The analogy of dissimilar similarities
also helps to clarify the radical difference between the apophaticism of the
Greek theologians and the negative theology of the Western Scholastics. Negative
theology (theologia negativia) compares objective dissimilarities, just
as cataphatic theology (theologia affirmative) compares object
similarities. In both cases the purpose is the comparison of essences and ontic
attributes. Of course, the similarities do not constitute identity. They
therefore presuppose a percentage of given dissimilarities, which permits cognition
of the relative character of knowledge. Nor do the dissimilarities constitute
absolute otherness. They therefore presuppose a percentage of given
similarities, which does not permit a complete agnosticism. The Fourth Lateran
Council (1215) adopted the view that no significant likeness could be posited
between the Creator and creature without presupposing an even greater unlikeness
(“quia inter creatorem et creaturam non potest similitude notari, quin inter
eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda”). It is evident that even in this statement
dissimilarity does not refer to the otherness of the personal mode of
existence. Dissimilarity coexists with similarity in a quantifiable-measurable relation.
The analogy of similarities, which presupposes at the same time even greater dissimilarities,
does not cease to represent objective predicates, or to constitute a quantitative
comparison of objectified magnitudes.
By contrast the analogy of dissimilar
similarities, by which I mean the apophaticism of the Byzantine theologians, is
based not on the quantitative comparison of objective dissimilarities,
permitting also a percentage of similarities, but on taking the objective
similarities themselves as real dissimilarities. That is to say, it refers the
dissimilarity to the otherness of the personal mode of existence, to the
priority which existence has in relation to the understanding of objective essence
has in relation to the understanding of objective essences. This means that for
the analogy of dissimilar similarities to function as a cognitive method, a
dynamic transformation is presupposed of objective predicates into experiences
of personal cognition, a transition from the cognitive level of intellectual categories
to the space of the universal knowledge provided by the experience of personal knowledge.
This dynamic transition is a possible fact which when accomplished becomes a “moral”
achievement. It is a self-transcendence of the natural individuality and
objective demands of the individual intellect, an entry into the space of
personal relation, an ascent to a personal mode of existence and the completeness
of knowledge which this mode reveals.
This means that the epistemology of
the Byzantine theologians is not just another method of cognition, better or worse,
more appropriate or less appropriate than the way of affirmation and the way of
negation. It is a dynamically possible “moral” fact, a cognitive potentiality
that accompanies that dynamic restoration of humanity to its existential authenticity,
its progressive acquisition of the personal completeness of existence. The epistemology
of the Eastern theologians presupposes “the transformation of the
understanding,” the unification of the fragmented cognitive human faculties
(the unit of mind and heart, of logos and action, of morality and
being), the single cognitive “contemplation” which is attained within the dynamic
limits of ascetic self-transcendence and loving-erotic ecstasy and
self-offering.
Thus the treating similarities as
dissimilarities presupposes, as a cognitive method, the moral-dynamic character
of knowledge, the linking of knowledge with the stages of humanity’s existential
perfection (the non-alienation of the relations which form the existential act
of subjectivity and makes it known). Ultimately, it presupposes a hierarchical
ordering of the personal powers of knowledge, which are always analogous to the
hierarchal ordering of the stages of existential perfection. It signifies
analogy as a hierarchy of cognitive-existential powers and perfections.(Christos
Yannaras, Person and Eros [4th ed.; trans. Norman Russell; Brookline,
Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007], 214-16)
On
universal knowledge via experience of personal knowledge:
“For example, in the case of a man or
a city, anyone who wishes to tell people about them speaks to them of what he
has seen and heard. Those who listen, not having seen the man or the city they
are hearing about, cannot know that man or that city merely by a report in the
same way as the narrator who has seen them. It is similar with the Jerusalem
above and the invisible God who dwells there. Nobody can speak about the unapproachable
glory of his countenance and about the energy and power of his all-holy Spirit,
or light, unless he has first seen this light with the eyes of the soul and
gained precise knowledge of the radiance and energy within himself . . . either
can he therefore say that he has arrived at knowledge of God simply by hearing
about it. For how can he know what he has not seen?” (Symeon the New
Theologian, Ethical Treatises 5 [SC 129.98.100]). (Ibid., 364-65 n. 43)
Morality and Being: identity and difference
The meaning of morality (êthos)
refers to the mode of existence: “character (êthê) is what makes us
ascribe certain qualities to the agent.” The reference to the “quantity” of
being presupposes the truth of existential authenticity and, at the same time,
its distortion or alienation, that which we call the Fall of man, the falling
away from the mode of existence “according to truth.” The falling away from existential
authenticity is defined anagogically by reference to the prelapsarian integrity
of existence, and the measure of this reference we call ethos or
morality. As a measure of existential authenticity, morality finds its
fulfillment or wholeness in the mode of existence “according to truth.”
Morality which has been made whole or integral is existence “according to
truth.”
This definition to the concept of
morality an ontological and existential meaning, not a conventional or
legalistic one. It identifies the ontological content of morality with the “quality”
of the mode of existence, that is to say, with the truth of being or with the distortion
of this truth. What I call the prelapsarian integrity of existence is the unity
of morality and being, the refusal to make an ontological distinction between
the two, or to differentiates at all between morality and being.
If the truth of being is defined by
the freedom and otherness of the personal mode of existence, then
morality, as the measure of the reference to existential authenticity, defines
the nearness or distance from the fulness of the truth of the person, or
personal communion and relation, of freedom from the self-containedness of
atomic individuality. With regard to the divine existence, where there is no
occurrence of fall from existential authenticity, the morality or ethos of God
is identified with Being (the mode of divine existence), with the triadic communion
and mutual interpenetration of divine persons. When Christian revelation lays
down that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), it refers not to a partial property of God’s
conduct but to that which God is as the fullness of the triadic
communion of persons within the “framework” of an undivided nature. The communion
and mutual interpenetration of the divine persons, that is, the mode by which
the Godhead is, reveals the morality of the divine life, the love and
the Being of God. But with regard to human existence, which introduces a fact
of fall from existential authenticity, morality is differentiated from being by the concept of the difference between the measure and the measured: As
a measure of reference to the truth of Being (to the freedom and otherness of
the personal mode of existence), morality defines and “measure” the fact of the
“preservation” of the person within the bounds of the realization, or failure
to realize, a relation beyond and outside of the distantiality of atomic
individuality. (Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros [4th ed.; trans.
Norman Russell; Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007], 275-76)
Apophaticism at
the boundaries of the ontological problem: apophaticism of essence and
apophaticism of person
The ontological meaning which Greek
patristic literature of the Byzantine period gave to the term prosopon (“person”)
became the occasion of an ontology radically different from that which the
Western theological and philosophical tradition represents in the course of its
historical development. The West has trapped in a polarized view of Being as
either analogically absolute and ontic or else mystical. This came about as the
inevitable consequence of the priority Westerners gave, eve in the first
Christian centuries, to the intellectual definition of essence over the
historical and existential experience of personhood—in contrast to the Greek
East, which always relied for its starting-point on the priority of person and
essence.
The priority of the need to define
essence within the context of the ontological question requires the objective definition
of the existence of beings and the intellectualist (analogical-ontic) and etiological
explanation of Being. The Scholastics established the threefold way (“via
triplex”) in the West of the analogical cognition of Being: the way of negation
(“via negationis”), the way of eminence (“via eminentiae”), and the way of
causality (“via causalitatis”).
In contradictory but historical conjunction
with its cataphatic-analogical determination of Being, the West was also preoccupied
with the apophaticism of Being, with the impossibility of the human
intellect to exhaust the truth of Being by means of definitions. Apophaticism
in the West arose from the need to protect the mystery of the divine essence.
That is to say, it is always an apophaticism of essence. It is
characteristic that the two thinkers who did most to shape the
positive-analogical approach to the knowledge of God, Anselm of Canterbury (d.
1109) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), at the same time proclaim the apophatic
nature of this knowledge, the essential unknowability of God, the
inaccessibility of Being. And we find following this line on the apophaticism of
essence not only the leading Scholastics but also the great mystics of the
Middle Ages—Peter Abelard (d. 1142), Albert the Great (d. 1280) and John Duns Scotus
(d. 1308), as well as Meister Eckhart (d. 1327) and Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464).
But it is impossible for the
apophaticism of essence to confront the ontological problem as an existential
problem, as a question about the mode by which whatever is is,
about the “mode of existence.” The absolutizing of the existential fact by the
Scholastics, with regard to God, who is defined as “pure act” (“actus purus”
[in Greek katharê energeia tou hyparchein]), interprets the mode
in which the essence is and this mode is to exist (“essential
est id cuius actus est esse”). But it does not touch upon the mode of
existing (tropos tou hyparchein), and consequently it continues to limit
the ontological problem to the field of abstract definitions.
By contrast, Eastern theology had
always rejected any polarization between the analogical-ontological and the
mystical determinations of Being. The ontology of the Easterners was primarily
existential because its basis and startling-point is the apophaticism of the
person, not the apophaticism of essence.
In the tradition of the Eastern Church
there is no place for a theology, and even less for a mysticism, of the divine essence
. . . If one speaks of God it is always, for the Eastern Church, in the
concrete: “the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob; the God of Jesus Christ.”
It is always the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. When, on the contrary,
the common nature assumes the first place in our conception of trinitarian
dogma the religious reality of God in Trinity is inevitably obscured in some
measure and gives place to a certain philosophy of essence . . . Indeed, in the
doctrinal conditions peculiar to the West all properly theocentric speculations
runs the risk of considering the nature before the persons and becoming a
mysticism of “the divine abyss,” as in the Gottheit of meister Eckhard;
of becoming an impersonal apophaticism of the divine nothingness prior to the
Trinity. Thus by a paradoxical circuit we return through Christianity to the
mysticism of the neo-platonists. (Lossky, La theologie mystique, 63-64 [ET,
64-65)
The distinction between the apophaticism
of the person and the apophaticism of the essence cannot be fully accounted for
as a theoretical difference. It represents and constitutes two diametrically
opposed spiritual attitudes, two modes of life, in short, two different cultures.
On the one side, life is based on truth as relation and as existential experience;
truth is actualized as life’s social dynamics and life is justified as the identification
of being true with being in communion. On the other side, truth is identified
with intellectual definitions; it is objectivized and subordinated to usefulness.
And truth as usefulness objectivizes life itself; it comes to be translated
into technological hype, into the tormenting and alienation of humanity.
But the historical and cultural
consequences arising from the differences between East and West in the realm of
ontology must remain the subject for another book. Here I simply draw attention
to the brilliant formulation by Martin Heidegger (perhaps the last “essence
mystic” in the West) of the quandary created by the priority of the
apophaticism of essence. Heidegger’s approach showed clearly how the
apophaticism of essence defines and respects the limits of thought, and consequently
the limits of metaphysics or of the ineffable, but leaves the problem of ontic individuality
on the borders of a possible nihilism, reveals Nothingness as an eventuality as
equally as possible as Being, and transposes the ontological question to the
dilemma between being and Nothingness: “[why is there something that exists at
all and not rather nothing?]” With Heidegger the apophaticism of essence proves
to be as much a possibility of ontological and theological nihilism as an
ontic-intellectual definition of essence. (Christos Yannaras, Person and
Eros [4th ed.; trans. Norman Russell; Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox
Press, 2007], 20-23, comments in square brackets added for clarification)