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Religious fundamentalism is a major source of political instability in the world. The literalizing of God and religious texts infuses followers of the three Western monotheistic religions with an impetus to fight to the death any nation or group that they feel opposes their understanding of what God demands of them. From even before the era of the official promulgation of monotheistic doctrine, an alternative reading of the supreme Power in the universe has been available. This alternative reading has been officially canonized in Western religious thought as negative theology. Negative theology states that we can only know what God is not-but not what God is. Since God brings the explanatory quest to a halt, God can only be infinite. It is a contention of this essay that the structure of negative theology duplicates the structure of skeptical argument-and they both issue forth in incoherence. The only mode of relationship to God that is available to us is a mystical one, which means that no person can base their relationship to God on the premise of certainty. Fundamentalism then rests on a vulnerable set of rational arguments, which the essay seeks to explore and expose.

In A New Apophaticism Susannah Ticciati draws on Augustine to develop an apophatic theology for the twenty-first century. The central hypothesis is that God-language has the purpose of transforming human beings into better signs of God.

Offers an account of Christian identity as failure Everyone agrees that theology has failed; but the question of how to understand and respond to this failure is complex and contested. Against both the radical orthodox attempt to return to a time before the theology's failure and the deconstructive theological attempt to open theology up to the hope of a future beyond failure, Rose proposes an account of Christian identity as constituted by, not despite, failure. Understanding failure as central to theology opens up new possibilities for confronting Christianity's violent and kyriarchal history and abandoning the attempt to discover a pure Christ outside of the grotesque materiality of the church. The Christian mystical tradition begins with Dionysius the Areopagite's uncomfortable but productive conjunction of Christian theology and Neoplatonism. The tensions generated by this are central to Dionysius's legacy, visible not only in subsequent theological thought but also in much twentieth century continental philosophy as it seeks to disentangle itself from its Christian ancestry. A Theology of Failure shows how the work of Slavoj Žižek represents an attempt to repeat the original move of Christian mystical theology, bringing together the themes of language, desire, and transcendence not with Neoplatonism but with a materialist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the work of Dionysius and Derrida and through contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, this book offers a critical theological engagement with Žižek's account of social and political transformation, showing how Žižek's work makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity. The first major reckoning of Zizek's relation to Christian theology.Rose builds upon Zizek's work, while remaining deeply critical at key moments.

The God on Mount Sinai is the most widely used figure in Christian Negative Theology, with Dionysius Areopagita being its most famous interpreter. As Denys Turner described in his work The Darkness of God, the Dionysian God dwelling in the darkness has an intimate relationship with the Sun in the “Cave Allegory” of Plato’s Republic. This paper clarifies the complex relationship between these two figures, which remains largely underexplored in Turner’s book. The Dionysian God has three kinds of divine darkness: the first one stems from the Neoplatonist Porphyrius, who reinterpreted the darkness of the Cave to defend a Platonic positive view of the material world; the second one is attributed to Church Father Origen, who applied the Platonic philosophy to re-interpret the God on Mount Sinai; and finally, the last divine darkness, inspired by the Life of Moses, written by Gregory of Nyssa, which reaches the ultimate negation of any light.

The ancient doctrine of negative theology or apophasis-the attempt to describe God by speaking only of what cannot be said about the divine perfection and goodness-has taken on new life in the concern with language and its limits that preoccupies much postmodern philosophy, theology, and related disciplines. How does this mystical tradition intersect with the concern with material bodies that is simultaneously a focus in these areas? This volume pursues the unlikely conjunction of apophasis and the body, not for the cachet of the cutting edgebut rather out of an ethical passion for the integrity of all creaturely bodies as they are caughtup in various ideological mechanisms-religious, theological, political, economic-that threaten their dignity and material well-being. The contributors, a diverse collection of scholars in theology, philosophy, history, and biblical studies, rethink the relationship between the concrete tradition of negative theology and apophatic discourses widely construed. They further endeavor to link these to the theological theme of incarnation and more general issues of embodiment, sexuality, and cosmology. Along the way, they engage and deploy the resources of contextual and liberation theology, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, process thought, and feminism.The result not only recasts the nature and possibilities of theological discourse but explores the possibilities of academic discussion across and beyond disciplines in concrete engagement with the well-being of bodies, both organic and inorganic. The volume interrogates the complex capacities of religious discourse both to threaten and positively to draw upon the material well-being of creation.

This study approaches Dmitri Čyževs’kyj’s studies on Czech literature in the context of the reception and reflection of the Baroque in Czech culture in the 1930s. This rediscovery and rehabilitation of the Baroque, to which 19th-century historicism and Czech positivist historiography referred to pejoratively as the ‘dark’ period, was not a straightforward process, but was characterized, on the contrary, by a surprising convergence of heterogeneous, even disparate worldviews, as well as ideological, philosophical, and artistic-aesthetic positions. Dmitri Čyževs’kyj’s studies played a significant and interesting role in this process of differentiated reflection and reception of the Czech Baroque. These may be broken down into three concepts: ideological figures that play a pivotal position in Čyževs’kyj’s treatises on Czech and other national literatures of the Baroque and Romantic periods, from a literary aesthetic, hermeneutics, and historical perspective: worldview, antitheticality, and negative allegory.

Throughout church history, there have been those who stressed the limits of our ability to speak with confidence about God and extolled the nobility of silence in the face of God’s ineffability. Dionysius the Areopagite famously asserted, “With regard to the divine, negations are true, whereas affirmations are inadequate”. Apophatic silence is presented as respectful of the mysterious otherness of God. Christian preaching is a practice that refutes all attempts at negative, apophatic theology. Every sermon participates in the wonder of the uniquely Jewish and Christian claim that God not only speaks but also invites, even commands, humanity to speak about God as well. Christian preaching is suspicious of any attempt to sentimentalize silence in the name of humble acknowledgement of human limitations to speak truthfully about God. Preaching therefore requires the courage to speak up and speak out with the God who, in Jesus Christ, has spoken to us. The silencing of the voices of women, persons of color, and others who claim to know that God is with them is an aspect of neocolonial oppression that preaching cannot abide. Preaching is a protest against all those who would tell the voiceless that some things are better left unsaid.

Negative theology or apophasis - the idea that God is best identified in terms of 'absence', 'otherness', 'difference' - has been influential in modern Christian thought, resonating as it does with secular notions of negation developed in continental philosophy. Apophasis also has a strong intellectual history dating back to the early Church Fathers. Silence and the Word both studies the history of apophasis and examines its relationship with contemporary secular philosophy. Leading Christian thinkers explore in their own way the extent to which the concept of the apophatic illumines some of the deepest doctrinal structures of Christian faith, and of Christian self-understanding both in terms of its historical and contemporary situatedness, showing how a dimension of negativity has characterised not only traditional mysticism but most forms of Christian thought over the years.

This article arose from the study of apophatic theology also known as the via-negativa. Apophatic theology, by definition, refrains from stating what and who God is instead of focusing on what God is not. It renders religious language as a sign-system inadequate in describing God, his nature, and human numinous experiences. Yet, language is the fundamental modelling system that stimulates our everyday phenomenological, spiritual, and religious developments. This article is demonstrating how the apophatic theological view attempted to solve or investigate the inadequacy of religious language or the lack of God’s language. The research drew from contemporary scholarship on Augustine’s use of apophatic theology in developing its hypothesis of the importance of music as a transcendental language. Moreover, through music and prayer, language becomes an intermediary beyond the physical to the metaphysical. In this instance, Augustine of Hippo, coming to terms with the inadequacy of religious language, considered music a succinct communicative tool in his theology and divine pedagogy. So, due to the challenges of language, the purpose of this article is using Augustine and his view of music within the Sitz im Leben of his spiritual development to solve a theological problem. In this article, the following will be discussed: (1) Augustine’s Confessions as a dialogue where he speaks to God through Scriptures and hymns; (2) Augustine’s earlier philosophical theory of music; (3) and Augustine’s use of apophatic theology in our spiritual development. The importance of this research will help us understand God’s immanence (over his ineffable) through our use and understanding of music as a harmonious language consisting of unchanging mathematical properties. Furthermore, the truthfulness of music as a harmonious language about God’s mystery can be better understood.ContributionThrough Augustine’s apophatic theology, this study contributes to our understanding and revitalisation of spirituality using music as an alternative form of harmonious language of the spirit. Moreover, it considers music a universal language that transcends all senses and other modes of cognitive activities. By establishing a basic principle of what makes us spiritual, we can transform our cognitive abilities and become better spiritual beings. Furthermore, this study examined the harmonic nature of music in the seven liberal arts as a significant mathematical aspect of the cosmos.