Apophatic Theology Research Articles

Niepojmowalność absolutna

The author attempts to rethink the philosophical problem of "absolute incomprehensibility". The problem arises in connection with a quest for the possibility of a final and absolute consolidation of sources and reasons of everything that aspires to have sense, that is, in connection with the question of reasonableness itself. The key issue proves to be relationships of categories like: absolute, reality, man and philosophizing. All this requires serious metaphysical settlements. In the final conclusions the author postulates the complementation of apophatic theology and apophatic anthropology.

Early Christian spirituality of ‘seeing the divine’ in 1 John

Apophatic theology and cataphatic theology both occur in the corpus Johanneum to describe the character of God. Apophatically the Gospel of John and the first epistle of John state that ‘nobody has ever seen God’. Cataphatically, Jesus teaches in the Gospel that, ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’, and in 1 John we read that after the Parousia has taken place ‘we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’. This article focuses on the cataphatic phrase ‘we shall see him as he is’ (1 Jn 3:2). This investigation responds to the variety of interpretations of this particular phrase, as well as to the interest in the spirituality that it could have evoked amongst the readers of this epistle. In order to gain clarity on the ‘spirituality of “seeing him” in the first epistle of John’, this research focuses on the mechanisms used by the elder in the text to create spiritualities in the readers, such as the composition of images in the imagination of these early Christians, the dynamic interactions between the reader and the text, as well as the dialectic of pretension and retention in the reading of a text.

Contemplation and Classical Christianity: A Study in Augustine by John Peter Kenney (review)

Reviewed by: Contemplation and Classical Christianity: A Study in Augustine by John Peter Kenney Andrew Hofer John Peter Kenney Contemplation and Classical Christianity: A Study in Augustine Oxford Early Christian Studies Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 Pp. xi + 191. $74.00. John Peter Kenney has contributed this incisive monograph with a twofold aim: “to retrieve conceptions of contemplation found in the early texts of St Augustine and then to consider them in reference to Augustine’s classic depiction in the Confessions” (viii). As in his previous work, Kenney here eschews “common-core theories” from psychological models constructed to describe the vast array of reported mystical experience in the world’s religions. Instead, he seeks to read Augustine on his own terms. In so doing, Kenney pays attention to how Augustine debates with opponents, such as the Manichaeans, the “contradictores” within the Christian fold who rejected Augustine’s “transcendentalism,” and most [End Page 139] especially the Platonists. Contemplation and Classical Christianity demonstrates how Augustine both relies upon insights from “the books of the Platonists” and moves past their failings to develop the key features of his distinctive understanding of divine transcendence and presence to the soul. To set the stage, Kenney’s first of five chapters studies contemplation and pagan monotheism, with particular attention to Plotinus’s teaching of the soul’s descent into materiality through tolma, that irrational act of audacity, and its ascent through its own native capacity for union with the One. Whereas ascetical practices, the pursuit of virtues, and meditation play essential roles in Plotinian contemplation, what Kenney most emphasizes is apophasis. Having laid this groundwork, Kenney goes on to elucidate Augustine’s ambivalence towards Platonism. The second and third chapters overlap with each other in that both consider Augustine’s time at Cassiciacum. Kenney highlights the disjuncture between Augustine and the “books of the Platonists,” such as in Augustine’s not relying on “Plotinus’ apophatic theology of the One, nor on his ramified theory of divine transcendence” (42). The author also maps the descriptions of contemplation at Cassiciacum on to Augustine’s retrospective look to Cassiciacum from the Confessions and finds a fundamental consistency in such key areas as “a priori knowledge of God through interior cognition”; the complete transcendence of God from the mind and the world as we know it; the importance of purgation from vice; and the absolute necessity of divine agency to guide and sustain the soul (90). Two salient and interrelated aspects of rejecting Plotinian theory are also deepened by the time of the retrospection. In the Confessions, Augustine stresses, more than in the earliest texts, “the soul’s removal from the transcendence of the divine” and the powerlessness of the soul on its own to return to God (91). The fourth chapter examines Augustine’s early Catholic treatises, subdivided into three periods: those written after his baptism while he was still in Italy, the monastic texts of North Africa, and then the ecclesiastical texts after his ordination. Kenney shows how Augustine comes to a quite different understanding from the Platonists of the soul. Aided by his meditation on the Scriptures, Augustine is convinced that the soul simply does not have the native power to ascend but is completely dependent upon the grace of God. In the fifth chapter, we find that Augustine’s early writings on contemplation culminate in Book 9 of the Confessions and the subsequent books, which provide the intellectual support for defending the brief mutual ascent at Ostia of Augustine and his uneducated saintly mother, Monica, to the heavenly Jerusalem. As a “martyr” (for staying in Ambrose’s church when under imperial military threat), Monica appears as “a paradigm of unlearned wisdom acquired by grace” (152). She comes to represent Augustine’s new articulation of contemplation—in striking contrast to Plotinus—of what it means to ascend to the heaven of heaven by the grace of the infinite and uncreated God, who beckons the humble in this life to enjoy that immediate awareness forever. Kenney does not intend to portray “the historical Augustine” or to chart the influences on Augustine—and certainly not to become mired in age-old controversies about Augustine’s relation to Platonism (ix...

The Depth of Unknowing

What is the relevance of the sixth-century writings attributed to Dionysius of Areopagite or Pseudo-Dionysius for twenty-first-century Christianity? This article is an inquiry into the notion of divine unknowability within the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus. As a thinker who lived in an era in which great disputations over cardinal doctrines of the church had become passé, Pseudo-Dionysius seemed to have creatively used different concepts and phrases than those great thinkers before him. For Dionysius, the way to know God is to unknow (agnōsia) God, for God cannot be the object of human knowledge—God is beyond being. To posit God as being or to be existent means, therefore, idolatry, since God is that which cannot be grasped by words or human concepts. To assess this apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, I shall make use of the thinking of Raimon Panikkar who struggles against Western “strict monotheism.” Finally, I shall demonstrate the implications of the doctrine of the unknowability of God vis-à-vis modern debates on the existence of God and on atheism.

Apófasis e interioridad, en los primeros escritos de Agustín

This paper begins by addressing the following question: Given the importance of the Platonism of the school of Plotinus to Augustine’s development, why didn’t he adopt apophatic theology in his early writings? That question leads to a consideration of the role of apophasis in the theology of the Roman Platonist school and in its framing of pagan monotheism. Attention then turns to the Cassiciacum treatises and their representation of interior contemplation. There we find the record of Augustine’s discovery of transcendence within the interior self. But Augustine understands transcendence after his own fashion, incorporating it into his newly recovered Catholicism without entirely obscuring the outlines of Platonic transcendentalism. Thus in these early treatises the outlines of Augustine’s mature understanding of Christian contemplation can be seen already to emerge.

“There is Hope for a Tree”: Lament and Hope in Conversation with Polydoxy

AbstractPolydoxy contributes to a much needed reform of theology by exposing the “logic of the One” as a corruption of Christian thought, by its recovery of the importance of apophatic theology, and by its deployment of multiplicity both to celebrate human diversity and as a “name” of divinity. This article extends these themes by considering them as spiritual and not only intellectual practices that can assist us in our responses to the contemporary situation. The article is framed by attention to the environmental crisis that requires and relativizes theological resources as we find ways to act in the world.

Jesus’ Cry of Lament: Towards a True Apophaticism

The lament speech form is an integral part of Israel’s faith and liturgy, yet its significance has not been adequately accounted for in Christian liturgy and theology. This is astonishing given that Jesus’ resurrection is God’s response to his lament on the cross. Jesus’ cry radicalizes Israel’s practice of lament, yet at the same time his lament contains the distinct aspects of revealing a trinitarian kenosis of God and portraying the crucified one as the new locus of encounter with God, all of which highlights the need to give prominence to an apophatic theology. Given the saving significance of Jesus’ suffering, our suffering, as taken up into the history of God, is to be viewed as a mode of God’s presence; it is not only a condition from which to be delivered but the means by which the hope of a ‘new creation’ will be realized. Jesus’ cry also discloses a complex threefold character to his suffering, which calls for a radical discipleship conceived as participation in the kenosis of the crucified one, who is in complete solidarity with all aspects of suffering humanity.

Edith Stein, Apophatic Theology, and Freedom

Edith Stein, Apophatic Theology, and Freedom

‘Who resembles you? But they resemble you’: Israel and the apophatic in Yannai

Yannai, one of the most influential and prolific liturgical poets in Jewish Palestine in the Byzantine period, frequently introduces negative terms to express God’s transcendence, especially in his silluq poems. The current article collects and analyses cases in which such celebrations of God’s transcendence are checked or qualified by reference to the people of Israel, whom Yannai describes in similarly apophatic terms. I contextualize this theologically charged rhetorical reflex through comparison with contemporary Christian apophatic theology and the exaltation of God in the hekhalot literature.

Milczenie Boga w Twórczości Literackiej Arnolda Schönberga / The Silence of God in Arnold Schönberg’s Literary Texts

Summary This article attempts to delineate the religious dimension of Arnold Schönberg’s literary texts. The question about the role of religion in his creative work has been discussed at great length, though almost always with reference to his musical compositions. His literary texts, however, do not deserve such neglect as they address a number of fundamental religious concerns. The author is perplexed by the elusiveness of the divine presence, his inability to express the experience of Nothingness and Absolute Abstraction, the necessity of praying treated as an act of defiance against the void. The article also discusses Schönberg’s libretti to his major musical works (Die Jakobsleiter, Moses und Aron, and Moderne Psalmen) and his drama Der biblische Weg. It is there that the composer shows how the modern man’s religious experience gets tainted by negativity and a sense of God’s absence. The only way to cope with the problem of Le Dieu caché is to enter the path of apophatic theology, that is to try to approach Him through negation, adopt the attitude of ‘deliberate incomprehension’ and puts one’s trust in paradoxes

Apophatic Theology and Masculinities

Apophatic Theology and Masculinities

Apophatic Theology and Masculinities

Apophatic Theology and Masculinities

Truth and Proof in Mathematics and (Philosophical) Theology

In this article the author ponders the question as to whether there is an intrinsic relation between mathematics and theology with regard to their understanding of truth. Various concepts of truth drawn from philosophy (Plato, Aristotle) and theology (e.g. scripture, apophatic theology, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Ockham, Luther, Scholz, Barth, Pannenberg) are introduced. The concept of truth in mathematics with its relation to proof is discussed with regard to results in proof theory acquired by Gödel and Gentzen. The basic idea is that there is an interesting analogy between the way mathematical truth is sought in Gentzen's work and in apophatic theology.

Grounding Speech and Silence: Cataphaticism and Apophaticism in Denys and Aquinas

This article investigates the interplay of cataphatic and apophatic theology in the works of Denys (Pseudo-Dionysius) and Aquinas. In each case, the reasons given for the possibility of speech about God, and the denial of this possibility, are investigated. This classical theological understanding of ‘speech’ and ‘silence’ is set against two contemporary presentations of apophaticism as found in the writings of Jacques Derrida and Anthony Kenny.

What Do I Love When I Love My Patient?

This essay examines the implications of Jacques Derrida’s complex engagement with negative theology for the field of psychotherapy. Negative (or apophatic) theology is a long tradition which emphasizes God’s absolute otherness. This essay explores Derrida’s attempt in The Gift of Death to translate this theological language into the language of human intersubjectivity. John Caputo, the most renowned American interpreter of Derrida’s writings on religion, calls for a “generalized apophatics,” an application of apophatic thought to fields outside of religion. Caputo bases his exhortation on Derrida’s assertion that “every other is wholly other.” This essay is a preliminary attempt to sketch the outline of an apophatic psychotherapy, with an emphasis on Derridean themes such as the impossible, the secret, and translation.

Dionysian Negative Theology in Donne’s “A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day”

One of the crucial interpretive problems that remains at the heart of Donne’s “Nocturnall” is that of nothingness. Critics have consistently explained this nothingness within an alchemical context. Such a context is, without a doubt, a key part of the poem: in alchemy, base metal is reduced to a “quintessence of nothingness” on its way to becoming gold. 1 Alchemy was practiced seriously in the seventeenth century, and the literal goal of the science was also a common analogy for the deepest movements of spiritual purification, conversion, and contemplative ascent. This is, however, just where the puzzle lies in the “Nocturnall.” An alchemical metaphor is at work, but the movement toward regeneration that the reader expects from this metaphor appears nonexistent. At the end of the poem (“This/ Both the year’s, and the day’s deep midnight is” [ll.44–45]), the speaker seems to stand in the same despairing darkness in which he began (“’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s” [l.1]). If the sole context of the poem is alchemy, is it merely a failed, abortive alchemy? As Edgar Hill Duncan noted early in the poem’s critical history, “Much of the subtlety, and, one may add, the difficulty of the poem arises from the fact that Donne applies the terms of the figure to a situation which is the complete reverse of the alchemists’ dream. Instead of the ‘Elixir of All’ we have here the quintessence of nothingness.” 2 This essay ar gues that there is an additional context that makes sense of the puzzle in the “Nocturnall”—a context that has, so far, gone unnoticed. Nothingness, as critics have shown, does express the tremendous force of Donne’s grief at the death of his beloved. I will show, however, that even as Donne uses “nothingness” to denote this despair, he simultaneously uses the word within another context that was as familiar to his readers as alchemy: the context of Dionysian negative theology. The Dionysian mystical tradition is a tradition of apophatic neoplatonic theology. The tradition maintains that nothing can be predicated of God—God is neither light nor darkness, being nor nonbeing, love nor hate. Rather,

The Im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue (review)

Reviewed by: The Im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue Jeannine Hill Fletcher The Im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue. By Catherine Cornille. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2008. xii + 265 pp. In this very readable volume, Catherine Cornille lays out the essential principles that she characterizes as requisite conditions for interreligious dialogue. With a short introduction and conclusion, the substance of the book is presented in five chapters, each unpacking one of these virtues: humility, commitment, interconnection, empathy, and hospitality. While at first glance these may seem commonsense for any conversation, the strength of this volume is the way in which Cornille problematizes any easy adoption of these, recognizing the limits we run up against in interreligious exchange. She goes further, then, in both complicating an easy read of the principles and pursuing their possibility with the help of a wide range of religious thinkers and theorists. By helping readers identify these principles within the Christian tradition, she invites individuals to transform their traditions toward more positive postures in dialogue. Two of the most persuasive chapters—on humility and empathy—investigate these themes with a rigorous scholarly excavation of resources, seeing them present in religious traditions and practices of encounter. While the reader may intuit "humility" as an important intellectual posture, Cornille demonstrates it also as a theological [End Page 238] virtue. From Christian theological traditions, humility in dialogue is grounded in an affirmation of the eschatological nature of our striving toward truth. This is complemented by the long-standing practice of apophatic theology in recognition of the ineffability of ultimate reality. Similar themes are identified in the other major religious traditions of the world. In the chapter that treats empathy the reader moves from out of an understanding of empathy as a primarily emotive category and pursues with Cornille's careful scholarship the hermeneutical, phenomenological, and theoretical traditions that might be brought to bear. With the help of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Edith Stein (1891-1942), and Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890-1950) (among others), empathy is rendered as a fundamental interpretive orientation necessary for the real possibility of learning across difference. Recognizing that "there are inevitable limits for the empathic understanding to be gained" in interfaith learning, nevertheless, Cornille successfully employs both theory and practice as invitation toward its possibility. While going in depth with each of the themes develops theological nuance and theoretical sophistication, the orientation is at times sustained by a very particular understanding of religions as authoritative sources of truth to which individuals give their consent. In the chapter on commitment, for example, Cornille insists on identifying those involved in the dialogue as fully committed members of particular faith traditions, embracing authoritatively constructed understandings of its truths. "Religious commitment," Cornille writes, "is generally understood as a deliberate identification with the teachings and practices of a particular tradition. It thus entails assent to the truth-claims of a particular tradition and recognition of the authority of the tradition in matters of doctrine and discipline" (p. 66). This suggests, at times, a fairly rigid notion of religious participation and tends toward homogenized religious bodies with clear authoritative structures. Further, this construction of 'religion' renders the relation among them fundamentally conflictual, as when Cornille argues that "most religious traditions regard themselves as the ultimate if not the sole repository of truth, as the highest path to salvation or the most efficacious means to liberation" (p. 10). Although admitting exceptions to this general rule, "religions" are regularly reduced to their competing truth claims, and interreligious dialogue is envisioned concretely as "a two-way process in which each partner is engaged in a process not only of informing but also convincing the other of the truth of his or her own beliefs and practices" (p. 71, emphasis added). Cornille is describing a rather elite project of dialogue where "representatives of traditions" engage in argumentative practice (albeit one conditioned by humility, interconnection, empathy, and hospitality). Dialogue is not the "hodge-podge" and "mish-mash" of New Age syncretism (p. 64), where individuals speak from out of their own experiences. Rejecting any such non-normative stance of allegiance to a particular authoritative tradition, Cornille writes (disapprovingly), "If no particular religion...

“ ”

In this guest column, Epstein offers “a new sign” that, he argues, resolves difficulties that have arisen in many theories and practices, including linguistics, semiotics, literary theory, poetics, aesthetics, ecology, ecophilology, eco-ethics, metaphysics, theology, psychology, and phenomenology. The new sign, a pair of quotation marks around a blank space, signfies the absence of any sign. Most generally, “ ” relates to the blank space that surrounds and underlies a text; by locating “ ” within the text, the margins are brought inside and can become the focus of attention. Not only the margins but also the material background of a text (the page or screen) can be brought forward and focused on through the transparency of the sign “ ”, in which case “ ” becomes a sign of itself. Consubstantial with its medium, therefore, this sign is both relative and universal: “ ” is the same everywhere, on every surface, in every language, and also in the arts. Epstein analyzes works by Rauschenberg, Malevich, Ilya Kabakov, and Vasilisk Gdenov in the visual arts, as well as music by John Cage, to demonstrate the usefulness of his new sign for aesthetics and art criticism. Each discipline, he argues, has its own nonspeakable conditions and assumptions that it needs to bring inside disciplinary frontiers. At the frontier of language, “ ” is both inside and outside, and therefore can express the nonspeakable condition of speakability. In concluding, Epstein suggests that the task of the avant-garde in theory today is to develop a “negative semiotics”: a semiotics of nonsigns, modeled on negative (apophatic) theology.

Adoration and Annihilation: The Convent Philosophy of Port-Royal (review)

Reviewed by: Adoration and Annihilation: The Convent Philosophy of Port-Royal Ellen Weaver-Laporte Adoration and Annihilation: The Convent Philosophy of Port-Royal. By John J. Conley, S.J. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2009. Pp. xiv, 318. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-268-02296-9.) Those familiar with the history of the conflict between the members and supporters of the Cistercian monastery of Port-Royal and the Society of Jesus over St. Augustine’s theology of grace as propounded in the Augustinus by Cornelius Jansen will find this study written by a Jesuit, which features the nuns of Port-Royal as philosophers and theologians, delicately ironic. John J. Conley, Henry J. Knott Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Loyola College in Maryland, has the expertise necessary to discern the theological [End Page 310] and philosophical ideas in the diverse writings of the three Arnauld abbesses of Port-Royal. Mère Angélique Arnauld, reformer of the monastery; Mère Agnés Arnauld, her sister; and Mère Angélique de Saint Jean Arnauld d’Andilly, her niece, continued the virtual hegemony of the Arnauld family over Port-Royal. The introduction provides an excellent brief history of the convent from its foundation in 1204 up to and including the “century of the reformed Port-Royal (1609–1709).” Conley’s term for the reform of Mère Angélique, “the Angelican reform,” can be a bit confusing to those conversant with the term Anglican, referring to the Church of England. Conley’s presentation of the Jansenist controversy, relying on recent scholarship, is even handed. Turning to his thesis that the Arnauld nuns produced a literary corpus of serious philosophical significance, Conley begins with an analysis of the autobiographical Relation écrit par Mère Angélique Arnauld sur Port-Royal, massive correspondence, and conferences of Mère Angélique Arnauld. It is noted that one characteristic of her reform was its enhancement of the spiritual authority of women, illustrated by the convent chapter’s election of the abbess; the right of the abbess to appoint chaplains, confessors, and preachers; and the right of the nuns to pursue biblical and patristic study, to receive spiritual direction, and to be educated. These rights are, of course, simply the application of the Rule of St. Benedict, which was always followed by Cistercian monasteries, and the strict adherance to which was basic to the reform of Mère Angélique. The major elements of the philosophy gleaned from the writings of Mère Angélique are emphasis on the divine incomprehensibility of God—the central theological thesis of our complete dependence on God’s grace for the capacity to perform a single virtuous act, as well as for our salvation—and a moral philosophy of blunt rigorism Mère Agnès Arnauld authored a devotional treatise that became very controversial, Le chapelet secret du Saint Sacrement (1626). Each of the sixteen paragraphs celebrates an attribute of Christ in the Eucharist. Her apophatic philosophy is illustrated in the closing six attributes: inaccessibility, incomprehensibility, independence, incommunicability, illimitability, and inapplicability. In the analysis of Mère Agnès a negative connotation is given even to the positive attributes: holiness, truth, existence, liberty, existence, self-sufficiency, satiety, plenitude, eminence, possession, and rulership. Her account of the virtues proper to a nun, L’image d’une religieuse parfaite et d’une imparfaite (Paris, 1665), bears the stamp of her apophatic theology. The submission of the nun to God is central in her treatment of the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The heart of adoration lies in a mutual annihilation between Christ and the soul of the nun contemplating the sacrament. The gift of the Eucharist, in which she sees the continual immolation of Christ to his eternal Father, excites her to self-immolation. [End Page 311] Besides her works of devotion, Mère Agnès developed an ethics of resistance in her Avis donnés par la Mère Catherine Agnès de Saint-Paul sur la conduit que les réligieuses doivent garder en cas qu’il arrivait du changement dans le gouvernement de sa maison (Paris, 1663). Mère Agnès frames the strategy of resistance within...

Knowledge and the Transcendent: An Inquiry into the Mind’s Relationship to God by Paul A. Macdonald, Jr.

494 BOOK REVIEWS Knowledge and the Transcendent: An Inquiry into the Mind's Relationship to God. By PAUL A. MACDONALD, JR. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009. Pp. 306. $69.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-08132 -1577-8. Macdonald's book demands the attention of philosophers and theologians alike. Philosophically, Macdonald engages skepticism, subjectivism, philosophy of the mind, analytical philosophy, epistemology, realism, and Thomism. Theologically, Macdonald discusses the relation of faith and reason, the role of the intellect and the will in faith, apophatic theology, eschatology, and the significance of theological realism. These twin trajectories inform his answer to the question: "How can God transcend the mind but still remain known to the mind?" Critical of the overwhelmingly negative responses to this question since Kant, Macdonald affirmatively proposes, "Having knowledge of God thus seems to require that our conceptions of God bear on or are directed on God's transcendent reality" (xiii). The aim of the book, therefore, is to offer an epistemology that permits objective knowledge of God that does not diminish God's transcendence. Macdonald accomplishes this by arguing for an epistemology of direct realism and then shows how direct realism is compatible with natural knowledge of God, knowledge gained by faith, and even knowledge in the beatific vision. This last aspect is particularly intriguing since the beatific vision functions as the primary or quintessential instance of direct realism. Knowledge and the Transcendent is divided into three parts. The first part outlines howsubjectivism and skepticism proffer a problematic conception ofthe mind's relation to God, and traces the influence of this problematic through various philosophical and theological thinkers since Descartes and especially Kant. The second part addresses this problematic by offering an alternative, direct realism, argued for on the basis of a close reading of Aquinas's epistemology (STh I, qq. 78-85) and supported by its consistency with the knowledge of God by reason, faith, and beatitude. Macdonald argues that direct realism ensures objective knowledge of things and correspondingly of God-even if, in the case of the latter, this knowledge is partial, noncomprehensive, and nonabsolute. The third part applies direct realism to contemporary discourses on faith and reason on one hand and theological realism on the other. In this manner, Macdonald orients direct realism and its implications by critically engaging the works of John McDowell, Victor Preller, Norman Kretzmann, Denys Turner, and Peter Byrne. Modern discussions about knowing the transcendent God have often been falsely construed on the basis of a misconception of the relation between the mind and the world and, derivatively, the mind and God. Modern epistemologies conceive a disjunctive dualism between subject and object, the BOOK REVIEWS 495 mind and the world, which limits reason to dealing with mere appearances and not things-in-themselves. This restrictive narrowing of reason and objective knowledge by skepticism and subjectivism consequently creates a divide or boundary between the mind and God so that one must either overcome the divide by reducing God to the subject (anthropomorphism) or accentuate it so that God ultimately remains entirely unknown (agnosticism). Macdonald explains the consequences of many modern epistemologies, worth quoting at length, In short, the problem can be specified as follows: once God is placed outside or beyond a cognitive boundary (given that God is pictured as transcending a cognitive boundary), then there can be no objectivity in what human persons believe and say about God. The beliefs and assertions we hold and make about God ... can have no bearing on who God objectively is. This leads to skepticism regarding our knowledge of God. The alternative to the skeptical position, which in fact turns out to be an extension of skepticism, is subjectivism. According to this position, we can think and talk about God in terms of our religious symbols and experience; or we can think and talk about God in terms of our individual or collective religious responses and practices; but again, we cannot think and talk about God "in God's self." (3) As one may expect, Macdonald outlines the genesis of this problematic in Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Their epistemologies result in "theological antirealism ," whether in its anthropomorphic or agnostic forms, indicative of...