Theology

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A name can carry an argument inside it. Theology is one of these. It joins the Greek theos, god, to logos — word, account, reasoning, the ordered giving of reasons — and so promises, in a single coinage, a logos of theos: a reasoned account of the divine. The promise is also a strain, because most of what theology takes for its subject is held, by the very traditions that practice it, to lie past the reach of ordered speech. The discipline sets out to say at length what it grants in advance cannot quite be said. That tension is not a defect to be repaired; it is the working condition of the field, the pressure under which its characteristic methods were forged.

The word is older than the discipline it now names, and it began far from the seminary. In the Republic, censuring the way poets speak of the gods, Plato sets down what he calls hoi tupoi peri theologias — the patterns or norms for right speech about the divine, the standards a city should hold its myth-makers to (the phrase is variously rendered as outlines of theology or norms of right discourse about the gods) (Republic 379a). This is the earliest surviving use of the term, and already it marks theology as a matter of how the divine may be correctly spoken — a question of measure, not of mere praise. Aristotle raised it higher. Dividing the theoretical knowledge into three — the science of changeable embodied things (natural philosophy), the science of unchanging abstractions (mathematics), and the science of what is both unchanging and separate from matter — he named the third theologikē and ranked it the most honorable, the one he also called first philosophy, the study of being qua being. Its object is the unmoved first cause argued in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics: a substance eternal, immaterial, and fully actual, which moves all things not by pushing but by being loved, the object of desire and of thought toward which the cosmos turns. Here theology is not devotion put into prose but the highest reach of philosophy, the inquiry into the first principle on which everything else depends.

The Christian narrowing

The Greek word survived its passage into Latin and then the modern tongues — theologia, théologie, and, through forms like theologie and teologye, an English theology settled by the later fourteenth century. What changed across those centuries was not the spelling but the scope. Early Christian writers took theologia over and bent it toward their own concern, and by the high Middle Ages it had contracted from right speech about the gods, or first philosophy, into something more specific: the ordered exposition of revealed doctrine, the systematic unfolding of what a church holds to be disclosed about God. The classic motto of that program is Anselm’s. His short treatise of c. 1077–78, written at the abbey of Bec and now known as the Proslogion, he first meant to call Fides Quaerens Intellectum — faith seeking understanding. The order of the words is the whole method: belief comes first and reason follows, not to manufacture faith but to grasp what faith already holds. Anselm’s formula reverses the expected order: one does not understand in order to believe, but believes in order to understand. Reasoning here is the labor of a mind already committed, working out the intelligibility of what it has received — a definition of the discipline that the medieval schools, and much of scholasticism after them, took as their charter.

A long fault line runs through the field on the question of where its reasons start. Natural theology argues toward God from reason and the observable world alone — from motion to a first mover, from contingent things to a necessary one, from the order of nature to an orderer — claiming nothing the unaided intellect could not in principle reach. Revealed theology reasons instead from what a tradition takes to be given: scripture, vision, the words of prophets, the deposit of revelation. The two are not rivals so much as two starting points, and the great systematizers worked both. Thomas Aquinas held that reason can establish that God is and certain of the divine attributes, while the inner life of God — Trinity, incarnation, the economy of grace — is known only as disclosed; sacra doctrina, sacred teaching, takes the articles of faith as its first principles much as a subordinate science takes its premises from a higher one. The line between the two theologies has been redrawn in every age — widened by the confident natural theologians of the Enlightenment, narrowed sharply by those who held that fallen reason cannot climb to God at all — but the distinction itself is one of the oldest organizing instruments the discipline owns.

A field of disciplines

Within any developed tradition theology subdivides. Systematic or dogmatic theology arranges the whole of doctrine into a single ordered structure — God, creation, humanity, salvation, last things — each part supporting the next. Fundamental or philosophical theology examines the grounds of belief itself, including the proofs and the divine attributes that natural theology pursues. Moral theology draws out how a doctrine of God bears on how a life should be lived, and ascetical theology, its contemplative neighbor, treats the disciplines by which a soul is ordered toward union. Where doctrine is read off authoritative texts, exegesis and biblical theology do the close work of interpretation; where it is hammered out in dispute, polemical and controversial theology defend the boundaries. These branches are not modern bureaucratic divisions so much as the natural joints of a discourse that has to cover the first cause, the world that hangs from it, and the creature trying to think both.

Theology has never had a monopoly on the address to the divine, and it lives among neighbors it does not contain. Prophecy claims not a reasoned account of God but a word from God, delivered rather than deduced; theology then arrives afterward to interpret what the prophet brought. Gnosis sets a saving, experiential knowing against the discursive kind, holding that the divine is grasped in an awakening no argument can supply. Mysticism reports a union or immediate contact that overruns every category, and stands to theology as the territory to the map — which is why the apophatic theologians, who knew the territory best, were the readiest to admit the map’s limits. Theology takes all of these as its data and its provocation: it tries to give reasons for what the prophet announces, what the gnostic claims to know, and what the mystic says cannot be told. Alongside it runs an older Hellenic stream the Renaissance would name and prize — the pagan Platonic theology of the philosophers, and the dream, gathered up as prisca theologia, of an ancient wisdom about God flowing from a single source through Hermes, Orpheus, and Plato into the Christian schools. That genealogy is itself a theological claim: an argument about where true speech of the divine begins and how it is transmitted.

Saying and unsaying

Beneath that division lies a deeper one, and it surfaces wherever the divine is held to be infinite. If God genuinely exceeds every finite thing, then every word drawn from finite experience — good, wise, powerful, one — must either fail or apply in some stretched and qualified way. Two disciplined responses follow. The cataphatic or affirmative way speaks: it predicates perfections of God, granting that such terms hold not univocally, as they do of creatures, but by analogy — God is good as the cause and measure of all good, not as one good thing among others. The apophatic or negative way unsays: it strips the predicates off one by one, on the conviction that the surest thing to be said of the divine is what it is not, and that the mind comes nearest its object by going dark. The two are not opposed programs but a single rhythm, affirmation followed by denial and then by the denial of the denial itself, a discipline given its sharpest classical form in the apophatic theology of the late-antique Christian writer who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. His Mystical Theology mounts the ascent and then dismantles it: God is beyond every assertion and beyond every negation alike, met at the summit not as light but as a darkness above light, a brilliance so total it blinds. The same current runs through the medieval English Cloud of Unknowing, which sets a cloud of forgetting beneath the contemplative and a cloud of unknowing above, and it is continuous with the Neoplatonic teaching of the One — the source past being, past intellect, past even the name one, of which Plotinus and the Neoplatonist henologists held that we say what surrounds it but never quite itself. In the fifteenth century Nicholas of Cusa gathered the strand into the formula of docta ignorantia, learned ignorance: since there is no proportion between the finite and the infinite, the highest knowledge available to a finite mind is the reasoned recognition of its own not-knowing.

The reticence is not Greek property. Comparable moves recur where no Hellenic root reaches. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad the sage Yajnavalkya answers the question of what the ultimate is with neti, neti — “not this, not this” — defining Brahman by stripping away whatever can be grasped as an object, a method later Vedanta made central to its discrimination of the self from all that is not the self. Maimonides, reasoning inside a strict ethical monotheism, taught that no positive attribute may truly be predicated of God, only the negation of privations, lest the divine simplicity be compromised by anthropomorphism — the Jewish negative theology that Bahya ibn Paquda’s Gate of Divine Unity presses to the same end. A parallel restraint attends the divine name in Israelite and later Jewish practice, where the tetragrammaton is written but not pronounced, and in much Islamic thought, where the tanzih that holds God incomparable guards against likening the Creator to anything created. These are convergent grammars of the sacred, each disciplined and ancient — and each means something distinct by its silence. Christian apophasis negates the predicates of a personal, triune God whose hidden being grounds the very procession it then affirms. Maimonidean negation protects the absolute unity of a God who is not three and not embodied. The Upanishadic neti, neti clears away the not-self to disclose Brahman as non-dual identity, the innermost rather than a transcendent other. Plotinian henology negates the One as the overflowing source from which all multiplicity emanates. The shared method — approach by unsaying — is real and well attested across the traditions; the metaphysics it serves diverges at the root, so that the bare claim that the ultimate exceeds all predicates carries a different cargo in each mouth.

The textual and scholarly tradition

The primary monuments of negative theology are largely recoverable in older critical and translation work. The Greek-Latin spine of the Dionysian corpus sits in Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologia Graeca vols. III–IV (Paris, 1857), which reproduce Balthasar Cordier’s seventeenth-century edition with the scholia; the standard older complete English is John Parker’s The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (London: James Parker, 1897–99), and a more literal rendering of the Divine Names and Mystical Theology came from Clarence Edwin Rolt (London: SPCK, 1920). The authorship question that unmasked the “Areopagite” as a late-fifth-century writer steeped in Proclus was settled independently in 1895 by Josef Stiglmayr and Hugo Koch, who showed the corpus drawing on Proclus’s treatise on the subsistence of evils. The Plotinian henological core is most accessible in Stephen MacKenna’s The Enneads (London: Medici Society, 1917–30), whose final volume carries Ennead VI.9, “On the Good or the One”, the locus classicus of the philosophy of the One. For the Jewish line, M. Friedländer’s translation of Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed (London: Trübner, 1881–85; one-volume revision 1904) carries the negative-attributes argument of Book I, chapters 50–60. Among modern studies, Deirdre Carabine’s The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition (Peeters, 1995) traces the filiation from Plato to Eriugena; Denys Turner’s The Darkness of God (Cambridge, 1995) follows the Christian stream from Dionysius through Eckhart; and Michael Sells’s Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago, 1994) reads apophasis as a performed unsaying rather than a set of propositions. The philological history of the term itself — its coinage in Plato and its passage into the modern languages — is laid out in Gerard Naddaf’s Plato’s Theologia Revisited and in standard reference accounts of the word’s etymology.

What the discipline does

Theology is not confined to the via negativa, nor to the God of the philosophers. Where revelation is claimed, it labors to render a body of given texts coherent — to reconcile the scriptures with one another, to draw out the implications of a creed, to settle in council and commentary what the words commit a community to. Where reason leads, it builds proofs and weighs objections, defines the divine attributes, and asks how an infinite cause can have any traffic with a finite world. It is not the property of one religion. In Islam, kalam — the dialectical theology of the Mutazila and the Asharites — argued the divine attributes, the createdness or eternity of the Quran, and the unity of God, while a parallel restraint in Sufism held the divine essence incomparable to anything spoken of it. In Judaism, systematic reflection runs from Saadia Gaon — whose account of the created glory explained how an unseeable God can yet be manifest — through the negative metaphysics of Maimonides to the kabbalistic naming of the hidden godhead as Ein Sof, the Without-End that precedes every emanation. The darshanas of Hindu thought reason about Brahman and the relation of the self to the ultimate; the elaborated doctrinal systems of the Christian schools weigh Trinity and incarnation; and the Hermetic dialogues of the Corpus Hermeticum press a discourse on the divine mind that the later tradition read as theology in a pagan key. All of these are, in the broad sense, theologies — ordered discourse about the divine carried on within a tradition and answerable to its sources. What binds these otherwise unlike enterprises is the structural predicament named in the word. The theologian stands committed to two things that pull against each other: that the divine is real and bears on everything, and that it overflows the categories any account can supply. Out of that double commitment the discipline gets its peculiar shape — the careful piling of distinctions, the analogies always half-withdrawn, the proofs followed by confessions of their limit. To do theology well is to keep both commitments at once: to reason as far as reason reaches toward a first cause, and then, at the edge where the finite mind runs out of proportion to its object, to fall deliberately silent and to have meant every word up to the silence.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899) · The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912) · Plotinus, Ennead VI.9 'On the Good or the One' (MacKenna)

→ Related: Logos · The One · Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Prophecy · Apophatic Theology · Pagan Platonic Theology · Jewish Negative Theology Maimonides Bahya · Saadianic Created Glory Theology · Prisca Theologia · Ascetical Theology · Thomas Aquinas · Scholasticism · Revelation · Nicholas Of Cusa · Mysticism · Religion · Metaphysics