Table of Contents

    Kosky - Contemporary Encounters with Apophatic Theology - JCRT 1.3

    Contemporary Encounters with Apophatic Theology: The Case of Emmanuel Levinas

    Jeffrey L. Kosky

    Of those places where mystical traditions of Christian thought have received a warm welcome, post-Heideggerian continental thought is perhaps the most surprising. One of the first of the post-Heideggerians to make this move, Jean-Luc Marion turns to mystical theology in two related works, L’idole et la distance (1977) and Dieu sans l’'tre (1982).[1] There, mystical theology, represented most especially by Pseudo-Dionysius and Gregory of Nyssa, proves integral to Marion’s attempt to formulate a theological position that evades the reigning Heideggerian understanding of theology as part and parcel of an onto-theo-logically determined metaphysics. Going one step further, Marion argues that mystical theology, especially in its naming of a Good Beyond Being, would even exceed Heidegger’s own step back from metaphysics in the direction of the thought of Being by inscribing Being, beings and the difference between them within the play of the Good.

    Since it is the Cause of all beings we should posit and ascribe to it all the affirmations we make in regard to beings (kataphasis), and more appropriately, we should negate all these affirmations since it surpasses all being (apophasis). Now we should not conclude that the negations are simply the opposites of the affirmations, but rather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this; as it is beyond privations, it is also beyond every denial, beyond every assertion (MT, 1000B).

    * * *

    1. Good Beyond Being. Insofar as responsibility describes the genesis of the subject prior to its being, responsibility must be described in terms of a Good beyond Being. Levinas writes, “If ethical terms arise in our discourse…, it is because’ the subject finds himself committed to the Good in the very passivity of supporting” (OB, 122). This commitment to the Good, according to Levinas, is the very genesis or birth of the subject in responsibility. “The Good chooses me first before I can be in a position to choose, that is, welcome its choice’ The Good is before being” (OB, 122). As in Dionysius, the Good summons me before I am, before I have being, and it is in response to that summons that I am born as a responsible self. “The way I appear is a summons” (OB, 139). Again, as with Pseudo-Dionysius, the relation between the Good and the self whose origin it marks is here described in terms of a summons, or call, which cannot be reduced to the relation between cause and effect or to any relation between two beings since the summons precedes and determines the eventual being of the other. The drama played out in responsibility is not acted by two beings, each seeking to pursue their own ends and to persevere in their own being, but in terms of goodness where I give up all that I could call my own in obedient response to the command of the hidden Good. Levinas writes, “the self is goodness, or under the exigency for an abandon of all having’ Goodness invests me in my obedience to the hidden Good” (OB, 118). Like the created soul who is what it is in terms of the good it has received, the responsible self exists only on account of its having received an investment of goodness which demands the dispossession of its own being.

    2. Hierarchy and asymmetry. The fact that the Good calls me before I am implies that the relation between the Good and me is hierarchical or, in Levinas’ terms “asymmetrical” and “irreversible.” Contrary to many contemporary moralists who see relations to be ethical or just when they are reciprocal or mutual, Levinas insists that responsibility breaks reciprocity insofar as I alone am responsible. To institute reciprocity and exchanged obligations would be to institute measure and comparison which would ground calculation and rational action and, according to Levinas, thereby miss ethics or responsibility insofar as calculation and rational action refer back to the priority of an I or ego who counts and reasons in advance of taking on responsibility. In contrast to such mutuality or comparable obligations in morality, the subject, Levinas writes, is assigned to itself in the “one-way irreversible being affected of responsibility” (OB, 84). The irreversibility of responsibility, like the hierarchical structure of the universe, reflects the transcendence of the Good whose summons is the irreversible origin of my being.

    3. Infinity and abandon of desire. Always coming after its summons, the response of responsibility comes to no end insofar as that to which I respond has already left the scene when I am there. My belatedness to my own origin, the fact that I come after the summons which summons me to be, returns in the end which recedes the nearer I draw to it. Responsibility, Levinas claims, is “without measure, for it increases in the measure ’ or absence of measure ’ to which response is made” (DQV, 119). Just as for Dionysius the created soul desires God with a desire that feeds on its own satisfaction, so too will Levinas claim “The more I respond the more responsible I am.” The ever increasing burden of responsibility is figured for Levinas in the notion of substitution. In responsibility, I am a self not insofar as I alone appropriate my being or realize my end, but in that only I substitute myself for every other, taking responsibility even for what they are responsible for, and thereby dispossess myself of my own: “the self is goodness, or under the exigency for an abandon of all having” (OB, 118). Structured in terms of responsibility, the I obeys a strange logic wherein the more I am I, the more I desire an end I can never fulfill since meeting it would entail the abandon of myself. “The more I return to myself, the more I divest myself’ the more I discover myself to be responsible” (OB, 112). This self-abandon in response to the summons of the hidden Good can be compared to the advice that Dionysius gives Timothy: “My advice is ’ by an undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all, you will be uplifted to the ray of divine shadow which is above everything that is” (MT 1000A). The ecstatic soul, here Timothy, responding to its hidden Cause finds that it can meet this end only by abandoning itself, which is to say that it itself cannot meet this end. Like the ecstasy of the soul yearning beyond itself, responsibility demands an apprenticeship in unknowing and dispossession, an abandon of my self in the approach of an other.‘’’

    4. Hyper-terms. Insofar as the ethical relation is not to be described in terms of Being but in terms of the Good, Levinas will have recourse to a form of language that does not depend on knowledge and the priority it accords to being. Such a form of language remains beyond and irreducible to a language determined by the simple negativity of the opposition between affirmation and negation, positive and negative. Levinas insists that “negativity, still correlate with being, will not be enough to signify the other than being” (OB, 9). To speak, however inadequately and improperly, of this “other than being”, this Good beyond being, he will use a language that resembles the mystical mode of theology in that it has recourse to a redoubled negation to push language beyond its apophantic function of revealing being according to the categorical alternative of truth and falsity. Pointing toward this third moment, Levinas claims that the “non-presence of the infinite is not only a figure of negative theology. All the negative attributes which state what is beyond essence become positive in responsibility” (OB, 11-12) or “what makes this more than a term of negative theology, is my responsibility for the other” (OB, 13). Now I admit that these citations seem to suggest that Levinas takes his distance from negative theology; but let me just recall that even Dionysius takes his distance from negative theology insofar as it is succeeded by a third or mystical way. The responsibility that Levinas says is “more than” or “not only” negative theology will be spoken of in terms that resemble those proffered in the mystical discourse of Dionysius. Let me cite just one example. The passivity of the subject is a “passivity more passive than any passivity that is correlative to the voluntary” (OB, 51). “More passive than any passivity” is what might be called, following Dionysius, a hyper-passivity. This hyper-passivity is, according to Levinas, "a passivity prior to the passivity-activity alternative " (OB, 121). Like the hyper-terms used by the mystical mode of Dionysius’ theology, this passivity more passive than passivity articulates the strange logic of a neither/nor that would exceed the predicative function of language. It would resemble the “redoubled negation” that does not return to an affirmation in and through its negation of the negative. To say that responsibility happens in a passivity more passive than any passivity is in effect to speak without saying anything determinate about the subject beyond the reach of speech and language.

    5. The saying of praise. Just as redoubled negation and the hyper- terms in Dionysius suggest a form of language that cannot be understood to function in terms of the predicative logos, so too does Levinas suggest another, non-apophantic function of language. He calls this form of language which signifies beyond the categorical alternative of the logos saying: “apophansis does not exhaust what there is in saying” (OB, 6). “The saying is beyond the logos, beyond being and non-being, beyond true and non-true” (OB, 45). Neither true nor false, the signification of saying, like that marked by the hyper-terms, lies beyond the categorical alternatives posed by logical signification. Levinas tells us more precisely what this saying consists of when he writes, “Saying states and thematizes the said, but signifies it to the other, a neighbor, with a signification that has to be distinguished from that borne by words in the said” (OB, 46). In contrast to the said or what is said in language, the saying does not signify by making determinations about being or securing an ultimate meaning or sense of that about which it speaks. Like praise in Dionysius, saying endlessly undoes the fixed determination of meaning that a predicative language would affirm ’ even in its negations ’ as is witnessed by the incessant and unending necessity of unsaying what is said in every saying when it is a matter of approaching the otherwise than Being. While Levinas does not elaborate a coherent theory or list of the proliferation of names for the beyond Being, the fact that the saying cannot be exhausted in the said would mark the endlessness of reference in a mode similar to that used in praise.

    In the yearning through which it is, being finds itself oriented toward an end that is without end or beyond completion. Such yearning renders that being irreducibly ecstatic and will thus imply that being’s ‘dispossession.’’ Ecstasy, which structures the whole movement of the erotic circle of the Good marks, as I have suggested, the ‘dispossession’ of the beings whose very existence it sustains. Thus while the truth of hierarchy is found in the ecstasy of divine yearning or desire, the meaning conveyed by that truth is dispossession.[2]

    Notes

    Jeffrey L. Kosky received his Ph.D. from The University of Chicago. He has published articles in religious studies and philosophy, and his book The Philosophy of Religion in Emmanuel Levinas will appear from Indiana University Press in the spring of 2001. He is the translator of Jean-Luc Marion’s On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought and is completing a translation of Marion’s Etant donn’e: Essai d’une ph’nom’nologie de la donation. He has taught at Williams College and now lives in Chicago.

    2000 Jeffrey L. Kosky. All rights reserved.
    Updated 07/28/21.
    jcrt.org/archives/01.3/kosky

    1. L’idole et la distance (Paris: Grasset, 1977) and Dieu sans l’'tre (Paris: Fayard, 1982) [English translation as God Without Being, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)]. ↩︎

    2. Ibid., pp. 182-183. ↩︎

    3. See Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). ↩︎

    4. This has been noted [by] John D. Caputo and Edith Wyschogrod.’ See Edith Wyschogrod “How to Say ‘No’ in French,” in Negation and Theology, Robert Scharlemann ed., (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992) and John D. Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). ↩︎

    5. See “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978): pp. 79-153. ↩︎

    6. De Dieu Qui vient ’ l’id’e (Paris: J. Vrin, 1992); p. 142.’ Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991); p. xlii.’ Hereafter cited intertextually as DQV and OB. ↩︎

    7. Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). ↩︎

    8. Citations from Dionysius are taken from Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987). From here on out, references will appear intertextually.’ DN = The Divine Names; MT = The Mystical Theology; CH = The Celestial Hierarchy; Letter = Letters. ↩︎

    9. Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism (New York: Crossroad Press, 1992): p. 174. ↩︎

    10. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 2 (New York: Crossroad, 1982); p. 168.’ ↩︎

    11. Ibid., p. 164. ↩︎

    12. Ibid. ↩︎

    13. On “coimplication,” see Ren’ Roques, “De l’implication des m’thodes th’ologiques chez le Pseudo-Denys” in Revue d’ascetique et de mystique 119 (1954): pp. 267-274. ↩︎

    14. This “redoubled negation” would mark a negation of the negation that does not, like the Hegelian negation of negation, return to the self-identity of the knowing subject but opens to what is beyond the categorical alternatives of affirmation and negation.’ The term “redoubled negation” is borrowed from Michel Corbin, “N’gation et transcendence dans l’'uvre de Denys,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et th’ologiques 69 (1985): 41-76. ↩︎

    15. The Glory of the Lord, vol. 2, p. 173.’ Von Balthasar here takes up a remark made centuries before by Maximus Confessor in his commentary on Dionysius’ Divine Names: “It is as cause of all things that God is praised; for Dionysius does not say: these things are predicated of God; but properly speaking he is praised by them” (cited by Jean-Luc Marion in L’idole et la distance, ed. de Poche, p. 190). ↩︎

    16. See also, “My speech desires to celebrate the divine names which manifest the Providence of God. My speech will not say the absolutely transcendent goodness, being, life, and wisdom of that Godhead beyond all which, as scripture tells us, has its foundation in a secret place above all goodness, divinity, being, wisdom, and life.’ My speech wants to praise the transcendentally good Cause of all good things” (DN 816C).’ Both these translations have been slightly altered following readings proposed by Jean-Luc Marion. ↩︎

    17. Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” in The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). ↩︎

    18. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” p. 125. ↩︎

    19. “Apophatic analogy” is the phrase used by Thomas Carlson in Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God to speak primarily of the operation of something like the Dionysian structure in Heideggerian thought of death, though he does recognize and acknowledge the possibility of its being operative elsewhere.’ “Generalized apophatics” is the phrase used by John D. Caputo in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques [Derrida] to describe the operation of something like mystical language in Derrida’s deconstructive practice. What I have done to show how this analogy or general [delete] is at work in Levinas’ ethics. ↩︎

    20. On this dismissal, see for instance: “there can be no ‘knowledge’ of God separated from the relationship with men… Everything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation represents not the superior but the forever primitive form of religion” (TI, 78-9); “our relation with the Metaphysical [a term equivalent to the transcendent] is an ethical behavior and not theology, not a thematization, be it a knowledge by analogy of the attributes of God” (TI, 78); “there is no theology nor any mysticism dissimulated in the analysis which we just gave of the encounter with Autrui” (Entre Nous, ‘’ p. 20). I should note that while Levinas dismisses theology and mysticism his later work will indeed point toward God in its articulation of the otherwise than being.’ Theology, then, would mean primarily a thematizing discourse, a theology in which the logos of theo-logy is decisive; it would be surpassed for the same reasons that Dionysius says predicative discourse must be surpassed. ↩︎

    21. Bernard McGinn in Foundations of Mysticism (p. 265) refers his readers to McGarrigle’s project when justifying his own reasons for including a discussion of the modern perspectives on mysticism in what is, by and large, a reading of historical evidence. For more on McGarrigle, see David Lodge, Small World (New York: MacMillan, 1984).‘’ ↩︎

    22. Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God, p. 181. ↩︎

    23. Ibid., p. 166-167. ↩︎