Apophatics

Abstract

A tradition in Christian thought, most prominent in early Christianity to the late medieval period, emphasises the conceptual and epistemic inaccessibility of God. Sometimes called ‘mystical’ or ‘apophatic’ theology, in contrast with the dominant ‘cataphatic’ approach, this tradition — or at least one influential strand of it — motivates an account of religious language that diverges from the face value theory. Apophatic theology, or ‘apophatics’, is infrequently considered in analytic philosophy of religion and then usually by way of ‘negative theology’, or the ‘via negativa’, a method employed by some apophatic theologians to reach a closer relationship with God by rejecting attempts to assign properties to God. Apophatic theology has received considerably more attention within continental philosophy of religion, notably from Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion. However, for reasons we come to shortly, they arrive at an apophatic interpretation of religious discourse rather than religious language. Closer scrutiny of their reading of apophatic theology is therefore taken up in Part II.KeywordsRepresentational ContentReligious SentenceReligious LanguageReligious DiscourseElimination ProblemThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.