The critical value of negative theology.

If metapyhysics seems today to have buried its undertakers, then negative theology may soon silence its critics. Having established a significant if sometimes recessive presence in Western theism, negative theology is again an important element in contemporary philosophical theology. While Anglo-American philosophy of religion remains dominated by analytic neoscholasticism,(1) in the last decade a countercurrent has emerged that makes common cause with the apophatic tradition. The Gifford lectures of Stephen R. L. Clark(2) are examples of this development, as are the works of Leszek Kolakowski.(3) Each thinker has attempted to expand discussion beyond the scholastic parameters of the field and make connections with important historical figures who are often neglected in the literature. Neoplatonism has featured prominently this development; as the principal philosophical foundation for apophatic theology in the West, it has been invoked in both its original Greco-Roman guise and its subsequent manifestation within the Abrahamic tradition (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).

One figure has been particularly prominent in the historical and theological reappraisal of negative theology: A. H. Armstrong, the eminent authority on Plotinus and Neoplatonism. His many studies have forcefully and cogently articulated Neoplatonism's philosophical foundations and religious resources.(4) Indeed, his essays constitute a type of historical theology, that is, they are theological reflections that emerge from historical study. This article will examine Armstrong's apophatic theology and consider some of its implications for contemporary religious thought. The first part of the article reviews his theological views with reference to their historical background in ancient Platonism and Christian Platonism. The second part then discusses some aspects of negative theology that have been made especially salient by Armstrong's sustained reflections over several decades.

Amstrong's Theological Views

It is tempting to think of Hilary Armstrong as a contemporary Cambridge Platonist, given his academic origins at that university. In the introduction to his most recent collection of essays, Armstrong locates himself in such terms, suggesting that the liberal Christian Platonism of his Cambridge days was his "true personal tradition or paradosis."(5) He reacted against this tradition, however, and adopted Roman Catholicism, "a more conservative form of Christianity,"(6) only to return to latitudinarian Anglicanism in the 1980s. This religious development is significant for understanding Armstrong's views on negative theology; his historical studies often evince a personal dynamism, with the result that these essays have the quality of first-order theology.

For Armstrong, negative theology is far more than a puzzling emblem of antique theology; it is the foundation of serious reflection about the divine. He understands negative theology as consisting "in a critical negation of all affirmations which one can make about God, followed by an equally critical negation of our negations."(7) In his words, "without the negative theology our representation of reality loses all depth and becomes abstract, flat, and unreal."(8) This happens because we lose sight of the divine whenever we accept as final or complete any conceptual representation of it. The true object of religious devotion and theological attention is not contained in the formulas of its representation, however authoritative or conceptually exact; rather it exceeds all finite capacity for conceptual similitude. This "escape of the One" is the central spiritual motion in Armstrong's theology.(9) Negative theology establishes a spiritual disquietude which calls the soul forth into further and unceasing searches for the divine. It subverts our deep human tendency to settle for idols, reminding us that all theology can function properly only as an icon of the divine, leading the spiritual self into the immediacy of God.(10) Thus, apophasis saves us from idolatry, that is, from exaggerated love of those graven images of the human spiritual imagination. By serving as an antidote to dogmatism,(11) the apophatic mode of reflection retains for philosophical theology a religious dimension, reasserting its ancient role as a spiritual exercise(12) and disabusing any pretense that it exists as a disciplinary end in itself. This is "the critical value of negative theology:

The most striking aspect of Armstrong's interpretation of negative theology is his association of the classical apophatic tradition with moderate skepticism. Although he admits that this connection is interpretive and not explicit in the ancient sources, he views it as a significant, tacit dimension of ancient Neoplatonic theology:

If one pushed the critical mysticism of Plotinus rather further than he would be willing to go himself, it might come to consort very well with another kind of Platonism of which the Neoplatonists and their immediate predecessors strongly disapproved, the ultra-Socratic Platonism of the Skeptical Academy. It is possible that under the influence of Cicero and Porphry, something like this convergence of the two Platonisms may have taken place in the minds of some of the last pagans of Rome in the fourth century A.D.(14)