Theology

← Encyclopedia

Theology is reasoned discourse about God or the divine — the attempt to set out, in ordered argument, what a tradition holds to be true of its god. The word joins the Greek theos, god, to logos, account or reasoning, and so carries its central tension in its own name: it proposes to give a rational account of what most of its subjects are also said to exceed.

The term is older than the discipline it now names. Greek writers used theologia for talk about the gods well before it became Christian: Plato applies it to the right way of speaking of the divine in poetry, and Aristotle ranks “theology” among the highest sciences, the study of the unchanging first cause. Early Christian writers took the word over and narrowed it, until by the Middle Ages it meant the systematic exposition of doctrine — faith, in Anselm’s phrase, seeking understanding. A long-standing division runs through the field between natural theology, which argues toward God from reason and the observable world, and revealed theology, which reasons from what a tradition takes to be disclosed in scripture or vision.

Within that frame a deeper split recurs wherever the divine is held to be infinite. Positive, or cataphatic, theology affirms — God is good, wise, powerful — granting that such words apply only by analogy. Negative, or apophatic, theology proceeds by denial, stripping every predicate away on the conviction that the divine is better approached by saying what it is not. The classic formulation belongs to the writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite, whose treatises argue that God lies beyond affirmation and beyond negation alike, in a darkness above light; the same current runs through the medieval English Cloud of Unknowing and surfaces, recognisably, in the Neoplatonic One that is said to be past being and past name. Comparable moves appear far from any Greek root — the Hindu neti, neti, “not this, not this,” and the reticence of much Jewish and Islamic thought about naming God. What looks like one shared silence is, on closer reading, many: the tracing of these resemblances is old and well attested, yet each tradition refuses speech from inside its own grammar of the sacred, and means a different thing by the refusal.

What scholarship can establish here is largely the history of the word and its arguments — who reasoned what, and when. Whether any theology reaches its object is precisely the question its practitioners disagree about, and not one a history of the term can settle. The discipline persists as the place where a tradition tries to say, carefully and at length, what it also confesses cannot be said outright.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899) · The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912)

→ Related: Logos · The One · Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Prophecy