumscribes, embraces and anticipates all things while itself eluding their grasp and escaping from any perception, imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding? How can we enter upon this undertaking if the Godhead is superior to being and is unspeakable and unnameable?” Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names 1.5. Cf. Maximus: “God is everything and nothing and above everything”: ho me¯den on to¯n onto¯n ale¯tho¯s, kai panta kyrios ¯on kai hyper panta ho theos.” PG 91, col. 1257. Quoted in Bulgakov, Unfading Light, 129 Cf. Maximus: “The one, unoriginate and incomprehensible, who fully has all power of being, excludes any thought of time and image, is inaccessible for anyone and cannot be known in natural representations by anything of what is. It is impossible for us to come to know the being of God in itself: he is not beginning, middle or end, or anything else of that which is known naturally as following from him. For he is unbounded, unmoved, unlimited, being immeasurably higher than every essence, power (potency) and activity (energy). . . . God is not essence (substance, ousia) as it is understood simply or in the sense that it is a principle; and he is not potency, as potency is understood simply or in the sense that it is mediating (a middle, mesote¯s); and he is not energy, as it is understood simply or in the sense that it is the goal of a motion pre-planned in conformity with potency and arising from essence. He is being, having essence and remaining above essence (ousiopoios kai hyperousios ontotes), having power and remaining above power, entirely filled with every activity and

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existing things: not that He has no existence, but that He is above all existing things, nay even above existence itself. For if all forms of knowledge have to do with what exists, assuredly that which is above knowledge must certainly be also above essence: and, conversely, that which is above essence will also be above knowledge.”89 Bulgakov, receiving this tradition in the modern period, voices a similar sentiment, insisting that

All properties, all words, all qualities, all thoughts borrowed from this world, no

matter how we might potentiate and strengthen them, are absolutely unsuited for

the description of that which stands beyond the limits of this world. The

unconditional negation of all definitions, of every yes, the eternal and absolute

NOT to everything, to each something, is supposed by the Absolute as its sole

definition: God is NOT-what (and NOT-how, NOT-where, NOT-when, NOT-

why). The NOT is not even nothing, insofar as a relation to some sort of something

is connected with it . . . it is Super-something. NOT-what does not have any

definitions of something; it is without qualities, or more precisely, super-

———————————— inexhaustibility, in a word, he is the active source of every essence, power, activity, beginning, middle and end. All that exists is called conceivable (nooumena) for it has principles for its own explanation; God, however, is called not conceivable (ou nooumenos) but they only believe in him on the basis of (ek) the conceivable; therefore nothing of that which is conceivable can in any respect enter into comparison with him.” Quoted in ibid.

89. The Orthodox Faith, I.4. See Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600– 1700), 264; Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 204. Tollefsen, commenting on Dionysius, argues that “the ontological difference between God and creatures is of such a kind that if we speak about being as a basic ontological fact of the created world, then we cannot speak about being in relation to God. The difference between God and the world, between Creator and creation, between the all-perfect God and the things He made is so radical that we cannot make predications about them within the same ontological scheme. The following statement, of course, is problematic on this background, but it somehow has to be said: compared with creaturely being, God is non- being. However, there is no common ground of ‘comparison.’ . . . There are simply no common concepts that could be predicated of both God and his creatures.” Activity and Participation, 72–73.

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qualified.90

For Bulgakov, the transcendence of the divine Absolute is reflected in the use of the

“alpha privative” (e.g., aoristos [without limit], apeiros [without bounds], amorphos

[without form]), which is “not so much the negation of this or that definition as its absence, the expression of the inexpressible, a gesture of the transcendent in the immanent, the limit for thought and for consciousness, beyond which it extinguishes and sinks into night.”91

On this reading, the divine essence is “unknowable” not because it is hidden from view, occupying an inaccessible region of the divine interiority, but because there is literally nothing (NOT-what) there to know.92 As the Source of time and space, there is no “there” for God apart from the universe in which he ecstatically manifests himself.

Creaturely knowledge, bound as it is to the conditions of our finitude, can only know

God in this mode—as he reveals himself. But to say this is not to suggest that it could be otherwise, that God is holding something back. There is nothing to hold back, and nowhere to withhold it.

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90. Bulgakov, Unfading Light, 107. The entire first section of Bulgakov’s Unfading Light (pp. 103-179), “Divine Nothing,” is extremely pertinent to the present discussion.

91. Bulgakov, Unfading Light, 108.

92. An intriguing connection might be made here to Gregory of Nazianzus’s picturing the divine essence and energies on the model of the Temple. At first glance, the equation of the divine essence with the holy of holies would appear to commit the kind of “spatialization” against which I have argued. This reading is problematized, however, by observing that the holy of holies, at least in the Second Temple, was itself empty. Though understand as the place of God’s presence, there is no-thing there, only a space, a place of manifestation (cf. the mercy-seat). So, there is nothing withheld from vision, only a void from which manifestations emerge. Thus, the veil, which would seem to be a barrier, is actually the limit of our sense, through which God ecstatically comes to reveal himself through light and fire and bread and, in particular, the High Priest, who energetically enacts Yhwh’s ecstatic presence with the people.

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So, then, if there is nothing there to know, why talk of the “unknowable essence” at all? We might begin by noting that Palamas, like the roughly contemporary

Kabbalists,93 had inherited and was largely obliged to write in the vocabulary set by the regnant philosophy. That the austere concepts at his disposal stood in some tension with the images and symbols of the tradition, as well as the lived experience of faith, raises the possibility that Palamas adapted the language of “essence” while seeking ultimately to deconstruct such language.94 In other words, a resolute reading of Palamism understands the distinction as fundamentally pedagogical and mystagogical, as aimed in some sense at its own transcendence (which is not to say that it is “mythological” in the pejorative sense). That is, the distinction aims at moving believers past dualistic

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93. The great scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem observes, in language equally suited to Palamas, that the Kabbalists wrestled with their lack of “a conceptual apparatus capable of formulating their intuitions and visions of God. The only language available in this sphere was one that opposed everything the Kabbalists wanted to say.Thus, they often enough found themselves helplessly entangled in a net of contradictions between the rigid . . . concepts that they, as men of their time, had to use, and the images and symbols that lived within them, that they had brought to life but could not adequately express in the terminology imposed upon them by their adversaries.” Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the , translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel revised, et al. (New York: Schoken Books ; Distributed by Pantheon Books, 1991), 159.

94. On this point, Sara Rappe’s discussion of Neoplatonism is redolent of both the “resolute” reading of the Tractatus and this claim concerning the self-refuting language of Palamism. According to Rappe, Damascius, recognizing the inadequacy of metaphysical language, sought to “program” a certain denial of the metaphysical enterprise into the discourse itself. The aim of the resulting philosophical formulations was not to describe, but rather “to deliver human beings from their own ignorant determinations about the nature of reality, without thereby imprisoning them in a metaphysical system that displaces reality itself.” Sara Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism: Non- Discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 208. Rappe suggests that the apparent heterodoxy of many of Damascius’s statements may owe to this understanding of metaphysical discourse as “self-refuting”: “[a] discourse on the Ineffable is not a metaphysical treatise in the usual sense of the word. Its purpose is to remove confidence in established doctrine and to reverse, as Damascius puts it, the more usual direction of language. Language turns back upon itself because its purpose is to negate its own function. Damascius’s chosen name for his style of metaphysics is .” Ibid., 212. John D. Jones picks up on this concept of the peritrope of speech in discussing Dionysius’s “deep apophaticism.” See “An Absolutely Simple God?” 397–98.

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(whether that means opposing two “parts” of God, or God and some other thing to which God relates extrinsically), and it employs an intentionally unstable dualistic formulation (essence and energies) as a therapeutic measure. On this view, the distinction is designed both to wean us away from thinking of the divine Source as something—as a region or content subject to the grammar of “what”-ness—and to dissolve the anxiety to secure our life with language through privileged access to arcane essences.95 As Stanley Cavell has argued, the temptation to say that there’s something hidden from us, something we can’t do, represents an evasion of our responsibility to what’s given, an attempt to remove ourselves from vulnerability to others and to convert this moral failure into an “epistemological lack.” We refuse to acknowledge our answerability to the other, because, we say, there is something we don’t or can’t know: the inner meaning of our words, another person’s soul, God’s essence. This anxiety generates either attempts to secure transparent access (thereby achieving certainty) or skepticism about the possibility of knowledge altogether.

The resolute Palamas reminds believers that the temptation to read “essence” as some inaccessible region of fixed identity—whether of divinity, personal interiority or linguistic meaning—must be resisted. The distinction distills a logic that dispels the allure of thinking that there is something hidden from us, some limitation to be overcome. The language of an eternally “unknowable essence” takes the pursuit of such an “essence” “off the table.” Accordingly, the distinction encodes a gentle warning against illusory quests for such hidden “essences,” while refocusing us on the responsibility we have to what is given in our life with language, one another, and with

God. With language, people and God, our attention must be directed toward what appears, what is manifest in “histories of multiple representation unified by some sort of

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95. Palamism thus reminds us, Williams says, that essences, “in the sense of definitive encapsulations of identity, do not belong in language.” “Commentary,” 42.

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continuity of activity.”96 To know the character of our words, other people and God we must look, not to some abstract, inner “essence,” but to the lived history of personal encounter and exchange.

The “point” of the distinction, then, could be read as a dual programme for spiritual and theological pedagogy. On one hand, it recalls theology from its obsessive preoccupation with substantial essences—and with the comprehension and mastery they seem to promise—and toward the pluriform history of God’s energetic self-revelation.

On the other hand, the distinction preserves the sense that this theophanic history is always-already “framed” by a prior plenitude, the ever-receding horizon of divine generosity. On this view, the Palamite language of the “unknowable essence,” having taken “essence” “off the table,” knowingly retains the shell of its meaning as a way of encoding the intuition of an inexhaustible apophatic reserve in our language about God, a reserve undiminished even as God forever gives himself to be known. The divine

“essence” is thus (can only be?) “indicated” as the inexhaustible Source of God’s gracious history of self-manifestations.97 God is always “more than” any given experience of God, and, in resolute fashion, the tradition resounds with testimony that this “more” or “excess” is a prompt not to intellection but to praise that culminates in silence.98

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96. Rowan Williams, “Commentary,” 43.

97. As Palamas says, “God is not only above all created things, but is even beyond Godhead.” Triads II.iii.8. Or again: “the essence of God goes beyond even nonbeing by reason of transcendence, since it is also ‘more-than-God.” Triads II.ii.37. Similarly, Bulgakov speaks of the Absolute, beyond all relation, as the “transcendent background of God,” in the sense that the name “God” already marks a relation and is thus correlative to the world (God for the world).” Unfading Light, 109–10. Cf. Icons and the Name of God, 28–29.

98. As Maximus says, “Finally, through the altar of the mind [God] summons the silence abounding in song in the innermost recesses of the unseen and unknown utterance of divinity by another silence, rich in speech and tone. And as far as man is capable, he dwells familiarly within mystical theology and becomes such as is fitting for one made worthy of his indwelling and he is marked with his dazzling splendor.” Mystagogy, ch. 4, in Maximus Confessor.

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On the resolute view, the Palamite vocabulary accordingly accents both the difficulty of “keep[ing] before our eyes the truth of our condition”—and so refusing to deny our creaturely finitude and dependence—and an assurance that in that condition we are eternally resourced by the divine plenitude.99 Read as an epigram of such epistemological humility, the distinction articulates a vision of self-knowledge “not as cognition of a spiritual substance, but as awareness of the conditions of finitude and the ability to live and act within them.”100 To say that the essence is “unknowable” here means not that we cannot speak truly of God or that some “part” of God is off limits to us, but that we can never know God apart from the conditions of creaturely knowing, which is to say: apart from the history of divine self-revelation, his “incarnation in language.”101 As Williams has observed, “[t]heology . . . is perennially liable to be

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99. “So the strenuousness is in the effort to keep before our eyes the truth of our condition; the relaxedness is in the knowledge of a mercy that cannot ever be exhausted.” Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, 30.

100. Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in the De Trinitate,” 129.

101. The expression is Ephrem’s. Dionysius arguably best exemplifies this refusal to approach God’s essence as in any way prior to or separated (abstracted) from his history of self-manifestation. Anticipating chapter seven’s consideration of anthropomorphism while drawing together the theophanic logic and this notion of language as incarnation, Hermann Bavinck remarks that “The name of God in Scripture does not designate him as he exists in himself, but in his manifold revelation and relation to the creature. Nevertheless, this name is not arbitrary, but God reveals himself as he is. Hence, God’s name stands for his honor, glory, excellencies, revelation, and divine essence. . . . Moreover, whereas God’s revelation in nature and Scripture is definitely directed to man, God uses human language to reveal himself and manifests himself in human forms. It follows that Scripture does not merely contain a few anthropomorphisms; on the contrary, all Scripture is anthropomorphic. From beginning to end Scripture testifies a condescending approach of God to man. The entire revelation of God becomes concentrated in the Logos, who became ‘flesh.’ It is as it were one humanization, one incarnation of God. If God were to speak to us in divine language, no one would be able to understand him; but ever since creation, he, in condescending grace, speaks to us and manifests himself to us in human fashion.” The Doctrine of God, 85-86, quoted in A. B. Caneday, “Veiled Glory: God’s Self-Revelation in Human Likeness—a of God’s Anthropomorphic Self-Disclosure,” in Beyond the Bounds: Open and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity, in Beyond the Bounds: and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity, ed. John Piper, Justin

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seduced by the prospect of bypassing the question of how it learns its own language.”102

A resolute Palamism agrees that theology needs constantly to retrace the path by which it has learned its language, to be reminded of how it learns.

Above I mentioned Cavell’s diagnosis of our epistemological pathology, of the temptation to hold in abeyance an acknowledgement of responsibility until one has attained certainty, pure presence, an essential foundation.103 To refuse that temptation means “choosing finitude,” accepting the truth about myself and so learning to regard my finite and dependent existence not as a curse to be overcome but a gift to be received, not as a limitation but as a limit.104 Accepting the limits of our epistemological finitude entails refusing the temptation to spin nonsense about an “outside” to our language. To put it simply: the created world, with its coordinates of space and time, is a “closed house.”105

A comparison of the distinction with Wittgenstein’s contrast between saying- showing contrast is instructive here, not least because both are susceptible to misunderstanding. In the case of the latter, as Diamond and Conant have argued, the problem is not the distinction itself but rather the temptation to construe “showing” as an occult manner of “saying” and so to regard what is “shown” as some kind of “quasi- propositional content.” Palamism is similarly beset by the temptation to construe the

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Taylor, and Paul Kjoss Helseth (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2003), 188.

102. Rowan Williams, “Trinity and Revelation,” 131.

103. Williams suggests that we might see “some connection between language and the acknowledgement of a creator; as if the sense of finitude and dependence combined with the sense of not being a determined vehicle of natural processes were inextricably involved in using words in the way we do.” The Edge of Words, 90.

104. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 87.

105. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, trans. Brian E. Daley, A Communio Book (San Francisco [Calif.: Ignatius Press, 2003), 176.

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divine “essence” substantially, as a uniquely inaccessible essence. Both non-dualisms thus face the allure of an “ineffabilist” reading, according to which there is something on the “far side” of intelligibility. Moreover, as with the Tractatus, a resolute reading of the

Palamite distinction will discern that the difficulty lies not with the distinction itself but with making the distinction “deep” enough. With respect to the Tractatus, this entails

construing the act of “showing” without the grammar of “what”-ness.106 For a resolute

Palamism, the difficulty comes in talking theologically without unwittingly or

uncritically assuming the grammar of “what”-ness. In short, the challenge comes in

“catching” the distinction’s impetus without lapsing into reifying the essence or

opposing essence and energies. This connection also suggests that it might prove fruitful

to consider the Palamite distinction under the aspect of an “elucidatory proposition,”

that is, as a bit of knowing “nonsense.” On this view, the distinction knowingly encodes

its pedagogical programme in the language of “unknowable essence,” a mystagogical

string of words ultimately aimed at their own transcendence.107

This is not to say that the language of “unknowable essence” is mere nonsense

(gibberish). On the contrary, by reading the distinction as “regulative,” I have suggested

that it reflects important aspects of the scriptural, liturgical and mystical “grammar” of

God. Still, the comparison is not wholly unhelpful, especially if one recalls that

elucidatory propositions are not persistently nonsensical. They become meaningful when

given a context of use, and the grammatical reading of the resolute reading proposes

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106. Conant argues that “What one nonsensical proposition may (or may not) be able to show is that some other less evidently incoherent proposition is also nonsensical. There lies the secret underlying the construction of these ladders. And that is the only way in which language that does not say anything can show.” “Must We Show What We Cannot Say?” in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 263.

107. Cf. Wittgenstein’s remark: “My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.” PI §464.

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that the “nonsensical” talk of the divine “essence” has been given precisely such use in

Christian communities. Other connections prove suggestive as well. Diamond notes that elucidatory propositions, though ultimately nonsensical, may be “useful or even for a time essential.”108 Theology has found it hard to avoid talk of God’s “essence,” and of

God’s being “outside” the universe or “beyond” the cosmos, as though God were simply on the far side of a barrier over which we might strain to see. The resolute reading acknowledges both that such entitative, spatial, and relative-oppositional pictures have their appropriate uses, and that they must be employed with caution, as pedagogical rungs on a ladder one day to be cast aside.109 Moreover, resolute readers of the Tractatus claim that certain propositions, though logically nonsensical, might have psychological

value. That is, the task of elucidation for the resolute reader is not to “show” what

cannot be said, but rather to “show that we are prone to an illusion of meaning

something when we mean nothing.”110 Elucidatory propositions are of particular interest

not for what they communicate about the world, but for what they show us about

ourselves, about the attraction we feel toward fantasy, projection and the avoidance of

responsibility. The resolute Palamas would say something substantially similar about the

pedagogical aim of the distinction, which works not to offer more information about the

divine life but to unmask the religious temptation to “look away and leap around,”111

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108. Diamond, “Throwing Away the Ladder,” 181. Cf: “But adhering to an ‘austere’ conception of nonsense is not itself going to be a guide to the [Tractatus], or a guide to what to say to would-be metaphysicians. In particular, it does not tell us how far, and in what way, we may in some particular case be able usefully to employ forms of expression that we might recognize as nonsensical.” Conant and Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely,” 79.

109. Without presuming to claim that the Palamite ladder could or ought to be cast aside short of the eschaton, it does seem as though Palamas’s “wooly language,” to which the early Williams objected so strenuously, might be seen as an intentional gesture, a humble acknowledgement of its own inadequacy as theory.

110. Conant, “Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and Early Wittgenstein,” 177.

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ultimately teaching us how to “frame” as humble and grateful our understanding of and response to the history of God’s dispossessing love.

2.2.3. Williams’s Gifford Lectures Embody This Non-Dual Understanding. This non- dual picture of our language is well articulated by Williams’s 2013 Gifford lectures, which, together with resolute readings of both Palamism and the Tractatus, renew an

attention to the importance of silence.112 Williams’s lectures look to linguistic

eccentricities like paradox, metaphorical extravagance and “strategic silence,” in order to

argue that difficulty in language is pervasive rather than anomalous, which in turn

suggests several important features about what it means to be human—that is, to live as

“linguistic animals.” In his last lecture, Williams considers the role of silence as one of

language’s means for registering its own inadequacy, pointing, like other forms of

extreme speech, “to the excess of world over word.”113 In non-dual fashion, Williams

maintains that such silence is not the intrusion of something “outside of language,” a

gesture to “some super-linguistic order of speech or being in which something other and

better than language will be available as a medium of knowing or encountering.”114

Rather, this is one of the means by which language copes with its own difficulty, thereby

making our awareness and our speech “porous” to its own background.115 Of course, as

background, such context cannot be represented as another item “within the sum total

of things to be talked about, and if we seek to represent it at all, it must be by other and

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111. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 173.

112. Cf. Palamism’s “ineffable essence” and the silence of austere nonsense as opposed to the sotto voce of substantial nonsense.

113. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 162.

114. Ibid., 163.

115. Ibid., 166.

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potentially eccentric strategies,” which distance our speech from depiction, description and imitation.116

In our earlier terms, silence is a means of “framing” our discourse in a particular way: as “an unavoidable move ‘outwards’ in order to give what we say another kind of location, a particular sort of horizon or hinterland without which what we say would be vacuous.”117 Silence is thus a means of referring our speech to this “hinterland of significance,” of talking in language about that which makes language possible.

Summarizing his notes on language earlier in the lectures, Williams suggests that,

If our language is systematically indeterminate, incomplete, embodied,

developed through paradox, metaphor and formal structure, and interwoven

with a silence that opens up further possibilities of speech, it is a reality which

consistently indicates a ‘hinterland’; as if it is always following on, or always

responding, living in the wake of or in the shadow of intelligible relations whose

full scale is still obscure to us. To put it a little more sharply: these aspects of

language seem to show that we live in an environment where intelligible

communication is ubiquitous—where there is ‘sense’ before we make sense.118

Against this background, we speak and act “as if our language carried resources beyond

its immediate referential vocabulary.”119 “[W]e are in the habit of treating our words as

vehicles of an energy that is beyond them,” thereby enabled to disclose futures we had

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116. Ibid., 173.

117. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 19. Of course, the quotation itself underscores the immense difficulty involved, since at every turn it appeals to spatial metaphors (e.g., “background,” “horizon,” “hinterland”).

118. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 170.

119. Ibid., 152.

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not consciously imagined.120 That the world is constantly generating new configurations opens us to the “apprehension of unconditioned act, a fundamental energy in response to which all finite agency or movement is constituted as the flow of searching for

(‘desiring,’ if we want another anthropomorphism) self-renewing, self-diversifying form.”121 We can only speak of such “an infinite flow of activity” as generosity, an “act of

intelligent and beneficent ‘bestowal.’”122 In shifting registers (linguistic, not

ontological)—in moving, say, from the descriptive to the poetic—we step out in trust that

we are funded with the linguistic and imaginative resources we need. That we do in fact

consistently find ourselves so funded suggests the presences of “resources that are there

in or for our present world, but to which we do not yet have straightforward access.”123

We are led, says Williams, “to speak about human speech as located against the

background of an active but imageless depth which is intelligible in the sense that what

it makes possible is intelligence, yet not intelligible in the sense that it cannot be reduced

to an item in the mind.”124 That is, the “hinterland” of significance can be seen as a

“horizon of what we would call intelligible abundance, an inexhaustible life which is

itself unboundedly open to diversity of representation and at the same time supremely

resistant to representation.”125 Accordingly Williams argues that “the most

comprehensive and thickly textured account we can give of what is recognizably human

is deeply implicated in concerns about ‘the sacred’—about what is not yet said, what is

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120. Ibid.

121. Ibid., 124.

122. Ibid., 32.

123. Ibid., 137.

124. Ibid., 172.

125. Ibid., 65.

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not sayable, what precedes our understanding, and both confirms and challenges specific acts of understanding.”126

To raise these questions is not to suggest “there is in any straightforward way an alternative or ‘higher’ register in which such questions are resolved; simply that the framework we start with is irresistibly oriented towards an articulation of its own limits, whatever its initial promise may have seemed to be.”127 Parsing the difficulty “may generate a new discourse with new sequences of problems—or it may finally push us to a point where we can only gesture towards a discourse that we have no clear way of developing in the ordinary way.”128 Note here that Williams speaks not about what is beyond language, but about the uncertain future expansion of language. For Williams, the point is that theologians attend to those difficulties that bring us to that point of gesturing, to those kinds of representation that go further than (perhaps “beyond,” but not “outside”) the categories of imitation and reproduction.129 In effect, Williams say,

“taking seriously the various open-ended aspects of our speech identified here is a way of

rethinking how we come to refer to the unconditioned activity which, in the conviction

of religious believers, surrounds all that we are and all that we say.”130 Williams thus

identifies silence as the “terminus of all theological discourse, of all our words and

images, as indicating that moment when we are, as it were, confronted with God

Himself.”131 Silence, says Williams, is always “framed”; it is always “the gap that occurs

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126. Ibid., 184.

127. Ibid., 179.

128. Ibid., 181.

129. Williams suggests that “[i]t is this gesturing towards what appears beyond and between speakers engaged in the unceasing exchanges of language that grounds our knowledge of ourselves as distinctively human, both radically limited and radically innovative.” Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 94.

130. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 179.

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here, in this specific place,” which directs our attention to what specifically is not being said. Accordingly, silence is not “pure” absence, the void, but rather the absence of some thing in particular. Thinking about where, in particular, silence “comes in,” then, means giving “the closest attention to the speech it interrupts or refuses.”132

The silence of Christ is also framed: by the two thieves, by the two “white-clad figures” in the tomb, by the cherubim above the mercy-seat now recognized as the

Eucharistic altar-throne. This is a silence shot through with “the recognition of excess, not absence or privation.”133 The “Word Who proceeds from the Father’s silence,” in

Ignatius of Antioch’s language, thus returns us to the awed silence of worship before the dazzling radiance of his face, which “can only be regarded in silent—apophatic— wonder.134 In the space of this worshipful silence, the unsaid words, the words that fail us, are precisely the words of comprehension, of explanation.135

For Williams and the resolute Palamas, the true “place” of silence, the locus of apophatic theology, is not a realm dualistically opposed to human life and language, but at the foot of Christ’s cross.136 St Paul remarks that the revelation of God’s glory is

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131. Golitzin, “A Christian Mysticism?” 162.

132. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 162.

133. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky, 222.

134. Alexander Golitzin, “Dionysius Areopagites: A Christian Mysticism?” in The Theophaneia School: Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, vol. 3, ed. Basil Lourié and Andrei Orlov, Scrinium: Revue de Patrologie, d’Hagiographie, Critique et d’Histoire Eccléliastique (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007), 172; Louth, “From Doctrine of Christ to Icon of Christ,” 267.

135. We might compare the words from T. S. Eliot’s poem, Ash Wednesday: “Where shall the word be found, where will the word / Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.” Quoted in Nicholas Lash, Seeing in the Dark: University Sermons (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2005), 6.

136. These paragraphs in particular owe to insights I have learned from Ethan Smith, to whom I am greatly indebted. His forthcoming dissertation, The Praise of Glory: Apophatic Theology and Transformational Mysticism, examines with characteristically

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found, not in the escape to another world, but in the vision of the crucified face of Christ

(2 Cor 4:6). The same perspective is apparent in the “King of Glory” icon, which shows

Christ crucified, thereby identifying the manifestation of Christ’s royal glory with his death. The apophatic moment is, as it were, bound to and framed by the revelation of the , slain from the foundation of the world (Rev 13:8). Apophasis here connotes not the repudiation of cataphasis, or the withholding of information, but the

“showing” that is not a “saying.”

Because the inaccessible God reveals himself in the Crucified, he is by that very

fact a hidden and incomprehensible God, who upsets our definitions and

expectations. The true ‘apophatic’ approach (apophasis means the ‘leap’ towards

the mystery) does not rest solely, as is often thought, in negative theology. That

has only the purpose of opening us to an encounter, a revelation, and it is this

very revelation, in which glory is inseparable from kenosis, which is strictly

unthinkable. The apophasis therefore lies in the antinomy, the sharp distinction in

character between the Depth and the Cross, the inaccessible God and the Man of

Sorrows, the almost ‘crazy’ manifestations of God’s love for humanity, and a

humble and unobtrusive plea for our own love.137

Rather than opposites, then, apophasis and cataphasis coincide, preeminently in the

———————————— trenchant insight the relationship between apophaticism and mysticism in conversation with contemporary philosophical theology. Thus, where most accounts of contemporary negative theology are guilty of abstracting the doctrine of God from the figure of Jesus, Smith’s reading of the Dionysian corpus in light of transformational mysticism, with the aid of a resolute reading of the Tractatus, opens space for a more Christological apophatic theology. Relatedly, Dragos Giulea highlights the development in Christianity from narratives of heavenly ascent toward the paradigm of “noetic vision,” an idiom that clarifies the sense in which the locus of revelation is not elsewhere. See his Pre-Nicene Christology in Paschal Contexts.

137. Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 38.

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cross of Christ.138 The silence here is the silence of reverence, of particular things not said

(explanations, definitions) so that something “more” might appear, or, as Williams suggests, a symbol within the world’s “text” indicating the presence of the “margin.”139

2.2.4. A “Resolute” Palamism Clarifies the Non-Dual Eschatology Affirmed by Williams

and Eastern Orthodox Theology. The theological temptation toward irresolute gesturing is

frequently spatial, but it also takes shape temporally in the form of dualist .

One of the strengths of a resolute Palamism, then, is its clarification of a non-dual

eschatology. That such an eschatology coheres with strong currents in Eastern

Orthodoxy suggests that the resolute reading, rather than imposing a foreign schema on

Palamism, might help sharpen dynamics already present in the tradition. Broadly, if the

divine and human are not to be straightforwardly opposed, then there is good reason to

be suspicious of eschatologies that picture the “end of history” and the repudiation of

our finite (i.e., recognizably human) ways of knowing. In other words, the promised

future cannot simply be “an escape into some parallel universe, in which the tensions of

the habitual world are dissolved; rather, it is a time in which each of the liturgical actions

performed in this world ‘is transformed by the Holy Spirit into that which it is, a “real

symbol” of what it manifests.’”140 Accordingly, if there is no determinate divine “essence”

over against or beyond the revealed energies, then the present mode of human knowing,

in which we attend to God’s acts of manifestation in space and time, is never wholly set

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138. Stăniloae thus comments that “[t]here is a reciprocal communication between cataphatic and apophatic knowledge, the apophatic being partially known through the cataphatic, and the cataphatic being better understood through the apophatic. The apophatic is not entirely unknown, just as the cataphatic is not completely understood because it originates in absolute apophaticism.” The Holy Trinity, 1.

139. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 159.

140. Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy in America,” ca. 46:30. The inset quotation is from , The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Paul Kachur (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 223.

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aside. A non-dual eschatology thus reads the “silence” of St Isaac the Syrian’s remark—

“Silence is a mystery of the age to come”141—as concerned not with the repudiation of

human history and speech, but with the silence of worship noted above, and so

paradoxically also, as several Orthodox authors have argued, doxology’s eternal

expansion, an endless flowering into sense as new concepts are generated and

transcended. St Symeon thus writes,

For progress will be without end, throughout the ages, / since cessation of

growth towards that infinite end / would be nothing else than to grasp what

cannot be grasped / and that he, of whom none can have his fill, would become

an object of satiety; whereas to be fulfilled by him and glorified in his light / will

constitute an unfathomable progress and an unending beginning. / And so, while

possessing Christ who has taken form within them, / they stand before him who

shines (in inapproachable light), / so too in them the end becomes the beginning

of glory / and, to make my thought clearer to you / in the end they will have the

beginning and in the beginning the end; consider, I pray you, that the person

who is fully satisfied has no need of more, whereas no runner can reach the end

of what is endless. / It is that plenitude which is filled with God’s divinity / and

to those who share in it, who have their dwelling there, / how could they grasp it

wholly, so as to be satiated?142

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141. Homily 65 in The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, translated from the Greek and Syriac by the Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Boston, Mass.: The Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2011), 467.

142. Hymn I, quoted in Dumitru Stăniloae, “The Faces of Our Fellow Human Beings,” International Review of Mission 71, no. 281 (1982): 32. Cf. “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” (Lam 3:22–23). Cf. Pseudo-Macarius, who writes, “But the Lord neither has an end nor is he totally comprehended. And Christians do not dare to say, ‘We have comprehended’ (Phil 3:13), but they are humble night and day in their search. In the changeable world, there is no end to education and no one understands

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In this eternal oustretching (epektasis), the believer advances toward an ever-receding horizon, while finding herself progressively changed, “dilated” by grace to perceive and receive more of what’s given.143 Macarius thus speaks of the eschaton as the believer’s

passage through an ever-expanding series of doors leading more deeply into the

inexhaustible riches of God: “Doors are opened . . . and he enters inside into ‘many

mansions’ (Jn 14:2). And the further he enters, again new doors open in a progression.

From a hundred mansions he enters into another hundred.”144 In similar fashion, John

Romanides argues that for Dionysius “perfection is an eternal process which never

comes to an end, even for the highest orders, since there can be no expulsion of motion

and change and history by the actualization of every potentiality.”145 Dumitru Stăniloae registers the same point emphatically, drawing together apophatic theology with epektasis in picturing eternity as the endless building up of the scaffold of our understanding, in which “[n]egative theology, far from forever insisting on the renunciation of rational

———————————— this better than a person who has begun to learn. So in this case, God is incomprehensible to man and he cannot be measured except in the case of those who have begun to taste him whom they have received, and who acknowledge their own weakness.” Pseudo-Macarius, The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter, translated, edited and with an introduction by George A. Maloney, preface by Kallistos Ware, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 26.17.

143. “And by his very own power God receives the soul, little by little changing it until he has increased it with his own increase. For he stretches the soul and leads it to an infinite and unmeasurable increase, until it becomes the bride, spotless and worthy of him.” Pseudo-Macarius, The Fifty Spiritual Homilies, 47.17 Cf. “. . . much more does the soul from which the veil of darkness has been removed by the power of the Holy Spirit and whose spiritual eyes have been enlightened by the heavenly light and whose soul has been perfectly set free from the passions of shame and has been made pure through grace, how much more does this soul serve the Lord completely in Heaven in the Spirit and serve him completely in the body. Such a person finds himself so expanded in consciousness as to be everywhere, where and when he wishes to serve Christ.” Ibid., 46.4.

144. Pseudo-Macarius, The Fifty Spiritual Homilies, 8.6.

145. John S. Romanides, “Notes on the Palamite Controversy and Related Topics – Part II,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 9, no. 2 (Winter 1963–64): n.p.

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concepts, longs for their growth. It is the supra-rational point of the untiring exertions of reason which must never stop its investigation of nature, of human life, of

Scripture.”146 Echoing Symeon, Stăniloae argues that the infinite “distance” between creature and Creator means that “this way of drawing near to God in likeness will never end . . . so never will he arrive at knowing God as He knows Himself. This road is full of the pilgrims of eternity, strung out according to their ontological distance from God, and according to their voluntary efforts.”147 We are “pilgrims of eternity,” journeying in

“an infinite world, of infinite steps.”148

3. Conclusion

Building on and extending the convergence in Williams’s work between

Palamism and Wittgensteinian philosophy of language, this chapter has developed the fruitfulness of two Wittgensteinian conversations for articulating points of convergence between these Eastern and Western non-dualisms. I suggested first that the

Wittgensteinian approach to the realism-antirealism debate dissolves the anxiety to explain whether and how Palamism represents a “real distinction” or merely a

“conceptual” one. Second, drawing on Williams and the work of several interpreters of

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, I advanced a “resolute” reading of the essence-energies

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146. Stăniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, 246. Stăniloae thus maintains that “in the life to come we will eternally contemplate in God, accompanied by ever new experiences, the logoi of all things, in a perfect unity. Ibid., 354. Stăniloae also quotes in this connection: “The limits which are imposed by do not exist. The gnosis which searches for truth further and further afield and ever more deeply is an effective possibility, for the process of knowing God is a movement of the spirit which has no end. But the mystery always remains and can never be exhausted.” From Berdyaev’s Freedom and Spirit, p. 65. Quoted in ibid.

147. Stăniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, 357. Cf: “Deification in a broad sense begins at Baptism, and stretches out all along the whole of man’s spiritual ascent; . . . Deification never stops, but continues beyond the ultimate limits of the powers of human nature, to the infinite. The latter we can call deification in a strict sense.” Ibid., 363.

148. Stăniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, 373.

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distinction as a compelling contemporary interpretation of Palamas. According to this

“resolute” reading, the Palamite doctrine exerts a “regulative” or “grammatical” function insofar as it inscribes an impetus toward what appears—namely, the energetic manifestations of God’s dispossessing love. By its emphatic denial both that the

“essence” and energies can be opposed, and that the divine “essence” is any sort of

“what” subject to knowledge, the distinction emerges as a gentle (all the more effective for it) antidote to the modern epistemological anxiety concerning essences and to the theological temptation to “spatialize” the Godhead. Relieved of its preoccupation with

“essence,” theology is reoriented toward the manifold history of God’s self-revelations,

“the almost ‘crazy’ manifestations of God’s love for humanity.”149

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149. Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 38.

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CHAPTER VI

JACOB’S LADDER:

THE DIVINE BODY BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

He clothed Himself in language, so that He might clothe us in His mode of life. –St.

Ephrem the Syrian1

The foregoing chapters have, on several occasions, suggested that a “theophanic” approach to Scripture and the Christian faith reflects a non-dual theological perspective.

The present chapter seeks to examine more directly some of the lineaments of this theophanic tradition in order to indicate historical and scriptural resources for the cultivation of a non-dual theological imagination.

Chapter three examined Augustine’s revolutionary interpretation of the Old

Testament theophanies, as well as the resonance between contemporary receptions of

Augustinian semiotics and postmodern critiques of the “metaphysics of presence.” The present chapter explores an alternative perspective grounded in ancient Jewish and

Christian traditions concerning the manifestation of the divine body, the complexity of which defies the reductive either-or reading of literal versus metaphorical—that is, “pure presence” or demythologized absence. In addition to “fleshing out” my references to the

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1. St. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Faith 31. Quoted in Hymns on Paradise, introd and trans by Sebastian Brock (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 46.

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theophanic tradition, then, this chapter attends to textual traditions that defy the equation of vision and objectification—presence and possession—which had seemed to demand the negation of presence. A survey of some of the history of these divine body traditions—first in the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish mysticism,2 and then in the appropriation of these traditions in the early Christian traditions regarding Jesus— reveals that, while a divine body (or bodies) is assumed in the Hebrew Bible, the nature of that body was understood in complex ways.3 That Christians appropriated many of these traditions in order to portray the manifold body of the risen Christ underscores the inadequacy of treating the picture of the divine body either as literal description or dispensable metaphor.4 Moreover, in anticipation of chapter eight, I submit that these traditions can profoundly enliven the reading of Scripture while also underscoring the

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2. The survey will rely, in part, on scholarship drawn from the so-called “new Religionsgeschictliche Schule” (“history-of-religions school).” Understood in a loose sense, this term helpfully “connot[es] a group of contemporaries with a shared interest in historical investigation of early devotion to Jesus in the context of the Roman-era religious environment, and a shared conviction that the Jewish religious matrix of the Christian movement is more crucial than was recognized in the older religionsgeschichtliche Schule.” Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), 12.

3. By emphasizing such historical traditions and their developments, the present approach to the question of anthropomorphism highlights diachronic and contextual aspects frequently absent from prevailing accounts, which tend to regard anthropomorphism either as a static phenomenon (e.g., the biblical understanding of anthropomorphism) or as a feature reducible either to the text or to a universal religious experience treated in abstraction from particular traditions and communities.

4. Though stark, this either-form formulation has the benefit of clearly identifying the horns of the dilemma as it is frequently presented. My interest concerns the fact that this dilemma continues to haunt both the discipline of theology and ordinary readers of Scripture. Recent philosophical work evinces a great deal of nuance and sophistication on the question of metaphor, and it is not my intention to suggest either a) that this binary formulation represents the current state of the discussion within academia or b) that my own approach via Wittgenstein represents the first or only “solution” for this problem. I aim only to elucidate an alternative approach to scriptural anthropomorphism by way of analogy with aspects of ordinary language (as opposed to more technical philosophical discussions). For another recent, though different, approach to the question of metaphor in theological discourse, see Jan Muis, “Can Christian Talk About God Be Literal?” Modern Theology 27 (2011): 582–607.

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continuity between the theophanic-iconic logic of Christian liturgical actions and the scriptural narrative.

This chapter’s résumé of historical scholarship on scriptural anthropomorphism and the divine body reveals that, in certain cases, anthropomorphic depictions of God were indispensable to the interpretive community’s mystagogical practice, and so were understood neither as literal descriptions nor as metaphorical ornaments. Accordingly, what stands in need of demythologizing is not the text, but our readings of it—not the form of the words, but our use of it—just insofar as those readings threaten to bypass or arrest a pedagogical-mystagogical dynamic rooted in and nourished by the liturgy.

Rather than underwriting a sense of our own purported sophistication vis-à-vis our spiritual elders, then, such a survey reveals that our task is principally one of recovery, since we have been preceded in our efforts by our Jewish and Christian forebears.

The chapter consists of two sections which sketch some of the history of reflection concerning the divine body, first in the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish mysticism (section one), and then in the appropriation of these traditions in the early

Christian traditions regarding Jesus (section two). The next chapter (seven) builds on this material by pursuing an alternative understanding of anthropomorphic language— informed by Wittgenstein and several of his philosophical interpreters—more reflective of these traditions of mystagogical use. Accordingly, the historical material in the present chapter grounds the philosophical-theological discussion of the next chapter in a particular context. In other words, while sharpening the inadequacy of the choice between literal-representational and metaphorical-ornamental approaches to scriptural anthropomorphism, the historical examination traces a history of use to which the next chapter’s philosophical discussion attempts to remain recognizably faithful.

1. The Divine Body in the Old Testament

“The movement of descent opens up a living relational space between the ‘place’ that is

God’s and the ‘place’ that is man’s—that space of ascents and descents (Gen 28:12; Jn 1:51) which

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is the real stage for all biblical ‘revelation.’”5The image of Jacob’s ladder6 captures the

central dynamic in light of which anthropomorphic language can properly be

understood—namely, that anthropomorphism calls forth and finds its answer in

theomorphism, the invitation for humanity to ascend to communion and likeness with

God (i.e., deification).7 In short, God may be imaged in human terms “because the

human is imaged in divine terms.”8 To the theophanic imagination, Jacob’s ladder, as

the place of angelic ascending and descending, represents a place of “angelomorphic”9

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5. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theology: The Old , vol. 6 of The Glory of the Lord: A , ed. John Riches, trans. Brian McNeil and Erasmo Leiva- Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 45.

6. Of relevance to our later discussion we might note that in some traditions Jacob’s body itself was the heavenly ladder, which was understood to possess cosmic dimensions. Genesis Rabbah 68.12. See Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “Shiur Koma Traditions in Jewish and Hellenistic Sources,” in The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament, Christopher Rowland and Christopher R.A. Morray- Jones, Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum Ad Novum Testamentum. Section III, Jewish Traditions in Early Christian Literature, vol. 12 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2009), 547.

7. Cf. “God condescends to the perceptive capability of the visionary, while the latter is transfigured, transformed, and sent out to bear witness to the encounter.” Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Mountain of the Lord,” 145. “Now we can actually say that to speak of a God in three Persons is not ‘anthropomorphic,’ since we can only speak of the human person in ‘theomorphic’ terms. H. Thielicke, Der Evangelische Glaube, II (1973), 8. Quoted in Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Spirit of the Truth, vol. 3 of Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 149.

8. Wolfson, “Mysticism,” 931. As Jacob Neusner puts it, “The insistent comparison of God with humanity ‘in our image and likeness’ comes to its conclusion in one sentence that draws humanity upward and does not bring God downward.” Jacob Neusner, “Conversation in Nauvoo About the Corporeality of God,” BYU Studies 36, no. 1 (1996–97): 13. Cf. St Abbas Thalassios: “There is a new wonder in heaven and on earth: God is on earth and man is in heaven.” The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 2, compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, translated from the Greek and edited by G. E. H. Palmer, et al. (London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1981), 312.

9. As Crispin Fletcher-Louis explains, the term “angelomorphic” denotes “wherever there are signs that an individual or community possesses specifically angelic characteristics or status, though for whom identity cannot be reduced to that of an angel.” Crispin H.T. Fletcher-Louis, Luke-Acts: Angels, Christology, and Soteriology, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 14–15. See also Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and

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encounter, a “middle ground” in which the strict maintenance of the ontological distinction gives way to accounts of theophany, elevation, transformation and mingling.

Accordingly, anthropomorphism is not simply an accommodation to human limitation but an act of divine condescension aimed at transformation. Joining heaven and earth,

Jacob’s ladder is also the bridge or conduit constituted by the symbols and poetry of mystical language, which traverse the divide between hidden and manifest, divine and human.10 Hence St Ephrem’s remark, with which this chapter began, “[God] clothed

Himself in language, so that He might clothe us in His mode of life.” In mystical circles, language becomes the two-way medium through which God reveals himself and draws humanity into the communion of love that is the divine life.

Focusing principally on themes of anthropomorphic descent in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish pseudepigrapha, this section will highlight three moments in the history of reflection on the divine body: 1) the preexilic tabernacle-temple, 2) the postexilic priestly circle, and 3) “shiur koma” mysticism. Taken together, these three moments—together with a brief look at heavenly Adam-Anthropos traditions—evince a complexity that defies simple categorization, while also exhibiting a measure of expansion and elaboration of inherited tradition over time. It is largely unsurprising, then, that these traditions were appropriated by Christians wrestling to make sense of the person and work of Christ, himself the true Jacob’s ladder (Jn 1:51) in whom divine and human trajectories converge and are reconciled.

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Early Evidence, Arbeiten Zur Geschichte Des Antiken Judentums und Des Urchristentums, (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 1998), 3 n2 and Bogdan Gabriel Bucur, Angelomorphic Pneumatology: and Other Early Christian Witnesses, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 95 (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2009), xxvi, esp. n8.

10. Rachel Elior, Jewish Mysticism: The Infinite Expression of Freedom, trans. Yudith Nave and Arthur B. Millman, The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (Oxford; Portland, Or.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007), 105.

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1.1. In the Preexilic Period, the Divine Embodiment Is “Transcendently Anthropomorphic”

Israel’s understanding of God and its use of anthropomorphism in speaking of

God developed over centuries in complex and nuanced ways. This dynamism is in part latent in the Hebrew scriptures, which were composed, edited and revised by a circle of post-exilic priestly scribes who preserved but also revised earlier, more diverse traditions.11 At one level, anthropomorphic language in the Hebrew Bible appears to reflect the early belief—common to ancient Near Eastern religions—that Yhwh, like other gods, was a very powerful being—that is, superhuman in some ways, but, we might say, located on the same ontological continuum as ourselves.12 In other words, while

God was more than human, the difference was one of degree rather than kind.13

Accordingly, the preexilic temple was understood literally as a house for God; God literally dwelt in the temple, and since the divine presence is heaven, “the temple constitute[d] heaven on earth.”14

Importantly, the boundary between the divine and human was not entirely clear in the preexilic period, and the relations between them often appeared fluid. The

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11. See Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical : Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, with a foreword by Patrick D. Miller, The Biblical Resource Series (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2002); Mark S. Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross- Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). Scholars debate whether monotheism was sufficiently established in Israel prior to the exile, despite the presence of polytheistic Israelites, or whether such monotheism arose in the wake of the exile.

in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the ”,אלהים (Karel van der Toorn, “God (I .12 Bible, ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 362.

13. Ibid.

14. Silviu N. Bunta, “In Heaven or on Earth: A Misplaced Temple Question About Ezekiel’s Visions,” in With Letters of Light: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Early Jewish Apocalypticism, Magic and Mysticism in Honor of Rachel Elior, ed. Daphna V. Arbel and Andrei A. Orlov (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2011), 35.

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“middle ground” was crossed in both directions: might be revealed as angels, even Yhwh himself, and exceptional figures (like Moses) could ascend to the place of

God’s presence. The divine and human were understood as separated not by geography but by holiness and quality of life.15 As James Kugel puts it, “There are not two realms in the Bible, this world and the other, the spiritual and the material—or rather, these two realms are not neatly segregated but intersect constantly.”16

In these traditions (found especially in J and E), Yhwh is embodied, if by body

we mean “something located in a particular place at a particular time, whatever its shape

or substance.”17 At the same time, the nature of the divine body is quite extraordinary.

Benjamin Sommer argues that Yhwh’s body and self, like those of other ancient Near

Eastern deities, possessed “a mysterious fluidity and multiplicity.”18 Pointing to the

murkiness with which Yhwh is represented by and identified with various “angels”

(mal’akh), Sommer contends that these angels were “small-scale manifestations” of

Yhwh—“part of God, though not all of God.”19 According to Sommer, these multiple

manifestations were not incompatible with Jewish monotheism. Such claims are also

appropriate to the cultic statues that may have occupied sanctuaries around Israel—

Yhwh is present in each but transcends all.20 God’s presence is hypostatized—given concrete expression—by the mal’akh or statue. God can have multiple bodies and yet

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15. Ibid., 32.

16. James L. Kugel, The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible (New York: Free Press, 2003), 35.

17. Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2.

18. Ibid., 10.

19. Ibid., 43.

20. Ibid., 51.

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transcend them all. Borrowing a term from Ronald Hendel, we might term such a conception “transcendent anthropomorphism,”21 a term that helpfully suggests the distance we have already come from flatly ontotheological notions.

1.2. In the Postexilic Period, the Priestly Tradition Represented by Ezekiel Speaks of Yhwh by

Means of the Anthropomorphic Glory

The tradition of transcendent anthropomorphism takes other forms after J and E.

In the wake of the Babylonian exile, two schools of thought emerged, each with its own understanding of how Yhwh had been present in the temple. Deuteronomy and the

Deuteronomistic literature (D) conceived of God as dwelling in heaven, and so spoke of

Yhwh’s presence in the sanctuary only through the mediation of the divine “Name”

(shem) placed in the temple.22 The alternative theology of the priestly circle (P) reaffirmed the preexilic sense of the temple as Yhwh’s abode, though it portrayed that presence in terms of God’s Glory, the “kavod of Yhwh.”23 At points, the Glory is a

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21. Ronald S. Hendel, “Aniconism and Anthropomorphism in Ancient Israel,” in The Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. Karel van der Toorn, PL, Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), 223.

22. Moshe Weinfeld, “Ka¯bôd,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren,¯ ¯ and Heinz-Josef Fabry, trans. David E. Green (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 37. “In the Book of Jeremiah, the abode of Yhwh is re-located from the temple, no longer extant, to an increasingly reclusive heaven. Heaven, identified in preexilic mentalities with the temple, is itself secluded to accommodate the new transcendent deity. Similarly for Deutero-Isaiah and Trito-Isaiah, heaven, equally reclusive, is Yhwh’s habitation (e.g., Isa 63:15; 66:1). The only immanent side of the divinity is the divine voice (e.g., Isa 40:25). Yhwh’s heavenly abode becomes a place of hiding (e.g., Isa 45:15). . . . The Sinai event is revised and purged of any reference to the form or bodily appearance of Yhwh (Deut 4:12). Yhwh spoke from heaven and not from the top of the mountain, and the contact with Yhwh was not visual but auditory (cf. Deut 4:12, 32, 36; 5:4, 22-23).” Silviu N. Bunta, “Yahweh’s Cultic Statue After 597/586 B.C.E.: A Linguistic and Theological Reinterpretation of Ezekiel 28:12,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2007): 231–32.

23. Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 201. “The noun ka¯bôd derives from kbd, which denotes ‘heaviness’ in the physical sense as well as ‘gravity’¯ and¯ ‘importance’ in the spiritual sense—i.e., ‘honor’ and ‘respect.’” Weinfeld, “Ka¯bôd,” 23. ¯ ¯ 304

phenomenon of radiant splendor that takes the form of a consuming fire surrounded by a cloud; at other times, the Glory is said to have an anthropomorphic form.24 Rather than removing Yhwh entirely to heaven as the Deuteronomists did, then, the Priestly source speaks of Yhwh by means of the anthropomorphic kavod, Yhwh’s material though mobile presence in the temple.25

This priestly notion of the Glory safeguards the actual appearance of Yhwh, since what is glimpsed is not the form of Yhwh himself, but his Glory—“the form in which he chooses to reveal himself.”26 The absolute holiness of Yhwh meant that to seek a vision of his form was extremely dangerous.27 Accordingly, the Glory constitutes “the luminous screen, ‘the face’ of [God’s] anthropomorphic extent . . . a radiant façade of His anthropomorphic ‘form.’”28 At the same time, the prophet is frequently shielded from a direct vision even of the Glory by the interposition of fire, light and smoke as a kind of buffer. The dialectic is that between the hidden and the manifest, and in that sense, the

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24. Weinfeld, “Ka¯bôd,” 27. In this sense, the priestly divine Glory is comparable to the anthropomorphic appearance¯ ¯ of Yhwh in J and E. Cf. Jarl Fossum, “Glory,” in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 349 Walter Eichrodt distinguishes five lines along which these kavod traditions developed. Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J. A. Baker, The Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), 2:30–32. I am indebted to Dragos Giulea for drawing my attention to Eichrodt’s work. See his discussion Pre-Nicene Christology in Paschal Contexts, 2.

25. Bunta, “Yahweh’s Cultic Statue After 597/586 B.C.E,” 232.

26. Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 52–53.

27. Cf. “This dialectic of holiness and danger in the visible presence of Yahweh offers a coherent response to the problem of divine representation. Yahweh has a body, clearly anthropomorphic, but too holy for human eyes. To the worshipper this idea coheres with the absence of anthropomorphic images of Yahweh in the Israelite cult. . . . God’s sublimity is expressed by his extremely holy and dangerous presence, not by his bodily form per se. It is a transcendent anthropomorphism not in its form but in its effect, approachable only by the most holy, and absent in material form in the cult.” Hendel, “Aniconism and Anthropomorphism in Ancient Israel,” 223.

28. Andrei Orlov, “Exodus 33 on God’s Face,” 326.

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“face” of God becomes an idiom in which to speak about “the personal experience of divine presence” while maintaining the theological tension between the transcendent- invisible and immanent-visible.29

The book of Ezekiel reflects the influence of this priestly understanding of the kavod, with respect to which it emphasizes its explicitly anthropomorphic appearance—

Ezekiel sees “something that seemed like a human form” (Ezek 1:26), which he identifies as “the appearance of the likeness of the Glory of the LORD” (1:28). Moreover, Ezekiel hedges the divine appearance further through the use of various terms for “likeness,” which indicate both the extraordinary quality of the visionary experience and the fact that what Ezekiel saw was an appearance or an image of the Glory rather than the Glory itself.30 These linguistic qualifiers also signal to the reader that the language is self- consciously inadequate to a visionary experience which transcends conventional language use.

In advance of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, Ezekiel depicts the divine presence itself as the true temple, which is embodied or encompassed by the physical temple in Jerusalem.31 Since the divine presence is heaven, any vision of God is a vision of and ascent to heaven. At the same time, since the divine presence is the true temple, the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in no way imperils the divine presence and temple: “The entire holiness of the temple and the entire heaven is concentrated in the divine presence. In rescuing the divine kavod from destruction, Ezekiel rescues all of the divine presence and the entire temple.”32 This conclusion is reinforced by the implication

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29. Seow, “Face,” 323.

30. Segal, Paul the Convert, 53.

31. Bunta, “In Heaven or on Earth,” 30.

32. Ibid., 42.

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that, in the absence of the physical structure, the temple rituals continue without interruption in the midst of the four creatures (cf. 10:2).33

Visionary theophanies of this sort became a central concern in ancient Israel’s prophetic tradition, and in the Second Temple period Ezekiel’s vision became the preeminent prototype of such mystical vision.34 Jewish apocalyptic literature, which developed in the milieu of such postexilic prophecy, came to emphasize a constellation of themes particularly rooted in Ezekiel, including the direct revelation of celestial mysteries—especially the appearance of the Glory (doxa) or Power (dynamis) of God on the throne—and the corresponding ascent of the visionary to heaven.35 Closely bound up with such traditions were those concerning “a supreme archangelic intermediary or heavenly primordial man, who was held to embody the divine Name and Image, and to act as God’s agent in Creation and Revelation.”36 Cast once more in terms of Jacob’s ladder, the divine descent into visibility becomes the ground for the visionary ascent to heaven.

These Jewish mystical traditions, alongside other pre-rabbinic and non-rabbinic literature, reflect a growing tendency toward what scholars have termed “binitarian monotheism,” understood as “a certain bifurcation of the divine, featuring a supreme divinity and a secondary more or less personalized manifestation of God: the Glory, the

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33. Ibid., 43.

34. Wolfson, “Mysticism,” 929; Rachel Elior, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism, trans. David Louvish, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (Oxford; Portland, Or.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004), 63.

35. See Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16–20.

36. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” in The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament, Christopher Rowland and Christopher R.A. Morray-Jones, Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum Ad Novum Testamentum. Section III, Jewish Traditions in Early Christian Literature, vol. 12 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2009), 501.

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Name, the principal angel, the Son of Man.”37 While picturing a “second power in heaven,” this binitarian framework does not preclude a fundamentally monotheistic conception, as evidenced by its appropriation and transformation at the hands of

Christians who sought to account for their worship of Jesus alongside God.38 The

Christological monotheism that emerged from the matrix of first-century Judaism thus drew on such notions in its struggle toward what would later become trinitarian doctrine.39

1.3. The Divine Body in Shiur Koma Mysticism Is Related in Complex, Theurgic Fashion to

Israel’s Praise

The relationship between the enthroned Glory and the angelic mediator leads us to a brief sketch of shiur koma (lit. “the measure of the stature”) mysticism, which is concerned with “the central mystery of the merkava tradition: the body of the Glory on the throne.”40 This body of the Glory on the throne was also understood as the embodied form of the divine Name (or names).41 As Gershom Scholem explains, on the one hand, “to the visionary, [the Deity] manifests itself in the tangible shape of a human

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37. Bogdan G. Bucur, “From Jewish Apocalypticism to Christian Mysticism,” in The Orthodox Christian World, ed. Augustine Casiday (London; New York: Routledge, 2012), 471. As Bucur suggests, we should exercise caution with respect to the term “” since its usage reflects not the concerns of the ancient texts but rather modern difficulties with their theological language. Acknowledging the possibility of distortion, however, such terms serve a heuristic purpose in drawing together several related threads across a diverse body of literature.

38. Bogdan G. Bucur, “Early Christian Binitarianism: From Religious Phenomenon to Polemical Insult to Scholarly Concept,” Modern Theology 27 (2011): 106.

39. Ibid.

40. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 506.

41. Ibid., 509.

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being seated on the throne of glory, constituting the supreme primal image in which man was created.” On the other hand,

aurally, at least in principle, it is manifested as God’s name, broken into its

component elements, whose structure anticipates that of all being. According to

this doctrine, God’s shape is conceived of, not as a concept or idea, but as names.

. . . The two realms are not separated, and the , which are the

hidden life of the entire Creation, are not only audible, but also visible as letters

of fire.42

The form of the Glory on the throne is the embodiment of God’s Name, which unfolds itself in the revelation of lesser secret names, themselves attributed to or inscribed upon the various body parts. These lesser names thus constitute the divine body and are understood as “aspects or potencies of the Great Name” or alternatively as angelic beings.43 Both aspects gave rise to mystical speculation which concerned the cosmic measurements of the divine body on the one hand and the revelation and recitation of the secret names on the other.44

As Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones argues, these traditions were pre-rabbinic and pre-Christian in origin,45 though they were extensively revised in accordance with later

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42. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 28. Cf. Wolfson: “Another assumption shared by the various trends of Jewish esotericism is that the luminous form of the glory visualized as the anthropomorphic shape upon the throne is simultaneously experienced in terms of the letters of the divine name (or names). . . . the potencies of the Godhead, the ten sefirot, are visually configured in the shape of an anthropos, but the limbs of that body are composed ultimately of the letters of the divine names associated with each of those potencies, which are all derived from the one name, the tetragrammaton.” Wolfson, “Mysticism,” 934–35.

43. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 509.

44. Ibid., 507.

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rabbinic theology.46 According to Morray-Jones, the earliest shiur koma traditions involved two separate heavenly figures: (1) the Glory (= Word/Name) or manifest appearance of the Creator, and (2) his Servant, the Youth-Messiah, who shared his

Glory and Name and was later identified with Metatron.47 On the first model, the

Father’s Glory is manifested by a single enthroned figure variously identified as the

Glory, Image, and Logos-Angel. In the second, “two-thrones” model, Metatron, the angelic Youth-Messiah, appears enthroned alongside the Glory as his servant, and so is differentiated from the figure on the merkava.48

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45. “All the evidence points to the late first or early second century as the period when the process of suppression was initiated. The tradition itself must, therefore, be pre-rabbinic.” Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “Shiur Koma Traditions in Jewish and Hellenistic Sources,” 542.

46. This reformulation, occurring in the late first or early second century CE, was likely carried out “in response to the catastrophic consequences of imminent , and as a defensive reaction to these ‘heretical’ developments,” i.e., in Christianity and . Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” in The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament, Christopher Rowland and Christopher R.A. Morray-Jones, Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum Ad Novum Testamentum. Section III, Jewish Traditions in Early Christian Literature, vol. 12 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2009), 610.

47. Morray-Jones explains that Metatron, as the Angel of the LORD, “functions as the celestial vice-regent who ministers before the Throne, supervises the celestial liturgy and officiates over the heavenly hosts. He sits on a throne which is a replica of the Throne of Glory and wears a glorious robe like that of God. He functions as the agent of God in the creation, acts as intermediary between the heavenly and lower worlds, is the guide of the ascending visionary, and reveals the celestial secrets to mankind.” “Transformational Mysticism in the Apocalyptic-Merkabah Tradition,” Journal of Jewish Studies 43, no. 1 (1992): 8. Metatron is thus a Logos figure, identified with the Face of God and said to embody the Name of God. He is even referred to as the “Lesser Tetragrammaton” whose “name is like that of his Master.” “The tradition of the Name- bearing angel and celestial vice-regent is apparently ancient and widespread. He appears in both apocalyptic and Hekhalot literature under a variety of names and titles.” Ibid., 8. 3 Enoch identifies Metatron with the patriarch Enoch, “who ascended into heaven and was transformed into the Name-bearing angel.” Ibid., 10.

48. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 535. Merkava/merkabah is “a later technical term for the throne-chariot in Ezek 1.” Fossum, “Glory,” 350. Bogdan Bucur explains that “the destruction of the second temple in the year 70 led to the articulation not only of rabbinic Judaism and its Mishnaic and Talmudic literature, but also of Hekhalot literature, whose interest in the

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Having already examined the Glory above, only this second angelic figure will concern us here. Serving as the celestial High Priest and head of the angelic hierarchy, the Youth is identified as the heavenly representative or prince of Israel—the heavenly

Messiah—and so almost certainly also with Daniel’s Son of Man (Dan 7:9-14) who appears before the Ancient of Days.49 As the heavenly representative of the community of Israel, the Youth represents Israel and so appears as God’s beloved.50 On the other side of his mediatorial role, he is also identified as the male Beloved of the Song of

Songs, “whose ‘Bride’ was the Community of Israel.”51

Called the “Son of God,” the Youth is strikingly said to share in God’s Name as the second “I AM” revealed to Moses (I AM WHO I AM), the Name having been given to Moses by the Youth himself from the burning bush. That is, the first “I AM” is Yhwh, and the second is the Youth. “The Youth therefore manifests and mediates the Glory of

———————————— heavenly temple, and the angelic worship before the divine throne has been labeled merkavah mysticism—that is, ‘mysticism of the chariot-throne.’” Bogdan G. Bucur, “Jewish Apocalypticism,” 470–71. “These traditions were associated with exegesis of Scriptural accounts of visions of the enthroned deity (Daniel 7, Isaiah 6 and, pre-eminently, Ezekiel 1) but it is probable that visionary-mystical practices were also involved. Such traditions were inherited from apocalyptic circles and enthusiastically developed by some Tannaim, but were opposed by others, mainly because the same traditions were being developed by groups whom they regarded as heretical, including the various forms of Christianity and Gnosticism. The Hekhalot writings represent the development of these traditions within rabbinism. While it cannot be assumed that everything in this literature goes back to the tannaitic period, the writers’ claim to be the heirs to a tradition from this time and milieu deserves to be taken seriously.” C. R. A. Morray-Jones, “Transformational Mysticism,” 1.hekhalot

49. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 536.

50. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “Shiur Koma Traditions in Jewish and Hellenistic Sources,” 543.

51. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 609. For reasons that are not clear, later rabbinic redactors of the tradition “preserved the character of the Youth but transferred the description of the Beloved to the kavod.” Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 534–35. As Morray-Jones observes, this demotion of the Youth may parallel Metatron’s similar fate.

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the Holy One, with Whom he is partly similar, yet partly dissimilar, since the ‘I AM

THAT I AM’ relationship between the two is expressive of both identity and difference.”52 Owing to this close identity-in-distinction,53 the Youth was himself an object of shiur koma speculation and veneration. Accordingly, the Youth is not only said to receive Israel’s worship—including the shiur koma as the ultimate expression of that praise—but to preside over the heavenly liturgy which expresses “the totality of God’s

Name.”54 The angelic hierarchy stands before this Prince of the Presence and leader of the celestial liturgy just as he stands before the Holy One as principal worshipper.55 He ministers before the throne of Glory as a participant in and mediator of the divine

Glory.56 He is the image and embodiment of the Glory, while still remaining distinct from and subordinate to God.

Since the shiur koma literature weaves together lists of measurements and names with hymns and liturgical material, Morray-Jones contends that these lists and the hymns should be seen as “complementary aspects (‘measure’ and ‘praise’) of a single theurgic-liturgical genre, whose central theme is the ‘greatness’ of God,” taken by

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52. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 523.

53. Cf. “From the appearance of his loins and down (cf. Ezek 1:27), each is like the other, but from the appearance of his loins and up, each is not like the other. The name of the Youth is like the name of his Master, as it is written: ‘for my Name is in him’ (Exod 23:21).” The quotation is found in both SRaziel and SKoma; in the latter it corresponds to Cohen’s section Nx, ll. 78–82. Quoted in Christopher R. A. Morray- Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 523.

54. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 537.

55. Ibid., 526.

56. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 522. “Just as the kavod mediates between the invisible Godhead and his Creation, so the Youth is the highest link in a chain of mediation which extends from the throne of glory to the bottom-most level of that Creation.” Ibid., 537.

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“mystical word-play” to mean simultaneously: (a) giant size, (b) majesty or power, and

(c) praise.57 In other words, for the shiur koma practitioner to know the measurements of the divine body and to recite the divine names are aspects of the same activity, equally forms of the highest form of praise. At the same time, the term “praise” is often synonymous with Glory in the shiur koma and hekhalot literature,58 which suggests that

“God’s ‘body’ and his ‘praise’ are one and the same thing. The shiur koma liturgies are, therefore, grounded on the fundamental belief that the activity of worship makes God visible.”59 Drawing on the fact that “the Glory appears on the Throne at of

Israel’s worship, and that the earthly liturgy is closely connected to its celestial counterpart,” Morray-Jones concludes that, “[b]y reciting the measurements of the body of the Glory, together with the names of which that body is composed, the shiur koma practitioner participates in this hierarchy of worship at the highest level and so helps to

‘construct’ the visible Image of the formless God.”60 Since the Image on the throne is also the Creator and Sustainer, this worship is a theurgic action of the greatest significance. Thus, the Targum to Psalm 22:3 says that God “establishes the world upon the praises of Israel,”61 which, taken together with the material above, suggests that

Israel’s worship—of which the shiur koma is the most profound expression—

“participates in the divine activity of Creation, and manifests the body of the Glory in

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57. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 516–17.

58. On hekhalot literature, see note 48 above.

59. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 517.

60. Ibid., 518.

61. Kevin Cathcart, Michael Maher, and Martin McNamara, eds., The Targum of , translated with a critical introduction and apparatus, and notes by David M. Stec, The Aramaic Bible, vol. 16 (Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 2004), 58.

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the world.”62

As the embodiment of Israel’s praise, the Youth is said to summon the Glory to visibility on the throne. “God is enthroned on the merkava in the visible with

Israel’s assistance.”63 The Youth alone in heaven recites the names of God, which even the angels are prevented from hearing. But as an initiate in the highest form of praise, the shiur koma practitioner shares this act of recitation and so also participates in the

Youth’s priestly mediation. Accordingly, the shiur koma practitioner aspires to become

“a lesser analogue of the Beloved Youth,” transformed into the likeness of the Glory and embodying the Name through participation in the heavenly liturgy.64 The shiur koma is thus a “mystical theology of ‘corporate’ transformation” in which the worshipper becomes a member of the body of Glory through the mediation of the Youth, the heavenly High Priest who embodies the community’s praise.65 Morray-Jones summarizes the multiple levels on which this theology operates:

To the extent that Israel remains true to her ‘bridal’ calling, thereby maintaining

her ‘likeness’ to God’s Image, the divine Glory is empowered to become manifest

in and through her acts of worship, which, for this reason, perform a theurgic

function of cosmic ‘service’. On the macrocosmic scale, the effect of Israel’s

worship, led by her angelic priestly representative, is that God’s Glory is

enthroned in heaven. On the microcosmic scale, the ‘temple enclosure’ within

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62. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 518.

63. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “Shiur Koma Traditions in Jewish and Hellenistic Sources,” 555. Italics in original.

64. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 537–38.

65. Ibid., 538.

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which the Divine Image and its middot [virtues] are enshrined is the community

as a whole and, especially, the purified body of the shiur koma ‘priestly’

practitioner himself.66

The second section examines how these themes of incorporation into the body of Glory

(i.e., glorification), participation in the heavenly liturgy presided over by the angelic- angelomorphic high priest, and the manifestation of the Glory in the community’s praise are all appropriated by Christians seeking to make sense of their experience of life in

Christ. First, however, I turn to consider the role of the high priest as a figure of central importance in mystical ascent literature.

1.4. “Transformational Mysticism” Pictures a Fluid Human Body Open to Glorification and

Emblematized by Adam and the High Priest

The temple and its imagery were central not only to the development of the shiur koma traditions, but also to the priestly-mystical exploration of what we might regard as the anthropological counterpart to such divine manifestation: “transformational mysticism.”67 In the absence of the temple (and its cultic statue), Yhwh’s presence, though imaged materially by the kavod, was no longer regularly accessible.68 With the loss of Yhwh’s direct image in a temple statue, the came to regard humanity itself as the living icon of the divine. Indeed, according to Genesis Rabbah, the angels originally mistook Adam for God.69

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66. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “Shiur Koma Traditions in Jewish and Hellenistic Sources,” 555–56.

67. C. R. A. Morray-Jones, “Transformational Mysticism.”

68. Bunta, “Yahweh’s Cultic Statue After 597/586 B.C.E.”

69. “Said R Hoshaiah, ‘When the Holy One, blessed be He, came to create the first man, the ministering angels mistook him [for God, since man was in God’s image,] and wanted to say before him, “Holy, [holy, holy is the Lord of hosts].”’” Quoted in Neusner, “Conversation in Nauvoo About the Corporeality of God,” 14.

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In describing Adam as formed in God’s image (tselem) and likeness (demut),

Genesis uses terms commonly used to denote the statues of gods.70 This suggests that, in the Priestly source, “Adam functions as the representation of Yhwh, or the physical replacement of the statue no longer extant.”71 Second, the creation account is crafted in light of the priestly circle’s liturgical ideology, according to which “the creation and the structure of the world mirror the construction and the function of the temple.”72 At the culmination of creation, Adam is placed in Eden, the world’s “innermost and most sacrosanct space,” a direct parallel to the placement of the preexilic statue of Yhwh in the temple’s innermost chamber, the holy of holies (an act which represented the temple’s completion). Third, the description of Adam as “image” and “likeness” in

Genesis 1:26 parallels the description of the “likeness” of the divine Glory in Ezekiel

1:26-28. In addition to connecting humanity with the “iconic function of the kavod in

Ezekiel,”73 this parallel underscores that anthropomorphism is correlative with theomorphism.74 Mark Smith summarizes the point, noting that “Whereas Ezekiel 1:26

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70. The term Ds˘ele˘m occurs in Num 33:52; 1 Sam 6:5; 2 Kgs 11:18; 2 Chr 23:17; Am 5:26; Ez 16:17, 23:14.

71. Bunta, “Yahweh’s Cultic Statue After 597/586 B.C.E,” 234. The Pseudo- Clementine homilies, Jewish-Christian writings from the beginning of the third century CE, explain that God has a corporeal form “for the sake of man, in order that the pure in heart shall be able to see Him, that they shall rejoice on account of whatever they have endured.” Quoted in Alon Goshen Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” The Harvard Theological Review 87, no. 2 (April 1994): 173. The homilies also say that the first man was modeled after this divine corporeal form.

72. Bunta, “Yahweh’s Cultic Statue After 597/586 B.C.E,” 234. See also Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “God’s Image, His Cosmic Temple, and the High Priest: Towards an Historical and Theological Account of the Incarnation,” in Heaven on Earth: The Temple in Biblical Theology, ed. T. Desmond Alexander and Simon Gathercole (Carlisle, : Paternoster Press, 2004), 82.

73. Bunta, “Yahweh’s Cultic Statue After 597/586 B.C.E,” 233.

74. Morray-Jones suggests that the targumists were aware of a tradition, which they attempted to suppress, “that the figure seen by Ezekiel on the merkava was either Adam or, alternatively, Jacob.” Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “Shiur Koma

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conveys the prophet’s vision of [Yhwh] in the likeness of the human person, Genesis 1 presents a vision of the human person in the likeness of the Divine. Rather than reducing Yhwh to human terms through an anthropomorphic portrait, Genesis 1:26-28 magnifies the human person in divine terms.”75 According to this “anthropology of theomorphism,” humanity is not identical to the divine (“isotheism”), but rather possesses an iconic and cultic function.76

The Eden-temple parallel pictures the temple as a restoration of Paradise, but it equally locates Adam as the high priest who images God in the world and focuses creation’s praise in the inner sanctum (Eden) of the cosmic temple.77 Scholars have noted a number of parallels between the account of Paradise in Genesis and the description of the tabernacle-temple—e.g., the tabernacle menorah is a stylized tree of life; expulsion in both cases is seen as death; both accounts include cherubim as guardians, the Gihon river, gold, and Eastern entrances; and both contain terminological parallels with respect to the service/ministry of Adam (Gen 2:15) and the

Levites (Num 3:7-8, 8:26), as well as God walking in the Garden (Gen 3:8) and the sanctuary (Lev 26:12, Dt 23:15, 2 Sam 7:6-7).78 Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the

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Traditions in Jewish and Hellenistic Sources,” 545.

75. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, 90. Reaching the same conclusion, John F. Kutsko remarks that “fundamentally P and Ezekiel are dealing with the same answer, approached from different angles: man is like God, God is like man.” Quoted in Bunta, “Yahweh’s Cultic Statue After 597/586 B.C.E,” 234.

76. Bunta, “Yahweh’s Cultic Statue After 597/586 B.C.E,” 241.

77. John Walton discusses the Near Eastern pattern in which the deity comes to reside in the temple on the seventh day. Accordingly, he argues that Genesis 1 understands the cosmos as a temple in which Yahweh takes up his abode on the seventh day, with clear parallels to the liturgical observance of Sabbath. The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2009).

78. Gordon J. Wenham, “Sanctuary Symbolism in the Garden of Eden Story,” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies 9 (1986): 20–22. Cf. J. Blenkinsopp, “The Structure of P,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 38 (1976): 275–92; Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and

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Garden may also be intended as a parallel to the destruction of the first temple.79 Finally, the seven days find direct parallels with the instructions given Moses concerning the tabernacle.80

If Adam is the original high priest, the high priest is also the new Adam, “wearing the garments that Adam lost on leaving Eden, doing what Adam failed to do in the temple-as-restored-Eden.”81 The Holy of Holies was understood as heaven, while the hekal, the great hall of the Temple, was the Garden of Eden, decorated with trees, pomegranates, lilies, and cherubim. Ezekiel even saw the river of life flowing out of the

Temple.82 In terms redolent of the angelic Youth-Messiah (himself the heavenly high priest), the high priest is a two-way mediator. On the one hand he is the embodiment and representative of Israel (themselves the true humanity) before God, wearing the names of the twelve tribes (Ex 28:9-21).83 Ministering in the microcosm of creation, the

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Zion: An Entry Into the Jewish Bible, New Voices in (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), 142–45; Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 78–99; Margaret Barker, “Beyond the Veil of the Temple: The High Priestly Origins of the Apocalypses,” Scottish Journal of Theology 51 (1998): 1–21; Crispin H.T. Fletcher-Louis, All the Glory of Adam: Liturgical Anthropology in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, vol. 42 (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2002), 63–64; Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah: Part 1,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 4, no. 2 (2006): 159; Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Mountain of the Lord,” 149–52. As Bucur observes, the Book of Jubilees explicitly links Eden and the temple: “the Garden of Eden was the holy of holies and the dwelling of the LORD” (Jub. 8:19).

79. Margaret Barker, The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy (London ; New York: T&T Clark, 2003), 132.

80. C. R. Morray-Jones, “The Temple Within: The Embodied Divine Image and Its Worship in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Early Jewish and Christian Sources,” SBL 1998 Seminar Papers (1998): 425.

81. Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus and the High Priest,” paper delivered to the British New Testament Society Conference (2003), 5, Http://www.marquette.edu/maqom/jesus.

82. Barker, The Great High Priest, 47. Cf. Ezek 47:1-12//Rev. 21-22.

83. “He brings humanity and Israel to God. He also brings the cosmos, the

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high priest draws creation together in praise before God. On the other hand, the high priest also represents God to Israel (and the world) since he bears the Name of God on his forehead (Ex 39:30). “He is the embodiment of God’s Glory, wearing ‘the garment(s) of Glory,’84 and in the temple-as-microcosm, the high priest acts as God himself.”85 As the true Adamic image of God, the high priest is also identified with the anthropomorphic Glory of Ezekiel 186 and may have received cultic worship.87 As

———————————— created world, to God since this is represented by his garments in its various parts.” Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus and the High Priest,” 5. “Besides the obvious vegetative language for the high priest’s garments (Exod 28:13-14 (cf. 1 Kgs 7:17, 43); 2833-34) and the homology of textiles and colours between Aaron’s garments and the tabernacle(-as-microcosm) materials, note the way in which the making of the priestly garments in Exodus 39 is structured so as to recall the ten-fold sequence of creative acts of Genesis 1.” Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus and the High Priest,” 5 n18.

84. The second-century BCE Letter of Aristeas describes the high priest in these terms: “He was girded with a girdle of conspicuous beauty, woven in the most beautiful colours. On his breast he wore the oracle of God, as it is called, on which twelve stones, of different kinds, were inset, fastened together with gold, containing the names of the leaders of the tribes, according to their original order, each one flashing forth in an indescribable way its own particular colour. On his head he wore a tiara, as it is called, and upon this in the middle of his forehead an inimitable turban, the royal diadem full of glory with the name of God inscribed in sacred letters on a plate of gold . . . having been judged worthy to wear these emblems in the ministrations. Their appearance created such awe and confusion of mind as to make one feel that one had come into the presence of a man who belonged to a different world.” Letter of Aristeas, 97–99. Cf. Philo, Life of Moses II.114.

85. Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah (1),” 159– 60. Margaret Barker has intriguingly suggested that on Yom Kippur, the high priest acts ritually as Yhwh in offering his own blood for the sins of the people: “the ritual that only the high priest could perform was the LORD giving his own life to cleanse and reconsecrate the temple.” Our Great High Priest: The Church as the New Temple, Fr Alexander Schmemann Memorial Lecture (St Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary, New York, Jan 28th, 2012), 13, Http://www.margaretbarker.com/Papers/OurGreatHighPriest.pdf.

86. “Ben Sira 50.7; 4Q405 23.ii.9 and the mar’eh cohen of the musaph prayer for Yom Kippur all identify the high priest with the anthropomorphic Glory of Ezek. 1.26- 28.” Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah (1),” 159 n14.

87. Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus and the High Priest,” 7. Though, to be clear, he receives this devotion only by virtue of his office and not as an individual outside the bounds of the office.

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Fletcher-Louis notes, the high priesthood was an office both “cosmic and divine,” moving with ease up and down the ladder of being and so encapsulating the “middle space” we are exploring.88

Entering heaven (i.e., the holy of holies) on the Day of Atonement, the high priest appears before the throne of God surrounded by the clouds of incense, there offering sacrifice for the purification of the cosmos and the taming of the waters of chaos

(cf. Dan 7). On returning to “earth,” the high priest is “a plenipotentiary of God’s own power and Glory,” irradiated by the “contagious holiness” of the divine presence.89 At

Sinai, God told Moses that anything consecrated with the sacred anointing oil would be

“supercharged with holiness”90 so that “whatever touches them will become holy” (Ex

30:29). That this is true of the priestly garments is reflected in two passages from Ezekiel

(42:14, 44:19) in which the priests are instructed to leave behind their before rejoining the people.91

On this point, Fletcher-Louis highlights the eighteenth chapter of the Wisdom of

Solomon, which makes the point forcefully by expanding on a story from Numbers 16, suggesting that Aaron deliberately wears his priestly vestments outside the sanctuary in order to deliver the people from a deadly plague by means of his intercession.92 Whereas the original story in Numbers does not address whether Aaron removed his vestments before leaving the sanctuary, Wisdom’s expanded version adds an unmistakable

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88. Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah: Part 2,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 5, no. 1 (2006): 60.

89. Ibid., 58–59.

90. Ibid., 67.

91. Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah (2),” 66. Cf. Lev. 21:10–12.

92. Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah (2),” 67.

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emphasis on Aaron’s high priestly garments: “For on his long robe the whole world was depicted, and the glories of the ancestors were engraved on the four rows of stones, and your majesty [i.e., the divine Name] was on the diadem upon his head. To these the destroyer yielded, these he feared; for merely to test the wrath was enough” (vv. 24-25).

In this way, Aaron “intervened and held back the wrath, and cut off its way to the living”

(v. 23). As this text illustrates, the high priest’s garments, inscribed with the divine Name and bearing the sacred anointing oil, “emanate a cosmic power” capable of overcoming

“the physical presence of disease and death.”93

As one who stands before the divine throne, there to be glorified and transformed by participation in the celestial liturgy, the high priest was closely bound up with a host of traditions that speak of the elevation and transformation of various patriarchal figures—including Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Melchizedek, Jacob and Moses.

Frequently pictured in terms of their (high) priestly function of mediation, these figures appear in visionary literature that variously describes their ascent to the throne of Glory, as well as their subsequent transformation into an angelomorphic likeness of the divine

Image.94 That high priestly themes were integrated so frequently in apocalyptic ascent literature reflects the conception of the high priest as a figure who traverses the middle ground between human and divine, thereby encapsulating a theological anthropology that is both ecstatic and transformational.95

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93. Ibid., 68.

94. Bogdan G. Bucur, “Jewish Apocalypticism,” 471. See also Martha Himmelfarb, “Revelation and Rapture: The Transformation of the Visionary in the Ascent Apocalypses,” in Mysteries and Revelations: Apocalyptic Studies Since the Uppsala Colloquium, ed. John J. Collins and James H. Charlesworth (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), 79–90 and Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses. Wolfson notes the connection between the appearance of the divine body and the spiritualization or angelication of the visionary: “The ultimate secret of the prophetic experience is the imaginative representation of the divine as an anthropos. Only one who transforms the physical body into something spiritual—a process presented in the relevant texts as an angelification of the mystic—is capable of imaging the divine forms

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In some ways, the figure of the heavenly Adam or Anthropos lies at the convergence of shiur koma mysticism and these high priestly themes (i.e., of both ascending and descending trajectories). Briefly, some mystical circles—later regarded by the as heretical—believed that since humanity was not said to be created simply as

“the image” of God but rather “in the image,” there must have been a heavenly prototype, a figure variously identified as the heavenly Anthropos, primordial Adam,

Light-Adam, the Image of God or (as noted above) the kavod.96 This heavenly

Anthropos—thought by some to possess a body of light97 so immense that it filled the

universe98—was “perceived to be the Image of God” which “came into existence on the

first day of creation and acted as a cosmogonic agent.”99 The human Adam was thought

by some to be created after the likeness of the heavenly Anthropos, making Adam a

reflection of the glorious kavod. Accordingly, Adam himself was said to possess cosmic

———————————— in bodily images.” Wolfson, “Mysticism,” 933.

95. See C. R. A. Morray-Jones, “Transformational Mysticism”.

96. C. R. A. Morray-Jones, “Transformational Mysticism,” 18.

97. It was this body (or garment) of light belonging to the Glory (or the “Light- Adam”) that some interpreters believed to be the source of light on the first day of creation in Gen. 1:3 (the celestial bodies being created on the fourth day). Jarl Fossum, “Colossians 1:15–18a in the Light of Jewish Mysticism and Gnosticism,” New Testament Studies 35, no. 183–201 (1989): 186; C. R. A. Morray-Jones, “Transformational Mysticism,” 6.

98. C. R. A. Morray-Jones, “Transformational Mysticism,” 16. Gottstein has argued that this Adamic body is closely related to the concept of image (tselem), with Adam’s luminous form being a pale reflection of the divine radiance. Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” 182. For a view critical of Gottstein, see David H. Aaron, “Shedding Light on God’s Body in Rabbinic Midrashim: Reflections on the Theory of a Luminous Adam,” The Harvard Theological Review 90, no. 3 (July 1997): 299–314.

99. April D. DeConick, “What is Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism?” in Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism, ed. April D. DeConick, Series 11 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 1–26.

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stature and radiance, both of which were diminished as a result of his sin.100 A corollary of this was the widespread conviction that the righteous would recover the glory of

Adam in the world to come, thereby becoming embodiments of the Name of God.101 The cosmic body of this primordial Adam was understood by some teachers as pre- containing all future generations, such that the Adamic body constituted the plan for the future unfolding of human history.102 As we will see in the next section, such notions may have provided a source for the concept of the body of Christ, since Christ is both the Image and the head of the body into which Christians are incorporated at baptism.103

Moreover, as the second Adam, Christ is understood to have recovered Adam’s glory, and his followers, by virtue of their conformation to Christ as Image, come to share in his glory.

2. Jewish Mystical Traditions Concerning Both the Figure of High Priest and the

Extraordinary Character of the Manifold Divine Body Are Reflected in the Christian

Understanding of Christ

In turning to Jesus, I begin with a modest observation, often passed over in more speculative examinations of anthropomorphism, but one that seems foundational to any

Christian consideration of the question. Namely, since the starting point for Christian theology is the Incarnation, cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then to the question,

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100. Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” 179; C. R. A. Morray-Jones, “Transformational Mysticism,” 17. While the full splendor of the image was lost, the physical body itself is thought to remain a dim reflection of the body of light, and so to be capable of being spoken of as “image” (tselem).

101. Fossum, “Glory,” 352; C. R. A. Morray-Jones, “Transformational Mysticism,” 17. Morray-Jones notes that this teaching is widely documented in Apocalyptic, early Christian literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as other rabbinic sources. He goes on to note that “Deuteronomy Rabbah 11:3 states that the glory taken from Adam was restored to Moses at Sinai.” Ibid., 18.

102. Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” 192.

103. Ibid., 193.

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Does God have a body? the answer must be an emphatic yes. This is precisely the meaning of the doctrine of the Incarnation, namely, that the range of predicates belonging both to the human and the divine “apply to the same person referred to by the subject term ‘Jesus.’”104 God has a body, because in Jesus, God “takes unto Himself a body, and that of no different sort from ours.”105

In John 1:51, Jesus applies the image of Jacob’s ladder to himself, telling his disciples, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” Christians find in Jesus the

“coincidence of opposites,” the place of encounter par excellence between the human and divine and of their perichoretic union-in-distinction. For Christians, then, Jesus is the point of convergence and culmination for many of the traditions we have been considering. In this section, I examine the appropriation of two traditions in more detail:

(1) the portrayal of Jesus as high priest in Mark and Hebrews and (2) the influence of the shiur koma traditions in Ephesians. That Christians appropriated these traditions underscores the inadequacy of treating the picture of the divine body either as literal description or dispensable metaphor. In particular, Christian talk about Christ’s manifold risen body is neither literal—offering a description, available to neutral

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104. McCabe, God Matters, 47. Cf. Cyril of Alexandria: “In Christ, being the only- begotten Son became a property of his humanity, because of this humanity’s union with the Word . . . , and conversely, being the firstborn of many brothers (cf. Rom 8:29) became a property of the Word, because of the Word’s union with the flesh.” PG 75, 1229B. Quoted in Schönborn, God’s Human Face, 86. As John Behr observes, Athanasius puts great emphasis on the solidarity of Christ with human beings: “by sharing a body with us, he enables those who share in his body to partake also of his life and resurrection.” The Nicene Faith, I: 197. At the same time, Behr explains how, for Athanasius, the Word’s becoming-human is simultaneously the transformation of the flesh: “There is no time, as it were, when he is merely like us: when he comes in the body he does not equalize himself to it, but, rather, in taking a body, he transforms all that belongs to human nature.” Ibid., p. 225.

105. Athanasius, “On the Incarnation” §8.2. The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, St. Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. Archibald T. Robertson, Series 1 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997).

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observation, of physical objects or states of affairs—nor metaphorical, offering an ultimately dispensable linguistic ornament. These traditions thus enliven our reading of

Scripture while preparing the ground for a non-dual, non-representational hermeneutic relevant to certain kinds of scriptural language (e.g., anthropomorphism).

2.1. Transformational-Mystical Anthropology Illuminates the New Testament Portrait of Jesus as a High Priestly Messiah

Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis has argued compellingly for construing Jesus’ own understanding of his identity as that of Israel’s true, eschatological high priest. He concludes that Jesus thought of himself as a high priestly messiah—that is, as a king who was also a priest—in the model of the high priestly Son of Man in Daniel 7.106 In

Fletcher-Louis’s view this picture of a figure moving up and down the ladder of being accords well with the Gospels’ portrait of “a character who spans the ontological hierarchy of human, angelic and divine identities.”107 This was a category available to first-century Jews, and if Fletcher-Louis is right in thinking that Jesus understood himself in these terms, then the origin for many elements of a genuinely high

Christology can be traced to Jesus himself. Moreover, as Fletcher-Louis demonstrates, his thesis sheds light on Jesus’ claims to represent God, and to mediate forgiveness, while also proving impressive in its ability to make sense of passages that have stymied earlier interpreters.108

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106. “His coming to God with the clouds evokes the Day of Atonement when the high priest enters God’s presence surrounded by clouds of incense.” Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah (2),” 58. Fletcher-Louis adds that in “Rev. 1.13-16 John sees Jesus as Son of Man (in the image of the Ancient of Days), dressed with the distinctive foot-length robe and golden girdle that the high priest wears on the Day of Atonement (cf. Lev. 16.4; Josephus, Ant. 3.153-55, 159).” Ibid., 59.

107. Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah (2),” 60.

108. Ibid., 72. cf. Exod 28.36-38, Lev 10.17, 2 Enoch 64.5.

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This high priestly interpretation of Jesus also helps explain the importance of

Psalm 110, since the “Melchizedekian priest-king” provides the type of a royal messiah, one with the added weight of antiquity.109 At his trial, Jesus effectively links the priest- king of Psalm 110 with the Son of Man of Daniel 7:13 (Mark 14:62). The high priestly background also illuminates the Jerusalem leaders’ opposition to Jesus. Since the high priest represented God, Jesus’ claim to be the eschatological high priest constituted, in the eyes of the Sanhedrin, “a blasphemous (and seditious) challenge to the current,

‘God-ordained’ high priest—Caiaphas.”110 Jesus’ provocative statements about the temple can also be understood in light of his claim to be the high priestly messiah. In

Mark 2:23-28, Jesus’ defense of his disciples’ eating grain on the Sabbath turns on his claiming to be both priest (able to remove the bread of the Presence) and king (like

David). His disciples, like the priests in the transcendent space-time of the temple, are exempt from the Sabbath work restriction because Jesus, as the true priest-king, is present with them, and wherever he is, there is the temple.111

Fletcher-Louis offers an extended reading of Mark 1:14–6:13, considered as a

kind of programmatic literary unit for the synoptic profile of Jesus. He notes that three

of the healing stories in this section are noteworthy because they “correspond in content

and order to conditions of impurity which Num 5.1–4 says require removal from the

Israelite camp”112—“everyone who is leprous, or has a discharge, and everyone who is

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109. See also Barker, Our Great High Priest.

110. Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah (2),” 59.

111. “Holiness of place is dependent on the sanctifying presence of holy humanity, perfectly embodied in the (high) priesthood. If Jesus is the true eschatological high priest, then it stands to reason that wherever he may be there rests the sacred space of the true temple.” Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah (2),” 76.

112. Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah (2),” 64.

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unclean through contact with a corpse.” In quick succession, Jesus cleanses a leper (Mk

1:40–45), heals a woman suffering from hemorrhages (Mk 5:25–34), and raises Jairus’ daughter from the dead (5:35–43), and in each case, Mark emphasizes that Jesus “goes out of his way to touch the sufferer.”113 Given the threat of impurity, the point of this unit seems to be to emphasize that Jesus possesses the contagious holiness of the high priesthood discussed above.114 “The way Jesus heals means that, instead of the contagion of

impurity flowing from impure to pure, it flows from pure to impure.”115 Unlike the high priest,

however, Jesus’ contagious holiness derives not from his office, but is rather “a

manifestation of his person.”116

Finally, Fletcher-Louis discusses the Markan notion that, in Jesus, “the kingdom

of God has come near” (Mk 1:15). In light of the high priestly reading, this likely

indicates that “the reality of God’s presence that has hitherto been present primarily in

the temple and its priesthood is now available not (just) in Jerusalem but also in the

towns and villages of Galilee.”117 There is no longer a need to travel to Jerusalem to

encounter the kingdom because “its reality (forgiveness of sins, the temple’s experience

of Sabbath rest and contagious healing holiness) [is] coming to them.”118

Fletcher-Louis demonstrates the presence of priestly traditions in the Synoptics,

but the Melchizedekean priesthood is also central to the book of Hebrews. David

Moffitt’s work on Hebrews highlights the connections between the book’s high priestly

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113. Ibid., 65.

114. See page 320.

115. Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah (2),” 65. Emphasis in original.

116. Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah (2),” 69.

117. Ibid., 78.

118. Ibid.

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Christology and the traditions of mystical ascent and transformation examined above.

According to Moffitt, Jesus’ resurrection is foundational to the logic of Hebrews, uniting its two Christological foci—namely, “the elevation of Jesus above the angels to the divine throne in heaven and the high priestly service he renders there in God’s presence.” 119 On

Moffitt’s reading, Jesus’ humanity is key to his ability to enter the οι’κουµ'ενη (oikoumene¯), understood simultaneously as the heavenly temple, the renewed creation, and the full and complete inheritance of the land promised by God to Abraham: “the promise God made to Abraham regarding the land is taken ultimately to be a promise to inherit the world as it will be in the coming age—incorruptible, pure, and consisting of the entire created realm.”120 Jesus, the α’ρχηγο'ς (arche¯gos, “leader,” “pioneer,” Heb 12:2), has crossed over into the land of inheritance. Accordingly, his “ascension into heaven and his assumption of the heavenly throne can therefore be identified with the entry of the

representative of God’s people into the eternal promised land.”121 According to Moffitt,

Jesus’ entry into the renewed creation assumes his possession of a human body, which

means that, somewhat counterintuitively, for the author of Hebrews it is Jesus’ human

body that explains his elevation above the angels as well as his exaltation to the divine

throne.122 The fallen human body, however, is not fit for the eschatological dwelling in

the presence of God. It must be glorified, transformed, and on this point, Moffitt

identifies several echoes of Jewish mystical ascent literature—especially concerning

Moses and Enoch—which highlight the need for such transformation before one can

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119. David M. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Supplements to Novum Testamentum, vol. 141 (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2011), 213.

120. Ibid., 117.

121. Ibid., 142.

122. Ibid.

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withstand the divine presence. On Moffitt’s reading, then, it is Jesus’ resurrection that marks his entry into the kind of indestructible life (and glorified human body) that is “fit to enter heaven and dwell in God’s presence.”123 Crowned by God with glory and honor,

Jesus became “the first human being to regain all the glory that Adam lost.”124

Turning to the second Christological focus that Moffitt identifies, the quality of

Jesus’ everlasting, resurrected life also qualifies him for the heavenly high priesthood.

This is possible because there is another priesthood besides the Aaronic, “one whose

legitimacy depends not on genealogy, but on the power of indestructible life.”125 Having

undergone, on the cross, the suffering prerequisite to perfection, Jesus is now qualified

by that everlasting life (entered into at the resurrection) to become the everlasting high

priest.126 As the one, true high priest in the heavenly priesthood of Melchizedek,127 Jesus

presents not his sacrificial death but his own indestructible human life. Moffitt contends

that, in Leviticus, the offering of blood concerns the presentation not of death, but of life to God. Accordingly, having suffered, Jesus’ resurrection and ascension enable him to

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123. Ibid., 146.

124. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection, 142. On the sense of Christ’s resurrection as his entering into “glory” and its relation to Adam typology, see also Bogdan Bucur, “Blinded by Invisible Light”.

125. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection, 148. The author of Hebrews “argues in 7:16 that, like Melchizedek, this other priest belongs to this priesthood by virtue of the fact that he possesses the power of an indestructible life (κατα` δυ'ναµιν ζωη^ς α’καταλυ'του). Over against the qualification of tribal genealogy prescribed by the , Jesus and Melchizedek are qualified for their priestly offices because they possess the kind of life that remains forever.” Ibid., 203.

126. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection, 195. Cf. “Specifically, the writer’s comment that Jesus arose in the likeness of Melchizedek serves logically as the middle term he relies on to justify his christological claim that just as God called the α»νθρωπος Jesus to be the exalted royal Son (Ps 2:7; Heb 5:5), God also called him to be priest forever (Ps 110:4; Heb 5:6; cf. 5:1).” Ibid., 200.

127. Moffitt argues that Melchizedek was understood as a ministering spirit, which indicated that his was a heavenly priesthood. Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection, 204.

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present his own resurrected life before God, an act that constitutes his high-priestly service in heaven (which Hebrews sets in parallel with the Day of Atonement).128

Moffitt’s research makes explicit the connections between the high priestly traditions examined by Fletcher-Louis and the Jewish ascent traditions involving both elevated (priestly) patriarchs and heavenly figures of mediation such as the Glory. As noted above, these traditions frequently converge in texts that examine the figure of

Adam, who was at times identified both as high priest and as the heavenly Anthropos, the Glory, and the Image. These Adamic themes also inflect the New Testament portrayal of Jesus as the new Adam.129 It is possible to see multiple resonances here between Adam, identified as high priest, and the similarly identified Son of Man.

Connecting the third leg of the triangle (the first two being Adam as high priest and the

Son of Man as high priest), Joel Marcus has argued that the arthrous phrase “Son of

Man” (‘ο υι‘`ος του^ α’νθρω'που, lit. “the son of the man”) should be understood as “Son of

Adam.”130 Marcus notes that at his baptism Jesus is “exalted by God to a divine status, as

Adam was at his creation.”131 Perhaps drawing on traditions regarding ’s jealousy

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128. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection, 218f.

129. Cf. 1 Cor 15, Rom 5, Rom 1:18-25; 3:23; 7:7-11; 8:19-22. Cf. James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry Into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980), 98–128.

130. See Joel Marcus, “Son of Man as Son of Adam,” Revue Biblique 110, no. 1 (January 2003): 38–61 and Joel Marcus, “Son of Man as Son of Adam. Part II: Exegesis,” Revue Biblique 110, no. 3 (July 2003): 370–86. Marcus argues that the Adamic tradition best fits all three categories of the “Son of Man” sayings articulated by Bultmann: “The ‘exalted Son of Man’ sayings correspond to traditions about Adam’s pre-lapsarian glory and authority, which he will recover at the eschaton. The ‘present authority’ sayings reflect the same traditions, but understood from the vantage point of realized eschatology: Jesus is already exercising the dominion over the world that Adam once had. And the ‘suffering’ sayings reflect Jesus’ participation in the other side of Adamic existence, the suffering and death that Father Adam brought on all humanity through the enmity of the and his own sin.” Ibid., 60.

131. Marcus, “Son of Man as Son of Adam,” 55.

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of Adam (cf. The Life of Adam and Eve), Satan apparently retaliates to this exaltation by testing Jesus, who, unlike Adam, “successfully resists this Satanic onslaught, thus restoring the earthly dominion that God had granted to Adam as His vice-regent on earth. Jesus can therefore begin his public ministry with the triumphal proclamation of the advent of the βασιλει'α του^ θεου^” (basileia tou theou, “kingdom of God”).132

In light of what we have seen, Adamic traditions resonate with and inform passages that speak of Christ as the Glory (Eph 1:17, Tit 2:13, Jas 2:1, 1 Pet 4:14133), the

Image (Col 1:15–20), and the Name (Mt 28, Eph 1:21, Phil 2:9, Rev 19:12–13),134 and

may also have provided a source for the concept of the body of Christ (the next section

addresses the relation of these themes to the shiur koma).135 Some scholars have argued

that the implication of God’s form (morphe¯) in Philippians 2 is that of a divine body,

identical with the Glory and equivalent with the Image.136 These traditions may also be

reflected in passages like Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15, which picture the

conformation of Christians to the image of the Son or “heavenly man” (1 Cor 15:49).137

Similarly, 2 Corinthians 3:18 draws on mystical terminology in picturing the reading of

Scripture as a seeing of the Glory of God, a mystical vision through which believers “are

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132. Ibid.

133. Fossum, “Glory,” 351.

134. Charles A. Gieschen, “The Divine Name in Ante-Nicene Christology,” Vigiliae Christianae 57, no. 2 (2003): 115–58.

135. Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” 193.

136. Gilles Quispel, “Ezekiel 1:26 in Jewish Mysticism and Gnosis,” Vigiliae Christianae 34, no. 1 (March 1980): 9. Cf. TDNT: “The µορφη` θεου^ in which the pre- existent Christ was is simply the divine δο'ξα; Paul’s ’εν µορφη,^ θεου^ corresponds exactly to Jn. 17:5: τη,^ δο'ξη, ,“η ει”χον προ` του^ το`ν κο'σµον ει”ναι παρα` σοι'.” Johannes Behm, “µορφη', µορφο'ω, µ'ορφωσις, µεταµορφο'ω,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, trans and ed Geoffrey W. Bromiley, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964), 751.

137. Fossum, “Glory,” 352.

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being transformed into the same image (eiko¯n) from one degree of glory to another.”

And a few verses later (4:4), this image is explicitly identified as Christ.138 Paul presumably has such conformation to the Image-Glory in mind when he speaks of the

“glorification” that awaits believers (Rom 8:17, 30).139 In light of such conformation Paul is able to call the individual Christian the “image (eiko¯n) and glory (doxa) of God” (1 Cor

11:7). Moreover, in Colossians 1:15-20, Christ is identified as the cosmogonic Image, as well as the Head of the Body in whom the fullness (ple¯ro¯ma) of God dwelt, imagery that can be seen as suggesting “the macrocosmic conception of Christ.”140 We thus find

Christians applying the extraordinary traditions concerning the manifold divine body to their understanding of Christ.

2.2. Shiur Koma Mysticism Informs the Conception of Christ’s Body in Ephesians

The macrocosmic character of Christ’s depiction returns us to the shiur koma, and more specifically to the book of Ephesians, the language and imagery of which have been deeply shaped by shiur koma mysticism. Morray-Jones avers that Ephesians can be read as “an extended meditation on the doctrine of the Beloved Youth-messiah whose

‘ascended’ and ‘glorified’ Body is the New Creation. The ‘members’ of that body, the

Community of the ‘holy ones,’ are participants in the ‘praise of the Glory,’ into Whom they are incorporated, and into the likeness of Whom they are mystically transformed.”141 We noted that the earliest shiur koma speculation concerned two heavenly figures, the Glory or Logos-Angel and the Beloved Youth or Servant-Messiah.

Morray-Jones suggests that the two traditions may be in the process of fusion in

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138. Ibid., 351–52.

139. C. R. A. Morray-Jones, “Transformational Mysticism,” 18.

140. Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, “Form(s) of God: Some Notes on Metatron and Christ,” Harvard Theological Review 76, no. 3 (1983): 284.

141. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 609.

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Ephesians since it seems to contain elements drawn from both traditions while not completely reconciling them.142 Thus, Jesus and the Glory stand in parallel in Ephesians

1:17 (“I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of the Glory”), which suggests an identification of Christ as the Glory according to the Logos-Angel model.

However, in Ephesians 1:20 (God “seated him at his right hand”), “Christ is enthroned alongside the Father, like the messianic Youth in the early shiur koma and in accordance with the ‘two thrones’ model of Daniel 7.”143

Morray-Jones suggests that the book of Ephesians may have originated as a sermon for the festival of Shavuot (i.e., the commemoration of Moses’ return with the firstfruits of the Torah), the liturgical traditions of which can be discerned in the letter’s language and imagery. These Shavuot traditions connected material concerning Ezekiel

1, Moses and the Song of Songs (thought by some rabbis to have been received at Sinai and closely associated with the development of shiur koma speculation).144 Since Ezekiel

1 was the prophetic reading for the feast of Shavuot,145 Ephesians may be “a Christian parallel to the Shavuot sermons about the ascent of Moses from Sinai to the heavenly throne.”146 We have already noted the existence of traditions in which Moses was said to have been glorified, enthroned, given the divine Name, and identified with the Glory.147

It appears that Ephesians effectively transfers the role of Moses in this tradition to

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142. Ibid., 593.

143. Ibid., 592–93.

144. Ibid., 595.

145. Elior, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism, 154.

146. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 586.

147. C. R. A. Morray-Jones, “Transformational Mysticism,” 13–18. With regard to the presence of such traditions in Hebrews, see Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection, 153ff.

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Christ.148 Ephesians also seems to be aware of a tradition, preserved in the Targum to

Psalm 68, in which Moses is said to have “led captivity captive” and to have “learned the words of Torah,” which he gave as gifts to the people.149 The author of Ephesians appears to have appropriated this reading, substituting Christ for Moses and the gifts of the Spirit for the words of Torah (Eph 4:11-12).150

In addition to these connections with Shavuot, scholars have discerned other resonances between Ephesians and the shiur koma. Foremost among these connections is Ephesians 4:13, the language of which (ει’ς µ'ετρον ‘ηλικι'ας του^ πληρω'µατος του^ Χριστου^

“to the measure of the full stature of Christ”) matches exactly that of the shiur koma.

Moreover, Gottstein suggests that “the breadth and length and height and depth” of

3:18 should be understood as the cosmic dimensions of the body of Christ, identified with the enthroned Glory.151 The next verse expresses the desire for the believer to attain to the knowledge of “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness (ple¯ro¯ma) of God” (3:19). Combining the previous verse with this allusion to texts like Isaiah 6:3 (“the whole earth is full of his glory”), the “fullness”

(ple¯ro¯ma) of God may be a direct reference to the body of Glory.152 On this reading, the believers’ “filling” would correspond to the glorification produced by their vision of the enthroned Christ.153 Ephesians 1:22 (“he has put all things under his feet”) appears to

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148. Morray-Jones observes that this picture is “consistent with the tradition of Moses’ heavenly enthronement, which the rabbinic writers were at pains to suppress, but which is preserved in the Exagoge of Ezekiel the Tragedian, where Moses is installed upon ‘a throne so great in size it touched the clouds of heaven,’ in the works of Philo, and also in the Samaritan literature.” “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 606.

149. This reflects a change from the MT in which Psalm 68 mentions not the giving of gifts to people, but the reception of gifts from people.

150. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 606.

151. Ibid., 589.

152. Ibid.

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echo two key shiur koma texts.154 The next verse (Eph 1:23) once more echoes shiur koma by juxtaposing Christ’s body and the term fullness (ple¯ro¯ma). Echoes of shiur koma can also be heard in the expressions “in measure” [’εν µ'ετρω,, en metro¯] (Eph 4:16)155

and “the immeasurable greatness [µ'εγεθος, megethos] of His Power” (Eph 1:19)156 since

“greatness,” as noted above, often referred simultaneously to cosmic size, power, and

praise (or “magnification”).157

Ephesians also portrays Christ in ways reminiscent of the Beloved Youth. The

Youth was often identified with the Beloved of the Song of Songs, and this allegorical

tradition informs the discussion in Ephesians 5:21–33 of Christ’s relation to the Church

as both his “body” and “bride.”158 Akiva maintained that the Song of Songs was

first revealed at Sinai, further encouraging the connection with Shavuot, “which is

described in rabbinic sources as the celebration of Israel’s wedding day.”159 Like the

Youth-Metatron, Christ is pictured as the agent of God’s creation (2:10), who has

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153. Ibid., 590.

154. Psalm 110:1 (“The LORD says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool’”) and Isaiah 66:1 (“Thus says the LORD: ‘Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool’”). Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 594.

155. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 597. “Measure” (metron) was a technical term in the shiur koma, one echoed also in early Christian writers, including Irenaeus. “Elsewhere in his magnum opus, Irenaeus insists that since God is ‘of infinite greatness,’ he cannot be measured, and remains unknown with respect to this greatness. It is only through Christ, that is, through his love, that God can be known. . . . Only his Hypostasis, his Son, can be measured. The Son is, therefore, the µ'ετρον of the Father.” Stroumsa, “Form(s) of God,” 286.

156. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 593.

157. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 517.

158. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 598.

159. Ibid.

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received the divine Name (1:21).160 As the Head of the Body, he is “the heavenly representative of the holy community, whose members are ‘incorporated’ ‘in’ him, so that the blessing received from the Father is mediated to them ‘through’ him. His role is thus precisely that of the Beloved Youth in the shiur koma.”161 Moreover, Christ, like the

Youth, is presented as the heavenly high priest, presenting the of the people and

mediating the divine Glory to them.162

We saw above that the idea “that Israel’s worship manifests the Body of the

Glory” was central to shiur koma mysticism, and this notion is also present, mutatis mutandis, in Ephesians, most notably in the repetition of the phrase, “the praise of his glory” (1:12, 14).163 Such praise is the “medium” by which the community is “gathered up” into Christ (1:10) and brought into communion with God.164 The community exists for the “praise of his glory,” and through such worship they come to share in the Son’s relation to the Father, participating in his Glory.165 There are two aspects to the

“fullness” or “glory” of which Ephesians speaks. First, there is the divine quality embodied in Christ. Second, this divine Glory which fills Christ is then mediated by him to the community which becomes, by virtue of its incorporation into Christ, the body of his Glory.166 As both new creation and resurrected body, the church through its worship

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160. Morray-Jones suggests that the Youth-Metatron tradition—in which the Youth is the second I AM in the name revealed to Moses—helps illuminate a passage like John 17:20-26 (“As you, Father, are in me and I am in you . . . The glory that you have given me I have given them . . . I made your name known to them”). “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 599 n98.

161. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 591.

162. Ibid., 607.

163. Ibid., 609.

164. Ibid., 591–92.

165. Ibid., 591.

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shares on the one hand in the world’s transformation and on the other hand it

“participates in [Jesus’] heavenly exaltation and enthronement.”167 Adam’s lost stature and glory, first recovered by Christ, are now extended via participation to his followers, who “build[] up the body of Christ,” seeking to attain “to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (4:12-13). In this way, the knowledge “to which the Christian initiate aspires is, or includes, the shiur koma of Christ’s ‘fullness.’”168

That the Christian seeks a vision of the enthroned Christ-Glory, whose body is manifested in the community’s praise, highlights the overlapping motifs of body, temple, cosmos and holy community, all of which are “complementary expressions of the same paradoxical reality.”169 That is, “the Glory of the LORD, the Divine Image, is enthroned at the innermost centre, in the Holy of Holies of the body/temple/universe, but at the same time comprehends all things within Himself (Eph 2:21–22).”170 This juxtaposition of New Testament motifs constitutes the source of the “three-church” model, according to which Christ’s body is simultaneously present on the altars of three “churches”: the visible church, the church above (in heaven) and the church of the believer’s heart.

Rather than dividing or multiplying Christ’s body, these churches and their altars are understood to coincide, compenetrating one another. In fact, mystically, they are all one

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166. Ibid., 596.

167. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 603. Cf. Eph 2:6: [God] raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

168. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 608. As Michael Fishbane remarks, “On this view, Eph 4:7–16 presents Christ as the supernal Anthropos in the image of the invisible God, so that perfected faith in and knowledge of this heavenly figure lead to some sort of mystical relationship to the divine figure on high.” Quoted in Ibid.

169. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Epistle to the Ephesians,” 602.

170. Ibid.

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temple, “because they both at once reflect and manifest the one true temple and priest,

Jesus Christ.”171 In other words, Christ’s resurrected body is enthroned in the heavenly temple (cf. the discussion of Hebrews above), on the Eucharistic altar of the church, and in the “little church” of the heart.172 (To this we might add his enthronement in the

praise of the righteous community, which manifests the body of his Glory [cf. Psa 22:3].)

As we saw with the divine body motif in the Hebrew Bible, the conception of the (risen)

body of Christ emerging from the New Testament is both extraordinary and manifold.173

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171. Alexander Golitzin, “Liturgy and Mysticism: The Experience of God in Eastern Orthodox Christianity,” Talk given at Brown University, November 1993. Composed in its present form in December 1994, partially published in English in Pro Ecclesia 8.1. (1994), 11, Www.marquette.edu/maqom/Liturgy.pdf.

172. This “three-church” model was developed in later centuries, especially in the Syrian context by Ephrem, the Syriac Book of Steps [Liber Graduum] and the Macarian homilies. See Bogdan G. Bucur, “Jewish Apocalypticism,” 473; Alexander Golitzin, “The Image and Glory of God in Jacob of Serug’s Homily, ‘On That Chariot That Ezekiel the Prophet Saw’,” in The Theophaneia School: Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, vol. 3, ed. Basil Lourié and Andrei Orlov, Scrinium: Revue de Patrologie, d’Hagiographie, Critique et d’Histoire Eccléliastique (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007), 180–212. According to the Book of Steps, the visible church is the mediating term between the church of the heart and the heavenly church. “It is through these visible things, however, that we shall be in these heavenly things, which are invisible to eyes of flesh, our bodies becoming temples and our hearts altars.” Robert A. Kitchen and Martien F. G. Parmentier, translated, with an introduction and notes by, The Book of Steps: The Syriac Liber Graduum, with an introduction and notes by Robert A. Kitchen and Maartien F.G. Parmentier (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications; Edinburgh: Alban Books, 2004), 12.2. Pseudo-Macarius says that “the word ‘church’ is said of many individuals as well as of one soul. For the soul brings together all the thoughts and is thus a church to God” (12.15). On the notion of the soul as the throne of God, see 1.2, 1.12, 6.5, 33.2, and 47.14.

173. I should briefly note that, in the wake of and Nicaea, the straightforward identification of the Son as the Glory on the throne came to be seen as problematic, since the related traditions could be taken to imply Christ’s subordination to the Father. In particular, the language of the heavenly court in which the Son and Spirit appear as paradigm or lead worshippers may have been one element of liturgical practice which Arius pressed to unwelcome conclusions. Cf. Rowan Williams, “Angels Unawares: Heavenly Liturgy and Earthly Theology in Alexandria,” in Studia Patristica, vol. 30, Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Louvain: Peeters, 1997), 350–63. According to the subordinationist reading advanced by the Homoians, invisibility is identified with divinity. The Son’s visibility marks him as a lesser manifestation of God, the firstborn of creation whose dignity qualifies him to serve as a mediating agent. The theophanic tradition we have observed in the Old Testament was regarded as proof that the Son is

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3. Conclusion

The cumulative weight of this chapter’s résumé of historical scholarship commends the importance of a complex of mystical-apocalyptic traditions for interpreting a great deal of biblical imagery, particularly anthropomorphic language. In certain cases, such anthropomorphic depictions of God were indispensable to the interpretive community’s mystagogical practice, and so were understood neither as literal descriptions nor as metaphorical ornaments. The Christian appropriation of these traditions with respect to Christ suggests the need for a related refusal of (simply) literal and metaphorical readings of the risen body of Christ. The complex picture of the divine body—including Jesus’ resurrected body, his Eucharistic presence, and his relationship to the community’s praise, inter alia—decidedly functions neither as a flat, literal description nor as a “dispensable discursive ornament.”174 To call such a picture

“mythological,” then, is—on the common understanding of the term—to misunderstand

both its nature and function. In short, the commonsense framing of the problem as

between literal and metaphorical is a false choice.

Recalling the discussion from last chapter, I suspect that some of the difficulty

presented by this interpretive dilemma (i.e., literal versus metaphorical) is generated by

the predominance of the designative model of language, according to which

representation is foundational to the work of language. One common version of this view

holds that the literal serves to designate, offering a verbal mapping of our environment.

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not truly God, isnce the Son proved visible in a way the Father is not. On this polemic context, see Basil Studer, Zur Theophanie-Exegese Augustins. Untersuchung zu einem Ambrosius-Zitat in der Schrift De Videndo Deo (Ep. 147) von Basil Studer, Studia Anselmiana Philosophica Theologica, (Roma: I.B.C. Liberia Herder, 1971) and Barnes, “The Visible Christ”. To avoid the implication that the Son is less than the Father, or merely the visible “part” of the Godhead, the pro-Nicene theology stressed the invisibility of the Son alongside the Father.

174. Stephen Mulhall, “Wittgenstein on Faith, Rationality and the Passions,” Modern Theology 27, no. 2 (April 2011): 319.

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The metaphorical, then, encompasses all other language that abandons this representational function, thereby seeming to eschew altogether its connection with

“reality.” The metaphorical on this view appears wholly untethered to the objective world; it retreats into the unconditioned private realm of the detached ego. On this model, then, the only paradigm according to which language can be seen as “objective” is as a description seeking correspondence to independent “reality.” To refuse the designative function is necessarily to consign one’s language to the private realm of personal taste and preference.

It is evident that neither of these alternatives is adequate to the accounts of mystical vision and transformation we have surveyed, which are neither straightforwardly descriptive nor dispensably metaphorical. The problem, we might say, is that the literal claims too much, while the metaphorical claims too little. As we saw in the last chapter, Charles Taylor’s response to this dilemma is to expand our appreciation for language’s various non-representational functions. In the next chapter, I adopt a similar strategy by pursuing a third exegetical option, informed by Wittgensteinian philosophy of language, while yet seeking to remain recognizably faithful to the mystical and mystagogical uses of anthropomorphic language in ancient Jewish and Christian communities. Seen in the light of the traditions surveyed here, this third exegetical approach appears as neither an anachronistic retrojection nor a revisionist attempt to vindicate our naïve spiritual ancestors.

The present chapter, then, in specifying some of the textures of the non-dual

“theophanic” tradition under consideration—has sought to prepare the ground for a non-representational, non-dual hermeneutic appropriate to certain kinds of scriptural language (e.g., anthropomorphism). It has also helped illuminate specific debates concerning the interpretation of scriptural theophanies and its proposed

“demythologization,” while challenging the widespread equation between vision and objectification which we identified in chapter three. As this chapter has underscored, the

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presence of the risen Christ does not deliver him up for possession; neither does the vision of Christ in Glory entail his objectification.

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CHAPTER VII

NEITHER LITERAL NOR METAPHORICAL:

ANTHROPOMORPHISM, INDISPENSABLE PICTURES AND “SECONDARY SENSE”

Chapter six demonstrated that, with respect to scriptural anthropomorphism, the conventional choice between literal-descriptive and the metaphorical-ornamental readings is inadequate to the complexity of ancient Jewish and Christian traditions concerning the manifestation of the divine body. Taking the failure of this literal- metaphorical binary as its impetus, the present chapter quarries the work of the “new

Wittgenstein” school in order to advance a third exegetical option that seeks to be attentive to and reflective of the mystical and mystagogical uses of anthropomorphic language in particular Jewish and Christian communities. On this third view, anthropomorphic language, as with certain forms of poetry, offers an indispensable and non-literal picture. By articulating this alternative reading, the present chapter attends to aspects of convergence between early Jewish and Christian mystical language and linguistic possibilities highlighted by Wittgenstein and his philosophical interpreters. I suggest that such philosophical reflection helpfully illuminates, by way of mundane analogue, some of what sets mystical language apart from both the literal and the metaphorical. The result, I hope, is a theological account that both highlights neglected mystical traditions and redresses a prevailing inattention to the diversity of our life with language.

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“All our talk is anthropomorphic, if this word is to be taken to mean that all language is derived from the things in which man has part.”1 In other words, if by

“mythological” we mean the application—albeit analogically—to God of language drawn from the spatio-temporal world, then the choice is not between mythological and non- mythological speech (at least in this sense). The question is rather which “mythology” we will employ—that is, which discourse, which set of images and inflections, is more adequate to the biblical revelation and the Church’s experience of the risen Lord? To the suggestion that philosophy promised the “demythologization” of theology, Emil

Brunner remarked that the substitution of abstract, Greek philosophical concepts for those of the Bible

is not, as was intended, unsymbolical and adequate, . . . all that has happened is

the replacement of the symbolism of time and personality by the symbolism of

space and of things. There is no philosophy, however abstract, which can evade

the necessity of speaking of ultimates symbolically even if the abstractions of

impersonal being and timelessness are used as such symbols.2

Conceiving the matter in this fashion opens the way to advancing a positive case in favor of anthropomorphic language (understood properly), especially when that usage foregrounds an awareness of its own limits. First, as Brunner suggests, such language better reflects the personal nature of the God of the Bible. To speak of this God—who

hears and cares for his people, and who acts in history for their deliverance—is to speak

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1. Helmut Gollwitzer, The Existence of God as Confessed by Faith, trans. James W. Leitch (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), 149.

2. , Dogmatics. Vol. III. The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith and the Consummation. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), 404-406. Quoted in Dumitru Stăniloae, “Revelation Through Acts, Words and Images,” in Theology and the Church, trans. Robert Barringer, foreword by John Meyendorff (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 152.

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“anthropomorphically,” a point that applies to claims about divine speech and action just as surely as to those about divine emotion and corporeality. Benno Jacob, commenting on the Hebrew Bible, formulates the issue succinctly: ‘“God spoke” is no less an anthropomorphism than “God’s hand.”’3

Several authors emphasize this contrast between the personal God of the Bible and impersonal notions of divinity variously reflected in certain streams of philosophy or mysticism.4 Karel van der Toorn describes the “ever widening gap between the image of the biblical God, who sympathizes with his children and experiences a wide range of emotions, on the one hand, and the increasingly dispassionate Greek conception of God on the other.”5 More pointedly, Jacob Neusner remarks that “No one prays to the

Unmoved Mover, and no one loves and worships the God lacking all positive attributes with whom philosophy makes its peace.”6 Such stark either-or framings of the question

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3. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 16.

4. E. LaB. Cherbonnier developed this observation at length in two articles, though by way of a somewhat misleading and overdrawn contrast between “mysticism”— understood in a purely negative sense—and a static and defiantly ontotheological conception of biblical anthropomorphism. Cherbonnier’s false choice, which occludes the reality of a Christian mysticism that makes non-literal use of such anthropomorphic language, relies on a reification of the earliest biblical notion of God. Cf. “The Logic of Biblical Anthropomorphism,” Harvard Theological Review 54, no. 3 (1962): 187–206 and “In Defense of Anthropomorphism,” in Reflections on Mormonism: Judaeo-Christian Parallels, ed. Truman G. Madsen, The Religious Studies Monograph Series, vol. 4 (Provo, Utah: The Center ; Salt Lake City: produced and distributed by Bookcraft, 1978), 155–73. Thus, R. J. Z. Werblowsky notes that “[t]he ultimate residual anthropomorphism . . . is the theistic notion of God as personal, in contrast to an impersonal conception of the divine. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, “Anthropomorphism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd, ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: MacMillan Reference, 2005), 389.

Van der Toorn goes on to note that Philo’s .367 ”,אלהים (Toorn, “God (I .5 creative synthesis of biblical and Greek enabled the “spiritualizing” influence of Plato to exert a lasting influence on Christianity as well as Judaism.

6. Neusner, “Conversation in Nauvoo About the Corporeality of God,” 28. This last remark invokes Moses . Strikingly, Rudi te Velde, in his Aquinas on God, locates Thomas on the “far” side of this divide, concluding that Thomas is concerned with the philosophical and ontological concept of God, which, te Velde insists, “should not be identified with the way God is represented and spoken of in the theistic language

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should not blind us to the fact that the self-critical (philosophical) moment is in many ways internal to religious reflection.7 Philosophy cannot dictate terms to theology, but the latter possesses resources that may, at least potentially, incline it in some of the same self-critical directions. Here we might recall Elior’s dialectic of mystical language, which forever oscillates between constructing and “deconstructing” its own linguistic valences.

In this chapter, then, I articulate an alternative reading by turning to

Wittgenstein and his philosophical interpreters to consider the role of such “pictures” in relation to religious language. I contend that ordinary language philosophy holds potential for the present inquiry insofar as it adheres to Wittgenstein’s call for philosophy not simply to think (in the abstract) about such questions but to “look and see,” i.e., to attend without prejudice to forms of life involving such religious language

——————————— of biblical religion. “Theism concerns, I think, in the first place, a representational form of thinking and imaging the divine; it characterizes the manner in which God is represented in the religious and theological way of talking about God in the Christian tradition. But Thomas certainly does not think that this theistic model is to be applied directly to the ontological reality it is meant to describe, however refined and purified it may be from anthropomorphic and metaphorical elements. We ought to distinguish between a theistic representation of God and an ontological account of that divine reality to which the representation is taken to refer as to its truth. As regards the latter, one should say that God, as the principle of the being of all things, must be understood in terms of self-subsistent being, which is not in any sense a description. I would not characterize what Thomas is engaged in as seeking for a rational and foundation of the (Christian) theistic concept of God. His approach to the truth of what Christian faith confesses of God is primarily ontological. It is an ontological inquiry into the truth of that reality to which Christian theistic belief must be taken to refer if it is to be understood as referring to God.” Rudi te Velde, Aquinas on God: The ‘Divine Science’ of the Summa Theologiae, Ashgate Studies in the History of Philosophical Theology (Aldershot, Hants, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 177.

7. Thus, Rowan Williams insists that “[l]anguage about God is kept honest in the degree to which it turns on itself in the name of God, and so surrenders itself to God: it is in this way that it becomes possible to see how it is still God that is being spoken of, that which makes the human world a moral unity. . . . Religious discourse must articulate and confront its own temptations, its own falsehoods.” “Theological Integrity,” in On Christian Theology, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 8. Williams suggests that this is particularly true in light of the resurrection, which “builds into the life of a group the dimension of self-critical awareness, the ‘constructive suspicion’ of one’s liability to reject and deny.” Resurrection, 48.

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and images.8 To that end, I argue two related points, both captured by Gershom

Scholem’s observation that “[a]nthropomorphism . . . is as intrinsic to the living spirit of religion as is the feeling that there exists a Divine that far transcends such discourse.”9

Scholem first argues that anthropomorphism may in some cases be intrinsic, or

indispensable, to certain ways of living religiously. Second, he maintains that, within the

context of lived faith, anthropomorphic language (when functioning properly) provides

not a terminus for faith—in which Divinity is exhaustively or comprehensively presented

to view—but a kind of verbal icon in which the invisible nonetheless becomes visible.

That is, the divine is simultaneously manifest and hidden—indeed hidden in the

manifest, manifest in its hiddenness—by being both presented in an image and

understood as transcendent to the image, without thereby rendering the image

superfluous.10 My aim, then, is to develop the possibility that the “picture” of the divine

body and its related anthropomorphisms can be fruitfully compared to two concepts

drawn from ordinary language philosophy: (1) an indispensable, non-literal picture, and

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8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd, G. E. M. Anscombe (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1958), §66.

9. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 15–16.

10. As Elliot Wolfson observes of the later Jewish Kabbalists, “Concealment and disclosure are not mutually exclusive antinomies . . . on the contrary, in the lived experience of mystical insight, the two overlap such that the concealment is a form of disclosure and the disclosure a form of concealment. . . . the process of unveiling is itself a form of concealment.” Wolfson, “Mysticism,” 928. Wolfson notes that “the experience of the mystic may point beyond the morphic form to that which is absent in its presence.” “Mysticism,” 927. Pseudo-Dionysius says in Epistle 3 that “he is hidden even after this revelation, or, if I may speak in a more divine fashion, is hidden even amid the revelation.” We might compare von Balthasar’s remark that the paradox of Christianity is that “in his self-disclosure God becomes ever more manifest as the Incomprehensible One.” Theology: The Old Covenant, 54. In a similar vein, D. Z. Phillips remarked, “What we have seen is that language is not a screen which hides God from us. On the contrary, the idea of God in the language we have been explaining, is the idea of a hidden God—Vere tu es Deus absconditus.” D. Z. Phillips, Faith After (London; New York: Routledge, 1988), 289.

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(2) “secondary sense” or “figurative” usage.11

1. Indispensable Pictures and “Secondary Sense”

In his lecture on religious belief, Wittgenstein imagines someone about to leave on a long trip who tells a friend, “We might see one another after death.” One of

Wittgenstein’s students, assuming that he wouldn’t take such a picture literally, asks whether the sense of the picture might not be reducible to an expressive statement of affection. Wittgenstein replies, “I would say, ‘No, it isn’t the same as saying “I’m very fond of you”’—and it may not be the same as saying anything else. It says what it says.

Why should you be able to substitute anything else?”12 While some pictures (or sentences) might be replaceable with another, in other cases, “[t]he whole weight may be in the picture.”13 Following Cora Diamond and Stephen Mulhall, I suggest that this notion of an indispensable picture illuminates the mystagogical use of anthropomorphic language.

1.1. The Non-Representational Function of Language Is Reflected in Wittgenstein’s Concept of

Indispensable Pictures

Wittgenstein follows a similar line of thought in the Philosophical Investigations.

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11. In what follows, I use “figurative” expression and “secondary sense” interchangeably, a usage that reflects not only that of Wittgenstein in the second part of the Philosophical Investigations, but also that of Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond. This is the narrower understanding of “figurative,” which, like “metaphor,” can be construed either narrowly or broadly. In the broad sense, both “metaphor” and “figurative language” can refer to the entire range of non-literal tropes, including irony, metonymy and hyberbole. By contrast, the narrower sense of “metaphor” refers to one non-literal trope among others, i.e., “what makes us think of one thing as another.” M. Arseneault, “Metaphor: Philosophical Theories,” in Concise Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, ed. Alex Barber and Robert J. Stainton (Boston, MA: Elsevier, 2009), 446. The narrower sense of “figurative” language refers to yet another non-literal trope, interchangeable with “secondary sense,” which can be contrasted with the narrower sense of “metaphor,” as I explain below.

12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett, Compiled from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees, and James Taylor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 71.

13. Ibid., 71–72.

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Rejecting the notion that religious pictures are “only an imperfect rendering of the spoken doctrine,” he asks “Why should [the picture] not do the same service as the words? And it is the service which is the point.”14 Together with his characteristic emphasis on use, Wittgenstein contends that some pictures are not simply proxies for words—i.e., they may not be replaceable with words—and so are unsubstitutable.15 Rather than concealing a kernel of verbal meaning, then—like some sort of rebus in need of decoding—“What the picture tells me is itself,” though what it says is rather more like poetry than portraiture.16

Wittgenstein develops a contrast between a portrait and a “genre-picture,” suggesting that the “method of projection” assumed in religious pictures is not literally description. At the same time, this is not to deny that the picture “re-presents” something essential (something true), if only for those with eyes to see.17 As D. Z. Phillips comments, to say that “the whole weight may be in the picture” and that the picture

“says itself,” means that the picture, if it is a religious one, “may become that in which we live, and move and have our being. . . . if God is in the picture, to be absorbed by the picture would be to be absorbed by God at the same time. After all, why shouldn’t an

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14. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II p. 178.

15. Cf. Stanley Cavell: “some modes of figurative language are such that in them what an expression means cannot be said at all, at least not in any of the more or less familiar, conventionalized ways so far noticed. Not because these modes are flatly literal—there is, as it were, room for an explanation, but we cannot enter it. About such an expression it may be right to say: I know what it means but I can’t say what it means.” Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of ,” in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 81. It is likely that the sense of a picture or sentence will only be susceptible of reproduction and translation at the least profound levels of meaning. The more profound the meaning, the less likely it is that such translation will be possible. Herbert McCabe, “Sacramental Language,” in God Matters (London: Chapman, 1987), 173.

16. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I §522f.

17. D. Z. Phillips, “Propositions, Pictures and Practices,” Ars Disputandi 2 (2002): 71.

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omnipresent God be present in our pictures of him?”18 So, while rejecting the notion of religious pictures as descriptive, Wittgenstein, according to Phillips, also insists that the picture is not dispensable since it captures something real.19

According to Wittgenstein, it is possible for such a picture to lie “at the root of all our thinking.”20 Such a picture (Weltbild) is less something we think about than something we think with.21 As Cora Diamond says, “[t]he picture may belong to, may characterize what the person goes on to do or feel or think, may be essential to the game he is playing.”22 It is characteristic of such an essential picture that it is inescapable in any characterization of the language-game which the speaker could acknowledge as doing justice to “her use of words, her life with those words.”23 That is, any description that eschews the picture (that, we might say, “demythologizes” it), would offer a mirror to the religious believer in which she would be unable to recognize her own reflection.

At issue here is a question of aspect, since descriptions of the same mode of life and thought might in one case employ the picture in describing its use (and so take the picture to be basic) and in another case discard the picture altogether (thereby asserting

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18. Ibid., 73.

19. “. . . “in the picture you did see the real thing. You saw God in the picture. That would explain why the destruction of a religious picture might be regarded as a desecration.” Phillips, “Propositions, Pictures and Practices,” 71.

20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 83e.

21. In passing, we might note the implications of this view with respect to conversion, which comes to look less like weighing “evidence” and more like “the adopting of a whole new way of life, or ‘picturing’ differently, or making a particular narrative central to one’s existence, than coolly adjudicating on their likelihood with the ‘speculative intelligence.’” , “The Resurrection and the ‘Spiritual Senses’: On Wittgenstein, Epistemology and the Risen Christ,” in Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 143.

22. Cora Diamond, “Wittgenstein on Religious Belief: The Gulfs Between Us,” in Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy, ed. D. Z. Phillips (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 117.

23. Ibid., 128.

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its non-essentiality).24 To take one example: if a religious believer has a picture of faith as predicated on the always-prior self-revelation of God, “[t]his religious believer’s practice of talking about God as speaking to her cannot be characterized in a way that does justice to its role in her life unless the characterization invokes the very picture whose use it aspires to describe.”25 Any description that attributes the initiative to the believer rather than to God will fail as a candidate she would accept.

Mulhall notes that Wittgenstein’s remarks on a picture that says itself are reminiscent of his account of the concept of a gesture. As with certain pictures or sentences, Wittgenstein emphasizes that certain gestures, like an expressive gesture in a religious ceremony, are inseparable from their meaning.26 Such gestures are unsubstitutable, saying themselves. At the same time, he also emphasizes the importance of context (e.g., the gesture’s place in a ceremony).27 Commenting on this passage,

Mulhall suggests that certain gestures can be said to “absorb” their contexts—“as if traces of the ceremony as a whole, and of the form of life of which it is a part, are inscribed in the gesture itself.”28

Wittgenstein also likens the irreplaceability of these sorts of pictures to that of a musical theme or a poem.29 The analogy with poetry and the arts is instructive insofar as

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24. Diamond, “Wittgenstein on Religious Belief,” 123, 128. As Mulhall notes, this means that description cannot remain neutral since “we cannot here regard the business of philosophical clarification as essentially distinct from the business of employing the language about which we seek philosophical clarification.” “Wittgenstein on Faith, Rationality and the Passions,” 321.

25. Mulhall, “Wittgenstein on Faith, Rationality and the Passions,” 320–21.

26. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press ; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), i.34 [hereafter RPP]

27. We can come to understand such gestures by exploring their surroundings (RPP i.36).

28. Stephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Clarendon Press ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 169.

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works of art are neither dispensable vessels nor reducible to their literal meaning.30 The work of art possesses a material integrity which cannot be discarded—attention must be paid to what appears. At the same time, there is a level of excess in any good work of art, a plenitude of significance or “depth” that makes multiple and sustained engagements profitable. Uniting the material and the meaningful, the sensuous and the significant, art shows that “form is utterly bound to matter, yet also that this or that matter does not exhaust the possibilities of form.”31

Reading anthropomorphic language under the concept of such an indispensable

picture highlights its non-literal and indispensable role in Jewish and Christian mysticism.

This concept is closely related to a second, that of the “secondary sense” or “figurative”

use of a word, understood as a transformation of its primary meaning.

1.2. Wittgenstein’s Concept of a Word’s “Secondary Sense” Represents a Non-Literal and Non-

Metaphorical Use of Language

The figurative transformation of a word’s primary sense rests on extensive

familiarity with a language, on being thoroughly “at home” in a language. Fluent

speakers of a language have a feel for the language, a pervasive and deep awareness of its

contours and “harmonics”—“an unhesitating familiarity with the specific identity of

individual words.”32 To such a person, words “can seem to be a manifestation of their

meaning, a living embodiment of the sentiment they express.”33 It is as though, on

seeing a word, we feel that we know its face, its unique identity in the range of linguistic

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29. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I §531.

30. Cf. Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy”.

31. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 87, 61.

32. Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 165. Mulhall also calls this an awareness of “the specificity of a word’s linguistic and non-linguistic contexts.”

33. Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 164.

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and non-linguistic contexts. In our earlier terms, it is as though the word becomes a unique “gesture” which has absorbed its surroundings in a linguistic field. This feel for the language can, Wittgenstein says, incline one to speak of the word having a familiar physiognomy: “The familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning into itself, that it is an actual likeness of its meaning—there could be human beings to whom all this was alien. (They would not have an attachment to their words.).”34 Wittgenstein calls this awareness of a word’s subtle shades of meaning

“experiencing the meaning of a word.”35

This feel for the language is central to literature and poetry, which explore the deep potencies and harmonies obscured by unreflective language use. Accordingly,

Wittgenstein says that this sense of a word’s physiognomy is manifested “by the way we choose and value words.”36 There is an ineluctably subjective quality to such choosing, insofar as one must learn what it is to be “at home” in the language. On the other hand, the writer or artist will insist that this is no mere ; there is objectivity to the creative process as well. When I search for the “right” word, or for the “right” harmonization for a musical composition, the process is irreducibly personal—no computer could select the “right” word for my poem, the “right” note for my melody. On the other hand, when I find it, it may feel less chosen by me than “forced” on me (or

perhaps found by me). I will probably insist not that this is the “right” word for me, but

that this is the right word. The right word, like the indispensable picture, may seem the

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34. PI, p. 218. Wittgenstein says that this is the kind of meaning you would be missing “if you did not understand the request to pronounce the word ‘till’ and to mean it as a verb,—or if you did not feel that a word lost its meaning and became a mere sound if it was repeated ten times over” (PI, p. 214). Elsewhere, Wittgenstein wonders whether such a person would be “lacking in an important sense; is it as if they were blind; or colour-blind; or without absolute pitch?” (RPP i.168).

35. PI, p. 214.

36. Ibid., p. 218.

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necessary word, and that for reasons I may be at a loss to explain without appealing to the word itself, to its particular “feel” (or, as Wittgenstein suggests, its smell).

The secondary sense of a word only becomes intelligible against this learned background of familiarity or adeptness. That is, such figurative expressions will only

“carry” for those with a feel for the language, who can “experience the meaning”

(individuality) of words. When we have this feeling of our words’ unique physiognomies, they become available to us “as elements of a gesture language, as a means by which to articulate a further set of spontaneous reactions to the world and our experience of it.”37 That is, in light of certain (typically elusive) experiences, the possibility of a word’s secondary sense emerges as a spontaneous linguistic reaction.

Pressed to express our experience, we find ourselves employing a word “outside” its ordinary linguistic field because only this word will do “as the expression of the feeling or inclination concerned.”38 At the same time, it is only because this word has “absorbed” its primary contexts, bears its primary technique within itself, that it can carry that sense with it into another context.39

Before considering specific examples, it may help us to attempt to distinguish between analogical, metaphorical and figurative language (which Wittgenstein calls

“secondary sense”40). Analogous expressions are distinguished by their ability to be “at home” in multiple contexts—i.e., to play roles in a variety of language-games. In analogical speech, we “stretch” or “project”41 the meaning of a word beyond its

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37. Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 169.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. “The secondary sense is not a ‘metaphorical’ sense.” Philosophical Investigations, p. 216.

41. On “projecting a word,” see Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 180–90.

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conventional usage “to cover things which, in everyday talk, we do not have in mind. . . . such ‘stretching’ is possible only in the case of words which are sufficiently open-ended to be stretched without breaking.”42 Analogous predication does not rely on the assertion of a strict quality or substratum common across an analogous term’s various contexts, but rather on the creative extension of the analogous term beyond its primary meaning (ratio propria) into contexts which share an intelligible relation (ratio communis)

to the primary meaning.43 Thus, while not consistently susceptible to strict formulation,

the pattern of analogical usage is frequently discernible based on established usage and

linguistic convention.44 Finally, the “elasticity” of an analogical term like “good” or

“healthy” means that the limits of their literal applicability cannot be specified. Hence,

one does not deny the literal sense of analogical terms.45

Metaphorical terms lack the elasticity of their analogical counterparts.

Accordingly, the metaphorical “projection” of language is a kind of breaking, a

fracturing of the conventional sense on which it relies in order to strike out in

unpredictable new directions. As a result, we do deny the literal truth of metaphor before

coming to understand its metaphorical significance.46 Thus, we don’t deny that God is

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42. Brian Wicker, The Story-Shaped World: Fiction and Metaphysics: Some Variations on a Theme (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 26. The best- known candidates for such analogous expressions are the (e.g., true, good, one) and evaluative or appraisal terms. David B. Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 222.

43. As Aquinas says, “healthy” can be analogously applied to both “urine” and “medicine” since the former is a sign of animal health and the latter the cause of the same health (ST I.13.5, 6, 10).

44. Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language, 225.

45. Nicholas Lash, “Ideology, Metaphor and Analogy,” in Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM Press, 1986), 111. By “literal” sense here, I mean that justified by established usage. As we will see, both metaphorical and figurative expressions are, unlike analogy, non-literal in this sense.

46. Wicker, The Story-Shaped World, 26. Attention to the variety of “literal” uses alerts us to the dangers of conceiving the “literal” univocally in terms of reference-

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good (analogical), even if, in this case, we don’t understand what we mean by saying it; we do deny, however, that God is (literally) a fortress (Psa 18:2), precisely in order to consider the ways in which God may be like a fortress.

As with metaphor, a figurative expression, or “secondary sense,” is dependent or

“parasitic” on the primary sense. Both metaphorical and figurative language operate outside the range of conventional usage (in this sense Stanley Cavell calls both

“unnatural,” whereas analogy, if I read him correctly, would be a “natural” form of a word’s “projection”), and so can be understood only if one already understands the words in their primary usage.47 That is, one can (in some cases, must) teach the meaning

of a word using analogous examples, whereas one would not teach a word using

metaphorical or figurative examples.48 Moreover, both metaphorical and figurative

expressions aspire to the transcendence of conventional linguistic criteria, not, as Cavell

notes, in order to repudiate those criteria or our mutual “attunement” in words,49 but in

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description. At the same time, while we may encounter some difficulty in certain boundary cases, we do commonly distinguish the metaphorical and literal as correlative concepts. Rather than attempt a final definition of metaphor, it is sufficient for present purposes to describe something of the difference by noting, as A. P. Martinich does, that metaphor “relies on the literal use of words only in order to indicate that the speaker means to communicate something other than their literal meaning.” “Metaphor,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig (London: Routledge, 1998). Martinich goes on to explain the difference between metaphors and similes, observing that, “typically if a metaphor were literally asserted, the result would be a falsehood, while (virtually) all similes are true. For example, the metaphor ‘My lover is a red rose’ is literally false, while the simile ‘My lover is like a red rose’ is literally true. The pretence of saying something false is a crucial feature of how metaphors work.” Ibid.

47. Cora Diamond, “Secondary Sense,” in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 227. The ordinary grammar of “sun” must be in place “if the metaphorical application of it to Juliet is to carry.” Stanley Cavell, “The Skeptical and the Metaphorical,” in In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 147–48.

48. The line between metaphor and analogy should not be drawn too sharply, since, as David Burrell reminds us, there is “an irreducibly metaphorical dimension in analogous expression,” which is particularly acute in light of the radical “stretching” demanded by the theological employment of analogy. Aquinas: God and Action, 64.

49. The term is Cavell’s. See The Claim of Reason.

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order to pressure and expand those attunements.50 That is, such language (both the metaphorical and figurative) looks to expand our life with words, to stretch or expand the bonds of our language, and to discover potencies in our words by “projecting” them in unexpected directions.

Despite these similarities, however, there are differences between the metaphorical and figurative. Metaphors (at least what Diamond calls “dead or deadish metaphors”) are susceptible of a kind of explanation in other language, “draw[ing] attention to some non-figuratively described common feature shared by the thing to which I apply the word metaphorically and by something to which I apply the word in its primary usage.”51 We can (at least try to) explain the juxtaposition or comparison being made in the metaphor. “Juliet is the sun” because, for example, all other “lights” pale in comparison with her, because in her light everything else takes on a changed aspect, and so on. In terms of our earlier discussion, the metaphor is non-literal, but it is nonetheless (at least in some sense) paraphraseable, substitutable (though not, in such a scenario, without some alteration). Moreover, as we noted, the recognition of metaphorical significance requires the denial of the literal sense. That is, the shift from the conventional range of uses is “accompanied by a shift in meaning,” which entails the denial of the conventional (literal) meaning.52

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50. This drive to plumb the depths of our connection with others is itself quite natural to humanity: “part[] of the nature or fate of a creature complex enough for, or fated to, language.” Cavell, “The Skeptical and the Metaphorical,” 148. Diamond makes the same point, arguing that such usages appear “natural enough yet not just a matter- of-course use.” Diamond, “Secondary Sense,” 240.

51. Paul Franks, “Talking of Eyebrows: Religion and the Space of Reasons After Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig and Diamond,” in Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy, ed. D.Z. Phillips and Mario Von der Ruhr, Ashgate Wittgensteinian Studies (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 146.

52. Diamond, “Secondary Sense,” 228.

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By contrast, “what [a figurative] expression means cannot be said at all, at least not in any of the more or less familiar, conventionalized ways.”53 The Philosophical

Investigations offer several examples of such figurative usage, including someone asked to order the letters of the alphabet by relative darkness, someone who describes the color of the vowel e as yellow, and someone asked whether she thinks Tuesday is lean and

Wednesday fat or the other way around.54

Oswald Hanfling argues that the phenomena of secondary senses is more common than Wittgenstein’s isolated examples might suggest, observing that secondary senses are especially important when speaking of “mental processes, feelings and aesthetics.”55 To Wittgenstein’s examples, he adds several others, including the feeling of being on “pins and needles,” having “butterflies in the stomach” and “stabbing” pains, as well as aesthetic expressions like “deep” sounds (cf. sorrow, wells), “high” notes (cf. buildings, mountains), “sharp” sounds (cf. knives) and “sad” or “sweet” music (cf. food).56 To take just the first of these feelings, there is only a vague relation between the expression “being on pins and needles” and any observable behavior. At the same time, the expression can’t be explained by means of analogy with the image—i.e., the feeling of “being on pins and needles” is not like being stuck with real pins and needles. Still, these are the words I want. Hanfling’s examples also highlight the way in which the

“unnaturalness” of secondary uses can be obscured through repetition and familiarity.

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53. Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” 81.

54. Diamond, “Secondary Sense,” 226. Here we can see that, as with metaphor, secondary usage presupposes, rather than illustrates, the primary sense. That is, one teaches the meaning of the words “fat” and “lean” in the ordinary way, not by way of referring to days of the week.

55. Oswald Hanfling, “‘I Heard a Plaintive Melody’: (Philosophical Investigations, p. 209),” in Wittgenstein Centenary Essays, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 128.

56. Ibid., 129.

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In figurative expressions, the words—“darker,” “yellow,” “fat,” “sweet”—have a different use than in ordinary settings, but the words themselves (these words) are irreplaceable (cf. the indispensable picture or gesture). In a normal instance of multiple meanings (e.g., the bank of a river and the bank that owns my mortgage), I can easily imagine sundering the two senses by assigning a different word to one of the uses. That is not the case with secondary uses, which assume the primary sense even while transforming it. “[N]o other word would do to express my inclinations in the secondary contexts; it is the word ‘fat,’ with all its usual implications and connotations, that aptly expresses my feelings with respect to Wednesday.”57 To understand a secondary sense, then, “is not to be able to give a paraphrase in [other] words used in their primary sense; nor is it to see what is said as merely the expression of an emotion.”58 Diamond observes of such figurative expression that, as long as I am thinking about the range of ordinary usages, I will be inclined to say that there has been a shift in meaning in the secondary usage. But when I recognize “that there is no question of giving you an explanation of how I meant the words, different from the ‘perfectly ordinary’ one, I may say the words mean what they always mean.”59 Thus, I may at first want to say that “high” has shifted its meaning when I use it of a musical note (as opposed to a tall building). But while it is being used differently in the musical case, I am hard-pressed either to explain how its meaning is different or to indicate what is similar between the two cases.60

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57. Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 168.

58. Diamond, “Secondary Sense,” 236. Asked what such terms mean in their secondary usages, Wittgenstein says, “I could only explain the meanings in the usual way” (PI, p. 216). Diamond traces the difference between analogy and such figurative uses by observing that a “healthy diet” is one conducive to health, whereas sad music is “not music conducive to sadness in the listener, nor music which sounds as if it had been written by a sad man, nor music which is nice to hear when you are sad.” “Secondary Sense,” 228.

59. Diamond, “Secondary Sense,” 228.

60. This was certainly my own experience sitting at the piano and attempting to

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Like metaphorical language, then (and unlike analogous usage), figurative expressions are not to be understood literally, that is, “as having the same sort of application, the same sort of consequences, as the words had as previously used.”61 But unlike metaphors, these words are indispensable; one cannot bypass or satisfactorily explain the figure in question in other terms. Thus, figurative expressions “seek to be taken verbally seriously as picture language”—that is, without seeking to explain them in other terms62—“but not to be understood as non-picture language, that is, literally.63

Secondary or figurative usage represents the extension of our life with words, an extension once again predicated on the mastery of words in their primary sense. Cavell pictures such poetic extension as a “second inheritance” of language, “[o]r, if learning a first language is thought of as the child’s acquiring it, then poetry can be thought of as the adult’s acquiring of it, as coming into possession of his or her own language, full citizenship.”64 Mulhall comments that this second inheritance of language

is made possible by—and so is expressive of—the depth of the first; for only when

our first inheritance of language has come to inform our lives in such a way that

each and every word of it is available to us as a unique gesture do we find

ourselves possessed of the reactive substratum, the new natural reactions, that are

essential for our inheritance of a further range of language and experience. In

this sense, our attachment to our words, our tendency to assimilate them, shows

——————————— explain to my son why this note was “high” and this one was “low.” Said differently, we don’t find the same shift in meaning (as in metaphor), which might require the denial of the primary sense. Of a secondary usage, I don’t say, “Of course, the note isn’t really high.”

61. Diamond, “Wittgenstein on Religious Belief,” 127.

62. Ibid.

63. Gollwitzer, The Existence of God as Confessed by Faith, 164.

64. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 189.

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that linguistic behaviour is second nature to us—that to acquire language is to

acquire a second nature.65

The possibility that a word might come to constitute a unique, irreplaceable gesture echoes Wittgenstein’s notion of an indispensable picture. In both cases, one cannot explain the meaning in the ordinary way—the word/picture indispensably says itself. If we ask how one might come to communicate the meaning of such figurative expressions,

Wittgenstein draws another analogy with music: “Ask yourself: How does one lead a person to the understanding of a poem or a musical theme?”66

These secondary responses, possible only because we have acquired language,

“form the basis of new language-games, a further extension of our range of linguistic behaviour.”67 As with the more mundane valuation of words, it may be that only this word feels right, though unlike the more mundane cases it will seem at first to be quite

“out of context” (“sadness” in music). This suggests an aesthetic that is neither simply expressive of the artist’s self (i.e., “sad music” doesn’t express the composer’s sadness) nor functional (it doesn’t aim to produce sadness in the listener). Rather, the artist searches for the “internal necessity of a work,” to which, in a sense, she hopes to become obedient.68 As Wittgenstein says, “It is not a figure that we choose, not a simile, yet it is a figurative expression.”69

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65. Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 170.

66. PI, §533.

67. Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 170.

68. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 97. Williams is here reflecting on Flannery O’Connor’s description of the artistic process.

69. PI, p. 178. Cavell says that such a figure “may seem “the only [natural] expression.” Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” 81. Diamond speaks of the connection between secondary sense and our need to give expression to certain feelings or experiences, in light of which those words are “forced” on one “as a piece of music played in a certain way, or a picture, might seem the only way one could express

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Our reinheritance of language at this nuanced, “poetic”70 level opens the possibility of increased individuation and intimacy: “for the spontaneous linguistic reactions upon which [figurative expression] is grounded provide a terrain upon which the specificity of one person’s inner life might find more and more fine-grained articulation, but in terms which can call forth an answering resonance in another person.”71 Words in their secondary sense open a range of perceptions and experiences only available to those with sufficient mastery of words in their primary sense. Thus,

Cavell says of such figurative expressions that “[o]ne may be able to say nothing except that a feeling has been voiced by a kindred spirit and that if someone does not get it he is not in one’s world, or not of one’s flesh. The lines may, that is, be left as touchstones of intimacy.”72 Here Cavell highlights the way in which secondary expressions—if they are to communicate, to “carry”—assume a (narrower) shared world since everything hangs on these words, this image (cf. “the whole weight”): “It is such shades of sense, intimations of meaning, which allow certain kinds of subtlety or delicacy of communication; the connection is intimate, but fragile. People who cannot use words, or gestures, in these ways with you may yet be in your world, but perhaps not of your flesh.”73 One may share your world (the first inheritance of language) without sharing your “flesh” (the second). In proffering a secondary sense in conversation, we reveal something of ourselves and so test the bonds between ourselves and others. We may find

——————————— what one felt.” Diamond, “Secondary Sense,” 233.

70. To clarify: this should not be taken to mean either that every poetic phrase is figurative or that all secondary senses are strictly poetic. As we have seen, some figurative expressions (e.g., “pins and needles”) have been thoroughly domesticated.

71. Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 170.

72. Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” 81.

73. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 189.

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that our reactions resonate with others, our bond thereby deepened.74 Or we may find ourselves separated by mutual incomprehension (“You lost me. I just don’t get it.”).

Diamond’s description of secondary usage as a kind of “rebirth” of our language—the “conversion of our concepts”75 produced by certain transformational experiences—brings our discussion to the theological appropriation of these twin concepts. As an illustration of such conversion, Diamond imagines an encounter with

George Eliot, a “magnificently ugly woman” by conventional standards. That one might over the course of an encounter with Eliot come to describe her as “beautiful” represents such a transformation of the concept: “in such a case, she is not judged by a norm available through the concept of beauty; she shows the concept up, she moves one to use the words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ almost as new words, or as renewed words. She gives one a new vocabulary, a new way of taking the world in in one’s words, and of speaking about it to others.”76 The application of the transformed language of beauty to Eliot is non-literal and indispensable, “in the sense that the application is not justified by the previously established practice, nor intended to be justified by that practice; yet the word is the necessary word.”77

2. Scriptural Anthropomorphism Can Be Profitably Read as a Special Kind of

“Secondary Sense”

The discussion of secondary senses to this point has been confined to the

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74. “In the realm of the figurative, our words are not felt as confining but as releasing, or not as binding but as bonding.” Cavell, “The Skeptical and the Metaphorical,” 147–48.

75. Diamond borrows the phrase from Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. E.g., “The conversion that all concepts of the preworld undergo when entering into the light of the real world is nothing other than this No.” Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, in translation by Barbara E. Galli, Modern and Religion. (Madison, Wis.: University of Press, 2005), 187.

76. Diamond, “Wittgenstein on Religious Belief,” 125.

77. Ibid.

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mundane. Following Diamond and Mulhall, I suggest that it may be profitable to read theological speech, including speech about the divine body, as a special sort of secondary

sense. Despite significant similarities, we must register an absolutely crucial distinction

at the outset: “what is distinctive [about theological language] is that the irreducibly

figurative or pictorial turn is said to be taken by God Himself in revealing Himself, not

merely by the human speaker.”78 Returning to the example of Eliot’s “beauty,” Diamond claims that something similar has happened with the concept of “God,” which has been transformed and renewed in light of God’s self-revelation. As with other secondary uses, these words can only be understood by those fluent in the primary sense and cannot be explained without reference to these words or pictures. Unlike mundane figures, however, the concept of revelation suggests that in this case God himself reveals and determines the language appropriate to theological speech.79 Through encounter with

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78. Franks, “Talking of Eyebrows,” 146. Cf. 2 Pet 1:21: “no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” To say that it is not merely a human activity is not to preclude human co-operation, as Bulgakov reminds us: “Of course, it is God who names Himself in man and through man by His revelation; however, this is accomplished through religious experience, mystical contemplation, philosophical speculation, scientific insight, moral exploit—in short, through human creativeness and life.” Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 116. Cf. “God, in revealing Himself in the world through man, bears witness about Himself in man’s consciousness, names Himself, even if it is with man’s lips: the naming is an act of God in man; it is man’s answer to this act, a manifestation of Divine energy...... the Divine energy itself speaks about itself in man, is revealed in the word, and the word, the naming of God, turns out to be the human incarnation of this energy as it were.” Ibid., 118.

79. Our earlier discussion of the need for description that reflects the picture of God’s always-prior action is germane here. Cf. Michael Wyschogrod: “We either consider the structure of language as determinative in respect to what can be said of Hashem [i.e., ‘the Name’] or we consider Hashem the Lord the language, who, as the creator of language, determines what language can or cannot say about its creator. . . . The limits and interpretation of the speech of Hashem about himself and his relation to his people is thus not to be derived from a theory of language: a theory of language, particularly of language about Hashem, is instead learned from the actuality of the divine speech about himself. The possibility of such speech is derived from its actuality instead of its actuality being made dependent on its possibility, which, in turn, is derived from an a priori analysis of language understood on its own and therefore uncreated [i.e., not understood as created] terms.” Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: God in the People of Israel (New York: Seabury Press, 1983), 171.

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God our religious concepts, including anthropomorphic language, are converted,

“acquir[ing] a distinctive set of secondary uses.”80 God gifts us with a converted, renewed language appropriate to his praise—God, “through his actions, gives a transformed content to the word ‘God.’”81

Of course, such religious speech may still sound like words given their primary sense, i.e., like “a description of another world, of superfacts, or very queer facts.”82 Only by attending to the various uses to which language is put, rather than the mere form of language, can we determine whether the speaker is employing terms in their primary or secondary sense. Thus, texts that speak of the divine body may appear (as they have appeared to some) to be literal descriptions of an object of ordinary vision. As we have seen, however, the remarkable character of the divine body in the textual traditions— along with the presence of verbal markers—suggests the inadequacy of such literalism, and this conclusion is reinforced by the mystagogical function ascribed to these texts in mystical circles. Read as indispensable pictures, as secondary senses of words like

“body,” we find that such anthropomorphic pictures are neither literal nor reducible, neither descriptive nor ornamental. Rather, the relevant words—“body,” “ascended to heaven,” “seated at the right hand,” and so on—“become an essential part of the expression of one’s visual experience rather than of a perceptual report . . . we are inclined to use them in the new context precisely because of their significance in the old; we act as if they carry their original implications into their new context, as if they have

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80. Franks, “Talking of Eyebrows,” 151. Helmut Gollwitzer likens this to the death and resurrection of our language in which our words remain verbally though not literally true, since “[t]he subject decides the predicate, not vice versa.” Gollwitzer, The Existence of God as Confessed by Faith, 163–64.

81. Diamond, “Wittgenstein on Religious Belief,” 125. To be clear, I am not claiming that this linkage of the indispensable picture of the priority of divine action with scriptural and creedal language represents Diamond’s own views.

82. Diamond, “Secondary Sense,” 237.

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absorbed or assimilated their original technique of use.”83 Such pictures say themselves, and God is in such pictures for those with eyes to see.

On this reading, anthropomorphic language in Scripture (and, by extension, in rabbinic and patristic commentary on Scripture), should be understood as the spontaneous linguistic reaction to encounters between God and humanity, encounters which “determine the application to God in a secondary sense of terms applied to

[humanity] in a primary sense.”84 In light of such theophanic encounter, mystical language represents the transformation of primary sense in order to construct a new, expressive use of familiar language. That such language fails to carry or appears naïvely literal to some should not be surprising, given what we have seen about the demands of intimacy made by such secondary expression.

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83. Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 167.

84. Franks, “Talking of Eyebrows,” 151. This notion of a divine-human encounter that is definitive for theological discourse is central not only to Gollwitzer’s Barthian account, but also to several Jewish commentators. See Franz Rosenzweig, “A Note on Anthropomorphisms in Response to the Encyclopedia Judaica’s Article,” in God, Man, and the World, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 135– 45 and Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith. Rosenzweig is particular forceful: “There is not one biblical statement, even the most ludicrous and most offensive, which cannot be realized in the meeting with creation or creature, as ever. Where there is something to see, God has an eye on it. Where man calls, God opens an ear. Where man hearkens upwards, or otherwise, where man closes his ear, the voice of the divine mouth can fill his ear. Where he stretches out his hand praying for help, God’s hand can touch it. Where he would like to draw near in yearning or seeks to draw afar in defiance, God will step down to meet him halfway or to confront the fleeing one at the end of his flight. And where a human community seeks to please Him with fragrances of a sacrifice in an honest belief (not in magical forcing of will that wants to buy itself free from another, closer duty), there He will—forgive the daring word!—not be so lacking in humor as not to smell it. For all that, one may not say that He has eyes, ears, mouth, hand, leg, nose; but not because seeing, hearing, speaking, touching, descending, smelling would be a degrading restriction for Him, but rather because the ‘having’ would be. We have no right to knowledge concerning God’s ‘having’ or ‘being’—a desire for such knowledge would always be an attempt to fix Him as an image; but we are entitled to a boundless trust in his unboundable powers: that always, at every moment, he can meet our and all creation’s momentary bodiliness and spirituality, bodily and spiritually, in the body and in the soul.” “A Note on Anthropomorphisms,” 140–41.

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The emergence of this mystical language, then, owes not simply to the unaided genius of the poetic imagination, but to the divine initiative (cf. 2 Pet 1:21), first through the prophets and climactically through his Son (cf. Heb 1:1). That is, God has given secondary senses to our language through revelation, which we might picture as God’s gifting us with the forms of a language we do not yet fully understand (or, at least, “a language whose full transparency to us is ruled out”).85 The sense of conceptual

reorientation brought about by revelation is nicely captured in one of Wittgenstein’s

pictures regarding religious belief (in this case, concerning the resurrection):

. . . this can come about only if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but

suspend yourself from heaven. Then everything will be different and it will be ‘no

wonder’ if you can do things that you cannot do now. (A man who is suspended

looks the same as one who is standing, but the interplay of forces within him is

nevertheless quite different, so that he can act quite differently than can a

standing man.)86

Leaving aside an exposition of Wittgenstein’s own use of this image, I suggest that it is a

fitting picture of the transformation wrought by revelation on our concepts, which are

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85. Cora Diamond, “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle,” in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 282. On this last point, Diamond compares the mystery of life to a great riddle to which we have been given the solution. As with mundane riddles, knowing that something is the solution is not yet to know how it is the solution. Diamond, “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle,” 286. On this view, our language about God possesses only “promissory meaning,” the outer shell of a meaning promised in God’s future. Like certain forms of mathematical conjecture, we have “forms of words whose sense is to-be-disclosed, never beyond the possibility of further conversion.” Mulhall, “Wittgenstein on Faith, Rationality and the Passions,” 323. Reflecting on Jesus’ isolation and the incomprehension with which he meets, Rowan Williams thus suggests that “his acts are signs of a form of human life yet to be realized and standing at odds with the political and cultic status quo.” “The Nature of a Sacrament,” in On Christian Theology, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 203.

86. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 33e.

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now “suspended” from heaven. They may look earthbound, flat-footed (“the same as one who is standing”), but on closer inspection we find the words now doing things that would be “out of reach” for the primary sense. In reading biblical pictures and images

(including anthropomorphism) as figurative expressions, the linguistic “center of gravity” (meaning) is translated from the language (and world) we presently inhabit to the one we have been promised, which we are just now beginning to learn. Borrowing another image from Cavell, the situation can be likened to that of a child learning language; such a child has been taught many words the concepts of which have yet to exist for her insofar as she has yet to acquire the forms of life which contain them.

I have wanted to say: Kittens — what we call ‘kittens’—do not exist in her world

yet . . . They do not exist in something like the way cities and mayors will not

exist in her world until long after pumpkins and kittens do; or like the way God

or love or responsibility or beauty do not exist in our world; we have not

mastered, or we have forgotten, or we have distorted, or learned through

fragmented models, the forms of life which could make utterances like ‘God

exists’ or ‘’ or ‘I love you’ or ‘I cannot do otherwise’ or ‘Beauty is but

the beginning of terror’ bear all the weight they could carry, express all they

could take from us. We do not know the meaning of the words. We look away

and leap around.87

We do not yet share in the forms of life needed to give our words their full weight. The words, as it were, belong to a new world, i.e., the new creation into which Christ, the arche¯gos, has preceded us.

This is, perhaps, nowhere as true as with respect to our language about the

Trinity, as suggested by Herbert McCabe’s use of a very similar image involving an

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87. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 172–73.

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intelligent 7-year-old who overhears a group of adults engaged in spirited conversation:

she has no idea what is going on. The talk seems to have some kind of purpose.

But it is not a purpose that she can grasp. . . . What is in fact most important to

her is what she doesn’t understand, though understands well enough that she

wants to be grown-up. Her future destiny, her adult life is waiting for her, but

she will only understand it when she takes part in it. No child is just a child; no

human being is just a human being. The child is on the way to sharing in a

mysterious grown-up life. All human beings are on the way to sharing in a

mysterious divine life.88

Theological language is, as it were, the language of heaven “overheard” on earth. God has graciously allowed us to “eavesdrop” on the life to come, and the language we have thus received awaits our growth into the communion of love that is the divine life.89 We

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88. Herbert McCabe, “Trinity,” in God, Christ and Us, edited with and introduction by Brian Davies, ed and introd by Brian Davies, Continuum Icons (London ; New York: Continuum, 2003), 115–16.

89. It is instructive to compare this eschatological interpretation with Cavell’s remark that “the child’s language has a future” and “the child has a future with its language.” “Notes and Afterthoughts on the Opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David G. Stern (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 278. This pedagogical view finds echoes in McCabe’s account of the meaning of sacraments, in which he pictures Eucharistic change as a transformation that occurs not within our language, but as a transfer from our language to God’s: “It is not just that in these signs we reach the limits of our human language in expressing the divine; what we believe is that our signs are taken over and become the language of God himself.” Herbert McCabe, “: A Reply to G. Egner,” in God Matters (London: Chapman, 1987), 154. The Eucharistic “change” is as radical as creation itself, insofar as it is not really a “change” at all (in the existing order of things). McCabe again: “It is not that the bread has become a new kind of thing in this world: it now belongs to a new world. As far as this world is concerned, nothing seems to have happened, but in fact what we have is not part of this world.” “Eucharistic Change,” in God Still Matters, ed. Brian Davies (London ; New York: Continuum, 2005), 119. Despite a certain similarity, we should distinguish here between the secondary sense, which is most appropriate to the icon, and the kind of transformation involved in the Eucharistic change. The icon, like the secondary sense, belongs simultaneously to two “worlds,” or, as Bulgakov says, icons “are situated at the intersection of the two worlds.” Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 125. The icon remains anchored as an object of this world,

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have understood enough to know that we want to grow up into the Image of Christ. Of couse, for McCabe, as for our other authors, this overhearing, as another way of picturing the conversion of our concepts, is the result of grace, by which God renews our words, giving us “a new way of taking the world in in [our] words.”90

Wittgenstein himself suggests that revelation might be pictured as just such an expansion of our language (and so of our world and selves): “Our being given a new sense I would call revelation.”91 Diamond notes that the possibility raised here of a new sense represents not a change within the same logical space, but a translation to a new territory—not a “discovery in a space, describable in advance, but a ‘discovery’ of a space.”92 Accordingly, secondary usage seems to span or join together two disparate linguistic fields. This quality coheres with the picture of words that belong to this world in their primary sense which may—given a secondary, theological sense by grace—belong also to a “new world.” Gifted with a secondary sense, then, a word constitutes a bridge between two linguistic fields, two “worlds.” Irreplaceable and irreducible, the word itself is the bridge, which one learns to cross only when one knows with intimacy the word’s face, its individuality. The connection between worlds then is not one of use, but rather

the word itself in all its particularity.

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retaining its worldly meaning even as another meaning becomes visible through it. Thus, the analogy with words that possess both primary and secondary senses; they continue to play both parts. In the Eucharist, by contrast, the objects of one world are understood to be wholly translated to another. As McCabe says, the language of Eucharistic change signifies that the elements no longer belong to our world, but to the world to come.

90. Diamond, “Wittgenstein on Religious Belief,” 125. “God” has ceased to be “a pre-understood category.” Instead, our understanding of “God” arises simultaneously and is correlative with our understanding of Jesus as Word. McCabe, “Sacramental Language,” 172.

91. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, edited from his posthumous writings by Rush Rhees, and translated into English by Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 172.

92. Diamond, “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle,” 278.

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This picture of spiritual understanding as a pedagogical-mystagogical growth by grace into God’s new creation, one with striking resonances in Wittgenstein, brings us to the threshold of what some patristic and medieval writers called “the spiritual senses”: the “transformed epistemic sensibilities of those being progressively reborn in the likeness of the Son.”93 Following Wittgenstein, Sarah Coakley argues that, since the differences between us may involve not only matters of reference, but of perception, the grammar of religious belief—including what we have been calling the conversion of our concepts—“cannot be explained except by an account of a transformation of the believer’s actual epistemic apparatus.”94 Accordingly, the tradition of the spiritual senses—in which there is both continuity and discontinuity between the physical and spiritual realms along the spectrum of the senses’ purgation95—coheres with the kinds of

linguistic transformation we have been tracing.96 It also witnesses to the fact, central to

Wittgenstein, that language is not only a mental phenomenon but is also bodily. The

radicalness of the transformation of our language envisioned here calls for a correlative

transformation of our bodies, our senses. Might it then be possible to construe the

increasing spiritualization of the body’s senses—as a supernaturally heightened

perceptual capacity—on the model of secondary sense—that is, as a heightened feel for

everything as it belongs, as it finds a place, in God’s kingdom (i.e., spiritual sense as

secondary sense)?

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93. Coakley, “The Resurrection and the ‘Spiritual Senses’,” 131.

94. Ibid.

95. Ibid., 137–38.

96. This tradition also helps makes sense of the range of different responses to the Gospel, even among believers, in part by underscoring the process of change. See Coakley, “The Resurrection and the ‘Spiritual Senses’,” 139.

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3. Conclusion

The history of reflection concerning the divine body—first in the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish mysticism and then in the appropriation of these traditions in the early

Christian belief about Jesus—belies the conventional view that scriptural anthropomorphism requires a choice between naïve literalism and dispensable metaphor. I have articulated a third exegetical strategy that transcends this binary by drawing on the Wittgensteinian concepts of the indispensable picture and figurative expression. These concepts enable us to better attend to the nuance and texture already present in our everyday uses of language, and so provide a kind of mundane analogue for the graced dilation of our language under the pressures of mystical experience.

As we have seen, both figurative and mystical language possess a “poetic” quality which eludes the literal-metaphorical dichotomy. Accordingly, Rachel Elior describes how mystical language, like poetry, expresses its freedom from the literal meaning through a dialectical “vitality” that oscillates between the “deconstruction” of conventional meanings and the infinite generation of new constructions and connections.97 Accordingly, the divine body appears, but the qualified language of prophetic and mystical discourse signals that these pictures are not to be read as literal descriptions. It thus appears as a body of light, a body with cosmic proportions that exceed that of the universe by orders of magnitude,98 a body that pre-contains future generations and world history, a body constituted by the community’s praise, a body

“without measure or analogy” (2 Enoch 39:3-8). As Elior indicates, these mystical revelations are not aimed at mappable correspondence with an independently observable “objective” reality, but with the “refashion[ing] of one’s view of the world, a

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97. Elior, Jewish Mysticism: The Infinite Expression of Freedom, 104–33.

98. Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, “The Shiur Koma and the Angelic ‘Youth’,” 507.

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restructuring encoded in the creative symbolic connections of mystical language.”99 In other words

the Biblical symbols of God are not what those who had visions of God saw, but

are rather the concepts and imagery used by those who had these visions in order

to give expression to this immediate knowledge of God which transcends

concepts, imagery, and even knowledge and vision itself, being an unknowing

and unseeing. . . . Regardless of what image or concept or word or symbol one

may use concerning God, God is beyond these, and this we know only by the

infallible authority of those who have been graced by God with this revelation of

His uncreated glory.100

In mystical circles, language like that of Ezekiel served a mystagogical purpose, providing both visionary and exegete with a marker or “verbal icon” intended to guide one further along the path to mystical experience. This poetic use of language helps cultivate an awareness “that God is revealing himself in a symbol, and yet is beyond that imagery.”101

The notion of a “verbal icon” is fruitful here, since the icon itself provides a

particularly illuminating paradigm of the pedagogical-mystagogical dynamic we have

been examining. Nikos Matsoukas makes the link explicit, commenting that “the

Orthodox theology of icons is based on the hermeneutics of theophanies.”102

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99. Elior, Jewish Mysticism: The Infinite Expression of Freedom, 18.

100. Romanides, “Notes on the Palamite Controversy – Part II,” 253.

101. Quispel, “Ezekiel 1:26 in Jewish Mysticism and Gnosis,” 1. The same has been said with respect to early Christian doctrine, which was understood as revelation “dispensed pedagogically by God in order to be appropriated mystagogically.” Thus, “the texts claim the function of spiritual pedagogy, and assume the reader’s response in the form of a mystagogical appropriation of the text.” Bogdan G. Bucur, “Early Christian Binitarianism,” 113.

102. Matsoukas, “The Economy of the Holy Spirit,” 401.

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Matsoukas’s remark indicates how apposite the icon is to the present discussion, which has proceeded in light of the Old Testament theophanies. In brief, then, the theophanic vision or imagination we have considered might equally be termed iconic (or, as I suggest in the next chapter, perichoretic), and, in light of the foregoing discussion, we could observe that the icon evinces aspects of an indispensable picture or a face given secondary sense. Like anthropomorphic language, the icon is neither descriptive- representational103 nor a dispensable, allegorical ornament.104 Familiarity with the icon— with its face—and with its place in the complex form of life of the church, enables us to experience the dawning of an aspect, the emergence of a special sort of secondary sense.

This is not something we simply project onto the image, but neither is it something there,

“on the surface,” for just anyone to see. We must learn to see (subjective), but having

learned, we will describe ourselves as seeing what’s there (objective). Moreover, while the

icon remains an object in this world (a matter of wood and paint), it also opens to us a

view of the transfigured world, of the world irradiated by the divine energies. It sits at

the intersection of the two worlds, bridging them in its irreducible particularity.

The crucial difference, it seems, is that—unlike mundane cases of secondary

sense—in the icon we encounter not only the physiognomy of the word-object (the icon),

but of a hypostasis, a personal Other whose gaze meets my own.105 This recognition of the

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103. As Jean-Luc Marion says, the icon does not move “from the visible to the visible by resemblance,” but “from the visible to the invisible by recognition [reconnaissance].” Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K. A. Smith, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 74. Again, “for similitude (and the rivalry it provokes), the icon substitutes fidelity (and the intentional communion it permits).” Ibid., 86. Cf. “The original is truly present in the icon, but this presence is entirely based on a relationship to a person.” Schönborn, God’s Human Face, 225.

104. Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 98. Bulgakov speaks of the icon’s symbolic realism, which involves “the intergrowth or concretion of image and idea.”

105. “The person, in other words, who stands in front of the icon is not the only one doing the looking. Such a person is being seen, being acted upon, in this framework. The icon, therefore, is not a passive bit of decoration but an active presence.” Rowan

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personal Other in the icon is the iconic equivalent of the revelatory reorientation discussed above. As with our words, the icon’s secondary sense is given by grace, through which the icon becomes the place of theophanic encounter, “the place of the presence in the image of the One who is imaged . . . the place of Christ’s appearance, of our

meeting with Him in prayer.”106 As Marion says, “[t]he icon has as its only interest the crossing of gazes—thus, strictly speaking, love.”107

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Williams, “Icons and the Practice of Prayer,” n.p. Cf. Marion: “. . . the icon silently demands from its visitor that he be seen by it and that, through the visible object, the invisible gaze of the visitor be opened to see the sudden appearance of another invisible gaze.” Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, 86. Cf. Theology of the Icon, 127, 390.

106. Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 85. Emphasis in original. Cf. Marion: ““Rather than being merely an object, the image then becomes the site of a reciprocal transition, thus the instrument of a communion.” The Crossing of the Visible, 86.

107. Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, 87.

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CHAPTER VIII

POETRY AND LITURGY:

WILLIAMS’S VISION OF AESTHETICS AND A “LITURGICAL HUMANITY”

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.1

At the end of the previous chapter, I connected the poetic dimension of some

kinds of religious language to the notion of a “verbal icon.” The present chapter

examines in more detail this connection between the artistic and the iconic—poetry and

liturgy—which has been central to much of Williams’s work over the last fifteen years.2

Williams the poet and theologian is keenly interested in the aesthetic question of vision—

of how to see (and learn to see) the world aright—particularly in how such transformed

vision is bound up with the embodiment of an alternative human reality. In brief, the

present chapter examines some of the ways in which Williams’s recent work considers

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1. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), Little Gidding.

2. Rowan Williams, “Poetic and Religious Imagination”. A list of the works from this time period in which aesthetics figures centrally would include: Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000); “Making It Strange”; Ponder These Things; “Swansea’s Other Poet”; “Has Secularism Failed? Notes on the Survival of the Spirit,” 2002 Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture at the Hay Festival of Literature, Scintilla 7 (2003): 9–20; The Poems of Rowan Williams; The Dwelling of the Light; “Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness”; Grace and Necessity; Headwaters (Oxford [England]: Perpetua Press, 2008); Dostoevsky; “Icons and the Practice of Prayer”; The Lion’s World; “Orthodoxy in America”; and Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words.

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the question posed by the above lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (the fourth of his Four Quartets)—which Williams has invoked throughout his career—namely, how might we come to see ourselves and our world truly, as though for the first time.

I have argued that, across his career, Williams’s thought has become increasingly participatory and non-dualist. That development, owing in part to the convergence between Orthodox and linguistic non-dualisms, has led Williams to a period of sustained aesthetic reflection, amounting to a consideration of how this non-reductive, non-dual vision of the world might be both learned and embodied. In important ways, this most recent phase of Williams’s thought critically nuances and deepens his earlier analysis of

Augustinian semiotics, which tended to be more theoretical and abstract, reducing the complexity of significant activity to the dichotomy of sign and signified. In contrast,

Williams’s aesthetic reflections have highlighted the sheer diversity of human signification in art and language, attending patiently to material practices of significant production as well as to the “variegated patterns of activity” into which such signification is woven. At the same time, as Williams’s ecclesiastical profile has risen, this turn to aesthetics has abetted his efforts to write and speak in a more “communicative” mode.3 That is, aesthetics has provided an important bridge subject through which to engage both Christians and nonChristians in critical dialogue, particularly about the imaginative impoverishment of contemporary culture.

The present chapter consists of two sections. In the first, I examine Williams’s aesthetic perspective as articulated primarily in this “communicative” mode—that is, in ways that seek to identify connections between Christians and nonChristians. The first section’s latter half considers Williams’s 2013 Gifford Lectures,4 which embody

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3. Williams explains that the communicative mode assumes “that this or that intellectual idiom not only offers a way into fruitful conversation with the current environment but also that the unfamiliar idiom may uncover aspects of the deposit of belief hitherto unexamined.” Rowan Williams, “Prologue,” xiv.

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Williams’s proposal for a reconfigured natural theology that proceeds by examining what close attention to the pervasiveness of linguistic difficulty might disclose about the shape of human existence. By proffering an account of human signification—and so human existence itself—as responsive, creative and dispossessive, Williams’s aesthetic account invites, though cannot compel, a “theological sequel.” Accordingly, the second section “crosses” the aesthetic “bridge,” following Williams’s 2014 “Orthodoxy in

America” lecture in making connections between his aesthetic reflections and the liturgy, where the Christian vision is made “visible and effective.”5

1. Williams’s Aesthetic Writings Trace an “Excess” in the Everyday beyond Our

Habitual Modes of Perception

1.1. Williams’s Writings on Aesthetics Contrast Secular and Artistic Vision

Much of Williams’s characteristic approach to aesthetics is evident in his 2002

Hay Festival Lecture, “Has Secularism Failed?”, in which he elaborates a contrast between the moral vision offered by secularism and that represented by the arts.6

Secularism, according to Williams, offers a truncated view of the self and its world in multiple senses. In vertical terms, it could be described as shallow, shorn of depth or significance; each person or object appears in isolation from others and from any transcendent order. Horizontally, the secular view is punctiliar and abstracted from history. The notion is reminiscent of the atomism of Charles Taylor’s “buffered self,” insulated from others and possessed of its own stable identity—the isolated knowing subject before whom discrete objects appear unproblematically. Objects are simply

“there” to be seen; there is nothing ultimately inaccessible about them, no need to

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4. Published as The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (2014).

5. Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy in America,” 27:36.

6. Known as “The Woodstock of the Mind,” the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts is an annual festival held in .

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supplement my perspective with those of others or my own future encounters. In other words, it is possible for me to attain a “total perspective,” a full comprehension of the object of my knowledge, a goal pictured as conquest, control and possession.

This secular imaginary denies the possibility of perspectives that could be ultimately inaccessible to the knowing subject. What appears, what lies on the surface, is what is there to be seen, and Williams observes that the social corollary of this view dictates that the protocols for our public life ought to be determined without reference to anything intangible.7 Questions of meaning beyond those of function or usefulness are systematically excluded, such that secularism is inseparable from functionalism, which, in turn, “generate[s] a social practice that is dominated by instrumental or managerial considerations, since the perspectives that would allow you to evaluate outcomes in other terms are all confined to the private and particular sphere.”8

Everything is reduced to a single “language,” that of the marketplace in which all goods are commodities, and all commodities are commensurable.

Williams has repeatedly returned to examining how the pervasiveness of this perspective has impoverished our cultural resources, leading to what he calls

“imaginative” or “linguistic bereavement.” As more and more areas of our life are colonized by the reductive monism of the market, we are increasingly unable to make sense of important dimensions of our existence in anything other than instrumentalist terms—a state of affairs that produces disastrous results for issues ranging from education and healthcare to registering the moral seriousness of evil.9 As Williams

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7. Rowan Williams, “Has Secularism Failed?” n.p.

8. Ibid.

9. For a small sample of work in which Williams explores these concerns, see Rowan Williams, Lost Icons and Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust: After September 11 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2002). This is also a significant theme in Williams’s treatment of Dostoevsky’s fiction in Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky.

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explains, the fundamental issue here is that in a world shorn of the sacred, “there is nowhere and no one to which or to whom fidelity can be given, no source outside the will from which difference, otherness, can be absorbed in a renewal of life or energy.

Everything depends on choice.”10 Such radical voluntarism undermines any sense of accountability to a higher order, as well as the awareness of our need for timefulness— including the struggles and negotiations of history, and the narratives in which we discover identities for ourselves and our communities. We desperately need, argues

Williams, to cultivate a language nourished by springs deeper than those of such

Western proceduralism.

The arts represent one such potential source capable of prodding us toward a more robust and truthful language. Williams maintains that close attention to the creative process and the experience of art illuminates something fundamental, not simply about the practice of art, but about all human activity. Art, he says, “is unintelligible if it is not what we might call an acute case of knowledge in general.”11 In other words, attentiveness to, and in, the arts can shed light not only on what it means to be an artist, but on what it means to be human as such. Critically, Williams believes that the arts strikingly reveal the inadequacy of the secularist vision, insofar as it proves totally incapable of accounting for persistent dimensions of human existence. Simply put, secularism neglects, trivializes or evades aspects of the human.

For Williams the “secular” is what posits closure and finality of vision, leaving no room for a seeing from elsewhere. The arts, then, are fundamentally un-secular in their affirmation of “inaccessible perspectives,” as Williams explains,

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10. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky, 220.

11. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 140.

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[i]maginative construction, verbal or visual, works to make present an aesthetic

object that allows itself to be contemplated from a perspective or perspectives

other than those of the artist’s own subjectivity. Art makes possible a variety of

seeings or readings; it presents something that invites a time of reception or

perception, with the consciousness that there is always another possible

seeing/reading.12

In the experience of art, both artist and observer are made aware of the partial and provisional character of their own perspective, and so begin to be opened to the recognition and reception of the perspectives of others. Ordinary perception, Williams notes, is always incomplete, “unfinished.”13 Since my seeing is necessarily a seeing “from somewhere,” other seeings or readings are always possible; there is always more to be seen, and my particular perspective is always shadowed by other “seeings” that are inaccessible to me. If one’s perspective is never total, never exhaustive, both artist and viewer must resist the temptation to closure, to insist on the finality of their own

perspective. Against the secularist reduction to immediate and exhaustible surfaces, here

there is always an excess of meaning that pervades appearances, an elusive surplus of

significance that opens outward both temporally and socially.14 A recognition of this

excess means that the dialogue with the other can never be ended; conversely, the desire

for possession or closure can only be realized through presumptive violence.15

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12. Rowan Williams, “Has Secularism Failed?” n.p.

13. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 135.

14. Thus, things “are not only what they are”; they “give more than they have.” Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 26.

15. “Any attempt to approach human affairs as if they belonged to the world of evidence and determined outcome is bound to end in violence—ideological violence to the understanding of what humanity is, literal violence toward those who will not be convinced.” Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky, 58.

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In her work, then, the artist aims at re-presenting something of this excess, or

“dimensionality,” some sense of the connections between things that evade ordinary perception.16 As Williams explains, “The artist perceives the material of the world . . . as offering more than can appear in one moment of encounter and so begins to produce a further thing in the world that will allow that unseen or unheard life to continue itself in another mode.”17 This is a vision of the world at once inextricably material and significative—“where things matter intensely, but matter in ways that breach boundaries and carry significance beyond what they tangibly are.”18 We must learn, says Williams, to see past the surface, but “without letting go of what’s actually there on the surface.”19 For

Williams, this means that the principal labor of art is that of honesty, of risking to see things as they are, grounded in a kind of obedience to what is.20 In this way, the artist or poet’s engagement with the material world exhibits the human as such, displaying the rhythm of distinctively human activity: first, of loving attention to what is given, and then the “involvement, known or unknown, in the making of meaning or the uncovering of connection.”21 Such an account means that truthfulness—both in art and life—unfolds over time and with sustained engagement.22 It also means that art is invention, in the

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16. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 28.

17. Ibid., 149.

18. Ibid., 75.

19. Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust, ix.

20. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 142. We might observe the connection here with the “extreme attention” that Simone Weil says constitutes humanity’s creative faculty. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.

21. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 75.

22. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 137 “Art invites a time of reception or perception, with the consciousness that there is always another possible seeing/reading.” Rowan Williams, “Has Secularism Failed?” n.p.

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twofold sense of the Latin term meaning both “discovery” and “production.” The work of art is to bring out, to make manifest, the “relations and dimensions that ordinary rational naming and analysing [sic] fail to represent.”23

In part, Williams’s treatment reflects the influence of Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspect-seeing. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein considers several cases in which an object of attention can be viewed in two different modes, under two different aspects. In the familiar example of the duck-rabbit, some viewers see the figure as a duck while others see it as a rabbit. From either perspective, of course, there is the possibility of new perception, of the “dawning” of a new aspect, so that what was once a duck is now seen as a rabbit. Rather than understand such ambiguous figures as paradigmatic of

Wittgenstein’s point,24 Avner Baz argues that aspect-seeing represents a broader feature of the human experience of the world concerned with the capacity to see more than what lies on the surface, to see beyond our ordinary and habitual patterns of perception.

Wittgenstein develops this distinction between ordinary, habitual perception, on the one hand—“knowing” or “seeing” (un-italicized)—and on the other, “seeing as” or “seeing,” which refers to a change of aspect, “the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged” (PI, p. 196e). To use Wittgenstein’s example: while looking at someone’s face, I suddenly see a resemblance I had not seen before. In one sense, of course, the face is unchanged; in another, it is entirely transformed before my eyes. “Noticing an aspect,” then, is not simply the seeing of appearances; rather, it involves our attention, recognition, and self-involvement. This does not mean that aspect- seeing is merely subjective, as Baz explains,

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23. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 28.

24. That they should not be seen as exemplary is, as Baz argues, due to the fact that in more typical cases of aspect-seeing it is not so simple to see both aspects and to easily flip back and forth between them. Avner Baz, “What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?” Philosophical Investigations 23, no. 2 (April 2000): 100.

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The most important thing about the aspect is that there is a sense in which it isn’t

really there and a sense in which it is very much there; a sense in which to speak

about ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ with respect to it is to miss its point and yet another

sense in which in seeing it and in giving it expression you are truer to the object

than if you stick to objective terms – the terms, that is, of what Wittgenstein calls

‘the language-game of reporting’ (PI, p. 190i), or ‘the language-game of

information’ (RPPI, 888).25

In other words, seeing an aspect means looking beyond the finality of appearances here and now, but it is also seeing something that is genuinely there to be seen, something to which we may try to draw another’s attention, and to which they may finally remain blind. It is a skill we can learn from, and share with, a community.

In Wittgensteinian terms, then, we might speak of the artist’s aim as the prompting of an altered vision, one in which a new aspect dawns over the whole. In one sense, of course, things remain as they were, still susceptible of flat, secular description.

On the other hand, however, everything is changed, as new connections are made and new meanings realized. In a sense, Wittgenstein says, this new aspect is subject to the will, not as arbitrary self-assertion or projection, but in the sense that it “makes sense to say:

‘Now see the figure like this’.”26 We can try to see something in a new way, and can be exhorted to do so. At the same time, however, one cannot simply will themselves to see a new aspect, whether in a face or a painting; it “flashes” upon us, comes to us as an unexpected gift. Aspects are neither simply objective, “out there” to be empirically perceived, nor are they purely subjective, “in here” to be projected outward. They occupy a space between subject and object.

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25. Baz, “What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?” 106.

26. Ibid., 109. Italics in original. The inset quotation is from PI, p. 213.

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Accordingly, on Williams’s telling, art is always in danger of going astray in either of two directions. On one hand, the artist can refuse to see past the surface, closing her eyes to the deeper connections waiting to be seen. There is a kind of flat- footedness or tone-deafness that closes itself off from a work’s resonance, settling instead for dull didacticism or flat representationalism. As Williams explains, such simplistic

notions of realism fail radically in the artistic task because they aim “to reproduce a

world in a way that takes for granted where its boundary lines are drawn by our ordinary

conceptual mapping.”27 This is the that prevails in secularism, which sees too

little and claims too much, assuming that one has comprehended and so finished the work

of knowing.

On the other hand, the subjectivist danger appears in the form of expressivism,

emerging whenever the artist seeks simply to express herself, to impose her own will on the world. The Romantic picture of the isolated artist whose work manifests only some private inner depths reflects this basic distortion of the artist’s vocation. Again following

Maritain, Williams stresses that art involves respect for and obedience to the internal necessity of the work itself. Far from asserting her own will, the artist is involved in a kind of withdrawal, of “letting be,” a point to which I return below. For Williams, then,

“[t]he ethic of the artist, if we can speak in such terms, is detachment, dispossession of the desire to hold everything inside your own head.”28

Art, then, is emphatically not simply the manifestation of the artist’s interiority.

Rather than presenting the world in terms of her own consciousness, the artist attempts to present both herself and her world in terms of “something not yet fully realized or grasped.”29 In other words, human creativity is inevitably political. The artist adds to the

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27. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 26.

28. Ibid., 126.

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totality of the world’s language in a significative gesture that proclaims her

“dissatisfaction with the existing world and existing linguistic options. The reality before

[her] is obscurely incomplete.”30 Having immersed herself in the world of particulars, having seen beyond the limits of ordinary perception, the artist returns from “the borders of language to confirm our suspicions that the world is not to be merely accepted, but accepted and transformed.”31 In attempting to make manifest the world’s hidden connections, art aims to create new possibilities for transformation, to open the present to the newness of the future.32 Imagining a world “that is both new and secretly inscribed in all that is already seen,” the artist projects herself and her world into an unknown future. Accordingly, Williams echoes both Maritain and Bulgakov in stressing that art can never be separated from the quest for justice. It can never rest content with the mere production of beautiful things to be looked at. Rather, art wants the world to change, and its uncovering of the world’s depth genuinely helps make such change possible. In this, the arts take their place alongside other socially creative activities since there is a profound connection between “the human creativity that goes into art, and the human creativity that goes into the building of society.”33 One of Bulgakov’s favorite quotations from Dostoevsky says that “Beauty will save the world,” and Williams takes both authors to mean that there is something genuinely transformative and revolutionary in the labor of art. The artist, like the person who fights for justice, dispossesses herself in order to “allow[] truth, reality to come to light.”34

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29. Rowan Williams, “Poetic and Religious Imagination,” 180.

30. Ibid., 179–80.

31. Ibid., 186.

32. Ibid., 182.

33. Rowan Williams, “Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness,” n.p.

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1.2. Williams’s Gifford Lectures Contrast Description and Representation

Williams’s theology of the arts possesses a number of striking features, not least the way in which he attends not only to the aesthetic experience and the idea of beauty, but also to the creative process itself and its place in human life. Seen in this way, the arts appear as one form of the distinctively human activity, i.e., gratuitous sense-making. We are, in Herbert McCabe’s words, “linguistic animals.” In his 2013 Gifford Lectures,

Williams accordingly develops his aesthetic reflections further in connection with language, posing the question, “Does the way we talk as human beings tell us anything about God?”35 In response, Williams suggests that our everyday strategies for dealing with linguistic difficulty, with language “under pressure,” are “where we might begin to see some of the ways in which talking about God is not a marginal eccentricity in human language but something congruent with the more familiar and less noticed oddities of how we speak.”36 Building on his earlier contrast between the secular and artistic visions,

Williams contends that the sheer diversity and flexibility of our language suggests how religious believers’ claims to speak truthfully about God might be understood as something other than the production of definitions of God or as “detailed descriptions of ‘what it is like to be divine.’”37

The Gifford lectures were established with a mandate “to promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term — in other words, the knowledge of God.” While sharing some of the reservations of past lecturers concerning such an enterprise, Williams finds value in a “reconfigured” natural theology,

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34. Ibid.

35. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, ix.

36. Ibid., xi.

37. Ibid., x.

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understood as the practice of “mapping the points where things become interestingly difficult, where the ordinary comes under pressure.”38 In such moments, Williams thinks, we may find that we have exhausted the level of discourse with which we started, without having reached an ending. That is, there is “an impulse to continue when

‘ordinary’ description is done with.”39 To go on speaking, we must change registers, shifting our expectations away from the assumption that there will be definitive closure and toward an acceptance that we ourselves are being confronted with something that is interrogating us.

By identifying areas in our linguistic practice “where routine description fail[s] to exhaust what ‘need[s] to be said,’” such a natural theology might offer a series of

“preparatory exercises for theology,” making possible but not mandating a “theological sequel.”40 On this view, a thickly textured account of the eccentricities of actual linguistic practice helps to disclose something about the shape of human life unaccounted for by the purely “secular” or “descriptive,” and Williams suggests that this shape coheres with much of what Christian doctrine says about God, the world and humanity.

Theology, then, will have an interest in those areas of language where language

“puts questions to itself and destabilizes our expectations that we can settle or complete our thinking of the world we inhabit.”41 These everyday strategies for speaking about the world’s excess help us develop “a repertoire of styles and idioms that undercut the possibility of understanding our speech as attempting straightforward description.”42

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38. Ibid., 3.

39. Ibid., 9.

40. Ibid., 8, 185.

41. Ibid., 17.

42. Ibid., 173.

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And we will need a well-honed repertoire of just this sort if we hope to talk about the

“sacred,” the most serious linguistic disruption of all precisely because it concerns the character of finite being itself, touching all possible subjects of discourse precisely since it cannot be numbered among them. Such language, says Williams, is going to be

“linguistically eccentric in a uniquely marked way.”43

In thinking about how we move beyond ordinary description, Williams echoes his earlier Hay Festival Lecture by employing a contrast between simple description, reproduction, or repetition on one hand and what he calls representation on the other.

Where ordinary description is “a mapping exercise in which we assume that the task is to produce a certain traceable structural parallel between what we say and what we perceive,” representation seeks to express the presence in another mode of what we are discussing.44 Williams’s revised understanding of participation is evident in his commendation of an “analogical” discourse that is able to identify the exercise of one’s agency in the agency of another, and so also to discern “continuity in material distinctness, continuity between discrete agents of a certain kind and between knower and known.”45 Representation, then, is a “way of speaking that may variously be said to seek to embody, translate, make present or re-form what is perceived.”46 Here we might think of the way in which an artist attempts to communicate something of her own experience in the medium of her expertise. Going beyond description as the mapping of a particular set of “facts,” representation “absorb[s] the life of what is encountered at a level that makes it possible both to recognize and to represent that life in another

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43. Ibid., 31.

44. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 22. Williams discusses the concept further in the appendix, “On Representation,” 186–197.

45. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 21.

46. Ibid., 22.

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form.”47 Thus, in speaking, Williams says, “we make things other than themselves,”

“transporting kinds of perceived life across the territorial boundaries of initial strict description” in order to reproduce that life in another way.48

The act of representation is thus creative rather than automatic or mechanical, since the relationship between what we are talking about and how we talk about it is

radically underdetermined. That is to say, sense must be made, constructed, and this

activity is pervasive in our use of language, since it is found wherever an object is

rendered in concept or metaphor—that is, where, in some fashion, the life of the known

continues in the knower. Here Williams is translating the Aristotelian-Thomistic picture

of the action of an object’s form on the knowing subject. At the same time, the accent on

the object’s activity is equally redolent of the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of energies.

Williams emphasizes that the act of representation, as an underdetermined act in

excess of ordinary description, is both free and not free (on the conventional

understanding). On one hand, such representation is free, in the sense that it is more

than a stimulus-response system and cannot be accounted for “by a simple energy

exchange model.”49 Humans possess a “‘feedback’ capacity, a reflexive dimension” that

enables them to stand apart from the “material, causal nexus.”50 As Cornelius Ernst said,

through language the world to which we belong becomes the world that belongs to us.

On the other hand, this freedom is not absolute. Our speech is deeply constrained, and

that in (at least) two senses. First, we are obliged to make ourselves intelligible, to make

sense to others.51 Second, our language is always trying “to allow what is there to show

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47. Ibid., 60.

48. Ibid., 60, 63.

49. Ibid., 52.

50. Ibid., 61.

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itself.”52 In other words, we are answerable, both to someone(s) and to something. That we

are so answerable—both to others and to the world given in language—is evident in the

fact that we so often find it difficult to say what we want, to make ourselves present to

others in our speech. “That’s not quite what I mean.” “How can I put this?” “Does that

make sense?” The difficulty of making ourselves understood, to ourselves no less than to

others, shows that sense is neither automatic nor arbitrary.

The anthropology emerging into view is one which understands what is

distinctively human “in terms of receptiveness to a set of signals from the environment

that do not allow of a final, ideally complete reading.”53 In other words, the nature of the

human self is “irreducibly time-bound.”54 Having “staked a position,” we expose our words (and ourselves) to challenge and revision as each gesture, each word becomes the occasion for unpredictable future response. Language is thus unfinished and unfinishable: “there’s no final vantage point, no final representation.”55 This unfinishedness owes to indeterminacy at both “poles” of the relation between knowing subject and object. At one end stands

an object which is constantly being uncovered at different levels or in different

perspectives, as if there is in principle no end to the ways in which it can be

understood and represented; at the other is a subject which is constantly involved

in drawing out the life of what is represented by more and more initiatives in

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51. The “sheer inescapability of making interpersonal sense”makes absolute freedom impossible. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 59.

52. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 60.

53. Ibid., 62.

54. Ibid., 73.

55. Ibid., 62.

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‘reading’ the object through one medium after another. In short, at both ends we

have an indeterminate horizon: the object is not to be exhausted by the multiple

representations that keep being generated; the subject is not to be constrained by

the limits of description or reflection.56

Each time I return to the novel or the painting, I “see” more there. I discover an excess of meaning, as if the object “proposes” more of itself than can be captured in any one account. Moreover, I myself am changed by the passage of time, so that the mere repetition of words, far from guaranteeing an identical experience, cannot say the same

thing. On this view, the unknown is “not so much an elusive interiority as the range of

possible relations in which the object stands or may stand. And this means that the only

way of augmenting or refining our knowledge is to ‘go on.’”57 The corollary is that

understanding appears as less a matter of penetrating into the inner workings of an

object or of “gaining insight into a timeless mental content ‘behind’ or ‘within’ what is

said” than it is “a matter of knowing what to do or say next,” how to continue.58

In addition to being free and temporal, our language is also material. That is, it

rests on “a closely woven scheme of physical interaction.”59 Here we must dispel two

misleading models of the relation of speech and thought. On one hand, we are not

“recipients of individualized sets of material stimuli,” raw perceptual data which we then

translate into language.60 On the other, language does not wholly deliver reality over to

us, giving us magical access to some hidden mystical interior in the object. Despite their

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56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., 79.

58. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 68. Emphasis in original.

59. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 97.

60. Ibid., 110.

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differences, both of these theories assume that there is some “gap” between mind and object—between language and what language is about—which must be crossed.

Briefly, there is no gap. Language belongs to the world, and the world to language. Language is not epiphenomonal, running on a parallel track to the world. On the contrary, it belongs to our evolving material universe as “its natural integrating factor,” evident in the fact that such language is produced by bodies working in space and time.61 Equally, language is that by which we have access to the world, by which the world belongs to us.62 The object in view cannot be considered in abstraction from the linguistic means by which we examine it. There is no raw, pre-linguistic set of atomistic data. To the contrary, “[t]he material universe appears as an essentially symbolic complex.

. . . an intelligible universe, because the unfolding story of material leads to speech, to the expression and sharing of intelligible structure.”63 We venture in search of meaning and find that the world in some way meets or answers our search for significance. It is, in some sense “in tune” with our capacity to think it. Or, as Williams says, following Hegel, “what is there for perception of any kind is there to be thought, to

be rendered in concept and metaphor. . . . Whatever we encounter is something that

triggers capacities for recognition and representation in our minds. And it is this insight .

. . that has suggested . . . the language of a finite reality that consistently ‘gives’ itself to

be known.”64 Matter itself is inherently symbolic, “already ‘saturated’ with the workings

of mind.”65 The material environment thus stands before us “not as a fixed object for

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61. Ibid., 102.

62. Cf. Summa Theologica I.85.2 sed contra. My thanks to Brad Kallenberg for bringing this connection to my attention.

63. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 102.

64. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 31–32. Emphasis in original.

65. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 101.

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describing and managing but as a tantalizing set of invitations, material offered for reworking and enlarging.”66

This note of materiality also includes the bodily nature of our knowing: “[e]ach of us as an intelligent linguistic subject stands at a unique intersection of symbolic action, simply in virtue of standing where we physically stand—as bodies.”67

Accordingly, my own understanding of and ability to respond to the world will be nourished by the presence of others, who, precisely as embodied, occupy different physical perspectives on our shared environment. The challenge, then, is to make space for the other perspective to appear, to allow ourselves to encounter the bodily presence of another who represents for me another “centre of meaningful experience, another point of view, the focus of another intelligible situation—and therefore a contributor in ways I may not easily grasp to my own intelligence.”68 Though language connects us, we remain ineluctably separate from one other. But rather than construe such distances, and the failure to know that results, as an “epistemological lack” to be obviated, Williams insists that our inability to stand in one another’s place is the guarantee of love, attention and respect.

Turning to the linguistic extremes of poetry, paradox and metaphorical extravagance, Williams considers the ways in which language “under pressure” pushes

“habitual or conventional speech out of shape”:69 “The environment we encounter and inhabit is more than it seems; sometimes it takes extreme and excessive speech to prompt this acknowledgement, and the deliberate ‘making extreme’ of our language is a tool of

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66. Ibid., 60.

67. Ibid., 117.

68. Ibid., 115.

69. Ibid., 150.

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discovery.”70 Such forms of “calculated shock”71 seek to enlarge both our speaking and perceiving, helping us to cultivate our imaginations beyond the possibilities of ordinary description as new perceptions are “pushed into being.”72 The unexpected association or the surprising metaphor unsettles us, makes things strange, and so prompts us to a new level of recognition. Unsurprisingly, then, we also turn to the varieties of linguistic extremism when we try to speak of God, indicating thereby both the inadequacy of any single definitive schema and the need to generate new “ways of ‘going on,’ new modes of action.”73

Of course, given our passion for exhaustive and rational description, it is just as likely that we will react with panicked isolation when we find our rational models and predictions failing to cope with reality. The work of extreme language, then, “is both to break open this isolation and anxiety and to offer the possibility of recognition in and through the reality of what is at first felt as strange.”74 Williams thus describes such extreme language as a “necessary tool of human maturity,” insofar as it “can locate us differently in our world, undercutting our sense of being a finished subject with a clear agenda of need and desire, ironizing our claims to self-awareness and repeatedly persuading us to begin again in learning what it is to speak and represent.”75

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70. Ibid., 139–40.

71. Ibid., 148.

72. Ibid., 58.

73. Ibid., 149–50.

74. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 153. Emphasis in original.

75. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 153.

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2. Williams Construes Art as a Kind of “Preparatory Exercise” that Finds Its

Grounding in the Liturgy

2.1. Williams’s Aesthetics Trace an ‘Excess’ in Artistic Activity

For Williams, art re-envisions the world in the light of new possibilities, thereby making something of that newness possible. Absent the illumination of faith, however, such desire is bound to remain undetermined and undirected, a blind groping after meaning. If we continue to expand the network of meaningful connections disclosed by the arts, however, we are confronted with the question of “the context that would finally make sense of the effort to make sense: a first word in the conversation, a first making of communicative form.”76 In other words, while the creative process cannot amount to an argument for God’s existence, the longing we discover in the artistic world witnesses to the restlessness of the human heart, which can only find rest in God. For Williams, this means that all true art is “iconic” in an expanded sense—it draws us out of isolation and opens us to unseen connections which have the potential to transfigure the present reality. The icon, one might say, articulates clearly the nature and function of all art—to open the world to the transforming “energies” of God. That is, icons “do” liturgically and intentionally what all art “does” at least potentially and inchoately.77

In order to develop further the implications of this claim, let us look more closely at the icon. First, in depicting some person or part of the world, the icon never aims at mere representation. Rather, the icon is constructed so as to show “human beings and situations as they are in the light of God’s action”78 and, actively “to open the world to

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76. Rowan Williams, “The Nature of a Sacrament,” 200. 77. Rowan Williams, “Christian Art and Cultural Pluralism:˘ Reflections on ‘L’Art de l’Icone’, by Paul Evdokimov,” review of L’Art de l’Icone: Theologie de la Beauté, Paul Evdokimov, Eastern Churches Review 8, no. 1 (1976): 39.

78. Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light, xviii.

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the ‘energy’ of God at work in what is being shown.”79 In this sense icons present us with a surface that invites us not simply to look at it, but to look through it to see the depth of creative energy already at work. If, as Augustine says, God is more interior to me than I am to myself (interior intimo meo), then the question for Christian living is never how to

“insert” God into the situation, but how to open every human perception to the action of the God who is already present. According to Williams, this is what icons prayerfully attempt to embody and communicate. Summarizing the eighth-century iconodule argument, Williams notes that the fundamental point is that, “while the divine life in

Jesus is indeed inseparable from the human, it acts on the human nature, shows itself through it, transfigures it. If we paint a picture of Jesus, we’re not trying to show a humanity apart from divine life, but a humanity soaked through with divine life.”80 In this sense, the icon affirms the world, but it is “an affirmation made in the light of a non- worldly judgement, pointing beyond itself to a truth which cannot be articulated or represented. Iconography is the art of apophaticism.”81 This apophatic reserve is not simply the “negative” moment in a greater dialectical resolution, but rather the silence that must attend the absolute unknowability of God. Accordingly, reverence is given to icons not as magical objects, but as sites at which the observable world has been

“thinned out” enough to show something of the “white heat at the center of everything.”82 Before the icon, says Williams, “you become aware that you are present to

God and that God is working on you.”83

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79. Rowan Williams, Ponder These Things, xv.

80. Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light, xv-xvi.

81. Rowan Williams, “Christian Art and Cultural Pluralism,” 39.

82. Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust, 35.

83. Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light, xix.

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To say that all art is “iconic,” however, is not to say that every work of art is an icon in the proper sense. All art longs for transformation, perhaps, but apart from the

Gospel such desire lacks focus, determination, and the means to attain its desired end.84

In Western terms, one might say that human creativity stands to proper (the

action of God) as nature stands to grace: it longs for its supernatural end without being

able to attain it. However great the technical skill and artistic virtuosity, apart from

God’s grace human effort is powerless to bring about the desired transformation.85 The arts have an integrity proper to themselves (which means, among other things, that they cannot simply be co-opted for purposes of religious didacticism), but on their own, they cannot achieve their final end.86 Far from endorsing aestheticism, then, the Beauty that

Dostoevky says will save the world can only be divine Beauty, as it works in and through created beauty. Thus, the arts represent an expression of the desire for God which only finds fulfillment in the gratuitous life and liturgy of the Church. Accordingly, we might expect that theology has a story to tell about the world and human creativity in which art finds certain features of its own activity meaningfully illuminated and grounded.87 In the light of revelation, art can attain an “elevated awareness” of its own nature and meaning.88

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84. As Bulgakov notes, the transfiguration at which every creative act aims “cannot be fulfilled by the powers of art and human will alone.” Bulgakov, Sergii Bulgakov, 157. “Every creative act strives to attain an absolute status, not only in regard to its origins, but also in regard to its goal. It longs to create a world of beauty, to triumph over chaos and convert it to order; but what does it actually save or convert?” Bulgakov, Sergii Bulgakov, 154.

85. Bulgakov, Sergii Bulgakov, 157.

86. In a striking image, Bulgakov pictures unredeemed art in the place of Simon of Cyrene, forced to carry the cross of its own tragically unrealized longing until the time of its salvation. Bulgakov, Sergii Bulgakov, 158.

87. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 169–70.

88. Bulgakov, Sergii Bulgakov, 157.

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To understand human creativity in this way (i.e., situated within the context of revelation) is, in a sense, to trace the excess of meaning in artistic activity itself. To suggest that the artist tugs on strands of meaning anchored ultimately in the Logos.

That at their extremity, which is simultaneously their innermost depth, artistic connections are held and sustained by the activity of the eternal Word (cf. Col. 1:17;

Heb. 1:3).89 In this light, the artist’s protest at the incompleteness of the present and her longing for the world’s transformation is an abiding if obscure sign of the eschatological character of all human creativity.90 This longing takes its proper shape in the context of

Christian hope, which witnesses to and anticipates the Holy Spirit’s transforming work.

Accordingly, Williams has explored Eastern Orthodox pneumatology in developing the connections between divine and human creativity.91

In Orthodox theology, the Spirit is closely linked with the Kingdom of God and its ongoing realization in the endless diversity of the human and natural worlds.92

Evdokimov thus insists that sanctity and creativity are bound together in the Spirit.93

The same Spirit both makes holy and gives new life and is thus the ground not only of

holiness but of newness and creativity. She is the “Spirit of the age to come,”

apprehended when “freedom, creativity, inspiration break in.”94 As the dynamic source

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89. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 82.

90. Rowan Williams, “The Spirit of the Age to Come,” 620.

91. See especially A Margin of Silence and “Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness”.

92. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 41.

93. “Of the several theses advanced by Evdokimov concerning the nature of culture and art, that which seems to be fundamental is his vehement denial that ‘creativity’ and ‘sanctity’ are real alternatives, or in any way mutually exclusive. There is a sanctity in creativity, and, of course, a creativity in sanctity.” Rowan Williams, “Christian Art and Cultural Pluralism,” 38.

94. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 14.

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of creative energy, the Spirit is continually breaking the present open to the possibility of newness and reconciliation. Thus, in terms germane to the arts, Williams affirms

Bulgakov’s description of the Spirit’s work of prophecy not as the giving of new

information about the future, but as a way of seeing and understanding the present in

light of its eschatological background: “understanding what it is here and now that

pushes towards God's future.”95 Such prophetic vision is the “ground of Christian social and political discernment,”96 which, in its compassionate protest, manifests the vivifying presence of God’s Spirit in the world.97

When the practice of art is true to its nature, Williams contends, it demands self- displacement, a refusal to impose one’s own will on the work of art. The artist seeks instead the patience and humility to stand back, to be receptive to the other, to “let be.”

For Williams, this creative impulse is a manifestation of love that echoes, albeit imperfectly, the divine love manifest in creation. As Williams says, “[t]hat the world should be is for God (so to speak) to withdraw but not to be absent. It is for God to let be a world with its own freedom, its own integrity. The God who creates a world of freedom, a world that is itself, is a kenotic God, a self-giving, a self-emptying God whose being is for the other.”98 The love of God, dimly mirrored in human love (artistic or otherwise), is manifest as unbroken respect for the otherness of the other, which entails a refusal of the violence that would reduce the other to another self.99 The challenge of the

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95. Ibid., 19.

96. Ibid., 20.

97. Rowan Williams, “Poetic and Religious Imagination,” 185; Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 14–15.

98. Rowan Williams, “Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness.”

99. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky, 235.

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full measure of humanity, then, is to come to understand an otherness that is not threatening, an understanding that is itself rooted in the life of God.100

This is not to say that all human creativity is a simple image of the divine, much less that all artists are saints. In fact, almost the opposite:

divine creativity is not capable of imitation; it is uniquely itself, a creation from

nothing that realizes not an immanent potential in the maker but a pure desire

for life and joy in what is freely made. [Divine creativity] is the limit case of

labour [sic] for the good of what is made. But though divine creation cannot be

imitated, what it does is to define the nature of a love that is involved in making.

It is both the gift of self and the gift of self.101

In other words, what we see in truly human creativity is the creaturely expression of

God’s own form of life, that is, his wisdom. Here Williams takes up Bulgakov’s controverted concept of Sophia, understood not as the quasi-personal “substance” of divinity but as theological shorthand for the “tone, the quality, the mode of God’s very being as shared, as outpoured and returned in love.”102 It is through the Spirit, then, that

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100. In a moving passage on Dostoevky, Williams explains, “The presence of an otherness that is ultimately quite inaccessible to me and resistant to my control, the otherness that makes unceasing dialogue possible, is not a presence that simply denies my identity, a threat to my security and ontological stability, an enemy never to be overcome. It is an offer and an invitation: it is an otherness that seeks itself in me, and enables me to seek myself in it, not a diminution of my own solidity but the condition for it, because what is utterly without foundations is a selfhood cut off from dialogue, from the active presence of the other. And the ‘iconic’ other, the holy image either in the literal form of the icon or in the translation of the icon into narrative in a holy person, is likewise not a kind of impenetrable surface repelling my identity, nor a solid presence invading my weak and under defended territory, but a presence that offers to nourish and augment what I am.” Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky, 208.

101. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 164.

102. Rowan Williams, “Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness,” n.p.

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creatures can come to share in the life marked by God’s own Sophia—i.e., the life lived by the energy of dispossession and outpouring.

By way of summarizing Williams’s aesthetics, we might consider Andrei Rublev’s icon of the hospitality of Abraham—which depicts the visitation of Abraham by three angels as found in Genesis 18.103 From very early on, these three scriptural visitors were understood by Christians as a foreshadowing of the revelation of the Trinity. It is, I think, not an overstatement to say that Rublev’s icon practically constitutes a theological source for Williams: he returns to it repeatedly in his work, and it beautifully encapsulates much of what he wants to say about the kenotic thread woven through his meditations on God, humanity and the arts (e.g., the Trinitarian self-gift, the endless

“deflections” of love).104 For Williams, then, Rublev’s icon makes explicit the invitatory character of all truly “iconic” art. As has often been remarked, the empty space at the table is for us: “there is, so to speak, a fourth seat which completes the picture, and that is where we observers are.”105 But to be drawn into this communion is to be involved in the Trinitarian perichoresis, the circling of endlessly reflected love: “drawn by the Son towards the Father, drawn into the Father’s breathing out of the Spirit so that the Son’s life may be again made real in the world.”106

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103. Williams’s theological meditations are frequently nourished by his readings of icons. In addition to his two books of reflections on icons—Ponder These Things (2002) and The Dwelling of the Light (2004)—I would highlight the role played by the icon of Jesus’ baptism in Williams’s consideration of baptism in Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), ch. 1.

104. In this connection, Florensky remarked that “the most persuasive philosophic proof of God’s existence is the one the textbooks never mention, the conclusion to which can perhaps best express the whole meaning: There exists the icon of the Holy Trinity by St. Andrei Rublev, therefore, God exists.” Pavel Florensky, , trans. Donald Sheehan & Olga Andrejev, introduction by Donald Sheehan (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 68.

105. Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light, 58.

106. Ibid., 57.

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Williams sees here a paradigm for the function of all iconic art—art that invites us to a new vision of the world, that draws us out of our fantasies of self-enclosed identity, and that opens us to the nourishing presence of the other/Other. Contrary to the narrowness of the secular vision, such iconic art opens space, space in which we may discover (and be discovered by) the movement of God’s Spirit. And, Williams asks, if the

Spirit articulates the self-giving love of God—the excess of love found both “within” and

“without” God’s life—must we not say that the Spirit is somehow at work wherever that selfless, dispossessive life is found?107 In obscurely echoing the self-giving love of God,

Williams suggests that truly human creativity works “with the grain of the universe,”

resonating like an overtone set ringing by the fundamental note of God’s love in creation

and incarnation.108 By tuning us, connecting us, with the “self-emptying, transforming

sacrifice of God,” the Holy Spirit “equips us to transfigure the world, sacramentally but

also artistically, socially and environmentally.”109 Williams has recently returned to this

note of sacramental transfiguration in a lecture that grounds his aesthetic reflections in

the Christian liturgy.

2.2. Williams’s “Orthodoxy in America” Lecture Grounds His Aesthetics in an Account of

“Liturgical Humanity”

Williams identifies his 2014 “Orthodoxy in America” lecture as an effort to

highlight themes in Eastern Orthodox theology that are significant for the “cultural

future of Christianity.”110 Drawing heavily throughout on the work of Olivier Clément,

Williams suggests that the Church’s foremost need is “to make resurrection visible” by

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107. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 25.

108. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 165.

109. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 30.

110. Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy in America.”

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offering the world a distinct kind of humanness: a “liturgical humanity” that embraces the twin concepts of freedom and personhood and which Williams finds embodied in the

Orthodox liturgy and articulated by Orthodox theology. Williams appeals to Orthodoxy because he believes the Eastern tradition sees more clearly than the West “how and why the action of the liturgical assembly is the defining reality for the Church,”111 reflected not merely in the Church’s words or concepts, but in its character as manifestation.

According to Williams, Orthodox liturgical activity “specifies and incarnates a culture”

with a distinctive anthropology, which is importantly at odds with prevailing cultural

notions about human freedom and flourishing. If Christians are to engage persuasively

with a world full of various forms of dehumanization, “we better be explicit about the

connection between Christian anthropology and Christian liturgy.”112 Williams’s lecture,

consonant with his earlier “communicative” contrast between the secular and religious-

artistic perspectives, articulates a vision of this liturgical humanity.

As with his Giffords, Williams’s approach to liturgical humanity involves close

attention to liturgical action and language in order to trace the shape of human existence

disclosed therein. In this context, Williams notes that liturgical anthropology is first of

all positioned as responsive and dependent. Liturgical language assumes the priority of

divine action, to which it seeks to respond appropriately. Participation in liturgical

action thus entails the willingness to acknowledge that we are not our own creators.

Moreover, the fact that we are “recipients of communication before we are speakers,”

means that we are also agents who are always liable to interruption.113 In this light our

speech must be “consistently hesitant,” says Williams, because we recognize that what

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111. Ibid., 48:13.

112. Ibid., 27:36.

113. Ibid., 32.14.

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our speech says is “a belated attempt to trace the act that has given it birth.”114 Liturgical

humanity is thus both “preceded and overtaken by the abundant, even the excessive,

communication of God.”115

All of this means, second, that the liturgical self is historical—immersed in the

temporal processes of dialogue and learning—a fact equally manifest in the fact that the

liturgy, as enacted, unfolds in time. In this respect, the liturgical conception of the self

stands at odds with contemporary practices that deny history in favor of timeless

abstractions or the momentary satisfaction of needs without reflection or self-scrutiny.

Indeed, Williams argues that “[t]he Christian revelation is what makes history possible

because it speaks of a world both interrupted by the Word of God and transfigured in all

its living complexity by the Word of God.”116

Humanity is both addressed and historical; we are given time in which to respond, which says, third, that humanity is responsible. To be human, says Williams, “is to be summoned to answer.”117 That God has addressed humanity in an act that goes beyond the categories of nature means that humanity itself is “taken beyond repeatable processes and made capable of responsibility . . . Capable of answering, and so to be changed by a relation.”118 Revelation thus makes humanity responsible by locating it beyond the determinations of cause-and-effect relations. Clément, cited by Williams, thus says that the Gospel “wounds history with the wound of eternity” and so “opens up in it the path of repentance and so of hope.”119 On such a view, freedom is not simply

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114. Ibid., 32:32.

115. Ibid., 34.35.

116. Ibid., 22:05.

117. Ibid., 24:15.

118. Ibid., 22:15.

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“the absolute liberty of the choosing ego,” but rather the liberty realized in responsible communion, through which one can attain “to the measure of the full stature of Christ”

(Eph 4:13).120

Fourth, liturgical humanity is called to transition and transformation, the crossing

over into a new form of life, indeed to a new world. As Williams remarks, “The humanity

embodied or enacted in the liturgy is a humanity acknowledging its need to be moved, to

be drawn from one world to another. A humanity acknowledging that the world it

occupies habitually is a world in question and in need of opening onto another

comprehensive frame of reference.”121 The liturgy offers time in which that transition

from one world to another can be “traced and enacted,”122 thus affirming that “there is

another space to occupy in which distance is not alienation and time is an unfolding of

constantly fresh perspectives on the inexhaustible abundance of God’s act.”123 Clément

emphasizes our correlative need to recognize the tendency to shrink from this passage

into new life by withdrawing into the isolation and tantamount to death.124

Accordingly, Williams notes, the possibility of passing into new life entails recognizing

the ways in which, left to ourselves, “we live in the direction of isolation, a fallen space

that separates and imprisons, where I am both at odds with myself and unable to escape

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119. Ibid., 24:00.

120. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky, 221.

121. Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy in America,” 36:06.

122. Ibid., 35:00.

123. Ibid., 38:00.

124. John Chryssavgis comments that “The liturgy is an act of communion, but only after the recognition of human isolation and fragmentation.” John Chryssavgis, Light Through Darkness: The Orthodox Tradition, Traditions of Christian Spirituality Series (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2004), 16.

405

from myself.”125 Williams connects this moment of transition to the Orthodox icon of

Christ’s resurrection, which depicts Christ’s descent to the underworld in order to raise up Adam and Eve and the saints of the first covenant: “This is the pivot on which the world turns, and the transition through which liturgy takes us. . . . when the fear of death is acknowledged and overcome in the light of the resurrection, something else becomes possible, and this possibility is what is enacted in the climax of the liturgical action.”126

Williams contends that liturgical anamnesis underscores the importance of memory for liturgical humanity, of the need to be mindful of “a context wider than that of the individual or even the community in this moment.” Strikingly, this act of remembrance includes the future: the prayer immediately following the words of institution in the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom call the faithful to remember Christ’s cross, burial, ascension, sitting at the Father’s right hand, and parousia.127 Williams stresses that the liturgy thus enjoins us to remember the future, including the second coming, which means bringing an eschatological perspective to bear in the present.128 To

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125. Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy in America,” 37:40. Williams has remarked that “the most truthful image we can have of hell is of God eternally knocking on a closed door that we are struggling to hold shut.” Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust, 151. In similar terms, he describes death as “the refusal of a certain relation with the truth represented by mutuality and exposure.” Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky, 213.

126. Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy in America,” 39:14.

127. Commenting on Maximus’s Mystagogy, Andrew Louth observes that “the bishop’s descent from his throne and dismissal of the catechumens, after the Gospel, symbolize the Second Coming of Christ and the final judgement. Everything that follows, therefore—the whole of the liturgy of the faithful—is understood by Maximus to take place after the Second Coming. . . . The proclamation of the Gospel is then, for Maximus, indeed the ‘end of history’; to hear the Gospel is truly to pass into the eschata, the last times.” Andrew Louth, “Space, Time and the Liturgy,” in Encounter Between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy, ed. Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 229.

128. Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy in America,” 43:40.

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remember what has to be remembered in liturgy, then, is “to be aware that what is now happening for this particular group of people is inseparable from and unintelligible without first the events which generate liturgy in the first place, the historical events that make liturgical transition possible, and second, the world of reference that generates or animates those events.”129 In this way, humanity, together with our past and future, is

“imbued” with more meaning than can be grasped here and now.130 The implication, says Williams, is that “[l]iturgical humanity cannot compose and possess a final account of itself. It knows that whatever is immediate and accessible is partial and that it lives out of all kinds of otherness.”131

Forestalling dualistic misunderstanding, Williams emphasizes that this passage from our habitual world into the liturgical world, which is also the passage into the eschaton, is not a denial of history and its difficulties. Invoking Schmemann, Williams says of the liturgy that it is“not an escape into some parallel universe, in which the tensions of the habitual world are dissolved; rather, it is a time in which each of the liturgical actions performed in this world is transformed by the Holy Spirit into that which it is, a real symbol of what it manifests.”132 In other words, rather than “providing a route out of the actual world into a religious sort of virtual reality, these liturgical actions uncover meanings that are always latent in the world we know.”133 The

invocation of the Spirit discloses the depths of the material world in which we daily live.

Thus, alluding to Eliot once again, Williams suggests that “[t]he point of liturgy is that

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129. Ibid., 42:427.

130. Ibid., 43:04.

131. Ibid., 44:50.

132. Ibid., 46:30.

133. Ibid., 47:05.

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we should know the place for the first time. . . . We are returned to where we actually are in God’s eyes. [And] [w]here we actually are in God’s eyes is in relation, in communion with God, with one another, with creation.”134

To see the world in its depths is to see it as it is in God’s eyes. So to see other people means learning to see them as an object of God’s love, the focus of an “infinite attention.” Here Williams expands the notion of “liturgical humanity” to that of a

“liturgical humanism,” in the light of which “we see human faces for the first time.”135

Drawing on Clément, Williams says that such “liturgical humanism” produces “amazed attention” through which we “see[] the face of the other uncovered in the light of Jesus.”

Clément speaks of the “sacrament of the brother or sister”: “a vision of every human face as the focus of self-forgetting love so that there is no conditionality about human worth or dignity.”136 Clément calls this “prophetic vision,” and it is quite close to Bulgakov’s description of the Spirit’s work of prophecy not as the giving of new information about the future, but as a way of seeing and understanding the present in light of its eschatological background.137 Such prophetic vision, says Williams, is the “ground of

Christian social and political discernment,”138 which, in its compassionate protest,

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134. Ibid., 47:33.

135. Ibid., 24:52.

136. Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy in America,” 25:30. Cf. Clément: “Spiritual attentiveness, when directed towards some one else, becomes actual astonishment, awakened consciousness, revelation. We experience an intense amazement that other people exist in the warmth of God’s light.” Olivier Clément, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology, foreword by George A. Maloney, reprint, 1986 (New York; London: New City Press, 2000), 54. Williams says that such seeing “forms us in the practice of unconditional attention to any and every other,” regardless of status or standing. Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy in America,” 53:00.

137. Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 19.

138. Ibid., 20.

408

manifests the vivifying presence of God’s Spirit in the world.139 Accordingly, Williams discerns political implications in such prophetic vision. Christians, he says, citing

Clément once more, are called to become guardians of an “open society,” committed to keeping alive a serious debate about the nature of being human in a context where

“trivial, functionalist and mechanical anthropologies” are taken for granted.140

At the conclusion of his lecture, Williams describes liturgy as “a communal event in which an alternative human reality is mapped out and which participants believe actually enables that alternative reality to be present.”141 If Christians are to embody the

“fleshly reality of the new community, the possibility of a transition into the new world which connects us to the depths of the familiar world, we need to keep liturgical action at the center of our vision.”142

3. Conclusion

For Williams, the Church and its liturgy constitute “an academy of attentiveness” in which Christians learn how to see.143 Accordingly, the cultivation of this vision—one capable of seeing the world, ourselves and others differently—is at the heart of

————————————

139. Rowan Williams, “Poetic and Religious Imagination,” 185; Rowan Williams, A Margin of Silence, 14–15.

140. Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy in America,” 58:10.

141. Ibid., 1:00:41.

142. Ibid., 1:01:30.

143. The phrase is borrowed from Nicholas Lash, Holiness, Speech, and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God (Aldershot, Hampshire, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub., 2004), 93. In light of her influence on Williams, we might note the connection here with Simone Weil, who wrote that “[a]bsolutely unmixed attention is prayer. . . . Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious. The amount of creative genius in any period is strictly in proportion to the amount of extreme attention and thus of authentic religion at that period.” Weil, Gravity and Grace, 117. Weil’s influence is evident in Iris Murdoch’s remark that “[p]rayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love.” Iris. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, reprint, 1970, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2004), 53–54.

409

Williams’s meditations on both aesthetics and the liturgy, as it is for much of the

Orthodox spiritual tradition. The way to such spiritual sight, says Pavel Florensky, is the concentration of our attention, a task in which Christians are aided by the liturgy (and the icon).144

Williams suggests that the theophanic-liturgical vision—which I have described in terms of a non-dual imagination—can be nourished by attention to the parallels between art and the icon, poetry and liturgy. Poetic and liturgical imaginations are at home with porous boundaries—with seeing the perichoretic presence of one subject in another—which makes them allies in resisting the erosion of our shared imaginative repertoire. Like poetry, theology “is always involved with doing new or odd things with speech.”145 Williams thus looks to sustain a tradition of theology that “think[s] of itself as a literary endeavor, as a way of talking, as a way of transforming language. Theology is not poetry, exactly, but it’s close.”146

It is in that spirit that I have suggested the value for theology in attending to scriptural and traditional “icons,” both liturgical and verbal. As Austin Farrer says, revelation grows through our contemplation of images, and the images themselves, “in growing, are transformed, they throw out fresh branches, they fertilize neighbouring and as yet purely natural imaginations.”147 To that end, a theology in service to the Church, one seeking the fertilization of its theophanic-liturgical imagination, will likely find that

————————————

144. In context, Florensky is addressing the role of the iconostasis, which he insists does not take the place of the saints portrayed, but rather “points toward them, concentrating the attention of those who pray upon them—a concentration of attention that is essential to the developing of spiritual sight.” Iconostasis, 63.

145. Breyfogle, “Time and Transformation,” 296.

146. Ibid.

147. Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision, Bampton Lectures (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1948), 136.

410

the essentially biblical language and imagery—temple, Paradise, Spirit and fire—are “still powerful and moving exactly because they are so deeply grounded in the language of the revelation made once for all to Israel, and because they resonate in harmony with the

Orthodox liturgy, including the latter’s iconography, hymnography, and even the architecture of an Orthodox church.”148

Through the liturgy, enacted on earth as it is in heaven, the mind of faith is quickened with the life of the Church’s inspired images, the heart set ablaze by the fire of divine love.149 Acquiring the “luminous” eye of faith, we begin to see the Cross as the

Tree of Life, the bread as Christ, the sanctuary as heaven, the Church as Paradise, ourselves as angels and temples, and the cosmos itself as a liturgy.

The sap rises from the earth, the water circulates and makes fruitful, heaven is

married to earth in the sun and rain, humanity toils in seedtime and harvest, the

storeroom thrills with dark scent, the old grain dies in the earth and the new

grain under the millstone—all so that in the end we shall have food bringing us

nothing but life, that in the end the flesh of the earth may become, through our

work, a chalice offered to the Spirit. And the effect is also the cause; for from this

luminous centre, from this dot of matter brought into the incandescence of the

glorious Body, the fire spreads even to the rocks and the stars whose substance is

present in the bread and wine; the eucharist guards and sanctifies the world,

gradually pervading with eternity the heart of things, and making ready the

transformation of the world into eucharist.150

————————————

148. Golitzin, “The Image and Glory of God,” 211. I would add that such resonance is not exclusive to Eastern Orthodoxy. The Western liturgical-hymnological tradition preserves many of these same elements. Bogdan G. Bucur, “The Theological Reception of Dionysian Apophatism in the Christian East and West,” 134.

411

CONCLUSION

In the introduction, I identified theology’s widespread and continuing captivation by a series of related metaphysical dualisms as an impetus for considering the non-dual theological imagination in dialogue with Rowan Williams’s theology. In the discursive distance traveled in the interim, I have tested the claim that a non-dual theological imagination might profitably be resourced by attending to the convergence between the linguistic non-dualism of Wittgensteinian philosophy and the theological- imaginative non-dualism of ancient Jewish and Christian mysticism (subsequently reflected in Eastern Orthodox theology, liturgy and iconography). I have also argued that the development of Williams’s thought and his own engagements with both non- dual traditions witness to the fruitfulness of their convergence for a non-dual imaginary.

The dissertation has advanced both interpretive and constructive arguments.

First as a matter of exposition, chapter one contended that Williams’s thought has been profoundly influenced by Orthodox theology, particularly in the “kenotic personalism” that inflects his Trinitarian theology, pneumatology and theological anthropology.

Second, as a matter of interpretation, chapters two through four traced the trajectory of

Williams’s thought from an overly formal notion of “intentional” union toward a much

“thicker” notion of participation animated by his aesthetic reflection and by the fruitful interaction between the “vocabularies” of the divine energies and Thomistic

————————————

149. Farrer, The Glass of Vision, 44.

150. Clément, On Human Being, 116.

412

participation. Finally, in a more constructive mode, chapters five through eight pursued a

programme of mutually illuminating dialogue between the two non-dualisms, making

further connections between the traditions with respect to theology proper, philosophy

of language and the cultivation of a liturgical-theological imagination. I have thus

suggested that a non-dual theological imagination informed by Christic perichoresis,

Old Testament theophanic traditions, scriptural anthropomorphism, Christian liturgy

and the theology of the icon might both illuminate and be illuminated by Wittgenstein’s

perspective on the realism-idealism debate, his critique of linguistic essentialism, a

“resolute” reading of ineffability, and his concepts of indispensable pictures and

secondary sense.

My investigation culminated with an examination of Williams’s reflections on the

Orthodox liturgy. Williams argues that a theology in service to the Church will be ever

mindful of how it learns, and so constantly returning to the rhythms of the liturgy.

Linking liturgy and poetry, Williams highlights the importance for theology of attending

to liturgical speech and action, and to the resources disclosed there for the formation of

a “liturgical humanity.” Williams’s focus on liturgical enactment, imagery and

iconography indicate that he believes theology would be well served by further

developing its kinship with poetry. For Williams, such a “theological ”1 learns to

inhabit a posture of “‘unselfing’ attention,” a patient attending to what is given, itself

open to an astonished wonder at the world lit by the fire of divine love.2 “Therefore, O

soul, make haste rather to wonder, and take care to love. Be ready to worship. Keep

yourself in a state of wonder. . . . Open the door of your spirit to wonder.”3 On this

————————————

1. I borrow the term from Andrew Shanks, What is Truth?: Towards a Theological Poetics (London ; New York: Routledge, 2001).

2. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words, 170.

3. Paul Krüger, “Le Caractère Monophysite de la Troisième Lettre de Jacques de

413

reading, the “manifest wonder” of the Eucharist distills a spiritual pedagogy in which both the cause and effect are liturgical.4

The trajectory of Williams’s work has culminated in a vision of a liturgical humanity, drawn by the Spirit into God’s new world and gifted to see the world and others with new eyes. It is wholly fitting, then, to conclude with a prayer from Isaac the

Syrian—a leading representative of the Philokalic spirituality of watchfulness to which

Williams calls the Church—which returns us to the issue of captivation and which beautifully draws together many of the thesis’s central themes.

O Christ, O Fountainhead of life, make me worthy to taste of You, so that my

eyes may grow light; . . . May we be captivated (and led) to You through our

minds, as we hold converse with Your great splendour. . . . make us worthy to

serve before You with attentiveness, in accordance with Your will; . . . Cause

Your hidden power to dwell in us, so that the senses of our souls may be

strengthened, in order that our soul may mystically strike up a song filled with

wonder. And thus may we sing praise at every moment with the hallelujahs of the

Watchers on high in honour of the might of Your being. And, as though in

heaven, may we bear on our [spiritual] limbs the sanctification of Your divinity.

————————————

Saroug,” L’Orient Syrien 6 (1961): 306–7. Quoted in Golitzin, “The Image and Glory of God,” 184. As Clément says, the Church of today needs to cultivate “[t]he art of being astonished that the Inaccessible God draws near to us in all the faces and all the beauty of the world.” Clément, On Human Being, 142–43.

4. David W. Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 9. It would be interesting to explore further the connections here with Wittgenstein. In a recent book, Kevin Cahill has argued that “Wittgenstein saw religions as essentially grammars of wonder, and so as holding out the promise of sustaining an openness to wonder, not least by providing a vehicle for its expression. Religions were ‘systems of coordinates’ for giving direction to a life fundamentally characterized above all by reverence, which Wittgenstein felt was the highest kind of human life to lead.” Kevin M. Cahill, The Fate of Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Critique of Metaphysics and Modernity, Columbia Themes in Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 147.

414

May we give thanks with all Your saints and worship Your great name without

ever being sated, O Father, Son and Holy Spirit, glorious in nature, for ages of

ages, Amen.5

————————————

5. (Isaac the Syrian), “The Second Part,” Chapters IV-XLI, ed. Sebastian Brock, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, vol. 554–555.; Scriptores Syri (Lovanii: In aedibus Peeters, 1995), X.41, 51–52.

415

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