Traditionally, we describe the divine via negation

"My suspicion being thus far clarified, it was obviously important to discover what accounted for this very radical shift of purpose to which that language had been submitted. And, again paraphrasing a complex answer, what is distinctive about the employment of these metaphors within the mediaeval traditions of 'mystical theology is the Neoplatonic dialectical epistemology - its apophaticism - within which those metaphors are set and by which their employment is governed." pp 4-5

thesis

"At its boldest, my hypothesis is that modern interpretation has invented 'mysticism' and that we persist in reading back the terms of that conception upon a stock of mediaeval authorities who knew of no such thing - or, when they knew of it, decisively rejected it." pp 7

"Those terms are 'apophaticism' and its complementary partner, 'cataphaticism'. They have a technical sense, and it is a principal purpose of this essay to clarify that sense, or those senses, which they acquire within the Latin traditions of Neoplatonic mysticism, but for the immediate purpose of getting that discussion going, they can be given an accessibly non-technical explanation. 'Apophaticism' is the name of that theology which is done against the background of human ignorance of the nature of God. It is the doing of theology in the light of the statement of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, that 'we do not know what kind of being God is'.1 It is the conception of theology not as a naive /^-critical ignorance of God, but as a kind of acquired ignorance, a docta ignorantia as Nicholas of Cues called it in the fifteenth century. It is the conception of theology as a strategy and practice of unknowing, as the fourteenth-century English mystic called it, who, we might say, invented the transitive verb-form 'to unknow' in order to describe theological knowledge, in this its deconstructive mode.2 Finally, 'apophaticism' is the same as what the Latin tradition of Christianity called the via negativa, 'the negative way'. These are among the things which are meant by the term 'apophaticism'.

It follows from the unknowability of God that there is very little that can be said about God: or rather, since most theistic religions actually have a great number of things to say about God, what follows from the unknowability of God is that we can have very little idea of what all these things said of God mean. And, strictly speaking, that is what 'apophaticism' asserts, as one can tell from its Greek etymology: apophasis is a Greek neologism for the breakdown of speech, which, in face of the unknowability of God, falls infinitely short of the mark." pp 19-20

dissimilarization

"For the logic of negation which applies to literal utterances is, we may say, straightforwardly 'Aristotelian'. In his Peri Hermeneias Aristotle remarks that 'to know an affirmation is to know its negation'.45 Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, put the same point in similar terms: eadem est scientia oppositorum,*6 'one and the same is the knowledge of contraries'. The point is not controversial: if we can know what it is to say that there is a cat on the mat then thereby we know what it is to say that the cat is not on the mat. The 'knowledge' is the same in either case, but in the one it is affirmed, in the other denied. If the knowledge were not 'the same' there would be no opposition between the two statements, for what the one affirmed would not be what the other denied. So they could not contradict each other." pp 36

"there is the problematic question of the role of hierarchy, and so of the metaphor of 'ascent', within the theoretical and metaphorical articulation of Denys' theology. It is because, we saw, the world is hierarchical in its ontological structure that the metaphor of ascent is constitutive within the dialectical epistemology." pp 47-8

Augustine's infliuence on the reformation

"s. Grammatically the double character of the passage is reflected in the manner in which it is built up out of the alternation of logical connectives (the 'if, the therefore' and the 'since') with first-person pronouns ('/ passed...', 'withdrawing my thought...', 'my mind arrived...', '/saw...'). In this second character - of being the description of Augustine's experience - it reads as the narrative of a mental process, perhaps even of introspection, which parallels in microcosm, as it were in a single experiential act, the story of his life as a whole: for that too is the story of a progression from a life lived 'in exteriority' among changeable things towards a gradual awakening of the depths of his own interiority; from that condition in which he lived, as he puts it, 'outside himself, to that in which he is able to find both God and himself 'within'. This is Augustine's personal itinerarium mentis, which is above all an itinerarium intus; it is a journey most aptly paraphrased in Augustine's own paradox: et ecce intus eras et egoforis et ibi te quaerebam - 'but see, you were within (me) and I was outside (myself); it was there that I sought you'.4" pp 53

"Nowhere is this residual, revisionary Platonism more evident than in Confessions. The discovery of God is the rediscovery of God, the return to a truth already somehow known, to a knowledge already somehow present within the searching itself. But again, how can it be said that we already know a thing if, truly, we are still searching for it? On the other hand, how can we be said to be searching for it if we do not know what we are searching for?" pp 58-9

"Though Confessions itself is, as we have said, the story of Augustine's searching for and finding the God 'within', that, for Augustine, is not the primary, foundational metaphor for his search: the 'true answer to my question' is 'rather that I should not exist, unless I existed in you'.25 Memory is, epistemologically, the point of juncture between the 'within' and the 'above', the point at which my deepest interiority intersects with the eternal objectivity of Truth, so that my knowing any truth becomes at least an implicit acknowledgement of Truth itself, a recognition of the Truth particular truths 'remind' us of. Memory, then, is the epistemological key. " pp 69

History of Dionysian and Augustinian Neoplatonism which are fused medievally by Boniventure

"When all the differences between Dionysian and Augustinian forms of Neoplatonism have been duly noted, as very properly they should be; when, running risks of obfuscating generalization, the Dionysian emphasis is said to be placed upon objective, cosmic hierarchy, that of the Augustinian upon subjective interiority, then it is time to make as much of the commonality of mind which informs every mediaeval Platonist, whichever of these two forms of it he favours. We can, in truth, identify one aspect of the distinctiveness of Bonaventure's theology as consisting in the manner in which he fuses the Dionysian hierarchy with Augustinian interiority - this is what causes the formula of an 'interiorised hierarchy' to spring to mind as a description. " pp 103

Hierarchy reconciled by Christ

"to say that the tensions between the hierarchical and the anthropocentric metaphors are reconciled 'in Christ5 is but to say where they are reconciled, not how. Let us note once again the possibility of being satisfied - it amounts to a real temptation - with a merely rhetorical harmonisation of what are objective tensions of thought. It is not as if the hierarchical language of the Itinerarium were in that sense 'merely* metaphorical in that it might represent a simple literary choice on Bonaventure's part, one which he could therefore correct the tendencies of by placing along with it the rival metaphors of a microcosmism, equally chosen ad placitum. ... It is therefore important for us to note just how surprising this fact has to be for a mediaeval Platonist - and how difficult it is for a modern mentality to recover that sense of surprise. For we do not think hierarchically. But for Bonaventure the Incarnation cut across and potentially subverted the implications of his cosmic ontology." pp 126

Empson should heed boniventure. From Iteneris which grapples with hierarchy

"Take care', Bonaventure therefore warns in chapter 6, 'that you do not believe you can understand the incomprehensible'.50 Here, in his discussion of the Trinitarian nature of God through the attribute of goodness, the same apophatic logic is applied. For we must also attribute contradictory predicates to the Trinity, both the distinctness and the communicability of the Persons, both their coeternity and their processions, both consubstantiality and multiplicity, and in just the same way these opposites are mutually entailing. Hence the same apophatic outcome is generated by the same inner logic of theological language; and then at yet a higher level still. " pp 129

Bonnie is dependent upon Denys who may be considered the first Christian Platonist?

"In the description of that dark ecstasy, Bonaventure is so dependent on Denys as to be satisfied mainly with extended quotation from his Mystical Theology. But in two ways Bonaventure effects a radical transformation of his Dionysian source, and the transformation is so effortless as to be almost imperceptible." pp 131

Bonnie fuses Deny and Augustine

"I have attended in this chapter principally to the manner in which Bonaventure's mystical theology can be seen as an attempt to harmonise two broad streams of Neoplatonic thought, the Dionysian and the Augustinian. At any rate, the problem which Bonaventure inherited with this double indebtedness was that of the divergent tendencies of an hierarchicalist ontology and of an anthropocentric Christology. And I have suggested that Bonaventure achieves some measure of stability in this synthesis through an adaptation of the Augustinian theme of interiority, a stability which is achieved through his doctrine of the human as microcosm, the human as minor mundus in which, through interiorisation, the objective hierarchy of the maior mundus is recapitulated." pp 133

heresy!

"In the early fourteenth century, however, the apophatic tradition becomes for the first time in its long Christian history embodied in formulations which are regarded with suspicion of heresy. " pp 137

"Yet they did appear to offer a theological challenge to their contemporaries, a challenge which is not to be wholly explained in terms of considerations of ecclesiastical realpolitik"

Eckhart speaks of an eternal coeternal beam!

I think I might say something like "there is no basis for eternal light" wc may not be the case!

"Sometimes I have spoken of a light that is uncreated and not capable of creation and that is in the soul. I always mention this light in my sermons; and this same light comprehends God without a medium, uncovered, naked, as he is in himself.6" pp 140

Eckhart sounds an awful lot like Satan talking to Abdiel

Or vice versa, Eckhart sounds an awful lot like Satan, so thought his inquisitors!

"I stood in my first cause, then I had no 'God', and then I was my first cause. I wanted nothing, I longed for nothing, for I was an empty being and the only truth I enjoyed was the knowledge of myself...But when I went out from my own free will and received my created being, then I had a 'God', for before there were any creatures God was not 'God', but he was what he was.26

These formulas seem reckless and heterodox, taken by themselves - which, Eckhart complained, is how his inquisitors did take them" pp 145

Rating of the senses

"Interestingly, Giles bases this allocation of sensory images between intellectual and affective styles of contemplation on a combination of Aristotelian and Dionysian principles. Aristotle had rated sight and hearing as the two highest of the five senses, both absolutely and in respect of their roles in the service of knowledge. Whereas touch, taste and smell are, he thought, more basic, because more 'vital', senses, since they are more closely associated with the body's vital needs.44 " pp 201

Habit of mystical theologians to use dialectics self-subvertingly

"First, in every author we have considered, the metaphors of 'exteriority', 'inferiority' and 'ascent' are central to the description of the progress of the soul towards God. Moreover, in all of them there is a more or less explicit recognition that that imagery must be employed 'dialectically' or as I have otherwise put it 'self-subvertingly'. And we found that the metaphorical embodiment of that dialectic is most commonly that of the self-subverting imagery of the divine light which, through its very excess, causes darkness and unknowing to the soul; hence, in that most Platonic of images, it is a light which is also a darkness, a 'dazzling darkness', a 'cloud of unknowing'." pp 252

Milton standing on a millenium of theophilosophical tradition

"Yet in all this complexity there may be identified a common preoccupation: what we have observed is a one thousand year tradition of seeking the terms in which to state, with a theological precision which alone can sustain an adequate Christian practice, the relation between the apophatic and the cataphatic 'moments' within the trajectory of the Christian itinerarium in Deum. This is the common concern of all the authors I have examined and if the superficial differences between an Augustine or a Bonaventure and an Eckhart or a Cloud Author are obvious, these differences are, in my view, only obvious and, from one point of view, only superficial." pp 256

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