that can only be the fruit of such wonder. It is surely a sophomoric kind of mysticism that grounds itself in the sheer unknownness of the ultimate. Authentic Christian mysticism is born of the wonder that is revealed in the Christ: that the world—that we!—should be so loved! (John 3:16).
Of course exceptions arise to the generalization about Western preference for kataphatic and Eastern preference for apophatic theological approaches. I already alluded to the Western mystics, who were always a rather countercultural element in the West. Indeed that quintessentially Western theologian, Augustine of Hippo, who was perhaps the main architect of Western theology, in one of his several phases or personae manifests a highly mystical strain. No statement may be more exemplary of the apophatic tradition than Augustine’s terse phrase, Si comprehendis, non est Deus (If you [think that you] understand, it isn’t God you’re thinking about.)5 It was of course Augustine’s more kataphatic side, especially in his later or so-called Catholic phase that set the tone for the Western Middle Ages. During the High Middle Ages, when Scholasticism achieved what may be thought the pinnacle of kataphatic or affirmative theology, Christian mysticism was almost an underground movement; but the alternative the mystics stood for was never wholly submerged, and in fact it was found sometimes in the personal devotion of the Scholastic theologians themselves. Even the highest schoolman of them all, St. Thomas Aquinas, was drawn to mysticism after he had experienced a spiritual crisis, a dark night of the soul and the light that was given him in that darkness. In the aftermath of this mystical experience of the divine, Thomas told his secretary, Reginald, that he could not go on with his great Scholastic project, the Summae, because, he said, “everything I have written seems to me straw!” More significantly still, when around the middle of the fifteenth century the medieval Scholastic project ground to an effective halt, it was the mystical approach to the comprehension of the things of faith that emerged to fill the vacuum, and perhaps save Western Christendom from early dissolution.
This is not uninteresting to Protestants, because we remember that Martin Luther was profoundly influenced by some of these late mystical thinkers, especially the so-called German Mystics and Meister Eckhardt. So it is not surprising when one finds in Luther’s writings a frequent and lively use of the via negativa. And while the mystical dimension of the Reformation was rather pushed aside by later forms of both Lutheran and Calvinist Orthodoxy, it was never wholly vanquished. In fact, I would maintain that Luther’s theology of the cross (theologia crucis) is at its core a type of apophatic theology; for in its rejection of religious triumphalism (the theologia gloriae)6, its refusal of eschatological finality, its embrace of a faith that must not be mistaken for sight and a hope that must not be mistaken for consummation, the theologia crucis opts for a spiritual and intellectual humility that may claim confidence [con + fide] but never certitude. I was not surprised, therefore, when in conducting my research for this study I found an article that declared that Søren Kierkegaard, that extraordinary nineteenth-century spiritual son of Luther, must be considered the apophatic theologian of the West.
Now, as the mention of Kierkegaard, father of existentialism, suggests that what lies at the heart of the apophatic tradition is the insistent sense that where living realities are concerned, fullness of human comprehension and definition is ipso facto impossible. That is why, as Augustine’s luminous phrase shows, this tradition has application first of all to the deity, for God defies containment or codification. Indeed, much of the negative theology of the mystics draws quite specifically on the biblical text, in Acts, where St. Paul addresses the Athenians on Mars Hill using as his point of contact with them the concept of “the unknown God” (Acts 17:16–17). God for biblical faith is above all a living God—a God whose presence—not the idea of God’s existence but the experience of God’s presence—is the crucial factor. God for the whole tradition of Jerusalem transcends all else, is unique, beyond compare; as Anselm of Canterbury put it in a famous phrase, Deus non est genere (God is not one of a species). Therefore God remains the unknown one, even when God reveals Godself—no, especially then! For, as Luther insisted, it is the revealing God (Deus revelatus) who, precisely in revealing conceals, precisely in manifesting hides, precisely in self-giving remains unpossessible (Deus absconditus). The living, self-revealing God of biblical faith transcends all our preconceptions of deity, shatters our idols and images of divinity, even the highest and most philosophically sophisticated of them, and is simply present as Thou, defying objectification, defying every attempt of ours to define and describe and specify and so (in Buber’s famous language) turn this Thou into an It. It should not be forgotten that the most sacred name for God in Hebrew faith is not a proper name at all but almost a conundrum—the tetragrammaton YHWH (Yahweh), which seems to mean “I am who I am,” or “I will be who I will be.” Strictly speaking, this means that theology, a doctrine of God, is impossible!
To speak autobiographically for a moment, I remember when that insight first struck me with full force. I had just begun my seminary teaching career, and the insight nearly stopped me in my tracks! If God is truly God, if God is “not one of a species,” but absolutely unique, unnameable, absolutely transcendent; if we, who cannot even describe our own spouses and children without falling into graven-image making, set out to describe God, then have we not committed the ultimate blasphemy? (It was about that time, in fact, that Ursula Niebuhr said to me quite earnestly, “Theology always walks close to blasphemy.”) I began to think, then, that I had chosen the wrong profession! But fortunately a second insight came to me. I wrote it down on a four-by-six index card, and stashed it away in the midst of a whole boxful of such cards in my study. I suppose it is still there to this day. I never look for it, but I know it is there. In fact, I remember it better than any of the other hundreds of index cards I’ve filed away over the years. It reads, “God permits theology.” As a discipline, a science, theology is impossible, for its object is no object but a living Subject. Yet God—with great condescension and forbearance—permits it . . . for the time being. So long as we know that it is not possible, only permitted, we may try our hand at it. It’s when we start thinking we are really quite good at it that we had better watch out!
What I mean to say in this homely autobiographical way is this: there must always be a prominent element of modesty, or even tentativeness and hesitancy, in what we profess concerning the knowledge of God. The Creed (any Christian creed!) should be whispered, not shouted. What prevents this modesty from becoming sheer agnosticism and devolving into theistic relativism is that, knowing and trusting God as those who sometimes feel themselves to be caught up in God’s presence, we may at least identify false gods, idols, demons, and unworthy images of the divine. We may not claim for our positive statements about God anything more than awkward and hesitant attempts to point to One whom we do not understand and can only stand under; but we may (not arrogantly, not self-righteously, yet with a certain confidence) sometimes say, No, this is not God, and neither is this . . . nor this . . . nor this . . . And if we do this consistently, and especially with regard to our own ideas and wishful thinking and fond, familiar images of God, it may be that the Spirit who is God will now and then come to us and whisper to us reassuringly . . . (Or was it only the wind?)
So theology via negativa is made necessary first of all because it feels impelled—is indeed “under necessity” (1 Corinthians 9:16)—to speak of God. And God—the God who at last allowed Moses to see his back—permits us to look for words that, transformed by the divine Spirit, can perhaps—perhaps!—bear witness to the great and holy silence evoked by God’s presence to us. It is to protect and honor the Word that names that silence that we who would be theologians are under necessity to take the greatest care about our words—“For the ear trieth words as the mouth tasteth meat” (Job 34:3, KJV).
But while theology by way of negation applies in this special sense to the deity, the apophatic tradition extends itself also to all other aspects of theological inquiry, for it understands the whole of reality to be characterized by an aura of wonder that cannot be reduced to words, formula, description or, doctrine. Alfred North Whitehead, the father of process thought, spoke of the “livingness of things,” and this fits rather precisely, I think, the mindset of this tradition. If what strikes one
