Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis: Only the Splendour of Light [1st ed.] 9783030496012, 9783030496029

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PALGRAVE FRONTIERS IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis Only the Splendour of Light Simon Hewitt

Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion

Series Editors Yujin Nagasawa Department of Philosophy University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK Erik J. Wielenberg Department of Philosophy DePauw University Greencastle, IN, USA

Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion is a long overdue series which will provide a unique platform for the advancement of research in this area. Each book in the series aims to progress a debate in the philosophy of religion by (i) offering a novel argument to establish a strikingly original thesis, or (ii) approaching an ongoing dispute from a radically new point of view. Each title in the series contributes to this aim by utilising recent developments in empirical sciences or cutting-edge research in foundational areas of philosophy (such as metaphysics, epistemology and ethics). More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14700

Simon Hewitt

Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis Only the Splendour of Light

Simon Hewitt School of PRHS University of Leeds Leeds, UK

Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion ISBN 978-3-030-49601-2    ISBN 978-3-030-49602-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49602-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: powerofforever / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my parents.

Acknowledgements

I was funded by the Leverhulme Trust under their Early Career Research fellowship scheme during the period in which this book was written. Previous time spent with the ERC-funded Nature of Representation Project at the University of Leeds allowed me the space for thinking about language and mind which has found its way especially into Chap. 8. Robbie Williams led that project and was an excellent mentor, and Gail Leckie was especially generous in spending time talking about issues around linguistic priority. The Centre for Philosophy and Religion at Leeds provided an excellent testing ground for the ideas contained in this book. Parts of the material were presented to audiences at the International Journal for Philosophy and Theology’s anniversary ‘Sisters in Arms’ Conference in January 2019 in Cambridge, to the Medieval Philosophy Network in London, to the Leeds PRHS Work in Progress seminar and to the Society for the Study of Theology. I would also like to thank Mikel Burley, Brian Davies OP, Bob Eccles OP, Fiona Ellis, Jessica Eastwood, Peter Hunter OP, Sam Lebens, Robin le Poedevin, Franco Mani, Rachel Muers, Jonathan Nassim, Paul O’Grady, Rebecca Stephens, Sussanah Ticciati, Catherine Wallis-Hughes, Roger White and Mark Wynn. Tasia Scrutton deserves thanks for so much, not least for an enduring love of the sort that is a model of how we created beings can faithfully image that uncreated love which lies beyond the competence of our concepts. vii

viii Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to the London fraternity of the Lay Dominicans, of which I am a member. In a sermon preached to the English provincial chapter of the Dominican friars, Herbert McCabe set out a vision of the Dominican vocation as being to proclaim the mystery of God, in particular that God is not a god, an object within the universe competing with us for metaphysical space. Just before concluding he said, This is the task of preaching that, it seems to me, we are here this week to organise, the task of telling men that they can have images if they like, they may do no harm, but they are not what we are talking about, none of them are God: God is not part of the world, God is the unfathomable mystery of love by which the world is; there are no gods, there is only this love.1

That is indeed our vocation, and I am grateful to the London Lay Dominicans for helping me to live it. But before any other vocation, and a prerequisite for it, stands the vocation to be human. For that I was formed, and continue to be, by my parents, Peter and Anne Hewitt, and I dedicate this book to them.

 McCabe 1987, p. 242.

1

Contents

1 God Beyond Words  1 2 Analytic Criticisms of Apophaticism 19 3 Analytic Apophaticisms 37 4 Referentialism and Religious Language 55 5 Grammatical Thomism 71 6 The Grammar of God-Talk 89 7 Speaking of God: Truthfully and Devotedly109 8 Is God a Person?127 9 Incarnation and Trinity143

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10 Politics, Kingdom, Beatific Vision161 Bibliography177 Index189

List of Abbreviations

DDI (the) doctrine of divine ineffability DDS (the) doctrine of divine simplicity DDT (the) doctrine of divine transcendence.

xi

Introduction

‘Great Father of glory, pure Father of light, thine angels adore thee, all veiling their sight; all laud we would render: O help us to see ‘tis only the splendour of light hideth thee’.1

The theologian known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite2 holds that our talk of God must involve both affirming and denial. Yet within this interplay of positive and negative, of cataphatic and apophatic theology,3 there is a certain sense in which the denial, apophatic theology, has priority. He writes towards the beginning of his Mystical Theology that, we should praise the denials quite differently than we do the assertions. When we made assertions we began with the first things, moved down through intermediate terms until we reached the last things. But now as we  Immortal Invisible God Only Wise, in the New English Hymnal. The original, written by the Free Kirk minister Walter Chalmers Smith adds ‘And so let thy glory, Almighty impart, Through Christ in his story, to Christ to the heart’. In what follows I affirm the spirit of both and deny that there is a tension between thoroughgoing apophaticism and properly christocentric Christian faith. 2  On account of his pseudonymous identification with the Dionysius mentioned in Acts 17:34. 3  For the purposes of this book, I will use ‘negative theology’ as synonymous with ‘apophatic theology’. 1

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climb from the last things up to the most primary we deny all things so that we may unhiddenly know that unknowing which itself is hidden from all those possessed of knowing amid all beings, so that we may see above being that darkness concealed from all the light among beings.4 The passage could not have been designed better to infuriate a good proportion of contemporary anglophone philosophical theologians. The metaphor of darkness suggests the unknowability of God, described in turn as ‘unknowing’ and ‘hidden’, and God is presented as ‘above being’. How does pseudo-Dionysisus , and those who have followed his line of thought over subsequent centuries, differ from an atheist? The atheist too, after all, denies that we can know anything of God and that there is no such being as God. Perhaps, the critic may continue, even this line of questioning is too kind; isn’t pseudo-Dionysius simply talking nonsense? Might he not be acquitted of the charge of saying what Christian theology must hold to be false only on the basis of saying nothing coherent at all? We will encounter versions of these complaints against apophatic theology as this book proceeds. The purpose of the book is quite simple, to defend, from a perspective internal to Christian philosophical theology, an apophatic theology according to which, far from being a concession to atheism, the conviction that God is radically unknowable arises out of the very reasoning according to which we can come to know that God exists. Relatedly, that we cannot know what God is, is a direct consequence of the doctrine of creation, and coheres well with the broader structure of Christian dogmatics. The task of the rest of the book is to make good these claims. By way of introduction, however, some methodological preliminaries ought to be addressed.

Philosophy or Theology? One answer to the question, ‘is this book an exercise in philosophy or theology?’ is ‘yes’. There is a certain point to this flippant response. Although my purpose here is to write a work of Christian theology, much that happens in the course of that exercise will be philosophy. There is, wrote Aquinas, a ‘theology which is part of philosophy’.5 Both philosophy  MT II.  STh Ia, q1, a1, ad. 2.

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and theology proper, what might be called systematic or dogmatic theology, can speak of God. The difference as I see it is both epistemological and contextual. Philosophy does not rely epistemically on any claim justifiable only on the basis of appeal to divine revelation; it may explore this kind of claim suppositionally (is the doctrine of the Trinity consistent?) but a person is no longer doing philosophy if, in the course of her argument, she asserts a claim of this sort.6 Christian theology, meanwhile, depends epistemically on what we believe to be divine revelation, communicated through the history of Israel and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, witnessed to in scripture, and meditated upon in the ongoing life of the Church. This epistemological difference arises from what I take to be a more fundamental contextual difference. Philosophy is an activity which has found many situations, although which is perhaps most frequently found in the contemporary West in secular university settings. Certainly philosophy is not of necessity a proper part of any specific wider activity, although it is inevitably pursued amidst the myriad of human activities which constitute any given society. Christian theology by contrast is a proper part of a definite and more encompassing activity, that of the life of the Church, fulfilling its baptismal calling and bearing witness to God’s self-communication. Theology, then, is confessional. Such is the overall purpose of this book, even if for large parts of it I am engaged in a kind of writing that can be engaged with simply as philosophy. As an endeavour in the service of the Church, theology is both situated and accountable. It is situated insofar as any given author belongs to a particular tradition. It is accountable in that theology can be found lacking by the wider Christian community; it may yet be said of any given work ‘this is not what we believe’. My intention is to write theology which is transconfessional7 in Schillebeeckx’s sense, accessible across a range of Christian traditions (and beyond) and speaking to issues that are ecumenical in scope. Nevertheless, my situation is particular: I take the Catholic Church’s understanding of the faith to be a constraint on what I write here, and I would take it to be a decisive objection to anything  Which is not to say that ‘pure’ philosophy cannot be of great service to Christians as Christians. See MacIntyre 2009. 7  Schillebeeckx 1983, p. 66. 6

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that follows if it could be shown to contradict this understanding. It is worth being up-front about this commitment, not just by way of situating what follows but also as a witness against the pervasive cult of the individual academic, who supposes himself (he is a he) to produce ideas ex nihilo unencumbered by tradition or community. If I intend here to write theology, however, it is certainly philosophical theology that I have in mind. Philosophical theology, on my way of surveying the intellectual territory, differs from philosophy proper in being part of confessional theology. It is typically concerned particular with issues of philosophical interest, with the language in terms of which doctrinal claims are articulated, with the coherence and consistency of doctrines, with the intersection between theology and metaphysics, or ethics, and so on. It makes use of work done in philosophy and applies philosophical methods to the investigation of theological topics. Apophaticism is a topic with respect to which a distinctively philosophical theological approach is likely to prove fertile, concerning as it does delicate questions about the limits of language and the nature of the divine reality. My strategy here is to approach these questions with resources gleaned from the analytic tradition of Western philosophy. This in itself is significant. There has been recent philosophical engagement with apophaticism. But the greater part of it has been within the continental tradition, with Derrida and Marion providing the best known examples. The analytic tradition meanwhile has tended to house a suspicion of the apophatic. Chapter 2 below addresses the most important articulations of this suspicion. The present book is an attempt to redress the balance, developing an apophatic theology using the resources of the analytic tradition.

Analytic Theology? I am deploying the tools of analytic philosophy with theological purpose. A natural question then is whether this book is an exercise in Analytic Theology.8 The capitalisation of the expression is to indicate that there is a broad movement answering to its name. Inspired by the work of figures  For an introduction to Analytic Theology see McCall 2016.

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like Plantinga and van Inwagen, given a showcase in an edited collection by Crisp and Rea,9 and exemplified in Crisp’s own work as well as that of figures such as Pawl and, latterly, Eleonore Stump, Analytic Theology has been part of the philosophical and theological scenes during the first two decades of the twenty-first century.10 Which scene it belongs most naturally within itself is an ambiguous matter. Often what is published as Analytical Theology is clearly confessional Christian theology in the sense outlined above. But at other times what is on offer seems more like philosophy of religion; and there have been movements towards analytic theologies of non-Christian religions and of inter-religious Analytic Theology.11 Still, as with analytic philosophy itself, whilst there might be difficulties delineating or defining Analytic Theology precisely, most of us have a good idea what is being talked about when we talk about Analytic Theology; we know the beast when we see it. I suspect that those looking at what follows with an informed eye will not see Analytic Theology, which is not to say that they won’t see a number of important shared features with work belonging under that auspice. It is no part of my aim in writing this book to produce a work of Analytic Theology, although it is certainly my aim to write philosophical theology within the analytic tradition; but nor is it an objective of mine to not write Analytic Theology. In the rest of this section, I will lay out briefly what I take to be the main points of difference between my approach in the present book and that of the mainstream of Analytic Theology. Generally reckoned to have begun with Moore and Russell’s break with British Idealism, equipped by Frege’s work on logic and language, and shaped by Wittgenstein (early and late), the analytic tradition within Western philosophy is broad.12 It is fair to say that Analytic Theology has drawn – in terms of content, style, and method – on the kind of philosophy practised in north America during the closing decades of the twentieth century, with Quine and Lewis as exemplars. Retreating from the kind of linguistic priority Dummett sees as definitive of the analytic  Crisp and Rea 2009.  See for example Crisp 2019, Pawl 2016, Stump 2018. 11  Hence, for example, the Journal for Analytic Theology’s 2019 essay competition on the subject ‘Diversifying Analytic Theology’. 12  Glock 2008. 9

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tradition,13 thinkers in this period revived metaphysics as a quasi-­scientific theory of reality in general (many would object to my ‘quasi’). Critics (myself included) would suspect this strand of analytic philosophy of scientism, that is of foregrounding explanation amongst philosophical tasks, and viewing the natural sciences as providing the paradigms for what good explanatory theories look like.14 The analytic philosophy I find most useful is typically not of this sort. As will become clear in Chap. 4, I view issues around language as of ongoing foundational relevance. I do not see explanation, by contrast with clarification or conceptual analysis,15 for instance, as monopolising the philosophers’ duties. My preparedness to follow recently well-trodden paths in philosophical theology is hampered by the fact that I am sceptical about the possibility of Serious Metaphysics.16 And, whilst valuing appropriate rigour, I am open to discursive and humane discussions. In particular, I see no reason to follow the mainstream of Atlantic analytic philosophy of religion in rejecting the insights of Wittgenstein. Herbert McCabe and Brian Davies, certainly analytic theologians if not Analytic Theologians, both influenced by Wittgenstein, are pervasive conversation partners in what follows. If Analytic Theology is too focused on a narrow strand of contemporary analytic philosophy, I think that it is altogether too negative about contemporary theology. Whilst it is certainly the case that theology can benefit from analytic philosophy, the concern for careful argument and rigorous distinction of which resonates with (for instance) the medieval scholastic heyday of Western Christian theology, there ought to be a presupposition against supposing that non-analytic theology has nothing to  Dummett 2014. Note that the retreat from linguistic priority goes beyond either Quine or Lewis. I would identify David Armstrong’s work on metaphysics as being of particular moment in rejecting a foundational role for language. 14  For a useful overview of understandings of scientism see the introduction to Beale & Kidd 2017. 15  On these distinctions see the early chapters of Dummett 2014. 16  In Hewitt 2018c, for instance, I challenge the suggestion that we can grasp a concept of ‘real’. ‘fundamental’, or ‘joint-carving’ existence. The kind of linguistic considerations that generate this scepticism look likely to generalise to other topics on the contemporary metaphysics syllabus. 13

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offer. The kind of unpleasant attack on a number of contemporary theologians which Rauser makes in his ‘Theology as a Bull Session’17 cannot be tolerated. But nor is the more general ignoring of contemporary theology by Analytic Theologians indicative of a healthy academic culture. Crisp and Rea’s list of writers they take to have defended ‘non-analytic approaches to theological topics’ is revealing, Don Cupitt, John Hick, George Lindbeck, Jean-Luc Marion, D.Z. Phllips and Merold Westphal.18

The inclusion of Hick and Phillips as ‘non-analytic’ thinkers serves as a useful witness to my earlier comments about the unduly restrictive understanding of the analytic tradition operative in Analytic Theology (If Philips, Wittgenstein’s most prominent student in twentieth century philosophical theology, is not ‘analytic’, who can claim that label?) Yet the immediate cause for complaint is elsewhere. Apart from being a list of, mainly anglophone, men this is striking for its narrowness in other respects. Feminist, black and liberation theologies have been the most fertile sites of thinking about theological method in recent decades, yet get no mention. Nor is there any suggestion that the influential systematicians of the last century – Barth, Rahner, Schillebeecx, Moltmann, and so on – gave thought to questions concerning how theology ought to be done and arrived at non-analytic answers. Still less do we get the impression that historical theologians might have reflected on method in a way which sits uncomfortably with Analytical Theology. This narrowness of conversation has to cease, and this is not simply for reasons of academic etiquette. There are intra-theological, indeed intra-­ eccelsial, reasons for a proper humility towards and dwelling with the writings of other theologians. Christian theology is not simply an academic exercise, aimed at producing journal outputs or monographs; and it certainly isn’t the kind of enterprise which ought to involve taking pleasure at defeating opponents. It is, rather, a particular instance of the Church’s collective journey into divine truth, a sharing with one another 17 18

 Rauser 2009.  Crisp & Rea 2009, p. 2.

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and a participation in divine knowledge. This of course doesn’t mean that a theologian must always agree with her peers (by the nature of the case this is impossible), or even that she can’t oppose intellectual trends or traditions – I personally am perplexed at the number of theologians who embrace forms of post-structuralism which I cannot but see as foundationally incompatible with Christian faith – but even this must form part of a fundamentally collective, intellectually humble, endeavour. Certainly any Christian theologian expecting to contribute to ongoing conversations ought to at least take seriously those thinkers large numbers of her co-religionists are presently looking to. We cannot simply jettison our reading of Rahner or McFague, say, in favour of Crisp or Stump. The most immediately striking difference between Analytic Theology and most of the rest of contemporary theology relates to the nature and purpose of theological writing. Rowan Williams writes of theology as having critical, communicative, and celebratory styles.19 He holds that theology begins as a celebratory phenomenon. This, ‘is typically the language of hymnody and preaching as we hear it in the Church’s early centuries’. It can be found in Christian art and in poetry, anywhere in fact where Christians celebrate and enjoy the divine life that has been given to them. Critical theology, into which category almost all Analytic Theology surely falls, has its place. Yet for all its utility it inevitably reaches a point where it will either continue to be pursued in a way which diminishes or reduces the faith, or else it will issue in a return to the celebratory mode. Then, says, Williams, ‘the cycle begins again’.20 I think that there has been a neglect of the celebratory within Analytic Theology. Undoubtedly this book is largely critical in style, but in using critical theological reason to argue the case that there are severe limitations on our capacity to comprehend God, I hope to encourage a renewed celebration of the divine mystery.

 Williams 2000, p. xiii.  Williams 2000, p. xv.

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Thomism The book as a whole may be read as a defence of a claim of Aquinas’, ‘we do not know what God is’,21 and as a work of philosophical theology in conversation with Thomas. I see Aquinas as of defining importance for anyone wanting to reflect philosophically on the Christian tradition because he sits historically before two of the key intellectual shifts characteristic of modernity, towards a dualistic understanding of the human person and towards an understanding of God as a person (or just perhaps, three people) like ourselves – shifts which I take to be incompatible with what Christians understand to have been revealed, but which have been so complete that we now find it difficult to articulate that revelation without their effect showing through. As a clear exponent of and skilfull promoter of non-dualism and non-anthropomorphism, Aquinas is a near-indispensable resource for formulating a theology which is faithful to the biblical picture of the God who ‘nobody has ever seen’ but who reaches out to human animals through the Word-made-Flesh.22 In any case, generations of Western Christian thinkers have found Aquinas compelling intellectual company, and I myself stand in a tradition in which he enjoys a certain normative status.23 I am, then, happy for what follows to be regarded as thomistic. In fact the influence of a particular strand of Aquinas-interpretation, associated with the English Dominicans, and known as grammatical thomism, will be evident to informed readers.24 Yet Aquinas reminds us that the discipline he calls sacra doctrina is a Scientia; it aims at knowledge, and therefore at truth. In fact it aims at the most august truths, those concerning God and God’s dealings with creatures. The kind of intellectual conservationism which seeks to preserve the claims of an historic figure at all costs substitutes, when that thinker is a theologian, a creaturely for a divine subject matter. Agreement with Aquinas is not an intellectual end worth aiming at in itself, and thomistic fundamentalism is perverse insofar as it  STh Ia, q3, pr.  John 1. 23  On Aquinas’ anti-dualism see Kenny 1994. 24  See Chap. 6 below. 21 22

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displaces as the proper end of theological enquiry what Thomas himself viewed as that end, divine truth. Within contemporary philosophy and theology there persists a kind of scholarship whose aim seems to be to preserve against attack the coherence of systems claimed by the authors to interpret the Summa (or Thomas’ metaphysics, or...). By contrast, my purpose here is to defend an apophatic theology, and I want to defend it because I think it is faithful to Christian tradition and (not unrelatedly) true. In attempting to fulfil that purpose, I have learned a lot from Aquinas.

Politics Theology, understood as an activity arising out of Christian faith, is an end in itself (much though those responsible for funding UK universities, concerned as they are with economic and cultural ‘impact’ will not like to hear this). In thinking and talking theologically, we enjoy the God who calls us to share her life and to participate even now in her self-­knowledge.25 But theology is not the whole of Christian life. Responding to the gospel, we are called to bring good news to the poor, set prisoners free, feed the hungry and clothe the naked. So often theological speculation and activism on behalf of the Kingdom are set in opposition. I think, however, that the recovery of an apophatic theology is of crucial importance for Christian praxis, since idolatrous pictures of God, of God’s action in the world, and of creaturely agency in relation to God function ideologically to rule out certain political options for Christians or else to demotivate the quest for social change.26 With Herbert McCabe, I think that idolatry and oppression are always complicit, and that it is a task for theology to expose this complicity and dissolve the pictures that make it seem inevitable. This political aspect of the project will be in the background throughout, coming to the fore in the final chapter.

 McCabe 2007, Ch. 2.  Compare Sobrino’s stress on the need for ‘deidolization’ in christology. (1993, p. 50).

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Pronouns for God One particular way in which inadequate understandings of God are complicit in injustice is through the belief that God is male reinforcing patriarchal relations between human beings. ‘If God is male, then the male is god’ as Mary Daly memorably put the point.27 Now of course ecclesial orthodoxy and informed theological opinion will deny that God is male, but still, it will be maintained, implicitly in practice if not explicitly, male language someone latches more adequately onto the divine reality. A work of theology is at more liberty than are scriptural or liturgical texts to unsettle this kind of doublethink, and I will alternate between male and female pronouns for God, the point being to remind us that God is neither male nor female, nor falls under any of our concepts. If at least some readers are irritated by this, the usage may well be having the desired effect.

Overview There is a clear direction of argument in the book, the fulcrum of which is the diagnosis of a particular view of language as informing contemporary philosophical rejections of apophaticism. Nevertheless, some readers may find it useful to dip in to certain chapters, ignoring others, and this will often be unproblematic. Similarly there is technical material in places (the criticism of Plantinga in Chap. 2 is one example) which can be skipped without loss of subsequent comprehension. The first chapter lays out my understanding of apophaticism, in terms of the Doctrine of Divine Transcendence and the related Doctrine of Divine Ineffability, tracing motivations for these doctrines and distinguishing them from others. Chapter 2 addresses the most prominent analytic criticisms of apophaticism and argues that these do not succeed. Chapter 3 looks at prior analytic attempts to develop apophatic theologies, both Jewish and Christian, concluding that these are not adequate as they stand, but provide us with valuable guidelines for the book’s constructive project. Chapter 4 undertakes the crucial work of showing how 27

 Daly 1973, p. 13.

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a popular analytic picture of language, referentialism, prejudices adherents against apophaticism, but then shows that referentialism is neither compulsory nor immune to critical assault. The following two chapters trace a grammatical thomist route to apophaticism, taking as its starting point a way of introducing the word ‘God’ to language, and go on to develop the implications for the grammar of God-talk. The doctrine of divine simplicity features prominently here. Chapter 7 discusses analogy and (what is usually called) metaphor: whilst the role of the former in explaining true statements about God is taken to be vital, ‘metaphor’ is taken to be an unduly homogenising category for a wide range of religious language, and the alternative category of devoted talk is proposed. Chapter 8 argues that, in the light of what has gone before, the frequently made claim that God is a person cannot be sustained. Finally comes the task of unfolding the implications of apophaticism for dogmatics. Chapter 9 addresses the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. The final chapter looks at politics and eschatology.

1 God Beyond Words

Towards the beginning of the book of Exodus Moses has an encounter with God. Whilst looking after his father-in-law’s flock he comes across a bush which is on fire, yet is not consumed by the fire. The angel of the Lord appears in the flame, and God calls to Moses from the bush.1 God identifies himself as ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ – this is the one who has entered into covenant with his people. Faithful to that covenant, and attentive to the distress of the Hebrew people in slavery, God pledges to bring them from slavery to freedom through Moses. Yet what if the people ask who has sent Moses for this task, Moses wonders, what should he say? God replies: ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever,

 Exodus 3:1–2. Throughout scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.

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and this my title for all generations.2

What kind of a name is ‘I AM’? And what kind of a choice is Moses given: either to use this mysterious name for the God who is calling him to liberate his people, or else to describe that God through his actions in the history of that people, ‘the God of your ancestors’? Philosophers are now familiar with the suggestion that names have no content other than their reference to a particular entity.3 However it would be tin-eared in the extreme to appeal to this in order to diminish the suggestion that something out of the ordinary is being suggested in this narrative about human speech concerning God. Jewish tradition receives the tetragramatton ‘YHWH’, the word translated ‘I AM’, as profoundly holy, literally unspeakable. The text itself may be rendered, faithfully to the Hebrew, as God saying to Moses, ‘I will be who I will be’, so there is a sense in which God is refusing to submit to naming under the guise of giving a name.4 God’s name, so to speak, is ‘Mind Your Own Business’. Theological reflection on the text has often dwelt on God’s being ‘He who is’, the one who simply was, and is, and is to come.5 Aquinas, discussing the ‘supreme suitability’ of the name ‘He who is’ to God relates this to God’s radical unknowability: we cannot know what God is during this life, therefore to use expressions of God which convey information is invariably to fall short. We do best, thinks Aquinas, to speak of God as he who is, the one who has being, since in saying that something is we are saying the most

 Exodus 3:14–15.  The shift towards neo-Millian theories of reference was initiated, although not endorsed, by Kripke 1980. See further Soames 2002. To understand the biblical text one needs to understand that the practice of naming in the culture producing the text was radically dissimilar to that assumed in present discussions of names. To name something was both to say something about it and to gain power over it (witness Adam in Eden). That God remains, in an important way, unnameable is, then, a prop against idolatry: God is neither comprehensible, nor at our disposal. 4  On the translation of the tetragrammaton Houston (2001) says ‘probably the simplest is ‘I will be whoever I will be’, that is, while I will graciously reveal my name to you, I will not be bound or defined by it’ (p. 99, citing Gowan 1994, p. 84). 5  Mascall 1943. Kerr 2002, p. 80 ff. 2 3

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universal thing that can be said. And, thinks Aquinas, the more ‘universal and absolute [words]6 are, the more properly they are applied to God.’7 There is an important sense in which human beings cannot speak of God. The development of this thought is the task of this book. For now, I will simply state my conviction that there are severe limits on coherent theological language. In particular I think we cannot truthfully, or even intelligibly, say what God is. Yet a striking feature of the giving of the divine name to Moses is that the revelation of God as beyond our capacity for discourse does not disclose God as remote or coldly indifferent. On the contrary, God is revealed as ineffable  – as Barth would say of revelation in Christ there is an unveiling which is also a veiling8 – and indeed as one who comes to his people’s aid. The unsearchable God is also the liberating God. She is also the God who will be worshipped as redeemer, appealed to in the light of the covenants, cried out to in grief, chided as absent, and thanked for blessings. The psalms stand testimony to the rich religious life within which prayer to God is made, yet even here we get a sense that our words are directed at a reality which itself escapes words. ‘You thought that I was one just like yourself. But now I rebuke you’.9 The need to preserve a sense of divine mystery when enquiring into religious language and the reality to which it points, yet to do so in a way compatible with there being a history of salvation and with the reality of living religion, is central to what follows. It is difficult to imagine a text more thoroughly dissimilar to Exodus than Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus (TLP). Whatever exegetical difficulties have attached to TLP, it certainly seems to be a

 Aquinas talks, following pseudo-Dionysisus, of divine names when discussing language about God. I will avoid this usage since, for contemporary philosophy of language, ‘name’ has a meaning more restricted than that intended by pseudo-Dionysisu and Thomas, designating a certain kind of noun-phrase. 7  STh Ia, q13, a11, co. 8  CD I.1, p. 169. Compare also Rahner, ‘Divine revelation is not the unveiling of something previously hidden, which through this illumination leads to an awareness similar to that found in ordinary knowledge of the world. Rather it means that the ‘deus absconditus’ becomes radically present as the abiding mystery’ (TI 16, p. 238). 9  Psalm 50:21. 6

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discussion of language and its relation to the world.10 Propositions picture states of affairs. True propositions picture states of affairs which in fact exist, that is they picture facts. Complex propositions are formed out of basic, or atomic, propositions, by the application of logical constants, which do not themselves refer to some special logical part of reality. Indeed the only reality available to be pictured is mundane and open to scientific scrutiny, ‘The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of natural sciences)’.11 The job of philosophy, thinks Wittgenstein, is to draw within language a boundary to what can be said. This, on the face of it, is the task executed in TLP. There is a problem, however. The propositions of TLP fall outside its own delimitation of the boundaries of sense. For if the function of language is to picture the world described by science, and if language does so by picturing that world, then the relationship of language to the world falls outside the domain that can be pictured. Since propositions only have sense in as much as they picture a possible state of affairs, propositions which purport to describe the relationship between language and the world are nonsense. In particular therefore, the propositions of TLP itself are nonsense, as Wittgenstein himself concedes, 6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them  – as steps  – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it)

The usual understanding is that in TLP Wittgenstein directs us towards propositions which show what cannot, in his own terms, be said. Having come to see clearly how things stand with language, his reader will realise that the puzzles concerning reference and the structure of reality (and which Wittgenstein had inherited from Frege and Russell) are solved. Yet, says Wittgenstein in his introduction, this serves to demonstrate ‘how  On the competing interpretations of TLP see the essays in Lavery & Read 2011. My own sympathies are with the traditional, or metaphysical, reading. These issues recur in Chap. 3 below. 11  TLP 4.111. 10

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little is achieved when these problems are solved’. What really matters lies beyond the bounds of what can be spoken. That which is higher, which lies beyond what can be pictured with words, includes for Wittgenstein absolute ethical demands, aesthetic value, and God.12 Whilst propositional pictures concern how things, contingently, happen to be, 6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world. 6.4321 The facts all contribute to setting the problem, not to its solution.

Whatever the solution is must escape our words, in spite of a desire for it being awakened by reflection on our very use of words. In fact, the ‘mystical’ passages in TLP arose out of Wittgenstein’s own eclectic religious sensibility, encouraged no doubt by his reading of Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief during the First World War.13 However, there is a clear sense in which any reader who works through the book is herself supposed to both want to speak of those things that cannot be said and to understand precisely that they cannot be said. In this Wittgenstein brings us face to face with a pervasive truth: human beings quite readily ask questions about reality as a whole and our place in it, and when we do so we run up against the limits of our language. A key concern of mine here is to indicate how natural theology ends up having to acknowledge the inadequacy of language before the object of its enquiry. In this respect, as for Wittgenstein (and, as we will see, Aquinas before him), reason and rigorous enquiry do not stand opposed to mystery, but rather, when applied properly, lead us to it.  This is evident in the TLP and in the later Lecture on Ethics, which still embodies Wittgenstein’s Tractatus-period philosophy in the relevant respects. 13  We have Wittgenstein’s notes from before the war and in most respects the TLP is already complete at that stage. The ‘mystical’ passages however are entirely absent. On this and Wittgenstein’s reading of Tolstoy see Monk 1991. On the notes on logic see Potter 2009. Note also, though, Wittgenstein’s early reading of Kierkegaard, described in Ch. 1 of Schöbaumsfeld 2007. On pp. 14–5 Schöbaumsfeld translates a portion of a letter to Wittgenstein from his sister Hermine in which she writes of some Kierkegaard volumes she is sending out to him at the front. 12

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Apophaticism in Christian Tradition This is neither an introduction to nor a survey of Christian apophatic theology. For these purposes Turner’s excellent The Darkness of God is unsurpassed.14 In order to ground the present investigation of apophaticism in the history and life of the Christian tradition, however, a brief overview is in order. My attention here is confined to Western apophaticisms, or those pre-1054 texts of continuing influence in the West. Apophatic theology, talk of God which emphasises the extent to which God lies beyond the reaches of language, and which denies the applicability to God of expressions designating creaturely features, has a long history within Christian tradition. The term ‘apophatic’ derives from the Greek apophemi, meaning ‘to deny’, and accordingly apophatic theology is a negative theology, which denies the applicability of a significant range of predicates to God in order to speak truthfully of God, or to give glory to God. In this sense apophatic theology is already present in the New Testament, perhaps most obviously in Paul’s speech at the Areopagus in the Acts of the Apostles, I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

 Turner 1995.

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Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.15

This is at heart a statement of the negative theology contained within Jewish creator-monotheism: God does not need anything from us, and cannot be represented by the work of our hands.16 Apophatic strands continued within post-apostolic and patristic Christianity. In a useful paper on apophaticism, Citron and Scott cite Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century and Maximus the Confessor in the 7th as providing clear examples.17 They could have added numerous passages from Augustine, such as the discussion of ineffability early in De Doctrina Christiana,18 Have I spoken of God, or uttered His praise, in any worthy way? Nay, I feel that I have done nothing more than desire to speak; and if I have said anything, it is not what I desired to say. How do I know this, except from the fact that God is unspeakable? But what I have said, if it had been unspeakable, could not have been spoken. And so God is not even to be called ‘unspeakable’, because to say even this is to speak of Him. Thus there arises a curious contradiction of words, because if the unspeakable is what cannot be spoken of, it is not unspeakable if it can be called unspeakable. And this

 Acts 17: 23–29.  Within the narrative of Acts Paul is presented as claiming Pharisaic heritage at Acts 22:3. The relationship of the Acts narrative to the historical Paul is fraught, see NJBC for a balanced overview, but for attestation of Paul’s ongoing sense of Jewishness within the Pauline corpus see e.g. Philipians 3:4–6. 17  Citron & Scott 2016. 18  The fact that Augustine, like Aquinas, is not usually presented as an apophatic theologian, at least within the analytic theological literature, is instructive. These figures are central to Western Christian theology. There might well be an assumption on the part of opponents of apophaticism that Augustine and Aquinas can’t be numbered among the opposition, and that passages suggesting otherwise require careful interpretation. I think, for instance, that Mullins’ bold assertion that ‘no [present or past] Christian theologian actually believes in the doctrine of ineffability… [since] every major Christian theologian has ignored it completely’ (2016, p.7), typical of a widespread attitude (and Mullins is more generous than most, carefully documenting apparent apophaticism in prominent thinkers), does justice neither to the texts nor what historical theologians have themselves to say about the relationship between apophaticism and divine revelation. 15 16

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opposition of words is rather to be avoided by silence than to be explained away by speech.19

It is with pseudo-Dionysius, writing in the sixth century, that early Christian apophaticism is most associated in both its Western and Eastern forms as paradigmatic of ‘dark’ mysticism, which understands God as ineffable even, indeed especially, in the soul’s union with God. Drawing on neo-Platonic and biblical sources, pseudo-Dionysius presents the soul’s ascent to God as moving it beyond inadequate attempts to grasp God conceptually. Crucially, and anticipating what I will say in the next section about the dissimilarity between God and creatures, these inadequate attempts may take the form of denials (or assertions of negations).20 I cannot ensure that I speak truly of God by observing the counsel to speak only negatively. For, says pseudo-Dionysius ‘[God is] beyond every affirmation and denial.’21 This kind of utterance is guaranteed to raise the hackles of a good proportion of analytic philosophers, but it is really saying something any theist ought to affirm. What we have here is the linguistic correlate of the radical unknowability of God. If I am entitled to deny some proposition just in case I am entitled to assert the negation of that proposition, confidence that each of a given class of propositions will either be assertable or deniable with entitlement is indicative of both ‘fit’ between our language and its subject matter and epistemic confidence regarding that subject matter. With God neither obtains; we cannot engage in linguistic practices which even approach suitability to the task of adequate description; nor can we, material beings who come to knowledge of the world by means of our senses, have any great hope as regards knowledge of the God who transcends the material creation. Alasdair MacInytre situates pseudo-Dionysius’ apophaticism with respect to his belief in creation,

 DDC 1.6.  We ought not to assume, with Frege and Geach, that these amount to the same thing. See Hewitt, forthcoming a. 21  DN641. See Chap. 2 for my response to the kind of worries philosophers are likely to have with the themes here. 19 20

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The world of finite beings proceeds from God as first efficient cause and returns to God as ultimate final cause. And in speaking of God as cause we name him as good, as wise, as living, as he who is, as power, and as peace. What we cannot do is know God as he is in himself or name him as he is in himself, for only what we know can be named. How then are we to talk about God? Dionysius opens up the most fundamental of the philosophical problems about God.22

With Aquinas, who cites pseudo-Dionysius frequently, Christian negative theology receives its most philosophically developed formulation.23 That this is the case needs stressing since the apophatic aspect of Thomas’ theology has been de-emphasised by some authors. Eleonore Stump, to cite a prominent and influential example, attempts to deflate the apophatic24 implications of the preface to STh Ia, q3: …we are not able to know with regard to God what he is, but [rather] what he is not, we cannot consider with regard to God what he is like, but rather what he is not like…25

Stump rightly draws attention to Aquinas’ preparedness to make claims about God which he believes to be true and his rejection of the Maimonidean position that we can talk of God only negatively.26 In spelling out what she takes to be Thomas’ position, in opposition to apophatic readings, however, Stump asserts that Aquinas is prepared to make positive claims about the nature of God. Whether this is correct will unsurprisingly turn on what is meant by God’s nature. If any predication of the form ‘Fa’ says something about a’s nature, then of course Aquinas takes himself to be saying a great deal about God’s nature, but this is not  MacIntyre 2009, p. 37.  Thanks to Brian Davies OP and Paul O’Grady for discussion of the following paragraphs. 24  I am avoiding Stump’s term ‘agnosticism’ here since I think it misleadingly implies a position concerning belief in God’s existence rather than knowledge of God’s nature. However, Davies, who reads Aquinas in a way similar to the one I propose talks, albeit reticently, of Aquinas’ agnosticism: 1992, p. 57. See also O’Grady forthcoming. 25  Discussing Maximus the Confessor, von Balthasar finds this thomistic thought already in a ‘tradition reaching from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa’. (2003, p. 88). 26  Stump 2003. pp. 94–5. 22 23

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a very interesting notion of nature. I can truthfully say of the number seventeen that it is my friend’s favourite number; it seems very odd to suggest that I have thereby told you something about the nature of seventeen, and thereby of numbers – the philosophy of mathematics is not that easy! In Chap. 6 I will develop an apophaticism, which I take to be friendly to Thomas’ position, which makes it clear that there is an intended and more restricted sense of everyday talk of an entity’s nature according to which we cannot know God’s nature. That understanding draws, as does Stump in her interpretation of the preface to STh Ia, q3 on Aquinas’ expression quid est (what [God] is). This expression designates the genus under which an entity is contained, as contemporary philosophers would put it: the kind of thing it is. Being able to answer this question when posed of everyday entities is central to science, in the broad sense, to our investigation of the world. We understand things by classifying them, and by coming to an understanding of how entities of particular kinds behave. Knowledge of genuses was pivotal to the practice of science as Aquinas inherited it from Aristotle, and something like it is of enduring importance today. In virtue of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS), Aquinas denies that we can know quid est of God. As we will see later, the question ‘quid est’ asked of God fails even to make sense, and our language is incapable of framing a question that would adequately enquire after something like God’s nature. Stump is right then to say that ‘quid est’ is ‘a technical term of medieval logic’,27 but she underplays the extent to which knowing of something quid est is central to a scientific understanding of that thing in the ordinary course of events. Indeed Aquinas feels bound to defend the proposition that God is the object of theological science against the objection that the essence of God is unknowable.28 This appears to be a problem since sciences usually presuppose an understanding of the nature of their object, which understanding would be manifest in an Aristotelian real definition of that object. Aquinas replies,

 Stump 2003, p. 96.  STh Ia, q1a7.

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Although we cannot know in what consists the essence of God, nevertheless in this science we make use of His effects, either of nature or of grace, in place of a definition, in regard to whatever is treated of in this science concerning God; even as in some philosophical sciences we demonstrate something about a cause from its effect, by taking the effect in place of a definition of the cause.

We cannot know what God is, thinks Thomas, but we can nonetheless reason to and about God on the basis of our knowledge of the world of which God is the creating cause. Against a minimal reading of Aquinas on divine unknowability we ought to concur with Victor White, St Thomas’ position differs from that of modern agnostics because while modern agnosticism says simply, ‘We do not know, and the universe is a mysterious riddle’, a Thomist says, ‘We do not know what the answer is,29 but we do know that there is a mystery behind it all which we do not know, and if there were not, there would not even be a riddle. This Unknown we call God.30

Thus in the Summa Contra Gentiles Aquinas writes, ‘The divine substance surpasses every form that our intellect reaches… we are unable to apprehend it by knowing what it is.’31 Influenced by Aquinas, and a fellow member of the Dominican order, Meister Eckhart is widely recognised in circles far beyond the academic as an advocate of apophaticism. He has also been of some influence in the upsurge of interest in apophaticism within continental philosophy since the last quarter of the last century. So entrenched are positions within the Western philosophical tradition, that this has not helped either the reception of Eckhart or the reputation of apophaticism on the part of analytic philosophers of religion. More generally, Eckhart has not been well served by his expositors, his writings often being cherry picked in support of one or other esoteric project in theology or spirituality. For many centuries a cloud of ecclesiastical suspicion did not help matters. Eckhart was accused  White means here that we do not know, of God, quid est.  White 1956, p. 18. 31  SCG 1.14. See further Davies, forthcoming. 29 30

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of heresy during his lifetime, and a number of propositions associated with him were condemned in the bull In agro dominico of Pope John XXII. Towards the end of the twentieth century a concerted effort was made by Eckhart devotees to part this cloud, and the citation of the mystical theologian by Pope John Paul II effectively marked the success of this endeavour.32 The truth is that Eckhart is a Christian theologian and preacher concerned deeply to do justice to the doctrine of creation, and the concomitant distinction between the creator and creatures, and to the Christian experience of the soul’s union with God.33 His ideas are often developed in preaching and, as Oliver Davies notes, show …a clear preference for speaking of God in radically negative terms, so that nothing is ‘added’ to him. The inadequacy of using names and affirmative language of God, which conceal rather than reveal him, is to some extent resolved by using negative formulations which appear to subvert the linguistic process itself, and thus God becomes ‘nothing of anything’, ‘solitude’ and ‘wilderness’ and is the ‘hidden darkness of the eternal Godhead, which is unknown and never has been known and never shall be known.34

Eckhart is stark in his apophaticism, ‘[God] is pure nothing: he is neither this nor that. If you think of anything he might be, he is not that.’35 Yet this in no way gives rise to a quietist religiosity; Eckhart is the great preacher of the birth of God in the soul.36 Examples of apophatic writings in Christian history can be multiplied; within the West for example, the anonymous author of the Cloud of  For details see the introduction to Fleming 1995.  It ought to be emphasised that there is a danger of misunderstanding soul-talk in an author like Eckhart. Writing before Descartes and solidly grounded in Aristotelian anthropology, he is not implying that there is a ‘spiritual bit’ of me which is capable of union with God, leaving my bodily reality out of the picture. The best way to get a grip of what is meant by it being my soul which is united with God is to compare Aquinas’ appropriation of intellectual activity to the soul in qq75 ff. of STh Ia. It is the whole person to whom God unites herself by grace. Precisely because we cannot limit that union to a particular physical part of the person we speak of the union being to the soul, as the form of the human animal. 34  Davies 1991, p. 115. 35  Eckhart 1979, p. 54. 36  Colledge and McGinn, 1991. Ch. 2. 32 33

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Unknowing, Nicholas of Cusa, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila stand out as of particular importance. What is striking in all of the cases mentioned is that in no way does the setting of severe limits to our capacity to speak about God function in these authors as a path away from Christian belief or practice, but is rather integral to Christian commitment. Negative theology is, for the heritage in question, not an alternative to Christian theology, but a working out of Christian theology in an attempt to be faithful to the tradition.

Ineffability Following this heritage, I wish to use broadly analytic methods to devise a theology of divine ineffability.37 At a first pass the doctrine of divine ineffability (DDI) states that no language user can describe God in words. This will require some finessing, not least in order to escape the charge of self-undermining made against DDI by some philosophers.38 Curious as it may seem, getting clear about DDI will involve getting clear about what it is to describe some entity. But that is business for a later chapter. With the proviso that the needed clarification will be provided, I think DDI is true. Nor is it true in a purely contingent way  – it doesn’t just so happen that God can’t be described in words, but had our languages been more sophisticated or our brains bigger, things would have been different. The intended reading of DDI is one that could be appropriately interpreted in the familiar heuristic: at no (metaphysically) possible world can God be described in words. This is consonant with the scriptural theme of God’s unapproachable glory. It is highly congruous with the declaration of the Fourth Lateran Council that there is no similarity between created beings and

 ‘Broadly analytic’ because I think there are legitimate concerns about aspects of the project known as ‘analytic theology’, including – crucially for present purposes – a tendency towards an inflexible approach to religious language. I also want to draw into theological conversation authors from parts of analytic philosophy outside the north American post-Quinean metaphysics which has dominated the scene to date. Wittgenstein is an obvious example. See my remarks on Analytic Theology in the introduction above. 38  See Chap. 2 below. 37

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God such that there is not a greater dissimilarity,39 albeit that DDI as it stands is stronger. DDI is, moreover, a claim about language, in spite of the word ‘God’ appearing in direct object position in its statement. For DDI concerns what can be said about God. DDI is closely related to, but distinct from, the doctrine of divine transcendence (DDT). According to this latter doctrine God is radically dissimilar from every other entity.40 Radical dissimilarity is different in kind from the dissimilarities with which we are familiar. If you say that I am dissimilar from the Pope, you are articulating a comparison within a shared logical space, in this case the Pope and I are being compared as human beings, in terms of the properties human beings can instantiate and the relations in which human beings can stand.41 Similarly if you doubt my assertion of the dissimilarity between Donald Trump and a gnat, you are still making a comparison within a shared logical space, albeit this time a more expansive one, that of animals. Now in cases of radical dissimilarity there is no shared logical space. In saying that God is radically dissimilar from creatures I am not saying that God fails to satisfy a requisite number of predicates on a check-list to qualify as similar to Lola, our pet dog. I am saying, rather, that there is no intelligible basis for comparison between God and Lola. Talk of ordinary dissimilarity compares two entities. Talk of radical dissimilarity conveys that there is not so much as a basis for comparison. Later on I will introduce the doctrine that God is simple (the doctrine of divine simplicity – DDS), a classical way of motivating belief in divine transcendence, and relate it to an understanding of the world as created. As things stand already, we are able to see the relationship between DDT and DDI: DDT is the metaphysical correlate of DDI, the basis in the being of God for the truth of DDI. It is because God is as God is, that our words fall short of God. My primary focus here is on ineffability, for the simple reason that this is regulative for theology, constraining as it  Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, Canon II. ‘For between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them’ (DS 806). The context is the condemnation of Joachim of Fiore’s attack on Peter Lombard over the doctrine of the Trinity. 40  Here and throughout I will use ‘entity’ as a category neutral word for anything that exists. 41  Compare here Herbert McCabe’s defence against the claim that the doctrine of the Incarnation is analytically false, McCabe 1987, p 57. The implications of divine transcendence for the philosophical theology of the Incarnation are discussed here in Ch. 9. 39

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does how we may legitimately attempt to speak of God. However, because of the close relationship between ineffability and transcendence, both topics will feature heavily as we proceed.

Divine Hiddenness If transcendence is closely related to ineffability, both need to be distinguished from divine hiddenness. The subject of a good deal of recent work in philosophy and Analytic Theology this is liable to be confused with one, or both of them, especially since the expression ‘divine hiddenness’ is sometimes used in theological writing to denote divine transcendence.42 Michael Rea notes correctly that divine hiddenness as it has concerned philosophers is a doxastic phenomenon, consisting in some individuals having inconclusive evidence for belief in God. This supposedly presents a problem for theism, since, one form of the argument goes, it is not clear why a perfectly loving God, desirous of a relationship with each of his creatures would deny any of her creatures evidence of his existence. God, being omnipotent, is surely able to provide such evidence. Rea draws attention to an experiential problem of divine hiddenness: Some people have strong but persistently unfulfilled desires to have experiences that seem clearly to them to be experiences of the love or presence of God as such.43

Neither the doxastic nor experiential forms of divine hiddenness are the same thing as divine transcendence, yet might there be a relationship between them? For example, might it be because God is transcendent that God is hidden from so many peoples’ evidence gathering and from so many peoples’ experience? Rea certainly thinks that there is a place for an appeal to transcendence in a philosophical grappling with divine hiddenness. Imagining a spectrum with an extreme transcendence view at one end (he instances pseudo-Dionysius as someone who belongs here) 42 43

 Rea 2018, pp. 13–14.  Rea 2018, p. 20.

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and an extreme univocal affirmation of divine personhood at the other, Rea positions himself halfway and engages with hiddenness on this basis. My approach is more radical. Rea wishes to hold onto an affirmation of divine personhood, albeit a nuanced one, because he takes this to be required by scripture. I do not agree, for reasons that will become apparent during the discussion of personhood in Chap. 8. I am therefore prepared to affirm DDI and (semantically descending from there) DDT. This certainly does have consequences for divine hiddenness, for if we hold that God is in no way like any object in the world, the whole idea of collecting evidence for God’s existence looks very odd indeed. What could count as evidence for God?44 What we can do, instead, is describe a way in to God-talk, which both assures us that God is and allows us to see the severe constraints on the logical grammar of the word ‘God’.45 One and the same process assures us of God and of our radical inability to get a cognitive purchase on God. The problem of divine hiddenness is shown to be a pseudo-problem arising from a misunderstanding of the grammar of ‘God’. The experiential problem of divine hiddenness, the all-too familiar fear that God might be absent is certainty real, but is a spiritual and pastoral, not a theoretical, problem. Theology and philosophy can come to the aid of such problems, just so long as they do not attempt to stand in for the struggle of prayer, the pastoral hand on a shoulder, or just (in Augustine’s words) the ‘gift of time’.46

The Practice of Apophaticism Understanding apophatic theology in terms of DDI risks misrepresenting something dynamic, the process of apophasis, stripping away inadequate images of God as part of the process of union with God, corporate and individual, as a merely static commitment to a doctrine concerning religious language. As encountered in mystical theology, apophaticism is  Compare here Wittgenstein in the Lectures on Religious Belief:, ‘Whatever believing in God may be, it can’t be believing n something we can test, or find means of testing’ 1966, p. 60. 45  Chap. 5 below. 46  See Thomas Merton’s wise advice on theology and spirituality at the outset of a course on the Christian mystical tradtion 2017, pp. 10–1. 44

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often portrayed more in terms of a process to be undergone than as a collection of propositions to be believed. So pseudo-Dionysius begins The Mystical Theology with a prayer, after which he advises his reader, to leave behind you everything perceived and understood, everything perceptible and understandable, all that is not and all that is, and, with your understanding laid aside, to strive upward as much as you can toward union with him who is beyond all being and knowledge.47

Meanwhile McGinn highlights that Eckhart’s apophatic pronouncements are those of a preacher, their aim being to encourage his congregations towards apophasis. In this context the lively, playful, contradiction-courting style we find in Eckhart becomes intelligible, the task of theology for Eckhart was not so much to reveal a set of truths about God as it was to frame the appropriate paradoxes that would serve to highlight the inherent limitations of our minds and to mark off in some way the boundaries of the unknown territory where God dwells.48

Historically apophaticism is not so much a contribution to theology (in the modern sense, at least) as a spiritual practice. It has consequences for theology, understood as a theory, a collection of doctrines, in that it aims to unsettle that theory, setting us free from the grip of some beliefs which seemed unshakeable, and in the process guarding us against the temptation to picture God in our own image. Recognising this much leaves a lot open. There is a pressure in an age beset with an interest in ‘spirituality’ to think of apophasis as an individual practice concerned with the ‘inner self ’, something to be engaged in from within the confines of one’s own front door, and probably issuing in spiritual experiences. It cannot be emphasised enough, then, that there is no reason that any of this should be the case. Apophasis can be thought of as a collective practice, something undergone by the Church, as it progressively sheds idolatrous images of the divine on its pilgrim journey towards the Kingdom of God. It was to congregations, groups of the 47 48

 MT I.  Colledge & McGinn 1991, p. 31.

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faithful, that Eckhart’s sermons were addressed. And the Exodus story of the reception of the prohibition on images and the subsequent disobedience is a story of collective command and failure on the part of the covenanted People of God.49 Very arguably it is within a corporate process of purgation and union that individual apophasis ought to be understood. Whether apophasis is thought of primarily as a corporate or as an individual process, though, it is first and foremost a practical, rather than a theoretical affair, something to be undergone on bended knee, in the upheavals of prayer, and not a thesis to be calmly adjudicated at the detached tribunal of reason. A proper recognition of this needn’t prevent us from thinking theoretically about apophaticism. Apophaticism does after all involve cognitive claims of the sort philosophers make it their task to assess. DDI is a prime example: it is regulative for the practice of apophasis, providing as it does the reason for the spiritual practice. Since we cannot describe God in words, we ought not to indulge in practices which are suggestive of us thinking otherwise. DDI stands in interesting relations to other philosophical and theological claims, and we can use the standard methods of philosophical theology to investigate these. To do this is the principal business of what follows.

 Exodus 19–32.

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2 Analytic Criticisms of Apophaticism

In Douglas Adams’ Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy we are introduced to the computer Deep Thought. Unparalled in its power to solve problems, the machine is the cause of upset to the philosophers Majikthise and Vroomfondel: ‘I mean, what’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?’1 By contrast with this predicament, present-day analytic philosophers of religion can give the impression of believing that they themselves know God’s phone number. Thumb through many of the contemporary classics in the philosophy of religion and you will find a lot of things being claimed about God. God is a person, a (propositional) knower, a moral agent, stands in various relationships to modal, mathematical, and moral reality, and much else beside.2 All of this stands in stark contrast to apophaticism, outlined in the previous chapter as involving DDI, which claims that in an important  Adams 2016, p 149.  On p. 2 of the classic Swinburne 2016, for instance we get a lengthy and precise definition of what it is to be God. This is uncontested by Mackie (1992), who simply denies the existence of God thus understood. 1 2

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Hewitt, Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49602-9_2

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way God cannot be truthfully described. Whilst much philosophy of religion has simply ignored apophaticism, in spite of the undoubted presence of apophatic strands in religious traditions, a few authors have presented objections to it. The concern of the present chapter is to present and answer the most important of these.

‘Apophaticism is self-refuting’ Some people, confronted with apophatic claims, find themselves with an uneasy feeling, as though the person making those claims has somehow contradicted and thereby refuted herself. For doesn’t the apophatic theologian say that God is indescribable? And in saying that hasn’t she described God, contrary to her previous assertion?3 If this line of argument were correct I would take it to fatally undermine apophaticism, since unlike a minority of philosophers I do not think that there are any true contradictions.4 Fortunately for my purposes I do not think the line of attack is successful. That is not to say that apophatic theologians haven’t at times wildly and knowingly contradicted themselves: examples are not hard to find in the writings of pseudo-Dionysius or the sermons of Eckhart. To take these cases as grist to the mill of the anti-apophaticist would be to severely misunderstand the kind of use of language in which these theologians are engaged. In spite of philosophical neglect of what ought to be an obvious truth, language is used for many things other than the context-insensitive statement of propositions.5 The mystical theologian and the preacher are not, typically, in the business of communicating theories, but rather are accompanying the spiritual lives of others, 3  Gäb (manuscript) terms this the paradox of ineffability. Augustine is aware of it in De Doctriana Christiana. 4  The classic presentation is Priest 2006. For a discussion in relations to apophatic theology see Lebens forthcoming, pp.  20–4. Recent work by J.C.  Beall on christology brings philosophical theology into conversation with dialetheism (the view that there are, or at least can be, true contradictions). 5  Thus Wittgenstein’s mea culpa: ‘It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-­ Philosophicus.)’ (PI 23).

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their readers and hearers, attempting to aid their union with God and their understanding of the truths of their faith.6 Devices such as the utterance of contradictions can play their part in this: bringing hearers to realise for themselves the inadequacy of their ideas about God, or inviting them to playfully deploy images of God without supposing themselves to have an understanding of the divine nature, or leading them to a realisation of the inadequacy of our words when confronted with the reality of God, and thereby to silence. Religious language is multifaceted and cannot be reduced to the narrowly assertoric, still less the systematically theoretical. However, Christians have and continue to engage in systematic theology, in the process of which they claim things to be true of God. Indeed this activity has been understood as itself of religious importance: Aquinas describes doctrine as ‘wisdom above all human wisdom’.7 So we cannot, even from a perspective which privileges sensitivity to living religion over philosophical pedantry, dismiss the charge that apophaticism is self-refuting.8 Theologians do make theoretical claims, and it is important to their Christian self-understanding that they do so. And as we have seen, some theologians have said that there are severe limits to what we can say about God. In so doing, have they refuted their own position? Plantinga holds that apophatic theologians do precisely this. He deploys a disarmingly simple line of argument against those who hold that our concepts do not apply to God: Either those who attempt to make this claim succeed in making an assertion or they do not. If they don’t succeed we have nothing to consider; if they do, however, they appear to be predicating a property of a being they have referred to, in which case at least some of our concepts do apply to it, contrary to the claim they make. So if they succeed in making a claim, they make a false claim.9  Emphasis on the plurality of purposes for which theological language is deployed is a merit of Ticciati’s (2015) treatment of apophaticism. 7  STIa, q1a6, co. 8  For perspectives according to which philosophy of religion ought to attend more to living religion see Scrutton & Hewitt 2018. 9  Plantinga 2000, p. 6. 6

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This line of attack leaves one feeling that it doesn’t get to the heart of what the apophatic theologian wants to say. I want to shore up this feeling in the following paragraphs. Nonetheless, Plantinga has convinced some friends of apophaticism, as well as enemies, that the doctrinal commitments of apophaticism are contradictory. For instance, Lebens, writing within an Orthodox Jewish tradition of apophatic theology, accepts Plantinga’s conclusion and goes on to explore ways of maintaining apophaticism in spite of this.10 I don’t feel the need to do this. On the contrary, I think that Plantinga has set up a version of a self-applicability paradox for the apophatic theologian, and that standard responses to such paradoxes are available to her, leaving her with a coherent, recognisably apophatic theology, which is not self-refuting.11 Given that the aim is to show that there can be an apophaticism free of contradiction, it is worth laying out the argument in some formal detail.12 For present purposes let an apophaticism be any claim of the form that, for some interesting class of predicates P, A-P: No predicate from P applies (univocally) to God.

A-P leaves it open whether for some members of P they apply analogically to God, or for every member F of P, God is not F (in which case P had better not be closed under negation, on pain of contradiction), or whether instead F-ness is simply not predicable of God, such that an attempt at such a predication would constitute a category mistake.13 Either way, there are plenty of interesting claims of the form A-P which are not contradictory. For example, let P be the class of predicates for intrinsic qualities of persons, or of material objects: in both cases an

 Lebens, forthcoming. pp. 9–42. Lebens’ novel approach to apophatic theology is discussed in Chap. 3 below. 11  The parallel with self-reference is drawn explicitly, in the course of a Plantinga-style attack on apophaticism in Mullins 2016, p. 6. 12  Readers who are prepared to take it on trust that Plantinga doesn’t succeed in undermining apophaticism can skip to the next section. 13  These matters will detain us later, especially in Chap. 6. 10

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intelligible and consistent apophaticism is forthcoming.14 In combination, these apophaticisms have considerable overlap with Aquinas’ refusal, captured in his account of divine simplicity, to predicate creaturely attributes of the Creator.15 Already then we have an apophaticism of impressive pedigree within a religious tradition, and one which does not undermine itself in the fashion Plantinga suggests. The problem comes when the class P is enlarged to include a predicate which expresses the condition of satisfying this open sentence: Indes: No predicate from P applies (univocally) to x.

Substituting ‘God’ for x in Indes, we see that the addition of this predicate to P yields an instance of A-P which is true only if it is false, and which is therefore false, assuming only a modicum of intuitionistic logic. The instance is self-refuting. The problem is, of course, a familiar case of self-applicability. The class P contains a predicate that encodes information about the non-applicability of predicates from P. A common recourse in the face of problems around the self-application of some condition (in this case we’re concerned with the condition of being such that no predicate from P applies, which is itself expressed by a predicate from P and within its own remit) is to excise the offending condition from our theory. In various contexts – set-theories, the theory of properties, and so on – appeals to predicativity, or to the Vicious Circle Principle serve to perform the excision. A similar move can be made by the apophatic theologian. Say that a predicate F is reflectively semantic just in case ‘Ft’, with t a grammatical singular term,16says of the purported referent of t either that it satisfies  For this apophaticism to be consistent with theism it’s required that existence is either: (a) not an intrinsic quality of persons/ material objects (along standard Kantian–Fregean lines), or (b) not predicated univocally of both God and non-divine entities (perhaps following the lines of McDaniel 2017). 15  Burrell 2010. 16  I’ve specified grammatical singularity since, as we’ll see, I do not think ‘God’ is a semantically singular term. I’ve omitted Quine-quotation in the body in favour of standard quotation for ease of reading. 14

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(singularly or together with other entities) some predicate, or fails to satisfy some predicate, or else that it is the referent (singularly or together with other entities) of some expression. Now, I claim, the following constraint on the statement of apophaticism using A-P both avoids Plantinga’s objection and coheres well with what apophatic theologians typically have in mind when they say that God is indescribable (and similar things): No-RS: No predicate in P is reflectively semantic.

According to No-RS, ‘is indescribable’ is not one of the predicates whose application to God is denied by the apophatic theologian. She therefore does not contradict herself in saying that God is indescribable if indescribability is cashed out in terms of the non-applicability of predicates from some P. But why should this be the sense of indescribability which the apophatic theologian has in mind? Plantinga’s argument against apophaticism feels like it is cheating, that it is frustratingly over-general in its understanding of the apophatic theologian’s use of the word ‘indescribable’ in a manner that makes the refutation of her position a trivial affair.17 It is prima facie unlikely that no proponent of apophaticism, numbered amongst whom are several great thinkers, noticed the self-undermining nature of their doctrine if its content were as Plantinga claims.18 Intellectual charity, the demands of which extend into the past as well as to one’s present-day colleagues, commands that we ought to attribute a coherent position to the proponent of apophaticism if this is possible. This consideration alone gives us compelling reason to impute to the apophatic theologian the position contained in the combination of (some instance of ) A-P and No-RS, rather than Plantinga’s interpretation of her beliefs. Yet there are further reasons for thinking that A-P and No-RS capture the sense in which apophatic theologians take God to be indescribable.  See Michael Scott, Religious Language (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 21–2.  Note that key figures in the development of logic, Boethius and Abelard, as well as Aquinas, an important commentator on the Aristotelian organon, were apophatic theologians in my sense. Are we to suppose they all lacked the ability to detect contradictions? 17 18

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The apophatic theologian is after all interested in God, rather than in theological language for its own sake. The apophatic theologian takes what God is supposed to be (the Creator, the ground of all being …) to place severe limits on the extent to which God can be captured by our conceptual equipment, and so to rule out numerous things from being sayable of God. A standard line of thought here will note that our conceptual apparatus is equipped for the investigation of creaturely rather than creating reality, and will perhaps appeal to something like the doctrine of divine simplicity to urge the importance of the distinction between the two. Thus plausible candidates for P include distinctively creaturely or material predicates. In any case, the apophatic theologian is concerned to limit what we can say about God in herself. Reflexively semantic predicates, however, only talk about God in a derivative sense. They provide us with a way of encoding a semantic claim about satisfiability, one which in a formal semantic theory would be most naturally articulated in the metalanguage, as a material mode predication. They are, in other words, a mechanism for semantic descent. It may or may not be the case that a given reflexively semantic predicate does (or doesn’t) apply to God in virtue of how things are intrinsically with God.19 But there remains a clear sense in which no statement made using only a reflexively semantic predicate is about God. Moreover we are going to need to avail ourselves of reflexively semantic predicates to say what the apophatic theologian wants to say, that there are certain things which cannot be said of God. Now, let’s return to what we said about apophaticism in the previous chapter. According to DDI, we cannot describe God in words. The hard philosophical work is going to be coming to an understanding of what it is to describe something in a such a way that it can be seen to be plausible that we cannot describe God. From arguing against Plantinga we can see what cannot be part of a description of an entity, in the present sense of description, if apophaticism is to admit a coherent statement, namely reflexively semantic expressions. So No-RS represents a constraint on our

19

 Given DDS, of course, there are no more to how things are with God than the divine nature itself.

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understanding of description. Later on, I’ll make use of the Aristotelian idea of real definition to say more about the target notion of description.

‘A Nauseating Brew’ Plantinga would say that all this is wasted labour. Suppose that I succeed in laying out an informative understanding of apophaticism, which says in some detail what the apophatic theologian is not prepared to say of God, and does so without committing that theologian to a self-refuting position. Would the theology thus made available really be worth having? In particular, would it be in a position to make sense of Christian life and worship, and would it be consistent with claims about God, Christ, and the world normative for Christian theology? In his Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga answers all these questions in the negative.20 Taking Kant, Hick, and Kaufman as his sample of apophatic theologians (not a representative one from either an ecumenical or historical standpoint) Plantinga insists that apophaticism involves its proponent in reductive reductionism,21 reinterpreting the religious language of ordinary believers in a way that robs it of religious interest. According to Plantinga, This is not a matter of pouring new wine into old wineskins: what we have here is nothing like the rich, powerful, fragrant wine of the great Christian truths; what we have is something wholly drab, trivial and insipid. It is not even a matter of throwing out the baby with the bathwater; it is instead, throwing out the baby and keeping the tepid bathwater; at best a bland, unappetizing potion that is neither hot nor cold and at worst a nauseating brew, fit for neither man nor beast.22

I hold no brief for the philosophical theology of Kaufman, the immediate target of this passage. However, Plantinga holds apophaticisms  Plantinga 2000, Ch. 1.  The term is from Lebens 2014. 22  Plantinga 2000, p. 42. 20 21

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beyond Kaufman’s guilty of reinterpreting Christian doctrine in a reductionist fashion, so if his opposition to this is justified then any Christian who signs up to DDI ought to be worried. What is the problem supposed to be? Take characteristic Christian claims: that God creates, that God the Son became incarnate as Jesus, that God redeems God’s creatures and brings us to share in the divine life, that God called his ancient people, and attends still to the prayers of us living today. Let’s take it to be common ground amongst philosophers and theologians that we ought not to seek to revise these claims in the following sense: they have a proper place in liturgy and devotion and in the ordinary everyday way in which believers talk about their faith. This rules a good number of revisionist theologians out of consideration.23 For us, meanwhile, the Christian is saying what she ought to when she says, for instance, ‘God has called us to new life in Christ’. But, according to Plantinga, the apophatic theologian is being duplicitous in her acceptance of this language, since she re-interprets the believer’s utterance, assigning to it a meaning very different from its natural one. After all it is persons whom we usually speak of as calling one another. And personhood is a prime example of an attribute that serious apophaticists deny of God. Seductive though this line of argument is, it is entirely question-­ begging. Plantinga is simply taking the non-apophatic interpretation of religious language to be correct as an account of everyday religious usage. But then it is incumbent upon the person running Plantinga’s line of argument to show that a non-apophatic account of everyday religious language is correct. This can only be done on the basis of attention to the actual practice of believers. I have argued elsewhere that the practice of Christian believers does not provide evidence for taking ‘God’ to denote a person.24 These matters will be revisited in Chap. 8. The sober but correct starting point in assessing ordinary religious language is, in any case, that we religious folk do not on a day by day basis make any metaphysical claims about God. It is a rare homily which tells us that God is (or isn’t) a person, and few parents teach their young 23 24

 Spong 2001 would be one example, Hampson 2012 another.  Hewitt 2018a.

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children that religious expressions latch on to divine reality in such-andsuch a way. How then are we to tell whether or not ordinary religious talk, ‘God has called us to life in Christ’, for instance, has a meaning consonant with apophaticism (which would presumably involve ‘to call’ functioning non-literally)? We can attend to the way the expression is used, how it functions within religious life, and the inferential transitions it is taken to license (if any). Are there significant differences between this and ordinary talk of callings (‘she called out to me across the street’, ‘Marcus was called to the bar’)? Obviously, yes. So we should not take this religious use and the ordinary uses to agree in meaning. A number of further questions remain, crucially whether the religious use of ‘call’ ought to be interpreted as analogical, in the thomist sense, so that the believer’s utterance is a candidate for truth, or whether the correct interpretation is more figurative, in which case the religious value of the utterance must consist in something other than its truth. Exactly the same considerations play out in the case of credal affirmations – when we say, for example, that God made the world, we mean something quite unlike what we mean when we are talking about ordinary makings; the former are agential transformations of matter, the latter is a bringing to be ex nihilo. And again the same considerations are salient when considering biblical narrative, including stories in which God is presented as a being undergoing emotional states, with the additional consideration that critical understanding of the text is needed. It is clear from all of this that Plantinga’s presupposition that ordinary religious language ought to be interpreted in a manner favourable to his non-apophatic theism at best stands in need of more support.25

‘Apophaticism Makes Reference to God Impossible’ In his Religious Language, Scott engages with apophaticism on a far more sympathetic basis than does Plantinga, devoting a chapter to describing apophatic positions and engaging with Plantinga’s self-refutation  Thanks to Jonathan Nassim for discussion of this section.

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argument in a similar way to my own above.26 My concern here is an argument he presents against apophaticism, although he goes on to provide apophaticism with a route out. I think that we are well advised to decline Scott’s offer and endorse an alternative response to the original argument. Scott draws attention to two assumptions widely held in thinking about theological language: 1 . ‘God’ is a proper name. 2. Proper names express properties that determine their reference.27 (2) can be understood as a version of descriptivism: for every proper name n, there is a description or cluster of descriptions which are the semantic content contributed by n to any statement in which n occurs (at least, in a non-intensional context), and which denote uniquely the refrrent of n. On this basis a case can be made against apophaticism. By (1) and (2) there is a description (or descriptions) which single out God as the referent of ‘God’. But if God is in a significant sense indescribable (recall DDI), how can this be so? The apophatic theologian has either to reject (1), or ensure that their understanding of divine indescribability is compatible with (2), or else reject (2). Scott’s preferred option is the rejection of (2), and he leads readers helpfully through an array of post-Kripkean non-descriptivist accounts of reference. We can refer to God using the word ‘God’, for Scott, but this does not presuppose an ability to uniquely identify her using descriptions.28

 Scott, Religious Language, Ch. 2.  Religious Language, p. 86. 28  The qualifier ‘uniquely’ is important since Scott is sympathetic to hybrid accounts, wherein names have partial descriptive content. He includes a brief discussion of Gellman’s (1997) view that the name ‘God’ includes the descriptive content supreme being. As it happens, I hold that proper names have sortal content, but I do not think that ‘supreme being’ is a sortal. Nor do I think that ‘supreme being’ enables us to identify a potential object of reference. Supremeness is sortal relative, what it is to be supreme amongst curries is different from what it is to be supreme amongst persons. ‘Being’ is a dummy sortal, and doesn’t provide us with criteria for judging supremeness. 26 27

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Scott is right to draw attention to (1) and (2) as jointly undermining apophaticism. He is also, in my view and for familiar reasons, correct to counsel the rejection of descriptivism about proper names.29 However, the apophatic theologian is well advised to call (1) into question as well. This strategy gives the initial impression of being hopeless. After all, ‘God’ is a grammatically proper name. So it is, but we are not concerned here with the surface grammar of the expression, but rather with its logical grammar, which we can understand here as the use of the expression as it relates to making truth-evaluable claims and performing inferences. It is familiar from over a century of philosophical discussion of singular expressions that surface and logical grammar can come apart. Russell argues that, although ‘the Present King of France’ might seem to be a singular noun-phrase very much like ‘me’, there is a stark divergence between the two expressions logically: ‘the Present King of France’ is an incomplete expression (and not a genuine term), and sentences containing it are to be analysed as quantificational in logical form, whilst ‘me’ is a genuine referring term, which simply refers to the speaker, and is not to be analysed away as a description.30 Kripke, meanwhile, draws our attention to the fact that whilst ‘the Holy Roman Empire’ might seem to be a definite description, much like ‘the man in the corner drinking champagne’, it isn’t – it is characteristic of definite descriptions that the semantics of their subsidiary expressions determine the denotation of the description. But the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.31 Similarly, according to me, the word ‘God’ in spite of looking and behaving in sentential context like a grammatically proper name is not a logically proper name. This would be an uninteresting result if we had other names for God. On the contrary, however, I claim that there is no expression in any language that is a name for God as ‘Simon’ is a name for me. From this it follows both that (1) is false in the argument Scott presents about apophaticism, and that the corresponding premise in any nearby revision of that argument will also be false.  The classic text is Kripke 1980. See also Hughes 2006.  Russell 1905. 31  Kripke 1980. 29 30

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Confusion can arise here because the history of theology is full of thinkers, and apophatic ones at that, who are quite prepared to talk of naming God. In particular Aquinas explicitly counters the view that ‘no name (nomen) can be given to God’.32 In the present context by ‘name’ I mean a referring expression33 which refers directly, in a sense to be discussed below, to an individual object, and occupies subject place in sentences. This is a Russellian understanding of names shorn of the sceptical epistemology which prevented Russell from holding that any inhabitants of the material world other than oneself and one’s immediate sense data were candidates for naming. Ancient and medieval discussion of nomina extends far beyond Russellian names. A name of God on this understanding is anything that can be said appropriately concerning God, quite apart from considerations of what I have been calling surface or logical grammar. So, in article 6 of the question of the Summa referenced above, Aquinas allows that ‘lion’ is used as a metaphorical name for God, whereas we might think that it is odd to think of ‘lion’ as a name for anything. Even if there is a sense in which ‘lion’ is a singular name (for a natural kind perhaps), its grammar is unlike that of ‘Simon’ in important respects; the two words are not intersubstitutable without loss of grammaticality. What of ‘God’? Is this semantically akin to ‘Simon’? I take it that Kripke successfully refuted pure descriptivism, the view that a name such as ‘Simon’ admits a reduction to a description (or descriptions)34 d, such that I am the unique denotation of d and that it is analytic, necessary and a priori that ‘Simon’ refers to me.35 Still, if ‘Simon’ does not refer to me by virtue of being synonymous with some description for me, there is a question about how it does so refer. There is a similar question about ‘God’, if indeed that is a name.  STh1a,q3,a1.  I’m simplifying here by excluding plural names from consideration, since these are not relevant to present purposes. See McKay 2006. 34  As is standard in the literature, I’ll drop this qualification from this point onwards. 35  For the details of the debate here, see Hughes 2006, Ch. 1. 32 33

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Kripke introduces the term ‘baptism’ for the social practices by means of which any given name acquires an object as its referent. Baptism may be by ostension; a language user might say ‘let’s call that hill over there “Ingleborough”, and thereby establish the practice of referring to Ingleborough with ‘Ingleborough’. Alternatively baptism may be by description. Suppose I say ‘let’s call the smallest puppy in the litter ‘Pongo’”; then, in the normal course of things, I have established a practice of referring to the puppy satisfying that description with ‘Pongo’. Note that ‘Pongo’ does not mean ‘the smallest puppy in the litter’. Pongo might very well have a growth spurt and overtake his next smallest sibling, Roxie, in size, but ‘Pongo’ would not now refer to Roxie. ‘Pongo’ is a name, rather than a description, and may be thought of as directly referential (in the sense that it is not synonymous with a description, and it does not refer via a description); it’s just that its reference is fixed by description. Let’s consider these two options – baptism by ostension and baptism by description – with respect to ‘God’. Can we baptise God by ostension? The obvious response is negative, since God is not part of the material world: I cannot point at God or otherwise indicate towards him.36 This is correct as far as it goes, but misses out on an essential component of ostension. One never simply points at something, thereby introducing a referent to our linguistic practices: if I point in the direction of the middle of a crowded street and say ‘let’s call that ‘Marmaduke’, I have not said enough to introduce a name to the language.37 Does ‘Marmaduke’ refer to the person most approximately in the direction of the end of my finger? To the dog at her feet? The coat she is wearing? The shop behind her? In order to disambiguate my pointing I have to supply a sortal under

 Objection: By means of the communicatio idiomatum, couldn’t Peter have truly pointed at Jesus, and thereby pointed at God? Response: Yes, but (I) the pointing is not at God qua God, and (II) this in no way helps the issue of the word ‘God’ acquiring a referent since, as we’ll see when we discuss sortals, Peter has no way of singling out Christ’s divinity as an object of reference. 37  We should resist the temptation to think that something going on ‘in my head’ will settle this question. Private mental acts cannot be constitutive of public meanings. For sure I might gesture towards something and make the Marmaduke suggestion, and then go on to explicate (as we’d put it) ‘what I mean’. But it is only at this point, when someone can be brought to understand what ‘Marmaduke’ means, that it has entered into the language. 36

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which the object of the pointing falls. ‘This dog will be called “Pongo”’, ‘Let’s call the band “R.E.M.”’ and so on.38 All this is neutral with respect to the question whether the sortal merely serves to indicate an object at baptism or else continues to be part of the semantic content of the name. I prefer the latter view, since I think it permits clarity about the nature of category mistakes (a topic to which we’ll return). For the purposes of assessing Scott’s argument, though, all that we need is, (3) x can come to be the referent of a name through baptism by ostension only if x falls under a sortal.

Now, I take it that sortal descriptions are going to be amongst those descriptions whose application to God is denied by apophatic theologians; certainly the detailed account I develop later rules out God falling under a sortal. From this and (3) it follows that ‘God’ cannot come to refer to God by means of baptism by ostension. So then, what about baptism by description? Here too there are problems. Following Russell and subsequent work, I take sentences containing definite descriptions to be quantificational in logical form.39 Moreover, I take it that in order to understand a quantificational claim I have to be in a position to understand at least one of its instances (one way to see this is to look at the standard introduction and elimination rules for quantifiers; being able to use quantificational vocabulary is a matter of being able to make the transition to and from instances). Now consider. (4) The referent of ‘God’ is the x such that φ(x)

Given what I have just said, and given that (4) is supposed to say that the word ‘God’ refers to God, I cannot understand (4) unless I understand some name for God, since otherwise I could not understand the quantified expression on the right-hand side. Call this name n. Now, we can ask of n how it acquired a reference. Given, 38 39

 For further discussions of names and sortals see Thommason 2015 and Lowe 2015.  Russell 1905.

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(5) For any name m, m acquired its reference by baptism by description, or by baptism by ostension.

We are faced either with a viciously infinite regress (if we suppose that n acquires its referent by baptism by description) or else with the result that no instance of (4) can be true (if we suppose that n acquires its referent by baptism by ostension; through the reasoning from (3) detailed above). Now, when baptising we won’t standardly use declarative sentences of the form (4). We are more likely to say ‘Let’s call…. “God’”, or perhaps “I name… “God”’. However I take it that we can’t coherently baptise by description without assenting to the truth of an instance of (4), since one of the things that is achieved by the speech-act that is such a baptism is the truth of an instance of (4). In the light of this, and since, by (5), if ‘God’ were a name it would have to have acquired its referent by either ostension or description, it follows that ‘God’ is not a name. Does it follow that ‘God’ is a failed name, something with the grammatical appearances of a name, but the semantic equivalent of a blank shot, as an atheist might claim? No.40 It follows rather that the word ‘God’ – which, in present context, I claim without argument has a myriad of perfectly meaningful uses – cannot be a name. In order to get a proper grip on the semantics of the word, we will have to look at how the word is used. As this book proceeds, I will suggest that by looking at a canonical use of the word, in the context of asking a question about creation, we can both make progress on this score and see how an apophatic theology might be motivated. This section began with an argument against apophaticism presented, although not endorsed, by Scott. I agree with Scott that the argument does not succeed in its own terms, and I further agree that this is because a descriptivist account of proper names ought to be rejected. However, against both Scott and his imagined interlocutor, I hold that ‘God’ is not  As Wittgenstein remarked of a different, but related, case ‘For a blunder, that’s too big’! (LC, p. 62). 40

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a proper name. If referring is what singular proper names do41 singling out an individual available to us as a discrete existent to be talked about or thought about, then we cannot refer to God. It does not follow that we cannot talk of God.

 There are, of course, wider concepts of reference, as something like Fregean Bedeutung or semantic value. I don’t object to the suggestion that the word ‘God’ has the divine reality as its reference in this sense (I am not a non-realist). I agree with D.Z. Philips, ‘By all means say that “God” functions as a referring expression, that “God” refers to an object, that God’s reality is a matter of fact and so on. But please remember that, as yet, no conceptual or grammatical clarification has taken place. We have all the work still to do since we shall now have to show, in this religious context, what speaking of ‘reference’, ‘object’, ‘existence’ and so on amounts to, how it differs, in obvious ways from other uses of these terms. (1995, p. 138). 41

3 Analytic Apophaticisms

Up until this point I’ve been engaged in ground clearing, suggesting that apophatic theology is an important part of the Christian tradition and examining philosophical arguments against apophaticism. It is now time to turn to more constructive business. The task before us is to lay out an apophatic theology which draws on the resources of the analytic philosophical tradition. This is not simply an arbitrary desideratum, indicative of my own educational background or intellectual preferences, but rather is grounded in the nature of the analytic tradition itself, particularly when that tradition is understood broadly (as including the later Wittgenstein, pragmatists, inferentialists, and so on).1 It is founded on the surely reasonable assumption that a philosophical tradition which has concerned itself so much with the nature of language will have something to contribute to a proper understanding of what is meant when we say that God is ineffable. According to the apophatic theologian there are  Inferentialism focuses on the role of language in the practice of inference (Brandom 2000, Dummett 1991). Pragmatism meanwhile refuses to identify one particular use of language as canonical but agrees with inferentialism in viewing language as a tool put to definite purposes within the panoply of human practices (Price 2013). Both concur in denying that representation has any privileged place in understanding language. See further the discussion at the end of Chap. 4 below. 1

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Hewitt, Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49602-9_3

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substantial and wide limits on what we can say about God. Analytic philosophy, which at least for long and canonical periods of its existence has concerned itself with language and its limits, is not an arbitrary tool for which to reach in attempting to articulate apophatic theology. There is a danger in any project of this sort of redoing work that has already been done elsewhere, even when (as with analytic philosophy and apophaticism) the amount of research lying at the intersection is decidedly minimal. The purpose of the present chapter, then, is to explore two recent attempts to develop apophaticism within an analytic framework, owing to Jonathan Jacobs and Samuel Lebens. Neither, in my estimation, is successful, but both contain rich material for reflection. Engagement with them will make clearer what is required of the apophatic theology I will go on to develop in Chap. 5.

Jacobs – The Ineffable God Jonathan Jacobs’ The Ineffable, Inconceivable and Incomprehensible God is noteworthy for its sophisticated engagement with the apophatic tradition in Christian theology.2 Jacobs is convinced that apophatic claims are ‘firmly entrenched in the mainstream of the Christian tradition’ and instances Clement of Alexandria, Hilary, Basil and Augustine as cases in point. Yet the theologies of these patristic writers cause Jacobs to worry about a problem similar to one presented by Plantinga and encountered in the previous chapter.3 For these theologians were significant figures in the formation of trinitarian orthodoxy. But if they maintained that God is ineffable, surely they cannot also consistently have maintained that God is three hypostases in one ousia. In saying this a theologian is saying something substantial about how God is in Godself, but this is precisely what her commitment to ineffability denies to be possible. As regards trinitarian doctrine, we might well wonder whether the view that it describes God in a fashion at odds with ineffability is quite  Jacobs 2015.  This is the objection based around the purported incoherence, rather than the insubstantiality, of apophatic theology. 2 3

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right. The formulary known (unhelpfully)4 as the Athanasian Creed is instructive to bear in mind, Such as the Father is, such is the Son, such is the Holy Spirit… The Father uncontainable [or incomprehensible], the Son uncontainable, the Holy Spirit uncontainable.5

Here, to put the point in a somewhat gnomic fashion upon which I’ll expand in due course, it does not seem as though the confession of God as Trinity is saying anything about the divine nature, but rather insisting that whatever that nature might be, it exists as Father, as Son, and as Holy Spirit. Trinitarian theology aside, however, Jacobs takes there to be prima facie inconsistencies between Christian talk about God in general and DDI. So, for example, Christians want to say that it is true that God is loving and that God is almighty. Yet, thinks Jacobs, Christians cannot consistently say these things whilst also affirming that God is indescribable, in spite of there being ample basis in the tradition for this latter affirmation. As I’ve already advertised in the previous chapters, I think that a twofold response to this apparent problem is adequate: first, we need to be careful in delineating what it would mean to describe God, and I believe that recourse to the Aristotelian notion of real definition will be of help here; second, recognition of the analogical nature of true statements about God will prevent us from making hasty inferences from the truth of those statements to our knowledge of the divine nature. Jacobs’ response is different, and it is the purpose of the rest of this section to address it. Jacobs appeals to fundamentality, a notion enjoying a good deal of currency in contemporary metaphysics, to account for the compatibility of apophaticism with the truth of characteristic Christian statements concerning God. The stress on compatibility is important, since Jacobs does not want to claim that his account is true, but rather that it presents us  It isn’t a creed (its literary form is more that of a hymn) and it is virtually certain that it isn’t by Athanasius. 5  My translation. Latin: “Qualis Pater, talis Filius, talis Spiritus Sanctus… Immensus Pater, immensus Filius, immensus Spiritus Sanctus. “DS 75. 4

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with a way things could be, and so constitutes a defense against the claim that apophaticism is incoherent. This type of strategy will be familiar to many from Plantinga’s work on the problem of evil and manifests a wider approach in contemporary analytic philosophy, describing the possible instead of seeking to determine the actual.6 I have reservations about this way of doing philosophy in general,7 but there seem to be particular difficulties in the case of apophaticism. Jacobs, rightly, wants to defend a substantive doctrine of ineffability,8 for which our inability to describe God isn’t a contingent feature of our biology or language, but results from the divine nature, which lies beyond the descriptive capabilities of any language user, actual or merely possible. But then we have modal collapse: (non-merely Cambridge) truths about the divine nature are necessary, so any possible truth about the divine nature is actual. Inter alia, any account of a genuinely possible way that substantive apophaticism might be true is an account of what is actually the case.9 Be that as it may, the appeal to fundamentality places Jacobs’ work well within the mainstream of contemporary metaphysics, and so constitutes his project as a welcome attempt to bring systematic discussion of theological topics into conversation with that philosophical subdiscipline. Fundamentality, often associated with grounding, is supposed to be a feature of facts (or, less often, objects in general) whereby fundamental facts (objects) serve to explain metaphysically less fundamental facts (objects).10 For example, a proponent of fundamentality might suggest that physical facts are more fundamental than chemical facts, or (less  Plantinga 1974. The strategy is evident in, for instance the construction of ‘toy’ theories in metaphysics. 7  The purpose of metaphysics is, as I see it, to limn reality as it in fact is, not as it merely might have been (not being a Lewis-style modal realist I take this to be a significant distinction). If the former project seems beyond our powers that is, I think, because metaphysics has become over-ambitious, a revisionary rather than descriptive enterprise in Strawson’s terms. 8  Jacobs 2015 p. 159. 9  Contrast this with Jacobs, ‘I shall not attempt to tell you what it is for God to be ineffable, but rather only what it might be.’ (pp. 160–1). 10  The question of what metaphysical explanation is supposed to be is beyond the remit of this book. See Thompson 2016 for a sceptical take. 6

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plausibly in my view) that naturalistic facts are more fundamental than ethical facts. Statements describing fundamental facts (or at least using only vocabulary suitable for so doing) are said to be more joint-carving11 than other statements. Jacobs modifies a visual example from Sider (Fig. 3.1). The description of the quadrilateral as divided into black and white halves is more fundamental than that made by a linguistic community which takes the diagonal line to mark the significant division. Jacobs quotes Sider approvingly, ‘[i]t is nearly irresistible to describe these people as making a mistake.’ Even though they may assert truths using their color concepts, they are “missing something” about the objective structure of reality. If a person speaks in this way, she may speak truly, but she’s got the wrong concepts. The propositions she expresses using her concepts don’t get at the ultimate, or fundamental, structure of reality. They are gerrymandered. They don’t, as Plato put it, carve nature at the joints.12

Now, let the operator ϰ apply to all and only those sentences which may be used (context-independently) to make fundamental statements. Then, according to Jacobs, the apophatic theologian claims that: For all sentences φ about how God is intrisically: NOT ϰ(φ) and NOT ϰ(NOT φ)

We can say nothing fundamental about how God is intrinsically, according to Jacobs. This is, however, compatible with being able to say

Fig. 3.1  Fundamentality 11 12

 The reference is to Plato, Phaedrus, 265d-266a.  Jacobs 2015, p. 162.

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plenty of non-fundamental things about how God is intrinsically. These include, for Jacobs, that God is three hypostases in one ousia and that God has all the classical divine attributes. I take the problems with Jacobs’ position to be twofold, at least if he is understood (as he wants to be) as making a contribution to Christian philosophical theology. First, even if we allow that fundamentality talk is generally in order, there are severe difficulties making sense of it in relation to God, particularly given DDS. Second, the suggestion that, at a level more fundamental than the Trinity, there is God simpliciter, has been explicitly rejected by orthodox Christianity. So whilst Jacobs’ affirmation of the apophatic tradition as part of the mainstream of Christian thinking is welcome, his approach to giving analytic expression to apophaticism is not one which suits the purposes of this book. First, consider the very suggestion that the fundamental/non-­ fundamental objection applies to facts about God’s intrinsic nature. It is far from clear what it could be for a genuine intrinsic fact concerning God to be less fundamental than some other fact. The statements of non-­ fundamental truths are, on Jacobs’ account, just that, statements of truths. They are not useful manners of speaking or workaday verbal models which, for all their utility do not say how things are in actual fact. Nor even are we supposed to entertain anything like Hick’s neo-Kantian picture, on which religions may usefully and truthfully speak, but according which the divine itself is hidden, the noumenal God lying beyond the phenomenal realities of religion.13 Instead, for Jacobs, the non-­ fundamental truths about God’s intrinsic nature are supposed to say how things are with God. Now, compare Sider’s treatment of fundamentality. He takes what is fundamental to be a matter of the structure of reality, Structure is particularly central to metaphysics. The heart of metaphysics is the question: what is the world ultimately, or fundamentally, like? And fundamentality is a matter of structure: the fundamental facts are those cast in terms that carve at the joints.14

 Hick 1989.  Sider 2011, p. 5.

13 14

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Sider’s own preferred limning of fundamental structure is familiar: a description of the world in terms of certain physical, mathematical and logical vocabulary would trace the fundamental structure. Facts about, for example, mind are perfectly bona fide facts but, for Sider, less fundamental. Neurons firing lie beneath my vague feeling of ennui, and not vice-versa. The familiarity of this sort of naturalistic metaphysic, and the accompanying sense that we can make sense of fundamentality talk when it is contrasting medium sized dry goods to microphysical particles, ought not to cause us to overlook the strangeness of applying the fundamentality framework to God. What is fundamental structure when it comes to God? The physical world undoubtedly invites us to think that its microphysical constituents and their organisation somehow give rise to everything else, explain it, and serve to make true statements about it. Some have even gone so far as to say that these fundamental realities are all that really exist.15 It is not difficult to see the appeal, or the basis for the apparent comprehensibility, of these sort of claims. We are familiar with the idea that the world of our everyday experience is made out of microphysical things, which we can to some extent explore with microscopes and our physical theorising, we can understand this being made out of in part-­ whole terms, and can easily enough get some grasp on the philosopher’s claim that these microphysical things enjoy a primacy in the structure of reality. None of this applies in the case of God. We simply don’t have any idea of what it would be for some ‘bits’ of God to be more or less fundamental, or to give rise to other ‘bits’, or to make more user-friendly everyday statements about God true. If fundamentality talk about the physical world aspires to a making rigorous of pre-theoretic intuitions about the physical world, in the case of God there are no such intuitions. ‘So what?’ – thus the predictable reply of an analytic theologian well schooled in contemporary metaphysics. Jacobs is appealing to the theoretical device of fundamentality to resolve a problem for Christian theism, namely the apparent inconsistency between apophaticism and other characteristic Christian claims about God. This ought to be assessed on the cost-benefit basis which is commonplace in analytic metaphysics. The response is a natural one. But whatever one thinks of the cost-benefit 15

 I’ve criticised this view in Hewitt 2018c.

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method in general, it won’t help here. For Jacobs’ attempt to render apophaticism consistent with other Christian doctrines runs straight into confrontation with one of those doctrines, taught as authoritative in several traditions,16 and linked closely to apophaticism itself: DDS. Divine simplicity is, in essence, the denial that there is any form of complexity in God. This, for Aquinas, follows from God’s being the creator, since complexity stands in need of explanation, and so were God complex she would be one of those things the creator is invoked to explain.17 There are, in particular, no parts of God, and so no layers of divine reality comparable to the physical, chemical, and biological structures of the world around us. There is the just divine reality, ‘altogether simple and unchangeable.’18 This being so, it is unclear how any truth about God’s intrinsic nature could be more fundamental than any other in any interesting way. (The rider here is to allow that it could be that ‘God is good and God is wise’ is less fundamental than either of its two conjuncts). At this point, a defender of Jacobs’ apophaticism might advocate jettisoning DDS. Even if that is a theoretical possibility consistent with a given theologian’s being faithful to her tradition, I will argue in Chap. 6 that we ought to accept DDS. I cannot therefore accept Jacobs’ approach. One particular aspect of Jacobs’ approach deserves a little more attention, however, both to anticipate a later discussion19 and to emphasise why fundamentality will not give the negative theologian what she needs. Jacobs holds that the statements of trinitarian theology, ‘God is three hypostases, one ousia’, ‘the Son proceeds from the Father’, ‘the Spirit is not the Son’, and so on, are genuine truths affirmed by Christians. He thinks, moreover, that none of these statements are fundamentally true. The picture we are presented with is as follows. There is divine reality, of which nothing can truthfully be said, and then there are non-fundamental truths concerning that reality, amongst which are numbered the propositions of trinitarian theology. This is a version of Sabellianism: really, at the  It is taught by the First Vatican Council (DS 178) and finds a place in both the Westminster Confession and the Thirty Nine Articles. 17  STh 1ae, q3, a7. 18  DS 178. 19  Chapter 9, below. 16

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most basic level, there is just God; nevertheless we may (truthfully, usefully, even indispensably) talk of God as three hypostases. Deep down there is the One; but the One is presented in our Christian talk as Three. By contrast, the doctrine of the Trinity insists that the one God exists only as the three hypostases; there is no way in which there is a divinity more fundamental, or otherwise prior, to the Trinity.20 Nicholas Lash makes the point well, According to what was, in due time, established as Christian orthodoxy, the distinctions that we draw in our attempts to speak of God go, as it were, to the very heart of the matter. The distinctions between Father, Son, and Spirit are distinctions truly drawn of God, and not merely of the way that God appears to us to be, or of the way that – for some brief span of time – he was.21

The One exists only as Three, and the Three simply are the one God. Any properly Christian apophaticism will have to do duty to the central place of the divine triunity in the doctrine of God: the God whose nature escapes our language is nevertheless Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, ‘the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Spirit incomprehensible’.22 Fidelity to trinitarian doctrine in the following sense, that the credal and conciliar articulation of that doctrine is true, and that there is no more fundamental sense in which it is not true, is a constraint on the account to be developed in the rest of this book.

Lebens’ Apophaticism From concerns specific to Christian apophaticism, our attention now turns to an Orthodox Jewish philosopher. Samuel Lebens is generous in his reception of Plantinga’s worries about apophaticism, holding that  So, as Faber’s trinitarian hymn Most Ancient of all Mysteries puts it, ‘Thou wert not born; there was no fount from which Thy Being flowed; There is no end which Thou canst reach: But Thou art simply God.’ 21  Lash 1992, pp. 30–1. 22  See Chap. 9 below. 20

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they constitute genuine problems for the would-be apophatic theologian. In his paper Why So Negative about Negative Theology? Lebens sets out the desiderata for a ‘Plantinga-proof ’ apophatic theology as being to avoid by susceptible to four criticisms made by Plantinga of the apophatic theologian:23 • • • •

Incoherence Lack of Support by Argument Arrogance Reductive Revisionism

Something should be said about the nature of these criticisms. Incoherence and Reductive Revision are the Plantingian charges we encountered in the last chapter. The character of the charge termed Lack of Support by Argument is obvious: here I think any superficial force that the accusation might have issues from the narrow diet of examples chosen by Plantinga in making his attack on apophaticism. It would be difficult to accuse Maimonides or Aquinas of not supporting their apophaticism with argument.24 The worry about Arrogance is that the apophatic theologian ends up telling the believer that she doesn’t really mean what she says when she says, for example, that God speaks. We encountered this worry too in the last chapter. Lebens goes on in Why So Negative About Negative Theology? to develop a version of apophatic theology aimed at avoiding Plantinga’s criticisms. Since writing that paper Lebens has developed his positive proposal significantly, whilst continuing to view Plantinga’s criticisms as a constraint on an adequate apophatic theology. Here I’ll address Lebens’ most developed presentation of his approach, which is to be found in his  Lebens 2014.  That argument proceeds by DDS in both cases, and of course Plantinga has attacked this in Does God Have A Nature? (1980). For a response see Davies 2000. But it is one thing to think a doctrine is unmotivated by argument, another thing altogether to reject that doctrine because is it motivated by an argument one does not accept. It is also unclear to me that a theologian needs an argument for affirming a claim as fundamental as DDS (even though I think such an argument is forthcoming). Am I violating my epistemic responsibilities if I affirm DDS because the Church teaches it, for example? 23 24

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monograph The Principles of Judaism. In this book his aim mirrors with respect to Judaism the aspirations of the present book in relation to Christian theology, Apophaticism is part of part of the Jewish tradition, and every day religious life. Analytic philosophers needn’t ignore apophaticism, nor reject it out of hand.25

In laying out the place of apophaticism in Jewish thought, as well as appealing to religious experience, Lebens directs us in particular to the thought of Maimonides and Saadya. The latter is less well known in Christian contexts, but a quote included by Lebens conveys Saadya’s position succinctly, There does not, therefore, remain a substance or accident or attribute that was not defined or determined or put together by Him or about which it is not certain that this Creator was its maker. Hence it is out of the question and impossible to declare Him to be anything that he has Himself created.26

For Saadya, as for Maimonides (and as we will see later, also for Thomas), apophaticism follows from the doctrine of creation. In order to do justice to God’s being the Creator we have to accept that God cannot be truthfully said to be contained under any creaturely category. Since our language is used most of the time for speaking of creatures this inevitably makes God-talk perilous, ever skirting falsehood on one side and nonsensicality on the other. In fact Lebens doesn’t think that apophatic talk can steer this path successfully, but rather holds that it winds up in contradiction for the reasons we examined when discussing Plantinga in the previous chapter. On the face of it, this means that apophaticism cannot satisfy Lebens’ coherence desideratum. He attempts to show otherwise. One option would be to embrace dialetheism, the position that there are true contradictions. A dialetheist could coherently27 say that ‘God is  Lebens forthcoming, p. 44.  Lebens forthcoming, p. 23. The translation is attributed to Gabriel Citron. 27  For dialetheists, coherence does not entail consistency. 25 26

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ineffable’ is both true and false (since, on this line of argument, it entails its own falsity, so if true is both true and false). Lebens wisely opts not to embrace a dialetheic solution. He examines, and rejects, Jacobs’ position discussed above, which in present context could be interpreted as restoring consistency at the fundamental level (the thought being that it is at the fundamental level that the Law of Non Contradiction has to hold sway.)28 So far Lebens is in full accord with what what has been argued earlier in this book. His preferred approach to defending the coherence of apophaticism, moreover, draws on a source to which I have already made approving reference, Wittgenstein’s TLP. As we saw in the first chapter above, Wittgenstein seems to find himself in an apparently contradictory position: he says plenty of things about the relationship between language and the world, yet by his own lights he is unable to say those things. The usual interpretation, known as the traditional interpretation, understands Wittgenstein as attempting to direct our attention to propositions which show what cannot be said.29 In seeing language at work we understand what it is that language does, even though we could never communicate propositionally what it is that we understand. A newer interpretation of Wittgenstein, often known as the resolute interpretation, although called by Lebens the therapeutic reading,30 understands Wittgenstein not as trying to show us something that cannot be said, but rather as writing sheer nonsense in order to demonstrate the futility of the metaphysical project. As Lebens puts it, ‘the Tractatus wasn’t trying to  This position collapses into triviality on very minimal assumptions. See Hewitt 2018b.  For the traditional reading (sometimes known as the metaphysical reading) see Anscombe 2001, Geach 1976 and especially White 2006. It is worth remarking that there are interpretations of the TLP which don’t fit neatly into either the traditional or the robust camp, such as McGinn 2009 and Tejedor 2014. 30  My complaint about the usage ‘therapeutic’, which comes from some resolute interpreters themselves, is that it tacitly loads the odds in favour of the resolute interpretation. For it is clear, to me at least, that Wittgenstein was a therapeutic philosopher throughout his career. Albeit in different ways at different times he wanted to talk his intelocutors down from philosophical perplexities of various sorts. Acknowledging this, however, is perfectly compatible with interpreting the TLP in a traditional fashion – the traditional interpreter can still see Wittgenstein as therapeutic concerning a large number of areas including: the sources of logical necessity, the philosophy of mathematics, religion, ethics, and aesthetics. Lebens, it should be said, favours a traditional reading; I think he is being unduly charitable to his opponent! 28 29

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illuminate some unsayable something; it was, rather, trying to cure you of the desire to engage in ultimate metaphysics’.31 According to Lebens the apophatic theologian finds herself in a similar position to the early Wittgenstein, uttering something that looks like a claim (in this case ‘God is ineffable’) yet banned by her own strictures from thinking that this utterance can communicate a truth. If this is right, then we can look to the interpretations of the TLP for help in formulating a coherent apophaticism. Imagining how he might preface his Principles of Judaism, which is both awash with apophatic sentiment and yet seems to say a great deal about God and religious language, he formulates one option consonant with the traditional reading of the TLP, This book outlines some of the fundamental principles of Judaism, but some other fundamental things can’t be said; nevertheless, I might be able to show you those extra things by uttering the falsehood, to function as an illuminating metaphor, that nothing whatsoever can be said about God.32

…and an alternative in line with the resolute reading, This book lays out the fundamental principles of Judaism. These principles may ultimately entail that what I say, in this book, is unsayable. To the extent that these principles therefore contradict themselves, I will  – at least – have helped you to recognize our human fallibility, and helped you to exchange truth for verisimilitude as your ultimate goal for theological inquiry. Notwithstanding, I can still say, and plausibly hope, that these principles achieve – at least – a high degree of verisimilitude.33

The insistence that theology ought to aim at verisimilitude present here is related by Lebens to an eschatological proviso. He quotes Wyschogrod approvingly, The redemption has been promised by God and therefore will come. But because it has not yet come, the story of Israel is still happening and cannot  Lebens forthcoming, p. 35.  Lebens forthcoming, p. 34. 33  Lebens forthcoming, p. 42. 31 32

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therefore be laid before us as an object of contemplation. Before faith lies the darkness of the future and therefore no logos of God is possible. At least not to man. And not now.34

Note that Lebens takes the characteristic claims of apophatic theology (such as ‘God is ineffable’) to be false. This contrasts with the usual way of understanding the TLP (common to traditional and resolute readers alike), according to which the apparent propositions of the TLP are not false but nonsense, and so not capable of being either true or false.35 It is not obvious to me that this matters for present purposes, although it would be interesting to see what a more avant la lettre tractarian approach would look like. There is an important respect, noted by Lebens, in which the task of writing a preface to a work of apophatic theology comes apart from that of interpreting the TLP. Unlike that case, we are not forced to choose between ‘traditional’ and ‘resolute’ approaches to apophatic theology. It is perfectly coherent to understand our apophatic utterances as both illuminating nonsense and as a kind of intellectual discipline, bringing us up against the limits of our capacities and instilling the humility which rests content with verisimilitude rather than truth in matters theological. Lebens accordingly commends both prefaces to his readers, whilst taking either alone to be sufficient to secure a Plantinga-proof apophaticism. Lebens’ theology of divine ineffability is deeply impressive, combining a sensitivity to Jewish faith and spirituality with an understanding of Wittgenstein uncommon in an analytic culture so often uninterested in even recent philosophical history. He has done a great service to philosophical theology, moreover, by reminding us of the saying-showing distinction in Wittgenstein. This looks likely to provide a useful framework for understanding aspects of religious language quite apart from the application to apophaticism. On that score, his approach seems like a

 Wyschogrod 1996, p. 174.  For Wittgenstein falsity consists in being a picture of a state of affairs which is not actual (that is to say, a fact). Statements without sense (whether they are nonsense proper, or the kind of thing Wittgenstein terms senseless – like logical tautologies) do not picture states of affairs; doing so just is what it is for a statement to make sense. (see especially TLP 2.2 ff.) 34 35

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reasonable and intellectually responsible one, given that Plantinga-like worries about the consistency of apophatic theology are well-motivated. I have already argued that apophatic theology need not be inconsistent, so I do not occupy the same dialectical territory as Lebens. The crucial difference between us, though, is that I take key apophatic claims to be true. In particular, I hold DDI to be true. For all the richness of insight that goes into their support, then, I cannot sign up to either of Lebens’ tractarian prefaces. How could someone decide between Lebens’ position and my own? My strategy in what follows is to argue for DDI, showing that it follows from considerations about the use of the word ‘God’.36 This will justify going beyond Lebens in affirming the truth of apophaticism’s characteristic claims. Of course this brings with it other problems, not least of which is the reconciliation of DDI with other claims concerning God that I want to hold true. In actual fact, I think this is less of a problem than it might seem, and that far from standing in tension with Christian doctrine, DDI rescues that doctrine from philosophical difficulties. But that is a claim that can only be defended further down the line.37

Beyond Existing Analytic Apophaticism We’ve looked at two existing attempts to develop apophatic theology using the tools of analytic philosophy. Neither is adequate for present purposes. Still, it will be useful at this point to review why each will not suffice, and what this means for the negative theology I will develop from Chap. 5 onwards. Jacobs’ proposal is not acceptable from the present perspective, which is one of commitment to Christian orthodoxy, because it rules out the truth at a fundamental level of key Christian claims, including crucially the doctrine of the Trinity. Reflection on this gives us a requirement for an adequate apophatic theology:

36 37

 Chapters 5 and 6 below.  See especially Chap. 9 below.

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• An adequate Christian apophaticism must be compatible with the truth of Christian doctrines,38 where this truth is not to be qualified contextually or as non-fundamental etc. Call this the doctrinal constraint on apophaticism. Lebens’ apophaticism was rejected for something like the diametrically opposite reason from Jacobs’. If Jacobs doesn’t permit a properly true cataphatic theology, Lebens is, curiously, so apophatic that he doesn’t allow us a true apophatic theology. It is a requirement on the work of this book that this kind of bind be avoided. • An adequate apophaticism must be compatible with the truth of DDI. Call this the true ineffability constraint on apophaticism. Note that whilst the doctrinal constraint is couched in terms of Christian doctrine, the true ineffability constraint is not. This is because I take true ineffability to be a requirement on any apophatic theology, Christian or otherwise. There is a more profound reason, though, that the later constraint does not mention Christianity. The position I am going to go on to develop is one on which DDI can be arrived at as a conclusion of natural theology. Apophaticism as such needn’t belong to Christian (or Jewish) theology.39 It follows simply from reflecting on what we must be talking about if we are talking about God. And that sort of reflection, I claim, as well as God-talk itself, is available to us by philosophical enquiry, albeit  By ‘doctrines’ here I mean what, from a Catholic perspective, I would call dogmas, were that word not so prone to be misunderstood. I mean those claims which are part of the content of the Christian faith, which cannot be rejected without at some level rejecting the faith itself. Members of different Christian traditions will disagree about which claims these are (for me they are those taught de fide definata by the Catholic Church). There are of course plenty of things believed by many Christians which are not dogmas. It is perfectly possible that some of these beliefs might be jettisoned in the course of working out a decent apophatic theology. Indeed, I think the majority of analytic theists (representing, I suspect a good number of believers in Europe and North America) who believe that God is a person ought to do precisely this with that belief. See Chap. 8 below. 39  Of course one might believe apophatic claims for reasons other than natural theology, because one has reflected on Exodus 3, say, or because one’s church teaches those claims. Aquinas’ observation that one and the same truth can be believed because of natural reason or because of faith is apposite here (STh Ia, q1, a1, co.). 38

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of a particular sort.40 There are not two Gods, however, one talked about by natural theology, the other by theology proper. As Aquinas insists, the two studies are distinguished epistemologically, in terms of their method, not by having distinct subject-matters.41 So anything truthfully said under the auspices of natural theology must be consistent with anything truthfully said under the auspices of doctrinal theology. The burden of the latter part of this book will be to show that the apophaticism I will develop, initially as a piece of natural theology, satisfies the doctrinal constraint and so does justice to the unitary subject matter of all theology. This, then, is the purpose of the rest of the book. Chapters 5 and 6 will argue for apophaticism in the spirit of the bringing together of Thomas and Wittgenstein which has been called grammatical thomism.42 In this vein I will also lay out an account of those uses of language which we term analogical and metaphorical; the former in particular is important for satisfying the doctrinal constraint. Then I will go on to discuss various doctrinal loci – christology, the Trinity, eschatology and political theology – as well as one commonplace belief, divine personhood. In each case it turns out that DDI is compatible with what Christian tradition has wanted to say, and that far from creating new difficulties, it enables us to dissolve philosophical perplexities in key areas. In spite of rejecting Lebens’ approach to apophaticism, it turns out that my alternative is also therapeutic.  To preview what will be said below, roughly my view is that what passes for natural theology in analytic circles, the kind of philosophical project which goes around collecting ‘evidence’ for God’s existence and attributes is caught up in a confusion about the nature of God-talk, as though religious believers when not committing philosophy intended to talk about some super-being within the world, and susceptible to quasi-scientific enquiry. The natural theology I embrace, following thinkers like Burrell and McCabe, is a grammatical enquiry: what sort of questions does it make sense to ask of the world? And what must be said of whatever answers them? See Hewitt 2019b. 41  STh Ia, q1, a 1, ad. 3 42  As well as Hewitt 2019, see Mulhall 2014. Kerr 2016 has objected to the usage. This ought to be taken seriously, not least because Kerr himself is sometimes ranked as a grammatical thomist, as well as because he knew McCabe (who certainly is one of the theologians people have in mind when they talk about grammatical thomism). However, Kerr seems to think that the usage implies that McCabe and others got their emphasis on divine mystery from reflecting on Wittgenstein – to this he objects that they imbibed it from the Catholic tradition, from Thomas and from Victor White’s lectures. This is right, but I don’t take the usage to imply otherwise (‘thomist’ is the noun, ‘grammatical’ a mere qualifier!). Rather McCabe, Burrell, and Kerr himself (for instance, in his 1997) use Wittgensteinian language and method to express these traditional themes. 40

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Before all of that we need to learn another lesson from Wittgenstein. In his later work he invited us to lay bare the philosophical pictures which inform our day-by-day thinking, so often holding that thinking captive, preventing us from noticing other possible ways of viewing the world, ourselves, and our language. My view is that philosophical theology in the anglophone world is in exactly such a state of intellectual captivity concerning the nature of religious language and that this is a solid barrier in the way of the reception of apophatic theology. Before going any further with my own theologising, then, I ought to at least say something to loosen the grip of (what I take to be) the offending picture. This may seem like an unnecessary detour (and those readers who think it is can probably skip the next chapter), but the extent to which unquestioned assumptions about language hamper philosophical theology is real and devastating. An aphorism of Wittgenstein’s captures something of the situation, A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.43

 CV 42e.

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4 Referentialism and Religious Language

The next task on the road towards the specification of an apophatic theology concerns a pervasive picture of language and its relation to the world. This picture, which I will term referentialism, informs most contemporary writing in the analytic philosophy of religion, usually tacitly. This largely tacit nature of the adherence makes referentialism proportionately harder to dislodge from its position. It is the purpose of the present chapter to show how adherence to referentialism renders assent to apophaticism difficult, but then to show that referentialism is not compulsory. Wittgenstein’s words about a similar topic would serve as a good epigraph, A picture held us captive. And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and our language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably.1

Referentialism Wittgenstein himself provides us with a good first pass at understanding referentialism. Criticising his earlier self, he writes in the Investigations,  PI 115.

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Tractatus Logio-Philosophicus (4.5): ‘The general form of propositions is: This is how things are.’ That is the kind of proposition one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.’2

What is going on in this passage? Wittgenstein is trying to talk his reader away from a certain view of language. The person who feels an affinity for this view is not to be blamed for her predicament, for the lure of the position is strong and arises out of our way of life. Nevertheless, the hard work of philosophical investigation can bring us to see that this way of viewing language is not compulsory. There are two parts to the offending view, Essentialism: Language has an essence. Referentialism: The essence of language is reference: (a) the primary and explanatory purpose of linguistic expressions is to refer to entities (typically these are mind and language independent), (b) truth is understood as correspondence, with the explanatory truth-conditions of a sentence being a function of the referents of the subsentential expressions and the order of those expressions within the sentence.

A prime example of a position which affirms both essentialism and referentialism is Wittgenstein’s own picture theory of meaning in TLP, hence him quoting the earlier book against himself in the passage from the Philosophical Investigations quoted above. However not every account of language which talks of reference and proposes a substantial theory of truth is referentialist in the present sense. The referentialist thinks that the references of linguistic expressions explain other semantic features of language, and for that matter the usefulness of language itself. It is this explanatory role of reference which is definitive of refentialism: in Wittgenstein’s terms, the referentialist takes herself to be ‘tracing nature’ in her use of words, and this explains, for instance, how things she says might be true or false. And because reference is primary, as Wittgenstein  PI 114. The reference is to TLP 4.5.

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puts it when describing his earlier view in the Investigations, ‘Once you know what the word signifies, you understand it, you know its whole application’.3 Since the model of understanding here is essentially private, a solitary individual just needs to know what a word picks out in order to understand that word, it sits comfortably with a view on which intentionality, the orientation of mind and language towards the word such that words and thoughts are about things, belongs first to mental states and only secondarily to language. Thus referentialism is often paired with, Head-first: Intentionality is primarily a feature of mental states. The intentionality of language is to be explained with reference to these.4

Since I want to argue that referentialism causes problems for apophatic theology, it is important at this stage to distinguish referentialism about religious language5 from what Scott has termed the Face Value Theory (FVT) of religious language.6 Scott has laid out an account of FVT in several places.7 Following his Stanford Encyclopedia article,8 we can take FVT to consist of the conjunction of three claims: (a) The content of an utterance ⌜P⌝, where P is an indicative religious sentence is given disquotationally: ⌜P⌝ means that P. (b) An utterance of P is an assertion (c) An utterance of P represents the world as being such that P obtains, it represents the state of affairs (for Scott, the ‘fact’) that P. These, as Scott himself allows, need some refining. For instance, indicative sentences can be used to perform speech-acts other than assertion,  PI 264. For a way in to the later Wittgenstein on language see the essays in Whiting 2010, particularly the introduction and Hacker’s contribution. 4  On the debate about mind/ language primacy regarding intentionality see further Chap. 8 below. Thornton 1998 is an excellent guide to this debate. 5  Since the referentialist will typically be an essentialist, the qualifier ‘about religious language’ is not strictly needed here, but it aids direct comparison with Scott’s Face Value Theory. 6  Scott 2018, p. 149. See also Scott 2013. 7  Scott 2013, 2017, 2018. 8  Scott 2017. 3

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making (b) over-general as it stands. In broad outline, however, FVT is an entirely unobjectionable.9 It is important to recognise this, and to understand how FVT differs from referentialism, in order to see that defences of FVT need not undermine anti -referentialism. This, in turn, serves to disarm the charge of non-realism often made against opponents of referentialism, since non-realism in the intended sense involves a denial of at least one of (a), (b), or (c).10 FVT is platitudinous. Nobody ought to deny either (a) or (c). Nor should anyone fail to sign up to a suitably finessed version of (b), according to which the canonical purpose of uttering P is to assert that P. Of course ‘God is good’ means that God is good; of course when I say ‘God is good’, under the usual circumstances, I am saying that God is good.11 Of course when I say ‘God is good’ I am saying that things are such that God is good (this is all I take states-of-affairs talk to mean.)12 I do not know how to argue the case with someone who denies any of this. I could only assume that, if they are not being argumentative as an end in itself (a phenomenon not entirely lacking amongst philosophers), that they do not understand the meanings of the relevant English expressions, or the use of quotation devices. (a), (b), and (c) are obvious. Not only are (a), (b) and (c) obvious, they also tell us very little. They tell us nothing informative about what a language-user understands when she understands a religious expression. We do not, in Dummett’s phrase,  At least, so say I – a determined hermeneutic fictionalist could make trouble for (b). I only have space here to say that I think hermeneutic fictionalism about (all) Christian theological language is wrong! (I also think there is a simple empirical test of this – are members of a given group of religious believers prepared to deploy, with respect to the contested parts of language, a truth predicate in a manner consistent with the T-schema?) Thanks to Jessica Eastwood for raising this issue. 10  For an example see the widespread dismissal on the basis of misunderstanding of D.Z. Philips ‘work (I disagree with much of this, and crucially his writing on the afterlife, but not because I think he is a non-realist) – the discussion in Burley 2012 is excellent. 11  I’ve ignored here the psychologistic colouring Scott gives to his account of assertion (concerning the communication of beliefs). I’d certainly want to challenge the idea that in asserting P I intend to induce the belief that P in the mind of my hearer, but I’d want to challenge this for all assertions, not simply religious ones. 12  Of course there’s a more exacting sense of ‘state of affairs’ in the spirit of TLP. On this account states of affairs are entities, constituents of reality. Even this, I think, ought to be uncontroversial in the light of an ‘easy ontology’ programme of the sort laid out in Thomasson 2015. The break with platitude comes when these states of affairs are taken to be explanatory with respect to truth. And this is no part of what is claimed by FVT. 9

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have the beginnings of a full-blooded meaning-theory for religious language.13 Relatedly they tell us nothing non-trivial about how linguistic competence might be acquired. Nor do they tell us anything about how reference, or allied semantic phenomena, might be possible in religious contexts. Nor yet do they tell us about the appropriate understanding of truth for religious language. Crucially they do not tell us that truth is a function of reference, that reference is explanatory with respect to truth for religious language. There is, in contemporary philosophy, a pull towards reading (c) as implying referentialism because of a tacit background metaphysic of truthmaking, according to which facts (identified with obtaining states of affairs) or fact-like entities (tropes, for example) make propositions true. This metaphysic is not obligatory, and neither therefore is the move from (c) to referentialism. Referentialism goes well beyond the platitudes of FVT. According to referentialism the purpose of language is to refer to parts of reality (and inter alia, therefore, the purpose of religious language is to refer to parts of reality) and other features of linguistic communication are to be explained with respect to this primary purpose. This lands its proponents, often without explicit assent, in the arms of a particular way of thinking about linguistic understanding and a Cartesian picture of the relationship between mind and language. All of this does not sit well with apophaticism, as we will now see.

Referentialism and Apophaticism Why is there a tension between referentialism and negative theology? Suppose that a language user can intelligibly and truthfully assert the sentence ‘God is good’. Suppose moreover that referentialism is true. Now consider what referentialism means for our understanding of what is going on with our language user and ‘God is good’. The sentence is meaningful, so its subsentential expressions refer, and since our language user understands the sentence, she grasps the respective references of the expressions ‘God’ and ‘is good’ (recall the earlier discussion of 13

 Dummett 1975.

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referentialism and understanding). Since the referent of ‘God’ falls under the referent of ‘is good’, the assertion is true. What would be involved in grasping the reference of ‘God’? At the very least our language user must be able to single out God as an object of singular reference or thought. But we have already encountered the difficulties attached to this, when discussing Scott’s argument about apophaticism and reference in Chap. 2. According to apophaticism, our speaker cannot point to God, literally, or (if sense can even be made of the suggestion) by means of an ‘inner’ shift of focus. God is not part of empirical reality such that she can be gestured towards or our attention drawn towards her by means of it shifting away from other entities. Nor, again according to apophaticism, can our speaker supply a uniquely identifying description for God,14 since on pain of regress a grasp of a name for God would be necessary prior to a grasp of that description. So it would seem that apophaticism is incompatible with referentialism. If referentialism seems unavoidable, perhaps because it is part of the philosophical air one breathes, then if one wants to be a theist one had better not be an apophatic theologian. Isn’t there a way out for the referentialist? Can’t our language user’s understanding of her word ‘God’ (remember here that, in a referentialist spirit, we’re taking understanding to consist in the singling out of a referent) piggy-back on the wider linguistic community? On this scenario, Bob says ‘God is faithful’, and understands what he says (he is not merely repeating a string of phonemes he heard someone else utter). He means by ‘God’ what the people who taught him the word meant by it, and it is sufficient for his understanding the word that he defer in an appropriate fashion to the linguistic community, within which reference is fixed. We are now in well-trodden territory. The idea that the reference of an expression might be determined communally in such a way that it need not be a function of the reliably introspectable mental states15 of any  The point here is that the capacity to supply such a description is a consequence of possessing knowledge of the reference of ‘God’ in cases where that knowledge is not my acquaintance. For these purposes, it doesn’t matter whether the language is public, or say a language-of-thought and the speaker speaking to herself (for the avoidance of doubt, I think neither the language of thought hypothesis nor a merely private criterion of understanding are tenable.). 15  i.e. the narrow-contentful states. 14

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given speaker is familiar from discussions of semantic externalism. Putnam invites us to consider the case of Twin Earth, where there is a substance (XYZ), which is indiscernible from water for all but scientific purposes and which is referred to locally using a word which sounds the same as the English ‘water’. Nevertheless, the English word ‘water’ does not refer to XYZ, since the purpose for which the English word ‘water’ was introduced was to refer to a certain chemical kind – which turned out to be H2O – and H2O is not XYZ. The fact that an individual speaker might not be able to tell you that water is H2O, still less identify the substance before her as H2O rather than XYZ, is neither here nor there. The world together with our linguistic practices functions to fix meaning; ‘meaning’, as Putnam memorably put the point, ‘just ain’t in the head’.16 Tyler Burge emphasises the social determination of reference: the person who claims to have arthritis in their thigh is speaking falsely (arthritis is a disease of joints only), but a person with indiscernible mental states would be speaking truly in a counterfactual situation in which the medical community used ‘arthritis’ more broadly.17 I do not what to dissent from the lessons taught us by Putnam and Burge. Language is a social practice, and one within which (in Putnam’s phrase) there is a division of labour. I can use the word ‘rose’ perfectly well to refer to the flowers currently blooming in our back garden. When, on a visit to a show garden, I chance upon a strange variety, and am not sure whether the flower in question is a rose, I defer to a botanist. She can tell me whether the new flower lies within the extension of the word I have all along being using competently. What I want to question is whether this sort of externalism about meaning is of any use to our would be referentialist apophaticist. In the Putnam and Burge cases, there are some competent users of an expression (‘water’, ‘arthritis’) who are not capable of tying down the reference of that expression, either by ostension or else by characterising its extension. But in each case there are some language users who are so capable: the people who (let’s suppose) first said, ‘let’s call the stuff in that

16 17

 Putnam 1973.  Burge 1979.

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lake “water”’,18 and those responsible for authoritative diagnostic manuals. Now consider the case of the word ‘God’. Clearly nobody has ever pointed at God qua God. And whilst we might properly talk about our attention being directed towards God, in prayer say, or in the course of a retreat or during Lent, we cannot, whilst remaining properly apophatic, mean by this that some region of reality (the divine bit) has been identified as eligible for reference with the word ‘God’.19 For familiar reasons this would require us being able to contain God under a sortal concept, in a manner incompatible with both DDS and DDI.20 Nor, even more obviously, will appeal to some subgroup of language users able to describe God precisely be of any use. By apophatic hypothesis there is no such subgroup. In Christian theological context, it is predictable that someone will reply as follows: on the contrary, there is an expert language user to whom we can defer, namely Jesus. We mean by ‘God’ the one of whom he spoke in parables, the one he came to reveal, indeed render present in the flesh, and towards whom he invites us to direct our life, and our inability to refer to God in the absence of Christ is beside the point, since God’s saving self-communication in Christ has enabled us by grace to do something we have no capacity to anticipate in the abstract, namely speak of God. In Barthian mode, the response might well go on to bemoan the attempt to think as though God’s Word had not been spoken in history.21 That indeed is a mistake, but in refusing to make it we do not open the door to the possibility of combining referentialism with apophaticism. The doctrine of the Incarnation, as we will have cause to explore in greater detail in Chap. 9, is that one and the same person, Jesus Christ, is both God and a human being, with the integrity of both humanity and  Of course this idea of an initial baptism is an idealisation, a just-so story. But that doesn’t matter: the point just is, people started using ‘water’ to refer to this stuff. 19  What might we mean in these circumstances? One promising suggestion is that we direct our attention towards parts of creaturely reality considered with respect to God. 20  In particular, we incur the so-called qua problem concerning the reference of singular terms, of importance for Thomasson 2015. 21  Compare Barth in CD III,4, pp. 479 ff. ‘Far too often [‘God’] is used as a pseudonym for the limitation of human understanding… We must certainly insist, however, that when we ourselves introduce the term ‘God’ at this point, we necessarily have something very different in view’. 18

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divinity being preserved.22 The linguistic capability of Jesus is a properly human capacity; it does not somehow acquire features it could not possess (including, according to referentialism, that of being able to refer to something which cannot be singled out as an object of thought or reference) simply because the person wielding it is God. Jesus as man can no more point to, or tie down descriptively, the divine reality than any of us, and it is this which would be required for him to function as an expert language user at this point. In any case, there are plenty of reasons to object to the idea that the content of the word ‘God’ is given to us from on high. As a matter of empirical fact it is false: and the use of ‘god’ and ‘gods’ outside of Abrahamic religion in related, although not univocal, ways, is important – as Thomas notes23 – if Christians are to so much as disagree with others, let alone enter constructive dialogue with them. The mention of Abrahamic religion raises another obvious point: surely Christians mean24 the same by ‘God’ as Jews and Muslims. The God and Father of Jesus Christ is the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. Too christocentric a revelationism rapidly tips over into Marcionism. And in any case, natural theology is possible (as we will see in the next chapter). People of many ages and cultures have enquired into what they call ‘God’, and when Christians engage in philosophical theology they are engaged in the same project, even if their opponents disagree about an issue as fundamental as God’s existence. It would indicate the crudest form of fideism to meet a thoughtful atheist with the response that we are talking at cross purposes. The proposed account of theological language under assessment – referentialism plus Christ as privileged language user – denies the possibility of what is actual, coherent dialogue between and beyond religions concerning God. It must therefore be rejected. So the compatibility of referentialism and apophaticism cannot be maintained by appeal to an appropriately social account of meaning. That may be just as well since, it seems to me at least, there is a pressure  c.f. DS 300.  STh Ia, q13, a10, ob 3 (the possibility of disagreement is insisted upon in the reply: ‘For when the pagan says an idol is God, he does not use this name as meaning God in opinion, for he would then speak the truth.’). 24  Meaning here includes (at least) Bedeutung. 22 23

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internal to referentialism away from social externalism towards a mentalist account of meaning. For once linguistic understanding is identified with a mental act of, or mental event within, an individual it often appears to make sense to explain linguistic meaning in terms of mental meaning. Public languages, on this view, are the primary manner in which individual persons, capable individually and pre-linguistically of understanding the world, singling out parts of it for intellectual concern, and forming attitudes towards it, communicate one with another. Linguistic communication forms a temporary reprieve from the Cartesian imprisonment of our mental lives. This is not an outlook which is favourable to the insights of Putnam and Burge, still less of Wittgenstein, although arguing this at all adequately would take more space than is available here.

Against Referentialism Referentialism, then, does not sit well with apophaticism. And given the prevalence of referentialism in contemporary analytic philosophy, it would be unsurprising if their commitment, albeit less than explicit, to a referentialist picture of meaning didn’t go some way towards explaining the difficulty many analytic philosophers of religion have in so much as engaging with apophaticism. Philosophers of religion are often working at some distance from research in the philosophies of language and of mind, and there is accordingly a danger of accepting second-hand and uncritically positions from within those subdisciplines. The task before us, then, is to show how the referentialist picture is less natural, and more problematic, than it might seem when we are idly swimming with the flow of philosophical fashion. That way it will be easier to be open to a more apophaticism-friendly understanding of language. The first question which ought to be asked of referentialism is whether there is any good prima facie reason to support it. Does it deserve the status it has enjoyed since the closing decades of the twentieth Century as the default philosophical understanding of language? Were it not for the impact of the past century and a half of philosophy of language (and the cognate disciplines of linguistics and cognitive science) it seems likely

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that we would almost by reflex reject referentialism’s insistence that it is the primary purpose of language to refer. Wouldn’t we rather respond, ‘well it depends. Which language? Used when, and by whom?’ Our sympathies would be with Wittgenstein against his earlier self: Review the multiplicity of language games in the following examples, and in others: Giving orders, and obeying them– Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements– Constructing an object froma description (a drawing)– Reporting an event– Speculating about an event– Forming or teasing a hypothesis– Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams– Making up a story; and reading it– Singing catches– Guessing riddles– Making riddles– Making a joke; telling it– Solving a problem in practical arithmetic– Translating from one language into another– Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.

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–– It is interesting to compare the diversity of the tools of language and of the ways they are used, the diversity of the kinds of words and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (This includes the author of the Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus). (PI 23) There is not one unique thing which we do with words, and in particular we do not solely use words to refer. But as Wittgenstein himself was clear, his earlier referentialism was not a ‘stupid prejudice’ (PI 340) There is something within our life together in modern societies which pulls us towards it as an understanding of language.25 At an intellectual level, the projects of Frege and Russell in the philosophy of mathematics had required attention to questions about language, and had made clear progress – Frege’s conception of numbers as objects and Russell’s theory of descriptions are the obvious examples here. The approach in both cases had been referentialist.26 There was, and is, a temptation to generalise from the fertility of this understanding to the correctness of referentialism as an over-arching account of language. Nor is the academic lure of referentialism’s apparent successes situated only in the past: Williamson, opposing Dummett’s philosophy of language, cites the successes of linguistic ‘science’ which proceeds on the basis of model-theoretic semantics, a referentialist positioning par excellence.27 Of course, linguistics is hardly philosophically innocent, and as an argument against Dummett this turns in a tight circle. Nevertheless it is testimony to the attractions of referentialism. Like so many cases of attraction, the appeal of its object is illusory. The problem is that the referentialist needs to take reference as explanatorily  Kerr 1997 emphasises this.  This is perhaps less obvious in the case of Russell – isn’t there a shift away from referntialism, since his claim is that most grammatical proper names do not refer, but are rather incomplete symbols? This is really a move within referentialism: for sure definite descriptions do not refer in the same way that names refer, but it is still the case that meaningful language represents the world as being a certain way, and that this is its primary function, in terms of which other semantic properties are to be understood. 27  Williamson 2007, pp. 281–2. Of course the mere use of model-theoretic semantics needn’t reveal a philosopher as a referentialist. It is the view that understands models as representing a real correspondence between worldly expressions and entities, and this as explanatory of truth and falsity (and therefore takes model-theoretic semantics to have a primacy over, say, use-based approaches) which embodies referentialism. 25 26

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primary. However reference is a poor candidate for this primary status. Consider the (type) expression ‘Lola’. ‘Lola’ refers to our dog, Lola. But if it is a genuine property of ‘Lola’ that it refers to Lola we now face a puzzle. Nothing in our use of the word ‘Lola’ up until this point ensures that the elongated lurcher presently sitting on the sofa is its exclusive semantic value. Suppose that ‘Lola’ refers to our dog up until January 2025 and to Lola’s nearest-in-age sibling from that point onwards. Nothing in our present use shows in favour of one account of the word’s reference over another. In particular, our preparedness to assert – even whilst thumping the table – that ‘Lola’ refers to Lola does not decide the matter, since in so doing we are using the word ‘Lola’: the stipulation has no more determinacy of meaning that the word whose meaning it seeks to stipulate. A more than disquotational statement of the word’s reference, meaning – as in ‘‘Lola’ refers exclusively to the dog seated on such-and-such a sofa at such-and-such a time’ might seem better, but in fact invites the same kind of challenge about the reference of ‘dog’ and ‘sofa’.28 Two false friends are likely to present themselves to us at this point. One thought, consonant with the head-first perspective which we’ve seen to be a natural pairing with referentialism, is that the reference of mental entities can serve to fix the reference of linguistic expressions. It is because of its association with my mental representation that my word ‘Lola’ refers to the referent of that thought. But this gets us no further, since sceptical worries recur: why is my word ‘Lola’ associated with rather than with, say, until Tuesday and thereafter ? And, in any case, why are we in a better position regarding the reference of than we are of ‘Lola’? Here those who favour naturalising29 content will appeal to an appropriate connection between referent and mental representation, usually a  I’m drawing here on Wittgenstein on rule-following in the PI. See Kripke 1982, although I reject the sceptical solution proposed there, and Thornton 1998. For useful related discussion (in the context of Putnam’s model-theoretic arguments against metaphysical realism) see Button 2013. 29  Again the standard usage ‘naturalising’ isn’t perfect, since it tends to suggest that those of us who reject naturalistic accounts have a somehow ‘supernatural’ (in the colloquial, rather than theological sense) or spooky understanding of reference. On the contrary, I think reference is a phenomenon within the natural world. It is just that we need to understand the natural world as irreducibly including human societies and their practices to get an adequate understanding of semantic phenomena. What we cannot do is reduce everything down to a level at which it is appropriately studied by the natural sciences (whence ‘naturalism’.) See further McDowell 1994, and from a philosophy of religion perspective Ellis 2014. 28

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causal connection. It is because the dog causes (in an appropriate way) that refers to the dog. But this route still faces the challenge that is still a representation, so there is the open question of how it represents. The mere fact of our lurcher causing (in an appropriate way) doesn’t force the conclusion that refers to Lola rather than its referring to Lola until Wednesday and my nephew Rowan thereafter. Representation is rule-governed, and for any given mental representation-­worldly object pair, linked by a certain kind of causal relation, there are indefinitely many rules which do justice to all the mental and causal facts, yet which yield widely differing semantic results. The way out of puzzlement over rules and reference is social. This has been argued at length by others elsewhere.30 I know how to use the word ‘Lola’, as will be evidenced later when I call her for dinner. This know-­ how results from my being appropriately initiated into an assemblage of linguistic practices; within these practices we can respond to one another’s usage, and correct one another when appropriate, ‘no, Lola isn’t that dog walking nicely on the lead, she’s the one over there pestering the picnickers’. These socially regulated practices suffice for our everyday practical purposes. Further questions about reference are not so much answered as revealed to be less urgent than they might seem from a referentialist pespective, and perhaps even dissolved. If we start our enquiry into language not with reference, but with the panoply of practical purposes for which language is used: calling Lola, reasoning about Lola, answering questions about feeding… then we can go on to derive a notion of reference from those uses. Reference to Lola, for example, might be explained in terms of reasoning (which I take to be paradigmatically public and linguistic) using sentences like ‘Lola is asleep’.31 An account of reference thus derived will have all the determinacy we need, that is it will arise out of and sit well with our linguistic practices. Attempting to establish more than that, from a perspective external to those practices, is simply philosophy for its own sake, and we should not assume that it will be successful. However, since from our perspective reference is not foundational, we can leave matters to rest there as the referentialist cannot.

 The literature is enormous. For a way in see Canfield 1995.  Compare here the approach to reference in Thomasson 2015 or Brandom’s inferentialism (2000).

30 31

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Alternatives to Referentialism In raising difficulties for referentialism, I have already hinted towards an alternative approach to understanding the phenomenon of language, beginning not with semantic properties of linguistic expressions but with the practical purposes to which language is put within human communities. For the needs of what follows we need only remain at that level of generality: referentialism is to be rejected and questions about linguistic meaning are to be tackled in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s remark, For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’—though not for all—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. (PI 43)

There are however, alongside ongoing work in the tradition of Wittgenstein,32 two current approaches in the philosophy of language which deserve mentioned as worked out alternatives to referentialism: Pragmatism. With its origins in the US, and particularly in the work of Wilfird Sellars, as articulated by Huw Price, this – considered as an approach to the philosophy of language – refuses any primacy to the role of language as representing the world, but instead insists that we begin enquiry into language by attending to the uses to which utterances are put in our interactions. There are, according to pragmatists, a multiplicity of such uses.33 Inferentialism. Developed by philosophers such as Prawitz and Dummett, and explored by others particularly as an account of logical vocabulary, inferentialism fleshes out the Wittgensteinian suggestion of meaning-as-­ use by focusing in on the use of expressions in making inferences as of determining semantic importance. Work by Brandom, who stresses the social character of inference by writing of ‘the game of giving and receiving reasons’, has generalised the approach to non-logical vocabulary.34  See the contributions to Whiting 2010.  Price 2013. Note that Price terms ‘representationalism’ what I am calling ‘referentialism’ (my reasoning being that I want to avoid confusion with the position in the philosophy of mind known as representationalism). 34  Dummett 1991. Brandom 1994, 2000. 32 33

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My own sympathies are with a hybrid approach, which affords primacy to the practice of reasoning, whilst acknowledging the multiplicity of ways of using language. Interested readers are referred to the literature. What matters here is that referentialism is not compulsory, and that there are alternatives from it. We ought not to remain unreflectively in its grip, thereby making apophaticism seem more prone to objections than it is in actual fact. With that lesson under our belts, the next task is to enquire into the use of one particular linguistic expression – the word ‘God’ – and to see how understanding that use properly leads to the recognition that DDI is correct.

5 Grammatical Thomism

The theoretical component of apophaticism, formulated in terms of DDI, is a claim about words about God, albeit one made by those whose ultimate concern is God himself. To shed light on DDI, its motivations and its implications, then, we ought to get clear about the logical grammar of the word ‘God’. In this chapter and the next, I will do just this using the resources of the tradition known (sometimes reluctantly on the part of its proponents)1 as grammatical thomism. The starting point for this task was touched upon in the previous chapter: the later Wittgenstein’s understanding of meaning as use.2 In the present chapter I will present a version of what Brian Davies has called Aquinas’ existence argument couched at the linguistic level, in terms of human talk about God.3 This will lead into the following chapter’s discussion of why our talk about  Kerr 2016.  This chapter draws substantially on material from my Hewitt 2019a. As I did there, I should emphasise what is not being attempted, namely an argument for the existence of God on the basis of a ‘nominal definition’ of God, of a sort to which McCabe in particular voiced explicit objection (2002, pp. 16–7). In modern terminology, the difference is between an investigation at the level of sense and one at the level of reference. Given that, in the next chapter, I will cash out DDI primarily in terms of the unavailability of a real definition of God, it is vital to be clear about these matters. 3  Davies finds the argument in De Ente et Essentia, as well as in both summae (1992, pp. 31–3). 1 2

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God, understood as talk which we enter into in response to the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing at all?’ is highly constrained in a fashion consonant with DDI. The importance of both chapters considered together is that, far from natural theology providing us with insight into the divine nature, it is precisely those considerations which license us to speak of God at all4 which bring us also to see that when we speak of God we run up against the limits of sense-making.

Learning to Speak of God Suppose that someone asks me to teach her the meaning of the word ‘God’. We are no longer in the grip of referentialism, so I do not suppose that she is asking me to point out, or describe, to what the word ‘God’ refers, which is just as well given the nature of the case. Rather, she is asking me to teach her to use the word. Now I, as a Christian, typically use the word liturgically  – to pray, make supplication, implore, confess. I cannot teach her that use without inviting her to be initiated into the form of life within which it can be seen to make sense, that is the life of the Church.5 Does this mean that I must refuse her request? No, because there is a kind of canonical use of the word ‘God’ which is accessible to any human being engaged in the broad practice of enquiring after explanations. That use is to answer a question which marks the limit of the practice, and whilst the question might well have its origins in scriptural revelation – in the sense that nobody might have thought to ask it were it  What if we are licensed to speak of God by revelation? As it happens, I do not think that we could encounter God in revelation were natural theology not possible. But in any case it is simply a mistake to think that revelation makes clear what God is, for the God who is revealed is still the Creator, and all the considerations brought to bear in an apophatic direction in this chapter and the next therefore remain operative. I think the suggestion that revelation diminishes divine mystery is widespread, and mistaken. In Chap. 8 below, I show how a proper apophaticism dissolves philosophical perplexity around two paradigm cases of revealed doctrines  – the Trinity and the Incarnation. See further the beginning of Chap. 7. 5  There is a good deal of pedantry in contemporary Wittgenstein scholarship about the use of ‘form of life’ for anything as broad as a religion. It is true that Wittgenstein himself typically deployed the usage with respect to more discrete, constrained practices (Kerr, 1997, pp.  29–31). But see the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics where he is quite happy to described mathematical practice (all of it) as a form of life. 4

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not for the Hebrew Bible – it does not depend for its intelligibility on that revelation. We are in the domain, then, of natural theology.6 So what do I say to my questioner? I want to teach her how to use the word in making assertions, by indicating to her the conditions under which canonical sentences containing the word ‘God’ may be asserted correctly.7 Amongst these sentences are ‘God exists’ and the applications of various predicates to God. Similarly, an adequate introduction to the sense of ‘God’ will convey something of the denial conditions for sentences containing the word, and of the circumstances under which its inclusion in sentential context constitutes a category mistake. With one eye to these desiderata and the other to my enquirer’s request to know whether the word ‘God’ corresponds,8 I decide to begin my elucidation by focusing on the sentence ‘God exists’. Now I take my lead from Aquinas, who in the Summa Theologiae famously offers five arguments for the existence of God. Not wishing to evaluate these arguments for present purposes, I nevertheless note that each proceeds from some feature of the world to the existence of a creator of the world which, says Aquinas, ‘all speak of as God.’9 This reflects what is surely a focal deployment of the word: to speak of the Creator of all that is (other than that Creator himself ). What I learn from these arguments, which cohere with the use of the word ‘God’ in talking about creation, is that I am entitled to assert ‘God exists’ just in case there is something rather than nothing at all.10 Since there is indeed something rather than nothing at all, or else I would not be in a position to ask or assert anything, I can say that God exists. The  The distinction between a causal dependence on revelation and an epistemic, or justificationary, dependence is importance, both here for securing the claim that we are engaged in natural theology but also more generally in Christian theology. It seems to me, for example, that many claims made about the ‘theological’ or ‘heretical’ nature of the secular trade (particularly within the Radical Orthodoxy school) on eliding this distinction. 7  This does not commit me to a claim that a full understanding of the sentences consists solely in the grasp of their assertion conditions. Indeed, I think take it that full understanding requires also a grasp of the inferential commitments incurred by an assertion (and, dually, by denial). The relevance of this will become apparent later. 8  I don’t intend ‘corresponds’ in any technical sense, in particular I do not intend to convey that ‘God’ refers in the same fashion as a proper name. This will be denied in the next chapter. 9  STh.Ia., Q1, Art 3, ob. 10  c.f. TLP 6.44 ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.’ 6

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controversy lies a stage back, of course: many philosophers will follow Russell in denying that the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ stands in need of an answer, and so will question the legitimacy of introducing an expression to designate whatever answers that question.11 Given that this assertion condition for ‘God exists’ is legitimate, however, there are two important results concerning the logic of God-talk.12 The first is quite simply that there is such a thing as the logic of God-­ talk, that our attempts to speak of God do not invariably churn out nonsense. There are intelligible circumstances in our life in which a sentence containing the word ‘God’ can be uttered with assertoric force, and this sentence stands in inferential relations to other sentences. Given that this sentence has a sense, it cannot be the case that its sole constitutive noun-­ phrase lacks a sense. This point deserves some emphasis, since recent work by Stephen Mulhall has annexed the work of the grammatical thomists to an approach to religious language influenced by the resolute reading of the early Wittgenstein.13 On this reading, somebody like McCabe, whose approach to God-talk has been given philosophical statement in the preceding paragraphs of this section, is gleefully talking nonsense, going through the motions of saying what cannot be said in order to provide us with therapy for our idolatrous proclivities, all the time keeping in our minds the riddle of existence (‘riddle’ here having the sense of TLP 6.5). This approach is quite clearly not McCabe’s. He is emphatic that his intent is to safeguard the religious believer from the charge of speaking nonsense: theology ‘is not concerned with trying to say what God is but in trying to stop us talking nonsense.’14 It is for this reason that he lays before his reader how the word ‘God’ is used, in the context of an argument about creation, so that she can see that the word does indeed have a use, and thereby a sense.

 Russell 1957.  The strategy described in this paragraph is to present, what Davies calls, Aquinas’ Existence Argument, present in both summae as well as De Ente et Essentia, through the medium of linguistic philosophy (Davies 1992, pp. 31–3). 13  Mulhall 2015. 14  McCabe 2002, p. 215. 11 12

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This is not to say that there is nothing odd about the word ‘God’ for McCabe. Preserving the strangeness of our talk about God, consonant with the thomistic insistence that we cannot know what God is, McCabe often says that we do not know what our use of words about God means. This form of expression can be prone to mislead, and suggestive perhaps of Mulhall’s reading of McCabe. In order to see why it does not offer support for that reading, it is important to be clear about the multiple sense of the word ‘mean’.15 When you ask me what an expression means you might, depending on the context in which you ask, expect a number of distinct things by way of a reply. You might be content with a translation or synonym of an expression: ‘what does mean?’  – ‘bakery’ or ‘it’s a shop where you buy bread and cakes’. Alternatively, you might be after the reference of the word: ‘what does ‘Bernie Sanders’ mean?’ – here you’d be satisfied with either a description of or an ostension at the referent. The position that every expression in a language has a reference such that its meaning can be supplied in this sense is a substantial metasemantic claim, closely linked to a referentialist view of language. By contrast, that some expressions clearly are meaningful in the operative sense is uncontroversial; my name serves as one example. Finally, a request for the meaning of an expression might be a request to be brought to a practical understanding of the expression, that is, to know how to use the expression. In my view, following Wittgenstein and Dummett, this corresponds to the primary sense of meaning, and under-­ writes the connection between the theory of meaning and the understanding of a language.16 Whether or not that is correct, however, there certainly is a sense of ‘meaning’ whereby grasping meaning consists in knowing how to use an expression: ‘listen to what she’s saying about Donald Trump, she can’t know what the word “genius” means’. It is moreover this notion of meaning which underwrites the denial that an expression is nonsense; nothing is nonsensical that has an intelligible use in the language. In the light of this we can clarify McCabe’s position on

15 16

 Hacker 2010.  Dummett 1975. PI 43.

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the meaningfulness of the word ‘God’ and our knowledge of that meaning.17 The word ‘God’, for McCabe, is meaningful in this last sense of having a use within the language: the assertion of the canonical sentence ‘God exists’ is licensed in response to the question why there is something rather than nothing at all. (Equivalently, given that anything whatsoever exists, we may assert ‘God exists’). And various inferential moves may be made from sentences containing the word on the basis of its use in answering that question. We can grasp this meaning of the word, which is to say we can have practical knowledge how to use it. On the other hand, we cannot say anything positive about the reference of the word ‘God’, since the considerations which give rise to the word’s use ensure that its referent lies outside any intelligible category of being (a conclusion McCabe arrives at through a consideration of creation and divine simplicity). There is then a clear sense in which we do not know what we mean when we use the word ‘God’ without it being the case that any attempt to deploy the word must issue in nonsense. I endorse McCabe’s strategy. The question about creation, ‘why is there something rather than nothing at all?’, provides a canonical way-in to God-talk. In the next chapter we will see how it also allows us to understand the severe constraints on the grammar of God-talk which issue in a robust apophatic theology. Then in the following chapter our attention will turn to analogy and (what is usually called) metaphor, in order to see how this apophaticism does not prevent us from speaking truthfully, still less usefully, of God. Before that, however, a likely objection to the grammatical thomist strategy must be addressed. Surely it is all too good, from a theistic perspective at least, to be true. The path to affirming God’s existence traced by the grammatical thomist is disarmingly quick. And that, runs the objection, can’t be right.

 Compare here Dummett, ‘If we use the word “about” in such a way that a statement is held to be about what the words occurring in it refer to, then what a statement is about need not in all cases coincide with what we learn something about when we come to know the statement to be true’ (1993, p. 284). 17

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Too Easy a Route to God? On the manner of introducing the word ‘God’ laid out in the previous section, it is nearly trivial that any given language user will be entitled to assert that God exists. But if a language user is entitled to assert that God exists, she is surely entitled to think it true that God exists. All that is required is that anything whatsoever exist. Yet surely this makes a difficult question, whether God exists, far too easy. Reasonable people disagree concerning the correct answer to the question. And in any case the tradition within which we are supposed to be working, thomism, has distinguished itself by opposition to what may seem like a nearby argument, the ontological argument, and to the claim that God’s existence is self-evident.18 It is certainly true that grammatical thomism provides an easy route to the affirmation of God’s existence. The question is whether it does so in a manner that is philosophically objectionable or self-undermining. To understand why it might be thought philosophically questionable it suffices to reflect on contemporary culture. When it isn’t simply ignored, the question of God’s existence is hotly contested. Books are written either way, entire philosophical careers dedicated to arguing for either theism or atheism; public opinion is split and geographically and culturally variable. Surely this is suggestive precisely of the question of God’s existence not admitting obvious resolution. Isn’t it a manifest failure of intellectual humility to claim otherwise? If the question whether God exists concerned the existence of a particular object in the world, to be pursued by evaluating evidence (whether empirical or argumentative) for and against the hypothesis that God exists, then it would indeed be a problem that grammatical thomism delivers such a decisive verdict in favour of the hypothesis, circumventing the weighty considerations that can be assayed against it and thereby effectively shutting down a lively research project.19 But it is at this point that the grammatical thomist ought to insist that understanding the  SThIa, q2, a1.  I have in mind here the kind of project executed in Swinburne 2004 and countered in the same terms by Mackie 1992. 18 19

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question of God’s existence in this way is the result of a concomitant misunderstanding of the grammar of God-talk. The word ‘God’ is not supposed to pick out an object in the world, such that it makes sense to conduct a quasi-scientific investigation of whether God exists.20 God is not one of the items in the inventory of the world, but is rather the reason there is a world at all. This being so, it is far from clear that there is a problem in taking God’s existence to be potentially obvious; for in so doing we are not making assertions about the contents of the universe from our armchair, but are rather acknowledging the universe’s own existence as real, contingent, and not brute. This does not mean that all we are doing when we talk about God is talking about the universe in a pious tone of voice, but rather – as we’ll see in the next two chapters – that all talk of God is licensed via more direct talk about creatures, that it arises out of radical questioning of more readily comprehensible creaturely reality, and as such ought not to be expected to conform to the same evidential norms as scientific questions about that reality. If this is right, why do so many people, apparently competent users of the word ‘God’, including religious believers, think that it is certainly not obvious that God exists, and that there is a substantial philosophical problem concerning God’s existence? That such people exist is certainly decisive witness to the fact that God’s existence is not always obvious.21 Here a Wittgensteinian rejoinder is the correct one: philosophical problems arise from misunderstanding the grammar of our language.22 Conventional philosophical approaches to the existence of God, which for these purposes include not simply the outputs of academic philosophy of religion but also the New Atheists and many of their theistic opponents, take it for granted that the purpose of God-talk is to pick out an entity in the world, whose existence may be regarded as an hypothesis subject to evidential investigation. Those pursuing these approaches may adopt this theoretical approach towards God-talk even if their liturgical or spiritual practice, for example, or the way they talk about God outside the confines of the seminar room, doesn’t sit comfortably with it. Someone  Compare here Wittgenstein in LC, and Schonbaumsfeld’s ‘target view’ (2010, 157–9).  Claims of obviousness always invite the response: obvious for whom, and when? 22  PI 109. 20 21

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might perfectly well kneel and adore the mysterium tremendens et fascinens, confessing the incomprehensibility of the God she somehow encounters falteringly through the haze of incense, yet committing her life to God with an absoluteness before which talk of doubt would be nonsensical, and all this after having spent her working day crafting an argument that the weak anthropic principle renders the probability of theism higher. The point of the Wittgensteinian diagnosis of philosophical perplexity is precisely that we may misunderstand our own language, a language we competently make use of when not indulging our philosophical instinct. In the light of this, we can see that the grammatical thomist approach to ‘God’ outlined in the previous section can be viewed as a means of drawing our attention to the correct grammar of the word by forcing us to attend to its defining place within the language-games of Abrahamic religious practice as designating the answer to a question posed by the existence of anything whatsoever, that is the Creator.23 Once we are properly aware of this grammar, the temptations to make illicit inferential moves from sentences containing the word ‘God’ or, more generally, to take the word to be a proper name for some entity in the world, will hopefully subside. And once we are in this position perhaps the obviousness of God’s existence might not strike us as something strange. What though about the specifically thomistic concern that the existence of God ought not to be self-evident and that, in particular, the ontological argument, which might seem to have an affinity to the grammatical thomist strategy, is unsound?24 Taking the elements of the concern in reverse order, Aquinas’ objection to the ontological argument as such is the move from the existence of the idea of God in the mind to the existence of God in reality.25 Not only does the grammatical thomist not endorse anything like this move, she is positively opposed to anything  That God can be shown to exist is in the manner described in the previous section is a matter of natural theology. However it is important for tying this natural theology into theology proper that what we call ‘God’ in natural theology is the same as what we call ‘God’ in theology. The doctrine of creation ensures this. 24  Mackie 1992, Ch. 3 rightly makes the point that talk of the ontological argument is simplistic. Thomas’ target is Ansel m in the Proslogion. 25  SThIa, q2,a1,ad. 2. 23

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like an automatic move from the discursive to the theological. The correct grammar for the word ‘God’ is one thing; whether or not that grammar is applicable is another, and depends on how things are in reality. The fact that, for the grammatical thomist, the requirements placed on reality for the admissibility of God-talk are decidedly minimal – simply the existence of anything whatsoever – does not nullify this point. Moving onto self-evidence in general, here Aquinas’ position is that God’s existence is self-evident per se, since there is no distinction between essence and esse in God, but is not self-evident for us. We, not being in a position to comprehend the divine essence, can only know that God exists through God’s effects. The grammatical thomist does not demur. An apophaticism about the divine nature is built into her account of the grammar of God-talk, and her account of what licenses the application of this talk appeals to what Aquinas would take to be the most characteristic effect of divine action, namely the existence of non-divine entities. In both cases then, the grammatical thomist is shoring up the key thomistic doctrine rather than modifying it.

Meaning Things about God Following Aquinas and subsequent thomists, I hold that there are things we can say truthfully about God, not least that she exists. We will go on in Chap. 7 to see how an account of analogy underwrites more general truth-telling about God. At this point, though, it is apposite to minute a recent theological treatment of apophaticism. Susannah Ticciati’s A New Apophaticism draws on thinkers within the ambit of grammatical thomism, principally Lash, Turner and Burrell,26 to establish interest in apophaticism, before going on to develop Ticciati’s own apophatic theology, rooted in Augustine’s writings.27 This is, says Ticciati, at the very outset, more radical in its apophaticism than the approaches of the contemporary theologians with whom she engages,  Ticciati 2015, see especially Ch. 1.  Particularly De Dono Perseverantiae  – Ticciati helpfully supplies translations of key passages (2015, xiii–xv). 26 27

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…we will take our argument even further than they do, stepping into undoubtedly controversial terrain. Even those who hold that language fails absolutely to describe or picture God are nevertheless wont to conceive of the role of God-language as, say, a gesturing beyond language towards the God who transcends it. But we will argue that this is to misconceive its role from the start, and thus altogether to get off on the wrong foot. Thus we will bring into critical question even the most apophatic of claims such as the following: ‘Language, in its failure, points beyond itself to the God who cannot be captured by it’. We will depart, in other words, from a model of God-language according to which reference remains central even while descriptions are held to fail.28

There are very clear similarities here with what was said against referentialism in Chap. 4. Moreover Ticciati does an excellent job of directing our attention to the multiple purposes of religious language. Chief amongst these for her is the transformative purpose of language, ‘God-­ language contributes to the signification of God by transforming human beings into better signs of God.’29 On this view, language signifies God not directly, but rather brings us to a position where we, created in the imago dei and redeemed by one like ourselves in all things but sin,30 signify God more faithfully. Working within a different philosophical tradition from the present work (and from her principal dialogue partners) – Ticciati draws freely on semiotics – the position is worked out with respect to second-personal God-language (as encountered in liturgy and prayer) and third-personal God-language, the paradigm and canonical case of which is doctrine.31 The result is a sustained taking-seriously of the apophatic tradition by a philosophically-informed theologian which stands in contrast to the paucity of engagement within the analytic philosophical literature.

 Ticciati 2015, p. 1.  Ticciati 2015, p. 217. 30  Hebrews 4:15. 31  Ticciati seems to have authoritative doctrine, or dogma, in mind: ‘…doctrine is a sign of the church’s development over time – a deep sign, as it were, of the mind of the church as the locus of divinely redemptive transformation’ (p. 223). She gives as examples the Chalcedonian definition on the natures and person of Christ, and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. 28 29

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My perspective is one of agreement with Ticciati on a great deal: religious language is a motley, and in particular its function in transforming human beings has been overlooked by philosophers.32 The interplay of second-personal and third-personal God-language, and their coming together in praise (Ticciati instances the inclusion of the creed in the eucharistic liturgy as a case in point) are rightly emphasised in A New Apophaticism. My challenge is to Ticciati’s negative claims: that God-­ language does not so much as gesture beyond itself towards God, and that even apophatic metalinguistic claims err (e.g. ‘Language, in its failure, points beyond itself to the God who cannot be captured by it’). I think that if the metalinguistic assertion of apophaticism is itself included within the language about which we should be apophatic then Plantinga’s challenge, discussed in Chap. 2, acquires a revived urgency. I can see no way to answer it in those circumstances. Of more theological importance, once standard semantic concepts, such as signification, are thought inapplicable to God-language, it is very difficult to see how the concept of truth can remain applicable. There is a danger then of ending up in the position McCabe described in a different context, of not taking ‘sufficiently seriously the point that faith means holding something as true – [but] more an act of courage or trust in a very general sense’.33 A subtle point stressed by recent work in the pragmatic tradition, but also by Dummett under the heading of sophisticated realism, is that whilst a given part of language might not have the primary function of signifying, or picturing, reality that language may in fact have a derivative referential function.34 Let’s suppose that the assertion conditions for some sentence are satisfied – and what more could be required for its truth? – and that it contains singular terms. Well, then, those terms surely refer – they occur in a true sentence.35 The familiar semantic properties of truth and reference do not play an explanatory role here (we wouldn’t specify the sentence’s truth conditions referentially), but rather they emerge from  In Christian theological perspective we ought to say: ‘its function, under grace, in transforming human beings…’ 33  McCabe 2007, p. 7. 34  Dummett 1993, Ch. 11. 35  On singular terms and reference see Hale 2013. 32

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more fundamental, non-representational accounts of the function of the language in question. So things are, I claim, with theological language. Our use of ‘God exists’ is, in the first part, to respond to the taking of explanatory questioning about the universe to its limits, no doubt also to express awe and wonder at the givenness of things. But in using the sentence we also say, of God, that God exists. And, we say something true. There is a difference between the case of ‘God exists’ and, say, ‘2 exists’ (a sentence concerning mathematics which we might also treat using a practice-based semantics). ‘God’ is not a proper name, not least because we cannot specify a sortal concept under which God falls. Nevertheless ‘God’ signifies God. It is about God. We will return to this issue in the next chapter. Before that, the relationship between ‘God’ and God requires attention of a different sort.

 ore than Words? Talking About ‘God’ to Talk M About God Religious language is a uniquely interesting part of human communication and deserving of philosophical attention. The grammatical thomist however, like Aquinas himself, takes philosophical investigation to be capable of uncovering truths about God, not simply about words concerning God. It is an objection to the grammatical thomist position, therefore, if the charge of substituting language for reality can be executed successfully. Two versions of the charge should be noted. The first, directed not against grammatical thomism as such but against the general position (whether in Fregean, Wittgensteinian or Dummettian form) that philosophy has a particular concern with a linguistic or conceptual subject matter finds expression in an engaging and sustained attack from Timothy Williamson in The Philosophy of Philosophy.36 The other, instanced in Francesca Murphy’s God Is Not A Story takes direct aim at grammatical Thomism, and charges it with failing to uphold a   Williamson 2007. For a more recent overview of Williamson’s metaphilosophy, see Williamson 2016. 36

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metaphysical realism concerning God, focusing as it does on words about God.37 Turning first to Williamson, he thinks that those who regard philosophical questions as concerning language misidentify the subject matter of the discipline. A good example is provided by his discussion of the law of excluded middle.38 The truth of ‘Mars was always either dry or not dry’ cannot be a linguistic matter thinks Williamson. For instance, the sentence cannot be true in virtue of the fact that Mars always was, or was not, within the extension of the word ‘dry’. A translation test makes clear that the question whether Mars was always dry or not dry does not concern the word ‘dry’. Translated into Serbian, the question reads, Da li je Mars uvek bio suv ili nije bio suv?

This translation, as Williamson notes, clearly does not concern the English word ‘dry’.39 Let’s grant to both Williamson and common sense that the question whether Mars was always dry or not dry is about the planet – whatever precisely being about a subject matter might involve here. This much may be acknowledged however by those who view linguistic methods as central to philosophy: the point is not that the question is about language, such people would insist, it is rather that reflection on language allows us to see that the question will always receive an affirmative answer without empirical investigation (in the passage at issue Williamson is writing about analytic truth.) More generally such a philosopher will insist – one in the Wittgensteinian tradition, and in particular Wiliamson’s immediate target Dummett40 – attention to language is distinctive of philosophical method. It is not that we are not concerned as philosophers with the extra-linguistic world, but rather that our access to that world is mediated via language. As Dummett puts the matter, language ‘may be a distorting mirror but [is] the only mirror we have’.41  Murphy 2007.  Williamson 2007, pp. 27–8. 39  Williamson 2007, p. 28. 40  Williamson 2007, pp. 272–92. 41  Dummett 2014, p. 6. 37 38

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So when Dummett himself goes on to engage in a book-length essay on the philosophy of logic and language, he prefaces it perfectly congruently by declaring his commitment to making progress on the central questions of philosophy, The layman or non-professional expects philosophers to answer deep questions of great import for an understanding of the world. Do we have free will? Can the soul, or the mind, exist apart from the body? How can we tell what is right and what is wrong? Is there any right and wrong, or do we just make it up? Could we know the future or affect the past? Is there a God? And the lay-man is quite right: if philosophy does not aim at answering suchquestions, it is worth nothing.42

The grammatical thomist applies the insights of this broad tradition of linguistic philosophy to matters of philosophical theology. The subject of enquiry for authors such as McCabe is God (were that not the case they would not be engaged in theology, philosophical or otherwise),43 but they conduct that enquiry by linguistic means. In considering the grammar of the word ‘God’ we come to understand how reality is such that this word is used intelligibly. This understanding is gained through attention to language, but it does not follow that the subject matter of our understanding is itself linguistic. Of course, for the grammatical thomist, the extent to which we can be said to have an understanding of God at all is very circumspect. Following Aquinas, McCabe holds that we can know that God is but not what God is, the nature of God is hidden from us.44 Our understanding of God, such as it is, shows us that God cannot be contained within a shared category with other entities, and this fact is manifest to us in the marked difference between the usage of the word ‘God’ and that of other noun-phrases of the language, and in particular in the marked contrasts in the types of inferential move licensed by sentences containing it. To Murphy’s objection that they do not move beyond language about God to the underlying reality, then, the grammatical thomist will reply  Dummett 1991, p. 1.  STh Ia, q1, a7. 44  STh Ia, q3, pr. 42 43

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that every reality is linguistically and conceptually mediated. Whilst this is perhaps particularly apparent in the case of the reality of God, of whom we can have no empirical experience, the fact that we come to an understanding about God through consideration of our theological language no more shows us not to be concerned with the divine reality than the fact that analytic philosophers have often approached the metaphysics of causation through analysis of causal language involves them in a denial of worldly causation. Attention to talk of God brings the philosopher to knowledge about God. Yet there remains a lurking suspicion that Murphy will not be satisfied. Do we really have metaphysical realism about God? If this is supposed to consist in some cognitive grasp of God which extends beyond our linguistic ability then we do not, but then neither can we be metaphysical realists about anything else either. Grammatical thomism cannot be criticised justly for not delivering what was never there to be had in the first place. The grammatical thomist, as I have presented her in this chapter, is content with her place as a creature in the world.45 She does not suppose that she can arrive at some archimedean point above thought and language from which to gain a ‘pure’ vantage point on reality.46 Still less does she, attentive to the first commandment, suppose that God belongs to the surveyable world. Nevertheless she speaks and reasons, and she believes that by talking and reasoning about the world around her in a particularly radical fashion she can come to be able to say that God exists, and to realise that whatever it is of which she is asserting the existence lies radically beyond her cognitive capacities. The basic point is all there in Augustine’s Confessions, And what is He? I asked the earth; and it answered, ‘I am not He.’ And everything on earth made the same confession. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the creeping things that lived, and they replied, ‘We are not  Distinguish this from being content with ‘one’s place in the world’. McCabe was at the forefront of arguing, rightly, that the world – and most peoples’ place in it – stands in need of fundamental transformation (Hewitt 2018d). I would add that one feature of capitalist society with which no Christian (or Jew or Muslim) should be happy is its constant challenging of our status as created, finite, beings: ‘dare to think big’, ‘the sky’s the limit’. 46  c.f. Genesis 11:1–9. 45

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your God. Seek higher than we.’ I asked the breezy air; and the universal atmosphere with its inhabitants answered, ‘I am not God.’ I asked the heavens, the sun, moon, and stars: ‘Neither,’ they said, ‘are we the God whom you seek.’

And I answered all these things which crowd about the door of my flesh, ‘You have told me concerning my God that you are not He. Tell me something positive about Him!’ And with a loud voice they exclaimed: ‘He made us.’47

47

 Conf X.vi.

6 The Grammar of God-Talk

Following McCabe, we have seen how the word ‘God’ can be introduced in a canonical fashion in the context of true statements. One such statement is made by saying ‘God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing.’ Indeed because we can ask of the universe, ‘why this rather than nothing?’, we are entitled to say that God exists. This leaves much open about how the word ‘God’ may be used, about its grammar in the Wittgensteinian sense. The purpose of the present chapter is to make good on this, showing in the process how the grammar of God-talk underwrites DDI.  In outline the theme of the chapter is that because God is the Creator of all that is, God in no way falls under the creaturely concepts our language is designed to express. God is, in this sense, wholly ‘other’. It is a mistake to infer from this that God is in some way remote from creatures, in a manner more consonant with deism than with biblical theology. On the contrary, God the transcendent Creator does not occupy a logical space within which it makes sense to insist that one of the pair must be applicable. Writing about pseudo-­ Dionysius, von Balthasar captures well the kind of position this chapter supports,

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Hewitt, Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49602-9_6

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Because God is endlessly distinct from all things, he is near, internal to every one of his creatures — he protects, preserves, satisfies the needs of each creature in its very otherness, its difference from him.1

Divine Simplicity In the preamble to the third question of the first part of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas, who takes himself to have established that God exists, remarks that the situation of his enquiry is a strange one,2 When we know with regard to something that it is, we still need to ask what it is like, in order to know with regard to it what it is. But because we are not able to know with regard to God what he is, but what he is not, we cannot consider with regard to God what he is like but rather what he is not like.

He goes on to tell us that we may come to understand what God is not like by ‘removing from him those things not appropriate to him’.3 This process of ‘removal’, of unsaying, is apophasis in the classical sense and is the means by which we can come to understand what I am calling the grammar of God-talk. The form this apophasis takes in Aquinas, following classical Christian tradition inherited from Augustine amongst others, as well as his Jewish and Islamic sources, is the assertion of DDS. In saying that God is simple we are saying that God is radically unlike creatures, and so that there are severe constraints on what can be said intelligibly, still more truthfully, concerning God. DDS, as we will see, leads to DDI, and also affords us a way of making DDI more precise. DDS is the doctrine that there is no real composition in God. Unlike some modern philosophers, Aquinas shows no sign of thinking that all composition reduces to one basic kind (the mereological composition of

 von Balthasar 2003, p. 83.  We met this passage above when discussing Stump’s downplaying of Aquinas’ apophaticism. 3  STh Ia, q3, pr. 1 2

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a whole from parts, for instance).4 So the best way to get a handle on what is meant by composition is by example, and we will encounter some examples of what Aquinas understands composition to be as we go on. For the time being we can get a broad sense of what is intended as follows: there is composition just in case distinct x and y come together such that either (1) x and y form a distinct z, or else (2) x in some way qualifies or modifies y. Why, then, can there be no composition in God? The various answers Aquinas gives to this question have their basis in God’s being the Creator. Given that God is whatever it is that answers the question, ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’, it follows that we cannot say of God that various kinds of composition obtain. So, for example, God cannot be the kind of composite we know as a body, because (quite apart from the obvious composition of physical parthood) within bodies there is a distinction between potentiality and actuality. Every body has unrealised potential – my computer is here, but it could be over there. But there can be no potentiality in the Creator, who is therefore not a body.5 More widely, thinks Aquinas, composition stands in need of explanation, whereas God is the terminus of explanation: we speak of God when we have nothing more to say or ask about why things are as they are. Therefore there can be no intelligible questions about why God is as God is. And there would be such questions were there composition in God. As Aquinas puts it, Every composite has a cause, for things in themselves different cannot unite unless something causes them to unite. But God is uncaused… since He is the first efficient cause.6

To put the point in a grammatical register, we learned to use the word ‘God’ to designate whatever answers a certain kind of question. Reflecting on that use, we realise that many of the modes of speaking we customarily engage in with respect to the objects we encounter in everyday life, and through scientific enquiry, must be inapplicable to God. We cannot  On this, witness the debate ensuing from Armstrong’s suggestion that states-of-affairs combine particulars and universals in a ‘non-mereological mode of composition’. Armstrong 1997. 5  STh Ia, q3, a1, co. See also the treatment in Dolezal 2011. 6  STh Ia, q3, a7, co. 4

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say of God that God is a body, that God changes, or that God might not have existed. (Nor, on pain of incoherence, can we say anything that entails one of these statements – already it ought to be clear that swathes of everyday language is inapplicable to God.) Such denials are the business of the third question of the prima pars of the Summa Theologiae. Two positions contained within Aquinas’ DDS, both of which I take to follow from the doctrine of creation in the manner sketched above, deserve particular attention for our purposes, paving as they do the route from DDS to DDI: that in God there is no distinction between property and substance, and that God is not an individual. In both cases, I have articulated the claim in a modern philosophical idiom.7 Contemporary metaphysicians think about property possession in a variety of ways. Think about the playfulness of Lola. Perhaps there is a universal property, Playfulness, instantiated by Lola but shared with other creatures (her friend, Florence, for example). Or perhaps, as Aquinas himself held, we should think primarily of a particular property, the playfulness of Lola: an individual form in medieval terminology, a trope to modern metaphysicians.8 Variants of each approach multiply throughout the literature. Common to all is the insistence that there is one thing, the substance possessing the property, and another distinct thing,9a universal or trope, and that these stand in a relation, normally called instantiation. According to DDS things cannot be like this with God. There can be no real distinction between God and God’s properties. God is good, we might agree, but this is not because God instantiates some property. Rather God is God’s goodness, to be God is to be good in the unique, and incomprehensible, fashion in which God is good. Related to this, and a concomitant of DDI, is that we are licensed in saying that God is good only because of our understanding of God’s creatures, not because we  Following here the canonical treatment in Davies 1992, Ch. 3.  See Cynthia MacDonald’s overview (1998) and the references therein. 9  Some philosophers will maintain that the two entities needn’t be wholly distinct. Many trope theorists, following Campbell 1990, think that substances are bundles of tropes. Married to a view of parthood as partial identity, this yields the result that properties are partially identical to their possessors. I find the idea of partial identity wholly obscure, but this can be left to one side for current purposes, since bundling is still a form of composition, so the considerations in the body of the text apply. 7 8

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have any understanding of God’s nature (to know how God is good would just be, by DDS, to know God). Two misunderstandings of the claim that God is God’s goodness need to be headed off. First, there is the objection, posed insistently by Plantinga, that in making this claim we are claiming that God is a property. Thus, [I]f God is identical with each of his properties, then, since each of his properties is a property, he is a property… if God is a property he isn’t a person but a mere abstract object; he has no knowledge, awareness, power, life, or love.10

We will deal in due course with the suggestion that being unable to predicate personhood of God is a problem.11 Plantinga’s argument, quoted above, is a straightforward application of Leibniz’s Law; if x=y and x is F, then y is also F, for any F. Whence, if God is identical to the property of God’s goodness, and the property of God’s goodness is a property, then God is a property. The argument is unquestion ably valid, so in order to avoid the conclusion it is necessary to question at least one premise. As it happens, both premises ought to be rejected by the proponent of DDS, since she ought simply to deny that the property/ substance distinction is applicable to God. We will encounter in a later section the idea that God is radically dissimilar from creatures, that God does not occupy a shared logical space with us, such that the distinctions which are intelligibly applicable in our case are not so in the case of God. Brian Davies stresses the point, having cited Burrell approvingly to the effect that DDS ought to be understood as a piece of negative theology, …Aquinas is not saying that, for example, God’s properties are unqualifiedly identical with each other and that God is unqualifiedly identical with all of his properties. To cast things in a more modern idiom, the Thomist doctrine of divine simplicity is an exercise in ‘logical grammar’; its aim is to tell us the sort of conclusions about God which are not to be drawn. And one thing being said by it is that God is not to be thought of (cannot be 10 11

 Plantinga 1980.  Chap. 8 below.

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known) as something with properties distinguishable from each other, or as something we can conceive of as distinct from the nature we ascribe to it.12

God is God’s goodness, but God’s goodness, unlike the goodness of Jarvis Cocker, is not a property distinguishable from a substance in which it inheres. Nor does the absence of any real distinction between intrinsic divine attributes entail that we mean the same thing when we talk of God’s goodness as we do when we talk of God’s wisdom, in the most important sense of the word ‘mean’. Here the Fregean distinction between sense and designation, to which appeal was made in Chap. 5 in our discussion of Mulhall, is important.13 The sense of the expressions ‘God’s goodness’ and ‘God’s wisdom’ differs. A language user acquires a different aptitude when learning one expression from the one she acquires when learning the other, and the circumstances of their appropriate use differ. However, both expressions have the same designation, in that the same non-­linguistic reality corresponds to each expression.14 A certain pull towards thinking otherwise comes, I think, from the supposition that reference is primary meaning, but this is just the referentialism we saw reason to break with earlier. We can, and should, mean things about God, but we cannot say anything true about the nature of what it is we are talking about. What precisely this maxim of silence involves is the topic of the next section. Before that, it remains to consider the claim that God is not an individual. There are two questions here, whether the claim is so much as comprehensible and whether it is an entailment of DDS. Philosophers formed in the tradition of Quine are prone to identify being an existent with being an individual, where to be an individual is to be the kind of thing eligible to be the referent of a proper name, an instance of a kind, countable as one: ‘to be is to be the value of a variable’.15 Without any  Davies 2000 p. 555. Burrell 1979.  To the best of my knowledge, the first appeal to the sense/ reference distinction in this context was by Geach in Anscombe & Geach 1973. 14  There is a certain similarity here with Bergmann & Brower 2006, but I don’t want to be committed to anything as strong or general in its remit as truthmaker theory and I certainly do not wish to infer a correct metaphysic for non-divine reality from apophatic theism. 15  Quine 1948. Van Inwagen 2014, Ch. 3. ‘Variable’ here means a first-order variable, a variable capable of substitution with a singular name preserving grammaticality. These were the only type 12 13

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need to venture into theology there is good reason to doubt this. As well as individuals there are stuffs, such as the coffee in my cup or the water in the pond. We talk readily about stuffs, and can re-identify them over time (‘the water in the bucket is the water that was in the pond yesterday’) but we cannot count stuffs  – the question ‘how many waters are in the bucket?’ is unintelligible – and so they are not individuals. The appeal to stuffs here has the purpose of unsettling the conviction that everything which exists is an individual, not of suggesting that God is a stuff.16 God exists, for (amongst others) the reasons given in the previous chapter. But there is no such individual as God, on pain of violating DDS. Why? An individual is something we can count. Following Frege,17 we can explicate this as follows: an individual is something that can be picked out as an instance of a sortal concept. We count 1 F, 2 Fs, 3 Fs, and so on. But sortal concepts come equipped with identity conditions, these being conditions under which I can tell whether this is the same F as that. For there to be a set of identity conditions it has to be possible to distinguish between F-ness as such and particular instances of F-ness, or to put the point in less platonic terms, I need to be able to distinguish this bit of the world (which is F) from that bit of the world (which is F also). DDS rules out there being a set of identity conditions for God. God is not an instance of a kind. God is simply God, and God alone is all that God is. What, then, of the assertion that God is one, with which the Nieceno-­ Constantinopolitan creed begins,18 and which is foundational for biblical monotheism, and essential to the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity? Aquinas argues that the divine unity ought not to be understood

of variable Quine thought admissible, see 1986, Ch. 6. 16  Thanks are due to Sam Lebens for alerting me to the dangers inherent in arguing along these lines. 17  Frege 1953 (1884). 18  Or slightly more carefully, the creed begins with an assertion that commits me to this other assertion. That I believe in one God is not the same claim as that I believe that one God exists: the former, but not the latter, communicates that I trust and commit myself to God, whereas even the devils believe that God exists (a nd, we are told, that God is one: James 2:19!) However, that God exists is a presupposition of belief in God, so the person who professes her belief in God is committed to the claim that God exists. Hence the person who professes her belief in the one God is committed to the claim that the one God exists.

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in terms of numerical oneness. Answering the question whether God is one in the affirmative, Aquinas writes, For it is manifest that the reason why any singular thing is ‘this particular thing’ is because it cannot be communicated to many: since that whereby Socrates is a man, can be communicated to many; whereas, what makes him this particular man, is only communicable to one. Therefore, if Socrates were a man by what makes him to be this particular man, as there cannot be many Socrates, so there could not in that way be many men. Now this belongs to God alone; for God Himself is His own nature… Therefore, in the very same way God is God, and He is this God. Impossible is it therefore that many Gods should exist.19

Human beings are countable because there is something to them other than the property (form) of humanity, namely their matter. And for this same reason human beings can be many. Since there is no such distinction between form and matter in God, God cannot be many. And in this sense God may be said to be one: that it cannot be the case that there are many Gods. The doctrine of divine unity is, for Thomas, a piece of negative theology. He goes on in the same article of the Summa Theologiae to deny explicitly that the sense in which we say that God is one involves a predication of number. ‘“One” which is the principle of number is not predicated of God, but only of material things.’20 This will strike many of us, particularly those familiar with Frege’s foundational work on arithmetic, as too restrictive. It seems like we can count natural numbers; importantly, every number numbers its predecessors. Still the point stands that countability, which is the same as being an individual, goes with falling under a sortal equipped with identity conditions,21 and God falls under  STh Ia, q11, a3, co.  STh Ia, q11, a3, ad. 2. 21  Under certain descriptions and in certain circumstances (when the question whether the number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs is being asked))numbers are supplied with identity condititions by the so-called Hume’s Principle: the number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs if and only if the Fs and the Gs can be paired up with no remainder. That Hume’s Principle only provides criteria for identity when the expressions either side of the identity sign are transparently number-­ denoting gives rise to the Caesar Problem. 19 20

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no such sortal. Thomas nevertheless allows that we can say that God is one in a sense of oneness which is ‘interchangeable with being’. God is, and God alone is God.

On Describing God is, but we cannot say what it is that we claim exists when we say ‘God is’. Is there any way of offering a positive account of what is being claimed by locutions such as the previous sentence, and so of offering an account of DDI and rescuing it from the suspicion of incoherence? The purpose of the present section is to answer this question in the affirmative. As with the foregoing discussion of DDS, our starting point will be Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae. Here, it will be recalled, Aquinas insists that we cannot know of God what God is (quid est).22 Similarly, it will be recalled, Eleonore Stump downplays this insistence of Aquinas’, writing that quid est is a ‘technical term of medieval logic’,23 quoting Peter of Spain in support as saying it is ‘that which is predicated of many things differing in species in respect of what they are’.24 To say of something what it is, in this sense, is to specify a genus under which it falls. To convert the idea into a modern philosophical idiom it is to say what kind of thing something is, to specify a maximally-specifc sortal concept under which it falls.25 The problem with inferring on this basis that Aquinas does not hold that there is a fundamental sense in which we do not know what God is is simply this: that knowing what kind of thing something is constitutes a fundamental piece of knowledge about that thing, permitting further investigations, licensing some inferences about the thing, whilst blocking  STh Ia, q3, pr.  Stump 2003, p. 96. 24  Peter of Spain, 1972, p. 21. 25  An infirma species, following Pawl (2019, p. 22) That God does not fall under an infirma species would provide a route to defending the claim that the Word assumed a concrete nature against Jedwab (2018), since the divine nature, understood thus, is not a concrete nature, so the objection that in Christ there are ‘too many concrete natures’ falls. I doubt Pawl would favour this route, but it does indicate that the effects of a properly apophatic doctrine of God can be seen throughout dogmatics. 22 23

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others. Because I know that Lola is a dog, I know that it is appropriate to take her for a walk and that the question whether she is divisible by seven does not make sense. According to DDS we make a mistake in even asking of God what kind of entity God is (so the failure of knowledge with respect to what kind of thing God is is radical: there is no answer to be had). The mistake we make is of the sort Ryle memorably described as ‘one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind’,26 a category mistake. We’ll proceed to more general questions around category mistakes and God-talk presently. For immediate purposes, the important point is that God cannot be an entity of a particular kind, since this would be the case just in case God were an individual. But as we have seen, it follows from DDS that God is not an individual. Because of this, we find ourselves intellectually disorientated when we attempt to speak or think about God. Much of what we say about God gives the impression that we are treating God as an individual; indeed the fact that the word ‘God’ itself has the surface grammar of a proper name encourages this understanding, as does the fact that the predicates conjoined to it usually designate (or at least can designate)27 qualities of individuals. Yet God is not an individual, countable as an instance of a kind, so these appearances are deceptive. We don’t know where to turn – the insistence of this present chapter is that this response is right, we ought to be disorientated by the grammar of the word ‘God’. That it unsettles us points in some way to the mystery underlying use: DDI obtains because DDT is true. In the next chapter we will point some way beyond the perplexity to ways we can talk significantly concerning God, by means of analogy and (what is usually called) metaphor. For now, our immediate concern is an understanding of how the denial that God is an individual underwrites a significant version of DDI. Recall that DDI, as introduced in the first chapter, is the view that God cannot be described. There is a sense of ‘described’ on which this must be flatly incoherent. If I describe x just in case I make a true assertion about x, then, by articulating the supposition that x is indescribable I describe x, contradicting my supposition. We have already encountered a case from  Ryle, 1949, p. 17.  It is in order to say ‘the wine is good’, but ‘the wine’ does not denote an individual.

26 27

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Plantinga against DDI on this basis. Even if we follow the advice of Chap. 2 and rule out semantically reflexive predicates from possible descriptions, there are plenty of claims about God which could count as descriptions in a permissive sense: God is the Creator of the universe, God is good, God was worshipped by Catherine of Sienna, and so on. Descriptions in this permissive sense are of limited value. For any given entity there are an infinity of true propositions concerning that entity, all but finitely many of them uninformative for all practical purposes.28 The Aristotelian tradition, of which Aquinas was an inheritor, and which continues in some contemporary metaphysics, places great store by real definitions. The project of supplying real definitions, rather than being a quaint occupation outmoded by modern science and theoretical metaphysics, is an enterprise in descriptive metaphysics.29 Real definitions specify what it is for an object to be an instance of a kind. A human being is, let us suppose, a rational animal. As this example suggests, real definitions historically have been stated in terms of genus and differentia but we needn’t insist on that. Crucially, however, real definitions are entirely in terms of intrinsic qualities of instances of the defined concept, and supply conditions the satisfaction of which is necessary and sufficient for falling under that concept. Real definitions facilitate inferences concerning the entities falling under them. From the proposition that I am human, and equipped with a real definition of humanity, you may infer that I am an animal, and indeed much else on the basis of the inferential content of the concept of animality. Now we are in a position to state a form of DDI: DDI: There is no real definition of God.

 Suppose there are only finitely many true propositions about some entity x. Let S be the plurality of these propositions. Conjoin the elements of S and insert a double negation at the beginning. The result is a true proposition about x (this holds even intuitionistically) which is not in S, contradicting the supposition. Note the result holds even if we’ve already ruled reflexively semantic predicates out of the propositions in S. 29  In the sense of Strawson 1959. 28

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There is a perfectly good sense in which a real definition tells you what something is. There is then, according to DDI, a perfectly good sense in which we do not know what God is.

God, Category Mistakes and Logical Space So, then, we may speak of the simple divine essence, of God, on the basis of asking a question about creation. But we cannot say what God is, in the sense outlined in the previous section. We can know that God falls under no creaturely category of being (this is the import of DDS), and this means that a lot of things we are used to saying about the ordinary objects of our everyday lives will be infelicitous when said of God, as I will say at this stage to convey there being something wrong with a use of language without prejudging the nature of that wrongness. It is infelicitous to say that God smells of sardines or that God is equal to 3 in arithmetic modulo 5. It is also infelicitous to say that God is a person, in any ordinary sense of that word (we’ll return to this in a later chapter), and therefore that God is susceptible to moral assessment in the manner required to get the usual problem of evil going.30 It is helpful to think about theological infelicities of this sort in terms of logical spaces. Think of a logical space as a plurality of entities which can be compared one with another on the basis of certain criteria, or which may each be assessed individually for the satisfaction of some predicate (according to univocal criteria). The current analytic instinct at this point would be to formalise (`let a logical space L be a pair , with S a non-empty set and R a set of relations on R…’) There may be something in that for some purposes, but those purposes are not mine. Sometimes clarity is best served by remaining at an impressionistic level, and I take it that we have a working understanding of what a logical space is. Lola and I can be compared within the logical space of animals, but I do not occupy the logical space of cars and cannot be compared with my Fiat for cylinder capacity. Within the logical space of numbers, assessments of entities for being odd or even can be made. I can be compared,  Davies 2006.

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as can Lola, with my Fiat within the logical space of material objects, for mass, say, or acceleration. And so on. It is usually the case that an entity will belong to a large number of logical spaces. Moreover which logical spaces an entity belongs to is a product of the kind to which it belongs. It is because I am a human being that I am comparable as a person, as an animal, as a material object, and so on. God does not belong to a kind, and so the only logical space we can speak of God as occupying is occupied by God alone. That God does not share a logical space with any creature has decisive consequences for the kinds of comparisons and inferences we can make, blocking certain lines of questioning towards which less apophatic theologies feel a pull. McCabe makes the point well, If [Aquinas] says ‘Whatever God may be, he cannot be changing’ readers leap to the conclusion that he means that what God is is static. If he says that, whatever God may be, he could not suffer together with (sympathise with) his creatures, he is taken to mean that God must by nature be unsympathetic, apathetic, indifferent even callous. It is almost as though if Aquinas had said that God could not be a supporter of Glasgow Celtic, we supposed he was claiming God as a Rangers fan.31

God cannot be compared along the axis changing-static, as can the inhabitants of the physical universe, nor along the axis sympathetic-cold, as can human persons. If I attempt to apply a predicate associated with some logical space of creatures, in a univocal fashion, to God then I am making a mistake. In particular I am committing a category mistake. In saying that God weighs eight stone, or (a mistake philosophers, at least, are more tempted to make) that God is subject to moral assessment, we are committing the same kind of mistake as if we say, without contextual explication, that yellow is virtuous or that the positive root of four is heavy. God does not lie within any domain the elements of which we are able, even in principle, to assess for weight or for virtue.32  McCabe 1987, p. 41. I distance myself from the suggestion that God does not support Celtic.  Virtues are, after all, a type of disposition, and possession of dispositions by God would be a violation of DDS. Still less does it make sense to ask whether God abides by the moral rules. What would count as a divine violation of a moral rule? 31 32

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Because a category mistake is being made in saying that God weighs eight stone, we have to be careful in parsing one way in which this might be reported, by saying that God does not weigh eight stone, or that it is not the case that God ways eight stone. It is not felicitous to say that the propositional negation of ‘God weighs eight stone’ is true, or that God possesses some weight other than eight stone (perhaps zero stones) and so lies within the compliment of the predicate’s extension. Rather the ‘not’, of ‘God does not weigh eight stone’ should be understood as metalinguistic negation,33 indicating not the deniability of the negated proposition but rather the infelicity of its assertion. And this in turn allows us to re-­ emphasise a theme from the first chapter, that God is radically dissimilar from creatures. I may be lighter than Donald Trump and heavier than my nephew Lucas: it makes no sense to ask where, on a line of weights running through Lucas, me, and the President, in that order, God falls. God is nowhere on that line, even extended into infinity. I am dissimilar from Lucas and Trump in respect of weight, and in many other respects; God meanwhile is radically dissimilar from us all.

More on Category Mistakes A certain kind of philosopher will object to the previous section, and in particular to the distinction between dissimilarity and radical dissimilarity. Let P be the proposition that God weighs eight stone, she will insist: well, since it is not the case that God weighs eight stone, the negation of P, ~P, is true, just as the negation of the proposition Q, that Lucas weighs eight stone, is true. This philosopher will press the point by insisting that God is not in so different a situation from Lucas as I have suggested, for in both cases the conditions for a certain entity weighing eight stone are not satisfied. Hence the proposition is false, and therefore its negation is true. Both the law of excluded middle, and the principle of bivalence, are preserved, and whilst there might be space for recovering a deflated account of radical dissimilarity (perhaps the reason ‘God weighs eight stone’ is false is significantly different from the reason ‘Lucas weighs eight  Horn 1985.

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stone’ is false), God-talk does not differ semantically from more quotidian language in the manner I have been suggesting. A view on which statements committing category mistakes are meaningful but false has been defended by Ofra Magidor.34 Against this, I want to insist, ‘God weighs eight stone’ (along with more tempting theological category mistakes) is not even so much as false. Concomitantly there are widespread failures of excluded middle and bivalence in our attempts to speak of God. From a use-orientated perspective a natural way of thinking about the matter is as follows: predicates come equipped with application conditions (and perhaps denial conditions),35 these are what I grasp when I come to understand the predicate – to understand a predicate is to know how to apply its conditions. But, of course, it will usually be the case that one can know how to apply a predicate only within a particular logical space,36 the domain of applicability of that predicate. I know, when confronted with material objects, how to test whether the predicate ‘weighs eight stone’ applies to them. Canonically, I weigh them; otherwise, I know how to assess whether I have a derivative basis for making the application, if I have reliable testimony say, or if I can calculate an object’s mass from the force it exerts at a known acceleration. Conversely, and similarly, I know how to tell of a material object when the predicate ‘weighs eight stone’ fails to apply, in the sense that the predicate ought to be denied of the object, and the assertion of the relevant negation licensed. However, when presented with something other than a material object, I do not know how to proceed to assess whether the predicate applies. If the meaning of the predicate is what a fully competent user understands, then,37 in this case we  Magidor 2013.  Generalising the approach of Rumfitt 2000 I endorse this, but arguing the matter would take us off-topic. 36  An exception might be thought to be the identity predicate. In fact, I am doubtful even here (and so suspect that ‘God=God’ is infelicitous) owing to the relationship between identity and number. (Relatedly, I don’t think the sameness relationship on stuffs is the same as the identity relation on things). 37  This understanding of meaning owes much to Dummett 1975. The shift away from it, and the fading into the background of questions about understanding in some contemporary philosophical treatments of meaning is indicative of the dominance of the kind of referentialist picture treated in Chap. 4. 34 35

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ought to say, the meaning of the predicate does not determine whether or not it applies to the non-material entity. And so a use of a sentence appending the predicate to an expression for such an entity is semantically defective, it fails to say anything evaluable for truth or falsity, and in this sense fails to express a proposition. Those who commit category ­mistakes try, but fail, to say something. That no proposition is expressed by a case of a category mistake is an external linguistic fact, and one any given language user might not pick up on. We have perhaps met people who are damaged emotionally by having been told that they ‘pushed God away’, or are frightened that their sins have ‘upset God’.38 These cases, both category mistakes in the light of DDS, ought to persuade us that the present topic is not arcane or merely academic. What of Magidor’s principal objection to this defectiveness view of category mistakes?39 This proceeds from an apparently attractive principle of compositionality,40 If S is a generally competent speaker of a language L and S understands the terms ‘a’ and ‘F’ of L, then S understands the sentence ‘Fa’.

The problem, of course, is that ‘Fa’ might be a category mistake and so, on the defectiveness account, meaningless. It cannot therefore be the case that anybody understands the sentence ‘Fa’. It is of course open to a proponent of a defectiveness view to reject compositionality, but this incurs the considerable cost of setting aside an appealing account of an otherwise puzzling phenomenon: that, on the basis of understanding a small finite number of lexical items, language users are able to understand indefinitely many sentences. Magidor offers the defectiveness theorist the fall-back option of a restricted principle of compositionality,

 Of course scripture contains plenty of language of this sort. Chapter 7 will say some things about how we might understand it. What is important here is that we ought not to believe that God is angered, indeed we cannot, since there is no such proposition as that God is angered (‘God is angered’ being a category mistake). 39  There are others, in Chap. 3 of Category Mistakes, and a book about category mistakes (as this is not) would engage with them in full. 40  Magidor 2013, p. 47. 38

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If S is a generally competent speaker of a language L and S understands the terms ‘a’ and ‘F’ of L, then, if ‘Fa’ is meaningful, S understands the sentence ‘Fa’.

This restricted principle of compositionality is, I think, correct and does the work required of a principle of compositionality in explaining interpretational competence without ruling out a defectiveness account of category mistakes. Magidor herself rejects the principle, and with it the defectiveness account, but this is against the background presupposition of referentialism (hence, she takes the best hope for support for the principle to be a type theoretic semantics, which she finds lacking). From a use-theoretic perspective, the restricted principle is natural. If S understands ‘F’ then she knows the logical space within which it is applicable – by which I mean, not that she knows a proposition ‘F is applicable in logical space X’, but rather she possesses the aptitude only to consider predicating F-ness of entities of the appropriate kind. Names, as we have already seen, are intimately associated with sortals, and this being so the following claim about names is attractive: S (fully) understands n only if S can supply a sortal concept under which the putative referent of n falls.

(‘Putative’ here is to preserve neutrality on apparent cases of reference failure.) Given this claim about understanding names, the restricted principle of compositionality is entirely natural. For suppose ‘Fa’ is a category mistake. Then a competent language user will (implicitly, at least) recognise this, since her understanding of ‘a’ includes a recognition that its referent is an entity of a certain kind, whilst her understanding of ‘F’ includes that ‘F’ is not applicable to entities of this kind. The exception to compositionality in the case of category mistakes arises out of language users’ understanding of lexical items, and does not present a problem to the more general explanation of interpretative capacities in terms of this understanding.

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The Word ‘God’ In conclusion to this chapter, we return to a topic addressed in Chap. 2 when discussing Scott’s work: the question whether ‘God’ is a name, and if not whether it may be classified otherwise. It clearly functions in a manner quite other than the names we are familiar with. Infelicitous usage comes easily and it can only be combined with predicates to express a true proposition if those predicates function analogously relative to their use of creatures, a topic which will take up much of the next chapter. On the other hand, the word is grammatically a proper name, it begins with a capital41 and functions syntactically as though it were a name. What should be said? That ‘God’ is not a name gains plausibility from reflection on our use of names. They function to single out objects of reference. But God, as we saw in discussing referentialism, cannot be so singled out. Names, we might say, refer to individuals; but by DDS God is not an individual. Relatedly, names are associated with sortals. Quite how this association works is a matter of debate. It may be that sortals are required for the purposes of initial baptism, but are not properly spoken of after that as part of a name’s meaning.42 Alternatively sortal information might be part of the content of a name, a view which has the advantage of allowing a smooth account of category mistakes as semantic (as we saw above). Either way, God falls under no sortal and so is not eligible to be the referent of a name. Rejecting the position that ‘God’ is a proper name of an individual, Aquinas prefers the view that it is a common name signifying the divine nature.43 It is, to this extent, more like ‘human’ than it is like ‘Simon’. It might seem that this likeness is slight: after all ‘human’ (or ‘humanity’) picks out a feature I can share with others, whereas God alone is God,  That this is why ‘God’ begins with a capital is worth re-stating, given the tendency of some militant atheists to write ‘god’ for ‘God’, presumably supposing the initial capital to indicate reverence, as it does with the now somewhat archaic writing of the pronoun ‘He’. That initial capitals for grammatical names do not implicate reverence, or even belief in the existence of the purported referent, can be seen by reflecting on ‘Nigel Farage’ and ‘Bilbo Baggins’. 42  See Thommason on the qua problem 2015, p. 95 and 2010, pp. 115–2 discussed there. 43  STh Ia, q13, aa. 8,9. 41

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and necessarily so (by DDS). Aquinas responds that the divine nature is ‘incommunicable in reality, but communicable in opinion’:44 the polytheist, after all, holds that there are many gods, and the Christian has a genuine dispute with her. Aquinas is clear that his view that the word ‘God’ falls clearly on one side of the distinction between proper and ­common nouns does not commit him to thinking, contrary to his apophaticism, that God falls clearly on one side of the distinction between universals and particulars,45 ‘God himself in reality is neither universal nor particular.’ Yet, maintains Thomas, ‘names do not follow upon the mode of being in things, but upon the mode of being as it is in our mind’.46 The point is couched in terms of Aquinas’ mentalist account of meaning, but is easily rendered in a more neutral idiom: although God is neither universal nor particular, we can speak of God as though he were one or the other (indeed, it is hard to see how we could do otherwise, given the grammars of our languages). The word ‘God’ is used to speak of the divine nature, even though in reality that is in no way separable from everything that belongs to the Divine, and so is appropriately regarded as a common noun. Here, at the edges of sense, at least, the form of language and the structure of reality come apart. A lot of motivational work is being done here by the undoubted importance of being able to dispute with polytheists. On Thomas’ understanding of these disputes, in ‘There are several gods in Valhalla’ the word ‘god’ is the same word as ‘God’ in ‘There is one God, Creator of Heaven and Earth’. The former sentence is necessarily false, in virtue of DDS, whereas the latter is contingently true (God might not have created). It seems to me that we can find ways of making sense of this dispute without type-identifying the tokens of ‘[G]od’. The gods are what we reject when we affirm our belief in the Creator: the gods are mysterious entities in the world, like us, but more powerful, more knowledgeable, and so on. They represent limits on our capacity to learn about and improve our world. God, as McCabe insisted, is not a god: the message of Sinai is that God has liberated us and that there are no gods. Now, through saying  STh Ia, q13, a9, co.  In a certain way, then, Thomas provides grist to the mill of MacBride 2005. 46  STh Ia, q13, a9, ad. 2. 44 45

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things like this it seems that we can articulate a dispute between adherents of God and those of the gods without assuming that numerically the same expression is used of God and the gods. And if that is right, might it not be better to think of ‘God’ as a sui generis expression, introduced canonically in response to a process of radical questioning about the existence of things? The logical grammar of the word, as we have seen, se ems to come apart radically from that of other expressions. What then is to be gained by containing the word under a shared logical category with other words? (Although Aquinas is certainly right that in so doing we needn’t be implying that God is contained under a shared category with other entities.) Not much seems to be at stake here; still, my preference is to agree with Thomas that ‘God’ is not a proper name, whilst refusing to follow him in insisting that it is a common name.

7 Speaking of God: Truthfully and Devotedly

‘What you have told us may be true’, an objector can be imagined saying, ‘but all you have said so far is that as far as our natural capacities go, we cannot describe God, but we do not need to rely solely on our natural capacities. God has revealed himself to us, and because of his gracious self-communication we are licensed to speak of God in ways that would not otherwise be possible’. I don’t deny the positive claims made here; I do however reject the implication that they undermine apophaticism. In fact, not only do I affirm God’s revelation in the history of Israel and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; within the spectrum of current Christian theology I am definitely at the end which would emphasise the need to do duty to revelation. Moreover I enthusiastically accept that revelation licenses us to say things about God which we would not otherwise be in a position to say. The creeds stand testimony to this. A proper recognition of revelation ought not, however, lure us into acceptance of the implied view of my questioner: that revelation comes on the scene like the metaphysical cavalry, making possible semantically what was previously beyond the bounds of reasonable hope.1 Against this  Turner describes the view (which he rejects), ‘free from the restraints of the apophatic, and as if to say that though God in himself is dark, Christ is light, the visibility of the Godhead, the source of 1

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we need to be clear: any genuine revelation of God is revelation of God, and will be communicated by human beings using our languages: handed on in our scriptures, expounded in our dogmatic formulae. As such, the grammatical constraints attaching to God-talk are operative over scriptural language and subsequent doctrine. Aquinas makes the point forcefully commentating on Boethius’ De Trinitate, Accordingly in the present life it is absolutely impossible to know the essence of immaterial substances [such as Aquinas takes God to be], not only by natural knowledge but also by revelation; for, as Dionysius says, the light of divine revelation comes to us adapted to our condition.2

How then is it possible, as orthodox Christian theology must insist that it is,3 that we can speak truly of God, and that more generally we use God-talk in a way that is not idolatrous but is rather conducive to our flourishing? One traditional answer distinguishes first between language directly about God’s effects in the world and language apparently concerning God in se; it then goes on to make a distinction between analogy and metaphor. We will meet the latter distinction in a moment. First, speaking of God’s effects does not pose any particular difficulties from the perspective of DDI. In doing this, we are talking about particular happenings in the world, under an interpretation which may – logically speaking – be either true or false; that we can do it, and what we are doing when we do it are not philosophically troubling, or at least are not philosophically troubling in ways which impinge upon DDI. So, in particular, descriptions of the actions of Christ in his human nature and the statement that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself ’ are not problems.4 Statements about the creation of the world would, historically, have been considered along the same lines, as concerning the most general and characteristic of God’s effects, existence (esse).5 Modern all theological affirmativeness.’ (2004, p. 50). 2  InDT 6.3. 3  The ‘orthodox’ here is intended to rule out, for example, global fictionalism about Christian language. 4  2 Corinthians 5:19. 5  STh Ia, q45, a5, co.

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philosophy and theology have tended to assume, following Kant’s response to Descartes’ ontological argument, that this inclusion is not licit, taking as it does existence to be a feature of things (the usual assumption is that Frege’s analysis of the particular quantifier as a second-level concept provides a satisfactory alternative).6 Elizabeth Anscombe defended the older view, which sits very comfortably with the grammatical thomist approach to affirming God’s existence, but we don’t need to decide the matter here.7 What about talk about God as God is in herself? Both ‘God is love’ and ‘God was angered’ appear to fall into this category, and these two sentences would usually be classed as analogical and metaphorical respectively. It is true that God is love, but what we mean by ‘love’ when used of God is somehow continuous with, but distinct from, what we mean by ‘love’ used of any creaturely love. On the other hand it is not true that God was angered: God does not exist within time and both lacks a body and lies beyond the possibility of change. Nevertheless, we are right – as biblical authors do – to speak of divine anger. Our use is metaphorical. Perhaps it serves, as Aquinas puts it, to communicate ‘spiritual truths’ which are fittingly taught under the ‘likeness of material beings’ to rational animals such as ourselves.8 Perhaps it functions to edify, to warn, or, by collective recitation, to affirm ecclesial belonging. However things may be, the idea is that metaphorical utterances are worthwhile, perhaps indispensable, without being true. I’m in broad sympathy with the standard account. We may speak of God truthfully, and this speech  – when we are speaking of God in Godself, as distinct from God’s effects – ought to be treated as analogical. I am less happy with the broad application of the concept of metaphor. Within the usual division of theological language, a great deal gets contained under the heading of metaphor, much of which is disjoint from the kind of figurative language philosophers and linguists would usually consider metaphorical. A comparison of the breadth of Sallie McFague’s  Kant 1998 (1781/7), A592/B620.  Anscombe 2015a and 2015b. See my forthcoming b, and for an excellent discussion of related issues O’Grady forthcoming. 8  STh Ia, q1, a9, co. 6 7

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usage in Metaphorical Theology with the dismissal this gets in Michael Scott’s Religious Language serves to make this clear.9 In any case some of the assumptions made in mainstream theories of metaphor – for example that a metaphorical sentence has a literal, truth-evaluable, sense – are not ones we will necessarily wish to make in a theological context: perhaps ‘God is angry’ fails to express any content, perhaps because a category mistake is being made. Rather than talk about metaphor, I prefer then to talk of devoted but not truth-orientated talk of God (devoted talk for short).10 In the rest of this chapter I will deal in turn with analogy and with devoted talk.

Analogy Something answering to the title ‘analogy’ has been made to do a lot of heavy-lifting in recent theology. Very often it is an analogy of being (analogia entis), rather than anything obviously linguistic, to which theologians appeal, and in the hands of the Radical Orthodoxy school, forgetfulness of this, specifically in the form of the Scotist insistence on the univocity of being, is held responsible for the problems of modernity, theological or otherwise.11 As intellectual history I think this is mistaken, and has politically deleterious consequences;12 however my purpose here bears no relation to the high metaphysics of the Radically Orthodox. Analogy in the sense in which I am interested, at least, is simply a matter of words being used in certain ways. Commentating on the Blackfriars

 McFague 1983. Scott 2013 pp. 170–1. The two authors, it seems to me, are talking at cross purposes. Jettisoning the word ‘metaphor’ for non truth-directed religious language is a way of avoiding this kind of confusion. 10  The usage is intended to emphasise the role such language has in our religious lives, its practical function in expressing relationships, one to another, and to God. The picture on which all religious talk is more or less hidden, more or less proficient, metaphysics still has far too much of a hold. If ‘devoted’ sounds too inward or pious, note that talk of the vengeance, which James 5:4 has it that withheld wages cry out to heaven for, is a prime example of what I would consider devoted talk. 11  The classic account is Milbank 1991. 12  See Hewitt 2016, my review of Pabst 2012. For a careful analytic take on the analogy of being see McDaniel 2017, Ch. 2. 9

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translation of the Summa, McCabe was deflationary in his reading of Aquinas on analogy: Much has been made of St Thomas’ alleged teaching on analogy. For him analogy is not a way of getting to know about God, nor is it a theory of the structure of the universe, it is a comment on our use of words.13

In this spirit, we might want to say something about our use of words to say true things about God. That is what I take the purpose of an account of analogy to be, to explicate the use of analogous expressions in such a fashion that it no longer seems incoherent that they both possess a sense (which is to say, a coherent pattern of use) and can be used to make true statements about God. The present section can do no more than gesture towards such an account in the spirit of the use-based approach to language advocated in Chap. 4. Then, in the next section, I’ll show how the account provides the basis for a response to (what Ticciati terms) the Problem of the Perfections. Imagine that we know how to use a predicate F with respect to a certain class of entities. We know when to apply F to a member of the class, and we know when to withhold it. The know-how we thereby exercise may be vague or admit borderline cases. To know how to use an expression is to be initiated into a social practice, and these are often not precise affairs. Still, we know how to use F of a certain portion of reality. Now suppose we consider the members of some second disjoint class of entities. We wonder whether we ought to say (of some or all of them) that they are F. At least some of the rules of use for F with respect to the original class are not applicable to members of the new class. It nonetheless does not follow that we must refuse to predicate F-ness of any member of the new class. It may be that some of the rules for F are applicable within the new class, as when say of human bodies and dinners alike that they are healthy, and in both cases are prepared to infer that this is something desirable. Then again it may be that entities in the new class bear some interesting relation, perhaps causal, to the F-ness of entities in the old class, such that it seems appropriate to us to apply F to at least some of 13

 STh. Appendix 4, Volume 3, p. 106.

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these entities. Again, this is the case with predications of healthiness: we call dinners healthy because they cause healthiness in human beings. So there are ways of extending the use of an expression which are continuous with the prior use such that we ought not to say that a new, albeit homonymous, expression has been introduced  – the familiar case of ‘bank’ used of a financial institution and ‘bank’ used of the side of a river illustrates the contrast well. In a case where use is extended in this sort of continuous way, or where variation in use could be illustrated by the supposition that it has been, I will term the relationship between the uses (and therefore the meaning) analogous. Moreover this is all I have in mind when talking about analogy: no high metaphysics, no systematic theory of predication, merely the observation that the use of words can be extended in certain ways.14 We have learned to use words for various perfections from our encounter with creatures in the world. I know how to say that my partner is loving, that our dog is good, that my neighbour is wise. And because I hold myself licensed to speak of the world as created and (by revelation) as redeemed, I hold that my encounter with creaturely reality entitles me to say continuous things of God. However, as we have seen, the very way­in to God-talk through consideration of creation places constraints on the grammar of God-talk. So when, in response to a joyful event in life, I say ‘God is good’, I cannot mean exactly the same by ‘is good’ as I do when I say that my student is good, since in the latter but not in the former case I am picking out a property which can be abstracted and considered in isolation from the subject of predication as such, and doing this corresponds to a real metaphysical distinction. Indeed I am picking out a property which need not have belonged to the student at all. It is no part of a human being’s essence that she be a good student; she could instead have been lazy or distracted. With God no such distinctions are possible. There are seeming avenues of inference, exploration and imagination to which we are not entitled to on the basis that God is good, even though their human equivalents are open to us on the basis that Siobhan is a good student.  And I think the list of those ways is open-ended.

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We ought to be careful on two counts. First, it does not follow from the observation that we are licensed to call God good by encounters with creaturely goodness that what ‘God is good’ means is that God is the cause of creaturely goodness. Rather we are saying something about God in himself, but something which we are warranted in saying because of the creaturely world. The point is simply that made in Faber’s hymn,    How wonderful creation is, The work that Thou didst bless; And oh, what then must Thou be like, Eternal Loveliness!15

Second, care is needed in saying that we do, or for that matter that we don’t, know what expressions used analogously of God mean. On the one hand McCabe is fond of saying that we don’t understand what our words mean when we apply them to God.16 On the other, Aquinas says that God’s ‘essence is beyond what we understand of him and the meaning of the names we use’17 (STh Ia, q13, a1, ad. 1), which suggests the issue concerning the limits of theological language is not so much with the meaning of our words as such, but rather with the inability of those words to capture the reality of which they are used. As we have already seen, the Fregean distinction between sense and reference can come to our aid here. The word ‘meaning’ is ambiguous. The most natural sense concerns the sense of expressions, what we understand when we know how to use those expressions. In this sense of ‘meaning’, we do know what expressions used analogously of God mean: we know how to use them appropriately. There is a sense of ‘meaning’, however, which connotes reference (in a broad sense),18 the worldly correlate of the expression. In this sense, we cannot know what our expressions, used correctly of God, mean,  Most Ancient of All Mysteries.  Compare MacIntyre’s more nuanced, ‘Theists in recognising that God exceeds the grasp of our understanding must also recognise that in trying to speak of God we are extending our use of words and the application of our concepts, so that we no longer understand what we mean when we talk about God to the same extent and in the same way that we do in our speech about finite beings’ (2009, p. 7). 17  STh Ia, q13, a1, ad. 1. 18  Frege’s Bedeutung. Frege 1980. 15 16

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since by DDS their meaning is the divine reality, and we cannot know what that is. God’s ‘essence is beyond what we understand of him and the meaning of the names we use’.19

The Problem of the Perfections Aquinas writes, We speak of God as we know him, and since we know him from creatures we can only speak of them as they represent him. Any creature, in so far as it possesses any perfection, represents God and is like him, for he, being simply and universally perfect, has pre-existing in himself all the perfections of creatures.20

The perfections which we predicate of both creatures and of God are, on this account, said primarily of God and only secondarily of creatures. God has ‘pre-existing in himself all the perfections of creatures’. It is as though their perfections are derivative, like the borrowed light of the moon. But there now seems to be a problem. Up until now I have been developing a position according to which human beings are proficient in using language for a wide variety of purposes, but can use language intelligibly of God only in a faltering way, typically applying expressions which have an intra-mundane use analogously to God. As McCabe has it, God is always ‘dressed verbally in second-hand clothes which don’t fit him very well.’21 But this might seem to contradict the passage of Aquinas quoted above: ‘we can only speak of them as they represent him’. Here it seems that (say) goodness is said primarily of God and only secondarily of Dorothy Day. It might be thought to be Day, on this way of seeing things, who is wearing second-hand linguistic clothes.22  STh Ia, q13, a1, ad. 1.  STh Ia, q13, a2, co. 21  McCabe 2002, p. 3. 22  For useful discussion of the problem here see Ticciati 2015, pp. 32–9. 19 20

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Aquinas, could, of course be wrong. There is no merit in the kind of degraded ‘thomism’ which tries to preserve every proposition in Thomas at the expense of his motivating project, namely speaking truthfully of God and of the human beings who are called to share in God’s life. As it happens, however, a distinction between two ways in which an expression might be used primarily of God (and only secondarily of creatures) ushers a way forward consistent with Aquinas. These two ways are as follows. Metaphysical Priority: God, who is F, is as Creator, the cause of F-ness in creatures. God’s F-ness is thus prior to the F-ness of creatures, which may be understood as a participation in God’s F-ness. Linguistic Priority: Language users are in a position to predicate F-ness of creatures only if they first know how to predicate F-ness of God, with the usage of creatures being analogous with respect to the usage of God.

Assenting to priority under one notion does not force assent to priority under the other. I have denied linguistic priority in developing an account of God-talk, and in particular did so in the preceding section on analogy. Indeed, I endorse the converse position: it is only because we know how to use expressions of creatures first that we can go on to apply them analogously to God. This much seems forced by a due sense of our status as language users who acquire understanding in a non-mysterious fashion and as part of the natural world; it is not controversial either philosophically or theologically. In no way, however, does adopting this position force the rejection of metaphysical priority. In fact metaphysical priority sits well with what has been argued up to this point. God is the Creator of all that is, the reason why there is something rather than nothing. The goodness of the world we see around us is secondary to the goodness of God (which, of course, by DDS, is not distinct from God). It seems right to say that God’s goodness is primary, not only because of the sheer fact of the dependence of creaturely goodness on God, but also because  – and here our language must become tentative if we have learned the lesson of apophaticism – in some way the

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possible creaturely goodness exists23 within the divine life. The language of ideas in the divine mind has been used historically to make the point; I think this is likely to feed an anthropomorphism at variance with DDI, but I don’t have an alternative to propose. In the old but dangerous register, the ideas of creaturely goods exist eternally in God’s mind, and hence there is a robust sense in which these goods are metaphysically secondary. But now notice that the very same theological motivation I have suggested for metaphysical priority, the doctrine of creation, undermines linguistic priority. We have seen that reflection on God’s being the Creator gives reason, through the inference from creation to divine simplicity, for a significant apophaticism. What linguistic capability we have with respect to God cannot be possessed on the basis of an understanding of the divine nature, of being able to situate God within a kind of entity the grammar of speech about which we can master, but is rather acquired on the basis of our encounter with the created world (including, Christian theology will insist, the history of revelation within that world). A proper taking stock of the world’s createdness will lead us to accept metaphysical priority and reject linguistic priority.

Devoted Talk Analogical statements concerning God are, when made correctly, true. God is good and God is powerful, and it is true that God is good and God is powerful. Truth is the aim of assertion,24 whether that assertion is made in the context of religious life or some other human context. If we are playing the game of assertion well, the result is truth. Because we can use expressions analogously of creatures and of God, we can play the  The possibility, it should be stressed, lies on the creaturely side, for (by DDS) there is no distinction between possibility and actuality in God. It is eternally, and modally invariantly, the case with God that God has the idea of dogs (whatever that amounts to, and that we cannot know). It is a contingent feature of the world that it contains dogs. 24  Which is not to say that every act of assertion aims at truth. A liar my assert with the opposite aim, whilst in many contexts verisimilitude might be the aim. But the intelligibility of these cases rests of the normal aim of assertion being truth. 23

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game of assertion well even when our subject matter is the Unknown God. There are, however, plenty of things which get said in religious contexts – in the pages of scripture, in liturgy, in theological works – which if understood as assertions of propositions have, in the light of DDI if for no other reason, to be recognised as untrue. ‘God repented’, ‘the Lord was angry’, ‘the Lord is a fortress’, and numerous other examples can be summoned from scripture.25 The usual approach to utterances of this sort is to appeal to metaphor. I have already objected to this recourse for the reason that it either contains too much under the category of metaphor, or else stretches the bounds of that category to the extent that it is no longer a useful tool for linguistic analysis. Only the third of the passages quoted above,26 for example, is obviously the kind of figurative utterance we would usually describe as metaphorical. The previous two commit category mistakes, but that no more makes them metaphorical than the same consideration forces us to view an utterance of ‘The least upper bound of any set of real numbers is an aardvark’ as metaphorical. Sometimes it might be, of course, and perhaps we can see some cases of metaphor as knowing and creative category mistakes (although, to deploy a metaphor of my own, here be dragons: if one thinks that category mistakes are meaningless and has a theory of metaphor whereby the linguistic function of metaphor is determined by the content of the metaphorical utterance, this position collapses to incoherence.) Then again, there are knowing and creative category mistakes we would hesitate to describe as metaphorical. Poetry abounds with them. And religion abounds with poetry. My preferred attitude towards language that has a role in religious life but which is not true when viewed as assertoric is to accept its diverse nature and not to attempt to delineate it as constituting an elucidatory kind. This is consonant with the rejection of referentialism. Religious language, even if we confine our attention to those parts having the surface grammar of declarative sentences, is a variegated phenomenon deployed for a plurality of ends. Devoted talk, as I will call language

25 26

 Jonah 3:10; 1 Kings 11:9; Psalm 46:11.  Psalm 46:11.

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which is religiously important for non-alethic reasons,27 in order to emphasise its place within religious forms of life, serves a variety of purposes. Sometimes it can bring its hearer to encounter some propositional content which might have been communicated in a simpler, declarative way. On at least one reading of Song of Songs 2:3, As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

the competent hearer will take on board that God is greatly desirable and that God’s people have delighted in God. It would be a lacklustre reading indeed which saw this passage as simply serving to direct the hearer towards that content: the hearer is invited to use her imagination, her emotions may be roused (the poem is, after all, at one level incontrovertibly about sexual desire), she may simply linger with the words and enjoy them. In other cases the usefulness of non-alethically orientated religious language might be expressive, or supplicatory. When we say ‘O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger’,28 which certainly seems to imply that God could be angry, we are expressing how things are for us, perhaps the fear of seeming apart from God, and praying that things might be otherwise. Other uses might reinforce communal belonging (‘God is our fortress’) or simply be prayer, or devotion, unanalysable in other terms, and no worse for that. It is not going to be fruitful to look for a substantive catch-all theory of devoted talk. That does not mean that there is nothing useful to be said about identifiable sub-types of devoted talk. One, in particular, deserves attention in advance of the next chapter’s discussion of divine personhood. This is what I will term locally fictional religious language. Various forms of (global) religious fictionalism are well known in current philosophy of religion.29 These subdivide into hermeneutic fictionalisms  Versimilitude, as well as truth, counts as an alethic reason here.  Psalm 37. 29  Le Poidevin 2019. 27 28

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(according to which an understanding of religious language in terms of a fiction concerning God, salvation, an afterlife, and so on, is a correct indicator of the meaning of that language) and revisionary fictionalisms (according to which we ought to revise our understanding so as to consciously use religious language with fictional intent). Both are standardly proposed as theories of all religious language. As advertised above, I am suspicious of theories purporting to embrace all religious language, and this is no exception. From the perspective of Christian theology, there have to be theological statements that are non-vacuously true,30 ‘the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God’ for instance. But the rejection of global fictionalism needn’t commit us to rejecting fictionalist accounts of parts of religious language. I support a local hermeneutic fictionalism about some scriptural (and other) language concerning God.31 In particular, I think telling stories in which God features as a person and engaging with those stories32 is an important component of Jewish and Christian religiosity. We certainly tell such stories, the JE passages of the early chapters of Genesis will serve as an example.33 But, by apophatic hypothesis, we cannot be truthfully saying how things are with God when we tell such stories. (The question of divine personhood is dealt with in the next chapter, but note for the time being the extent of the anthropomorphism in the language under consideration, ‘They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze.’)34 But we tell these stories, and we think that engaging with them is religiously useful. The idea runs like this: imagine that God were a person, and God acted in such and such a  An atheist global fictionalist will typically think ‘all Incarnations of the Word have salvific effect’ is true because they, being an atheist, think there are no Incarnations, and no Word for that matter, so the claim is vacuously satisfied. For the Christian this is not enough: the fictionalist doesn’t offer a correct account of why the claim is true. 31  To be pedantic, I support an interesting form of this fictionalism. Almost every contemporary philosopher and theologian is going to agree that some passages of scripture – Jesus’ parables, for instance – ought to be read as fiction, and most will admit, say, the book of Job into the hermeneutic fictionalist fold. My claim is that texts outside this broad consensus, in particular any narrative in which God features as a personal character, ought to be read as useful fiction. 32  There is a large literature on engaging with fiction. Walton 1990 remains a reference point. 33  On sources in the Pentateuch, see Davies 2001. 34  Genesis 3:8. 30

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way, entertain the pretence – the effect on your emotions, your beliefs, on your comportment towards God and towards the world will, under God’s grace, be of a sort sanctioned by our faith. Something like this idea is familiar enough: fables and morality tales abound. It belongs to biblical religion to tell stories of this sort in which God is a character, and to do this for the sake of our relationship with God. McCabe writes, What I refer to as God is not any character in the drama of the universe but the author of the universe, the mystery of wisdom which we know of but cannot begin to understand, the wisdom that is the reason why there is a harmony called the universe which we can just stumblingly begin to understand…35

And goes on to say, If I were to tell you what I believe, I would tell you much more. I would tell you that by the gift of faith I believe that this story is a love-story, that this song is a love-song, that the wisdom which made this drama so loved his human characters that he became one himself to share their lives.36

I am suggesting an intermediate case, or perhaps better an iteration of the second case. As part of God’s self-communication to her creation, as part of the author’s entry into the drama, the author allows stories to be told within which the author features as a character, a character whose features are drawn in the likeness of the creaturely authors. This happened not infrequently in the writing of the biblical books. We read, Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’ - therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.37

 McCabe 2007, p. 47.  McCabe 2007, p. 47. 37  Genesis 3:22–3. 35 36

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Now, God doesn’t utter words, nor does God ‘know good and evil’ in the same way as human beings, nor yet did God ever expel a couple from a garden. And yet the story speaks to us. It feels after all as though we have been expelled from Eden, we recognise the ways in which we try to become like God. And the way we, as people who read the Bible, come to this kind of realisation is through stories in which God is a person.

Indispensable Imagery But is the role of devoted language irreducible here? One natural way of rephrasing the question is: might we have come to possess the understanding we in fact gain from the Eden story by some other means? Something like this is at issue in most discussions of the irreducibility of metaphor in religious language; these get good coverage in Scott’s Religious Language.38 Understood like this, reducibility is plausible to the extent that understanding is considered a solely cognitive phenomenon, reducible to propositional knowledge. To the extent that the butterflies in my stomach as I read about the angels with fiery swords are not merely indicators of a contentful state, it seems to me, we ought not to assume that the same effect could have been induced in a reader other than by means of telling the story. But there is a philosophical presupposition at work prior to the mainstream debate, namely that when we talk about the irreducibility of a certain form of language we are concerned with its irreducibility for achieving a certain kind of effect, where this effect is distinct from the utterance of the words themselves. Not only is this presupposition not compulsory, there are good reasons to reject it when thinking about religious language. For religions are practices to which story-telling is integral. A large part of what it is to be religious is to listen to certain stories – for one’s parents to read the Bible to one, to hear these narratives at synagogue or at mass  – and for them to feature in one’s self-­ understanding, for one to interpret the world and oneself in the light of them. Hearing these stories may well alter our beliefs or emotions, but it 38

 Scott 2013, Ch. 13.

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is to misunderstand religion to suppose that the purpose of our listening to these stories is this kind of effect. It is not the consequences of the reading, but the reading itself which is of primary religious worth. To see this, consider Matthew’s story of the visit of the magi.39 This is a good witness to the importance of story for religion,40 in a way that will help us understand the kind of devoted talk we’re concerned with here. Most Christians, and many others, know some form of this story. What is it saying? In Matthean context, probably its propositional content is something like ‘the gospel has been handed on to the Gentiles’. Later Christian interpretation would add ‘Christ is a priest, a king, and a sacrificial victim’, these aspects of Jesus’ mission being symbolised by the magi’s gifts. But is the point in reading Matthew’s story to convey these propositions? Hardly: we read it, in churches in a lectionary, just because we read the gospels – that is what we do. But the story enters into a rich tapestry of celebrations (the feast of the Epiphany, les gallettes des rois), devotions (marking the names of the magi above door lintels, blessing epiphany water), poetry and hymnody (the intertextuality ranging from T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi through to standard epiphany carols), and much else that mark us out as Christians, constituted by certain stories. Faced with this rich life, the question about reducibility puts one in mind of Eagleton’s parody of a secular critic ‘who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’ d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn.’41 Christians are people who tell the story of Eden, who grapple with Job, who are transformed by Jesus’ parables. That is part of what it is to be a Christian.42 It is entirely irrelevant to philosophical theology, and a  Matthew 2:1–12.  Note that in this chapter we are particularly concerned with stories in which God (qua God) features as a person. The Matthean account of the magi is not one of these, and it is not being suggested otherwise here. The point is rather that this is a good example of the value of story for religion, and once we appreciate that the door is open to a renewed appreciation of stories in which God is a character without us feeling the need to abandon apophaticism. 41  Eagleton 2006. 42  In the following sense: it is a characteristic feature of Christian life that we do these things. The claim is not, of course, that every one of the baptised does them (and indeed, it would be an overly-­ individualistic construal of Christianity which moved one to read this that way – the scriptures are proclaimed, for example, on behalf of all the faithful, including those amongst the faithful, infants in incubators for instance, who cannot so much as be present at or hear the proclamation.). 39 40

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­ isunderstanding of religion as a practice, to worry about the dispensm ability of these texts in any more substantial sense. They are not dispensable to us, because they are the stories we tell. We are not simply minds who tell stories as an efficient or effective means to make ourselves better informed about God and about ourselves. We are communal, story-telling animals. The instinct to dig deeper beneath this remarkable, religiously inflected, fact about ourselves, to find the real (cognitive) truth of the matter is the product of philosophical prejudice. We need not succumb to it.

8 Is God a Person?

No implication of DDI as it has been developed in previous chapters is likely to upset more people, otherwise sympathetic to negative theology, than the refusal to allow that God is a person. This is indeed a practical consequence of DDI, on any sense of the word ‘person’ of which I am aware, but quite why this is the case will depend on which meaning of the word one has in mind. This chapter will argue in some detail the case against divine personhood understood in terms of the most frequent sense of ‘person’ in current philosophy, the post-Lockean one on which a person possesses mental states (such as believing, hoping, fearing…). Before getting on with that task, some preliminaries are well-advised. First, nothing that follows counts against representing God in narrative as a person. I suspect such mythologising is indispensible to Christian life and is, in any case, pervasive in scripture. This was discussed in the previous chapter. Second, as Brian Davies has pointed out, the phrase ‘God is a person’ finds its way into Christianity late, the first English usage being recorded in the heresy trial of John Biddle in 1664.1 The assertion that God is a person is contained in no creed and taught by no ecumenical council. For all that 1

 Davies 2016, p. 65.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Hewitt, Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49602-9_8

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it is sometimes claimed as definitive of theism, in general, and Christian theism in particular, divine personhood is peculiarly absent from authoritative statements of doctrine. In spite of this, divine personhood does get some support in weighty theological quarters. A case in point is Rahner’s striking insistence that, The statement that God is a person, that he is a personal God, is one of the fundamental Christian assertions about God.2

In the same passage from Foundations of Christian Faith, Rahner goes on to suggest that the assertion that God is ‘the absolute person who stands in absolute freedom vis-a-vis everything’ is self-evident. It is not, as the possibility of cogent arguments against this position should attest. Throughout this chapter I will oppose divine personhood in the cause of another theme which Rahner rightly articulates in Foundations, the conviction that God is Holy Mystery. It is more often philosophers than theologians, however, who take divine personhood to be a touchstone of Christian theism.3 It seems likely that the basis for this is sociological as much as anything, reflecting the dominance within analytic philosophy of religion of a North American evangelicism which stresses the importance of a personal relationship with God.4 It is not my brief to argue against this directly here; instead I

 Rahner 2002, p. 73.  So Swinburne writes of God as `a person without a body (i.e. a spirit), present everywhere, the creator and sustainer of the universe, a free agent, able to do everything (i.e. omnipotent), knowing all things, perfectly good, a source of moral obligation, immutable, eternal, a necessary being, holy, and worthy of worship’ (2016, p.  2), and Mackie enters the theism debate on these terms. (1992, p. 1. 4  Of course one could have a personal relationship with Jesus without incurring difficulties with DDI. A wider question is whether personal relationships are always such that both relata must be persons. An excellent, and somewhat neglected, probing into conceptual distinctions here is Thatcher 1985. 2 3

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want to point towards an alternative, a way of doing Christian theology faithfully which does not require affirmation of divine personhood.5 But what is being said when it is asserted that God is a person? There are two senses of the word ‘person’ which deserve minuting before we move on to the principal sense which is at issue when contemporary philosophers talk about divine personhood. The usual sense of the word ‘person’ in everyday English is simply as a synonym for ‘human being’. ‘I saw a person out walking and I thought I knew her’; ‘Marjorie, phone the police, there is a person in the sitting room!’ There is a perfectly good Christian warrant for the claim that God is a person in this sense: the doctrine of the Incarnation licenses the usage by appeal to the communicatio idiomatum. A certain human being, Jesus, is God. However, at the present time our focus should be on the suggestion that God qua God is a person in this sense (I’ll omit the qua-clause in what follows). This is likely to strike readers as absurd, and obviously false, which is just as well, since it is straightforwardly ruled out by DDI – were God a human being, God would fall under a sortal concept and admit a real definition. God is not a person in this sense, for all that we cannot help representing God as a person in this sense – ‘I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen’.6 For a medieval theologian the expression persona would have evoked Boethius’ definition: ‘an individual substance of a rational nature’. That God is not a persona is then an easy conclusion: from DDS it follows that  In a Catholic context, the most insistent stress on divine personhood in the past century has been by proponents of personalism, emphasising both divine and human personhood. Whilst I support heartily much of the praxis arising out of personalism, especially the Catholic Worker movement so influenced by Maurin, I think that our appreciation of the dignity of the human person can only be enhanced by not viewing humans as inferior instances of a kind shared with God (Marx’s criticisms of Feuerbach ought to have convinced us of this, as we’ll see in Chap. 10). Compare here Marcel, ‘There is an order where the subject finds himself in the presence of something entirely beyond his grasp. I would add that if the word “transcendent” has any meaning it is here—it designates the absolute, unbridgeable chasm yawning between the subject and being, insofar as being evades every attempt to pin it down.’ (1973, p. 193). 6  Exodus 33:23 5

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God is not an individual substance, and God certainly does not have a rational nature. God doesn’t have any nature, and reason is the form which intelligence takes in animals, of whom God is not one.7

Thoroughly Modern Persons There is another sense of the word ‘person’. It is with this sense of the word in mind that philosophers worry about whether foetuses, or patients with brain-stem death, or non human animals are persons.8 In a similarly speculative frame of mind it is wondered whether there might be persons on other planets, or whether the person that is me would persist were my brain transplanted to another body. A person in this sense is an individual locus of conscious experience, a possessor of mental states. The philosophical influences most obviously lurking behind this usage are Descartes and Locke. Whilst this way of using ‘person’ is not quite ordinary or everyday, it is a bespoke philosophical usage which comes easily to moderns. It latches on to what we are prone to value most about ourselves and permits the articulation of questions we find interesting. Whether this reflects some enduring truth about what it is to be a human person or, as I think, the temptation to privilege this kind of understanding of personhood arises out of the peculiar pathologies of our shared life under liberal capitalism, is not our present concern. I doubt that necessary and sufficient conditions can be had which adequately analyse the concept of personhood of interest here. I suspect there is a certain open-endedness built into the concept, whence the intriguing nature of questions around alien personhood. Be that as it may, there are  So Aquinas, in spite of wanting to keep the use of persona to be used of the trinitarian hypostases (since it ‘singifies what is most perfect in human beings’ and so is appropriately applied to our creator, nevertheless is clear that the word does not apply to God in its Boethian sense. STh Ia, q29, a3. I think th ose of us living in individualistic liberal capitalist societies, with Cartesian and Lockean ideas always waiting in the wings, might reasonably revise Thomas’ judgement about what is appropriate. 8  The classic is Parfitt 1984. 7

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obvious dangers in attempting to make precise the concept of personhood beyond the obvious license of usage, as reflection on bioethical cases ought to convince us. To draw sharp limits to the category of persons is, in many settings, to imply permission to kill or to let die. Here I will confine my attention solely to necessary conditions for personhood and characteristic features of persons.9 Three arguments against divine personhood will be presented, in each case the argument denies that God has qualities necessary for personhood. After this, a suggestion, featuring significantly in recent discussions of divine personhood, to the effect that only a belief that God is a person can make sense of liturgical and spiritual practices, will be considered and rejected.

The Animal Argument The persons with whom we are uncontroversially familiar, namely ourselves and other human beings, are animals. The states characteristic of personhood in these animal persons involve bodily movement, vocal expression, and seem utterly tied up with our corporeal natures. This is true most obviously of verbal and other communication - gesticulating, shaking the head, kissing  – but it is equally true of the ways of being which philosophers term mental states (believing, hoping, fearing…). In spite of this, the pull towards imagining mental states to be ‘inner’ happenings, incorporeal and conceivable as independent from our animal life, is real. If my thinking that Jordan Peterson is a menace in academia is something I take to be the operation of a Cartesian ego, and possible even were my mind not united with my body, then I can readily imagine that other non-bodily persons – ghosts, a deity – might think that Jordan Peterson is a menace in academia. But we ought not to concede so quickly that entities which are not relevantly similar to an organic body, not what we might call ordered  I take characteristic features of Fs to be features that Fs usually have in virtue of being Fs. They are not exceptionless (so specificying characteristic features is weaker than specifying necessary conditions). However if a case emerges of some F which lacks a characteristic feature, some kind of account of why this is (or might be) is owed. 9

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systems susceptible to reasons,10 can have any such thought. For us to be afraid that P, for some P, involves our bodies in a constitutive fashion. Fear is a matter of what goes on in the pit of one’s stomach, of the blood coursing through the arteries, but it is no less a mental state for all that. Still, my fear exists, in Sellars’ phrase, in the logical space of reasons11 and can be brought into confrontation and dialogue with other such states, providing a reason for action or inaction. Even as seemingly pallid a state as belief that P, for some P, is body-involving in the following minimal sense: if I genuinely believe that P then I will, in the usual course of things, be committed to certain bodily movements (including, importantly preparedness to assert P in certain conversational contexts). If this is what it is like for us to possess mental states, why should we suppose that there could be entities which possess states of the same types but with nothing like a corporeal instancing? Matters are not improved for the proponent of divine personhood by reflection on how we understand language about mental states. In the case of persons other than myself (and, I suspect, to a surprising extent in the first-personal case too) we learn to apply expressions for mental states in response to the bodily comportment, expressions, physiology and utterances of the person in that state. It in no way follows from this that behaviourism is true, that mental states are to be identified with the behaviour (or other observable phenomena – the reddening of the face, say, or the quickening of the pulse) that serves as a criterion for the ascription. But what does follow is that our understanding of mental state ascriptions, if it is not to consist in a magical capacity transcending even potential use, consists in knowing how to use them appropriately in response to bodily phenomena.12 But now it seems doubtful that I can so much as understand what it would be for God to be angry, or sad; we can’t imagine conditions under which ‘God is angry’ would be the right thing to say, if we are playing the language-game of assertion. For sure in scriptural and liturgical contexts such language has a place, and it is not  It is here that traditional Christian teaching regarding angels, if these are taken to be persons, will be recovered. 11  Sellars 1956. 12  I’m drawing here on the account of understanding in Dummett 1978. 10

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the role of philosophical theology to displace it (as Wittgenstein might have said, philosophy leaves the psalter as it is!).13 However we ought to be clear what we are doing when we say such things: engaging in a pretence that God is a person (the Author of all things condescending to be a character in our story), we go on to ascribe mental states within that fiction.14 The fiction may well be indispensable to our life as the Church, but it is a fiction. For we cannot understand how things could be such that we could rightly say of something not relevantly similar to an animal that it possesses mental states.

The Argument from Linguistic Priority There are two ways in which human beings can stand in intentional states, states which are somehow about the world. We can use language to say (or write) that certain things are the case. Alternatively, we can have mental states representing things as being a certain way. Now, we might ask about the relationship between these two kinds of intentionality. Is linguistic intentionality to be explained in terms of mental intentionality (the so-called ‘words-first’ or linguistic priority account)? Or does mental intentionality explain linguistic intentionality (‘head-first’ or mental priority)? Or is there no priority, with both types of intentionality, considered overall, being mutually explanatory?15 This debate, which has received renewed attention in recent philosophy,16 is of relevance to discussions of divine personhood in the following way: if God is a person then, on the currently operative understanding of personhood, he stands in mental states.17 But now if word-first or no priority accounts of content are correct, God must have access to linguistic content. If there is reason to doubt that God could have access to linguistic content in the  c.f. PI 124.  See the discussion of devoted language in the previous chapter. 15  See Stalnaker 1984 and Thornton 1998, Ch. 1. 16  See e.g. Williams 2019. 17  I take the currently operative concept to be one on which persons at least potentially stand in mental states (the qualification is with an eye to pre-linguistic infants and similar cases). God has no intrinsic potentialities which are not actual. 13 14

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relevant sense then, assuming a word-first or no priority account, there is reason to doubt that God stands in mental states, and so to doubt that God is a person. In the rest of this section I’ll sketch out an argument to this effect. Head-first accounts of content seem very natural: first there is an idea in my head, subsequently I find a way to put it into words, until which point ideas are trapped in the Cartesian prison of my mind, unable to get out into the public world. This is undoubtedly how things seem sometimes, at an individual and conscious level: ‘I just can’t find the words’. The claim of head-first theorists is much stronger than this recognition implies. It is that, consistently and society-wide, there is no linguistic content which doesn’t issue from some prior mental content. As we’ve seen, this view of content is often allied with referentialism. I think that head-first accounts are incorrect, and will briefly give my reasons for this. (Even if I am wrong at this point, the subsequent argument will show that the proponent of divine personhood must be committed to a mind-first account of content, which seems an unfortunate commitment for a theology.) Wittgenstein’s treatment of private language and rule following in the Philosophical Investigations seems to me to have established decisively that any kind of intentional content that is to possess the normative status to appropriately deserve the term content (it is about this, rather than that; it licenses this inferential move rather than that) will have to gain that status from the practices of a public language. Thornton has made a book-length case that Wittgenstein undermines the head-first view, and readers are invited to follow up the idea with his work.18 A more recent reason to oppose the head-first view issues from semantic externalism.19 As we saw in Chap. 4, the work of Burge (in particular) demonstrates that the content of mental states is not determined internally to the agent. What my thought about arthritis means is not simply a matter of other mental states, whose content is transparent to their phenomenal character. Rather that my mental concept arthritis means a disease of the joint is determined socially, by my participation in a linguistic community. But now if what my mental states mean is  Thornton 1998. See also the interesting applications in Thornton 2007.  I’m indebted to Gail Lackie for discussions of externalism and the philosophy of content.

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­ ependent, in a crucial class of cases, on the prior meaning of linguistic d expressions then it cannot, on pain of vicious circularity, be that each of my linguistic expressions has its meaning determined by the prior meaning of a mental state. If head-first views are wrong then God, in order to possess mental states (and so in order to be a person), must be capable of interpreting linguistic content. And this in turn requires that God be, necessarily, a member of a linguistic community.20 I’ve argued elsewhere that God cannot be a member of a linguistic community.21 Even were this not so, the suggestion that of necessity God is a member of a linguistic community cannot be acceptable to a Christian theologian, implying as it does forced creation (in order for there to be other members of God’s community) or, just perhaps, a tritheistic construal of the Trinity. We ought not to affirm divine personhood.

The Life Context Argument A different argument to the same conclusion runs as follows: being a person involves having a life context. God does not have a life context. So it cannot be the case that God is a person. What is a life-context and why is possession of one so important for personhood? As I understand it here a life-context is a pre-requisite for a life in a certain sense of the word ‘life’. In this sense, having a life is not a merely biological matter – more is contained in attributions of life than the sense in which humans have lives, and so do dogs, and hamsters, and fungi. Nor is it the sense in which there is undoubted scriptural warrant for talking of ‘the living God’. Rather, I have in mind a sense of ‘life’ which I take to be internally related to our understanding of personhood. In this sense to have a life is to have a life -story, to have done (and be in the process of doing) things, which are capable of interpretation and  Why necessarily? True intrinsic predications of God are true necessarily. So if we wish to attribute a capacity for personal thought to God, the requisite membership of a linguistic community would need to be necessary. 21  Hewitt 2018a. 20

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fitting into a narrative, allowing (at least potentially) others to form judgements about you, to assess your character. A life in this sense requires a context. There must be some arena within which the agent is active, where actions of the agent may be identified as being of the agent, and thereby distinguished from events or actions which do not qualify as belonging to the agent. This is manifestly lacking in the case of God. There is nothing that lies beyond God’s reach and nothing which could not be God’s action.22 There is nothing that could constitute an event as an action of God’s, in the univocal sense of ‘action’ on which actions are performed by persons.23 Nor, for that matter, do the interactions described between the faithful and God in prayer have the form of an exchange between speakers of a shared language where each party can recognise a publicly accessible and comprehensible action of the other as an utterance in a language and respond accordingly to reasons put forward by her conversational interlocutor. God’s speaking to the praying person is not public; watching somebody in the act of prayer is sufficient to understand this. Hearing the ‘voice’ of God is, for the believer, an often painful introspective process, which involves distinguishing thoughts, desires, and impulses taken to come ‘from God’ from ones taken to be of no significance for the Christian life. To make these observations is in no way to undervalue prayer, but rather to recognise that it cannot be categorised as a series of exchanges within a community such that God could be identified as a discrete agent with a distinct sphere of influence. Having a life in the sense with which we’re concerned is closely related to having a personality. Personality is formed over the course of, and becomes manifest through, a life. Persons, in our present sense, have  Some would make an exception for the libertarian free actions of human agents – this is a mistake, God is the creator of omnium visibilium et invisibilium, including human actions (the supposition that divine causation presents a problem for human freedom is another problem brought about by an insufficiently a pophatic theology: libertarian freedom obtains when nothing in the world external to the agent causes an action. God is no thing in the world. See McCabe 1987, Ch. 3.) 23  It seems to me that it would be out of bounds for Christian theology to deny that there is a sense of ‘action’ in which God performs actions. But it is not one which licenses the inference from action to personhood. 22

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personalities. Since personality is internally related to living a life, in a life context, God does not have a personality. So we ought not to say that God is a person.

 Response Considered: Personhood A and Practice One way in which a supporter of divine personhood might respond to what has been said so far is to insist that there must be something wrong with each argument (even if the imagined personhood theologian cannot pinpoint where each argument goes wrong) since divine personhood is implicit in Christian practice. There are different versions of why this being implicit in practice carries epistemic weight. One might appeal to experience, to personal encounter in practice, following a philosophical trend of recent decades which emphasises the epistemology of religious experience. I am doubtful that this kind of consideration ought to persuade anyone but will not pursue that line in this section. Internal to Christian theology is the suggestion that important aspects of liturgical tradition and Christian prayer more generally cannot be understood unless God is a person. Given the authority of tradition, then, we are entitled to reject considerations against divine personhood.24 Although they haven’t couched it in these precise terms, this sort of argument has been made by philosophers. I will focus here on work by Brian Leftow, since his prominence blocks any accusation of setting up a straw man. Leftow appeals to worship in the context of opposing naturalistic pantheism, where this is the view that God and the universe, understood naturalistically, are numerically identical.25 Leftow maintains that anything playing the ‘God-role’ in our lives (and so, anything eligible to satisfy the concept God) must deserve worship. Some entity deserves worship only if:  Quite how tradition is to be understood, and what counts as an authoritative part of it, is of course a question frought with difficulties. O’Collins 2018 is a useful way in to these debates. 25  Leftow 2016. 24

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1. It is conceptually appropriate to worship that entity. If I worship my coffee cup I have (on Leftow’s way of seeing things) missed something about the nature of worship, since my coffee cup is not a fitting object of worship. Says Leftow: ‘At a minimum, to be conceptually appropriate for worship, an item must be able to be aware of us addressing it and to understand enough of our address for there to be a point to it, and be sufficiently superior to us in some way to deserve a worship-attitude.’26 2. The entity is worthy of worship. The biblical God satisfies this criteria. Satan does not. Leaving aside the uninformative nature of (2) for anyone not antecedently convinced to prefer biblical religion to devil worship (one imagines a coterie of analytic Satanists frantically working on their own theories of worthiness), the first criterion is troubling. The idea that ‘superior entities’ warrant worship should raise hackles both theological and political. A conceptual worry can lend substance to both. There is no such thing as superiority tout court,27 an entity is always superior to another in some respect. Linux is superior to Windows as an operating system; whisky is superior to lemonade as a drink. Are we to suppose that there are relevant respects of comparison between God and creatures, such that the 1967 Celtic first eleven sit somewhere in a logical space, with God far distant and alone deserving of worship? The whole burden of this book this far has been to undermine such idolatrous understandings of deity. God is radically dissimilar from creatures. Our present concern, however, is divine personhood, so we should turn our attention to the case for that implicit in Leftow’s attack on naturalistic pantheism. He thinks, plausibly enough, that the impersonal naturalistic universe does not satisfy the criteria in (1) for being a conceptually appropriate object of worship. The universe cannot be ‘aware of my addressing it’ nor ‘understand’ my address. So much the worse for naturalistic pantheism, thinks Leftow. Anything that fulfills the God-role is  Leftow 2016, p. 71.  In British and Irish English there is a colloquial intransitive use, meaning ‘snobbish’. But that’s clearly not what Leftow has in mind. 26 27

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going to need to be something like a person, conscious and understanding. I say ‘something like a person’ because anticipating a reply to an objection along the lines that pantheists might personify an intrinsically non-personal universe, Leftow writes, A pantheist might reply that theists, too, personify God, because God is not a person in any ordinary sense. They do so because otherwise it is very difficult to talk about Him. But then (pantheists might say) aren’t I hoist with my own petard? I think not. If God is a person of an extraordinary sort, He is still a person. If He is not a person, still He is personal. Even the most anti-anthropomorphic theists, so long as they do not simply sub-side into negative-theological silence, admit that God knows, God wills, and God is good, in some legitimate sense of these terms: Even Aquinas’ theory of analogy tells us that these are really, literally true of God, though the way these properties are realized in God—the sense in which they are true of Him or what it is in God that satisfies these terms’ senses—is ultimately beyond us.

This liberality is ill-advised in Leftow’s own terms, for in arguing against the naturalist pantheist initially, he has insisted that conceptually appropriate objects of worship must be ‘aware’. This is an application of mental-state talk, pushing us towards divine personhood, understood in a Lockean fashion. Aquinas certainly does affirm that God knows, that God wills and that God is good, and holds that these are true, albeit with the predicates functioning analogously by comparison with creaturely uses. But the Aquinean reason for thinking these predications must be analogical, namely DDS, just stress how far outside any normal use of the word ‘person’ God lies: God’s knowledge is nothing apart from God’s being, identical also with God’s will and God’s love. Nor does appeal to analogical language help with the suggestion that God ‘understands’ language nor with getting a sense of the peculiar nature of God’s being the subject of ‘address’, these being the person-like states which Leftow foregrounds in discussing worthiness for worship. Why does Leftow suppose that only persons are fitting recipients of worship? Because, as we saw above, worship is being understood as address:

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[W]orship is a form of address: when we worship, we say things to what we worship. We sing hymns to God; we pray to God; we declare to God our belief in Him. We do not intend this as some sort of psychological self-­ help, or for moral improvement. The point of the practice is for these words to be heard and understood.

Appeal is being made here to a human practice, worship, and in order to assess the strength of the appeal we will need to attend to the details of the practice. It is hazardous to pass judgement on the ‘point’ of some practice without evidence; indeed, why should there be a point to the practice of worship beyond the practice itself?28 In actual fact there can be a point to addressing something which is not a person; consider Burns’ Address to a Haggis. Puddings are, however, impersonal, whereas the theistic opponent of divine personhood typically holds that God is neither a person nor impersonal (but rather that God, in her radical dissimilarity from creatures, is not any kind of thing of which personhood can be predicated intelligibly), so we should perhaps not draw too much on this or similar examples. We might, however, question whether it is always the case that prayer is not intended for ‘self-help’ or ‘moral improvement’. I certainly was taught, in a Catholic Christian context, that prayer changes us, rather than God, and have entered into it on that basis.29 Susannah Ticciati, as well have seen, emphasises the transformative impact of theological speech, whether that is the speech of liturgy and other prayer, or that of discursive theology.30 We should not assume that any admission that liturgical or other religious language has a function with respect to the participants is automatically reductive or betrays an insufficiently transcendent focus. There are, in other words, many questions left open by Leftow’s declaration that worship is a form of address, intended to be understood by a person. It is certainly not a conceptual truth. I now want to suggest that it is not even a truth, that there are cases of worship that are not forms of  In the present case, from a theological perspective we can regard Christian prayer (which is always first and foremost the prayer of Christ) as participation in Christ’s, Spirit-mediated, prayer to his Father, that is in the very life of the Trinity. It would be odd to ask after the point of the divine life. 29  Compare here Aquinas at STh IIii,q83, a2,ad 2. 30  Ticciati 2015. 28

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address. Limiting ourselves to western Christianity we might ask ourselves: is censing an altar a form of address?, what about hands being raised in a charismatic prayer meeting?, dancing during a pentecostal service?, the lighting of a candle before an image of the Sacred Heart? Do these involve ‘words’ that might be ‘understood’? Obviously not; yet they are absolutely typical acts of worship. The temptation to ignore the wide array of bodily acts of worship (and of supplication, expression, contemplation… it is a mistake to think all liturgy and prayer is worship) in favour of sayings and singings may have its roots in the assumption that liturgical actions are always a way of saying something that could be said in words: so the priest censing an altar, for instance, is saying (perhaps on behalf of the community), ‘we value what happens here’, or ‘we worship Christ, of whom this is a symbol’. A certain verbose didacticism in recent Western Christianity has encouraged this sort of approach. Against it, it is salutary to consider a piece of recent philosophical mythology. Norman Malcolm writes of a discussion between Wittgenstein and the Marxist economist Piero Sraffa, Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same ‘logical form’, the same ‘logical multiplicity’. Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: ‘What is the logical form of that?’31

We should not assume that any communicable meaning32 admits a sentential vehicle. In particular, the reduction of the meaning of prayer to that which could be communicated sententially is at best highly questionable, as is the suggestion that a given act of prayer must have some sentential content. Think about other forms of human expression. Does a piece of music have to say something? What about a kiss? It is haywire to think that what is going on when somebody kisses her wife is that she is saying ‘I love you’, albeit in a less verbal way. That is how we might 31 32

 Malcolm 2001, pp. 58–9.  In a broad, but intuitive, sense of ‘meaning’ which goes beyond the propositional.

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interpret it to a child who observes two people kissing, but that is because the child does not yet inhabit the set of practices within which a romantic kiss makes sense. That the two people love each other might be a precondition for the kiss being honest (just as some kind of religious belief can be a precondition for honest prayer). It simply doesn’t follow that a kiss is just a nonverbal way of saying ‘I love you’. In fact it seems obvious that the person who offers a sentential analysis of a kiss is missing something, that they have an impoverished grasp of humankind’s symbolic possibilities. We ought not to assume that a kiss admits any analysis, but yet it makes perfect sense to us in proper context, just as it is.33 Just as kisses, so with censings. Living Christianity, I conclude, need not be thought unintelligible save on the supposition that God is a person. That is just as well, because a properly apophatic theology will refuse to allow that God is a person. God is, on the contrary, radically dissimilar from ourselves. We will now go on to examine how a renewed appreciation of this might inform our thinking about characteristic themes in Christian doctrine.

 In fact I’d want to go further and suggest that there are many areas of life where the application of theoretical disengaged rationality is profoundly damaging to our flourishing and relationships. It seems to me that Carrie Jenkins is exactly wrong when she argues, at the beginning of a work on the philosophy of romantic love, that philosophy is well placed to address questions arising in that area (2017). Divine personhood and its relation to liturgy would provide another prime example of such an area. The philosophical theologian ought only to write about this because prior philosophy has tied itself in knots, or made damaging mistakes. Wittgenstein writes, ‘The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to—the one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.’ (PI 133). 33

9 Incarnation and Trinity

Anyone who has declared their hand for apophaticism in contemporary analytic theological circles will be likely to have encountered the worry that their apophaticism is a hurdle to be cleared on the way towards orthodox credal commitment. On this view, apophaticism is something of which Christian theology can have ‘too much’. It certainly exists in tension with core doctrines and must be curtailed on pain of violence to those doctrines. Yet one traditional view is, on the contrary, that apophatic and cataphatic elements coexist at every stage in the task of Christian theology,1 entwined and mutually reinforcing as the strands of a rope: how could it be otherwise, given that Christian theology is a response to God’s self-revelation as mystery? Theology must at once do justice to the historical reality of revelation – it must speak of God – and yet must also acknowledge that it is the radically distinct Creator, the God on whose face we may not look and live, who has been revealed – it must deny everything creaturely of God.2 In support of this vision for theology, and as a small effort towards a re-orientation of analytic theology, the present chapter will look at two 1 2

 Louth 1981, p. 178.  For an account of the theological task along similar lines see Ticciati 2016.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Hewitt, Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49602-9_9

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central doctrinal loci: the Incarnation and the Trinity. In both cases, my view is readily stated: apparent difficulties for the doctrines, which have detained philosophical theologians in recent years, arise out of an insufficiently apophatic conception of God. Once this conception has been put aside, the difficulties dissolve, although of course the mysteries remain.

The Incarnation ‘PERSONA DEI: I the image of the Unimaginable. In the place where the Image and the Unimaged are one, The Act of Will, the Word of the Thought, the Son. In whom the Father’s selfhood is known to Himself, I being God and with God from the beginning, Speak to Man in the place of the Images’. Dorothy L. Sayers – The Just Vengeance.3

In Jesus, so his first followers believed, God’s decisive action on behalf of humankind has been encountered. Soon it began to be realised that the action of God could not be distinguished from God, such that the one in whom God’s action is decisively performed is himself God, the Word who was with the Father in the beginning.4 John’s gospel, in which of all the New Testament texts5 this line of development is most clearly present, makes the point by having Jesus respond to Philip’s request that he show the Twelve the Father by saying that ‘I am in the Father and the Father is in me’.6 He goes on to say, Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.7

 Sayers 1948.  John 1:1. 5  Perhaps considered along with the Johannine epistles. I am sympathetic to the broad line of argument developed by Brown in 1999 and subsequently about the relationship between these texts. 6  John 14:10. 7  John 14:11. 3 4

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Start, as you might, with the events around Jesus, there is  – so the mainstream of Christian tradition has maintained – a pull from affirming the reality of God’s work in and through Jesus, towards making claims about the person of Jesus, and so affirming his divinity. What this affirmation involves has been worked out in the life of the Church over the course of centuries, as controversies, often arising out of the practice of Christianity (we worship Christ – what does this imply?), forced the ruling out of certain positions, and may yet rule out others. Of crucial importance to the development of christological doctrine, and the focus of philosophical discussion, is the 451 definition from the Council of Chalcedon, Following the holy fathers, we all teach that with one accord we confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in human nature, truly God and the same with a rational soul and a body truly human, consubstantial with the Father according to divinity, and consubstantial with us according to human nature, like unto us in all things except sin; indeed born of the Father before the ages according to divine nature, but in the last days the same born of the virgin Mary, Mother of God according to human nature; for us and for our deliverance, one and the same Christ only begotten Son, our Lord, acknowledged in two natures (physeon),8’ without mingling, without change, indivisibly, undividedly, the distinction of the natures nowhere removed on account of the union but rather the peculiarity of each nature being kept, and uniting in one person (prosopon) and substance, not divided or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son only begotten God Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as from the beginning the prophets taught about Him and the Lord Jesus Himself taught us, and the creed of our fathers has handed down to us.9

Philosophers have found cause for worry in the position articulated at Chalcedon, or at least in what they believe Chalcedon to have articulated. Kierkegaard’s Climacus takes affirmation of the Incarnation to go against reason, but sees in this a call for intellectual dying to the world,  Talk of nature occurs earlier in standard English renderings than in the conciliar Greek.  DS 148. Translation modified.

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embracing in faith the Christ who lies beyond reason’s reach.10 Modern analytic treatments see not a paradox to be accepted, but a problem to be solved.11 Thinkers in this tradition have viewed Chalcedon to be at least prima facie beset with problems, and even inconsistencies. Murray and Rea make the point starkly, The central difficulty for the doctrine is that it seems to attribute to one person characteristics that are not logically compatible. For example, it seems on the one hand that human beings are necessarily created beings, and that they are necessarily limited in power, presence, knowledge, and so on. On the other hand, divine beings are essentially the opposite of all those things. Thus, it appears that one person could bear both natures, human and divine, only if such a person could be both limited and unlimited in various ways, created and uncreated, and so forth. And this is surely impossible.12

As it stands this gives the impression of a more fragile position than is warranted. There is after all a standard response within Christian theology to the complaint about incompatible attributes – namely to appropriate attributes to either Christ’s humanity or his divinity, expressing this using ‘qua’ clauses: Christ is created qua man, uncreated qua God and so on. But adequate though this might be as an immediate response to the charge of formal inconsistency, it opens the door to the objection that it simply cannot be the case that a particular human being is God (and so, the appeal to qua clauses is irrelevant: Christ, so the argument goes, is not divine). No entity, it might be insisted, can have more than one nature. It might, further be queried whether the talk of one person being both human and divine isn’t obscure in a particular way.13  Kierkegaard 1985 (1844).  A recent exception is Beall’s dialethic christology. See Beall 2019. 12  Murray and Rea 2016. 13  The picture informing this worry deserves philosophical attention of its own. In particular, Rahner’s insistence on the difference in meaning of ‘person’ between trinitarian and christological discussions has to be heeded (FCF, pp. 292–3). People correctly worry about the incipiently appollinarian picture whereby a pre-existent person (in the same sense that you and I are persons) takes on human form in Jesus. In this respect see McCabe on the (supposedly orthodox, actually muddled) denial that Jesus is a human person (1987, p. 56). O’Collins eirenic attempt to sustain the denial of human personhood in Christ correctly notes the shift in usage of ‘person’ over the centu10 11

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Care is needed in assessing these worries. My perspective in this chapter is that of a committed doctrinal theologian, not simply of the philosopher of religion. As such, I want to begin by pressing the question of how a formulary such as that of Chalcedon is authoritative. No less than the books of scripture, the declarations of councils are produced in a time, arise out of a context, and are formulated in a particular language. Rahner, amongst other recent Catholic theologians, was at the forefront of insisting on this point.14 The conciliar decree is an authoritative exercise of the Church’s magisterium, that teaching office guaranteed by the gift of the Holy Spirit, only in so far as it communicates something arising out of divine revelation, which it typically does by ruling out certain positions as incompatible with what has been revealed. So, for example, we may not say that Jesus only appeared to be human, or that he is not God, but only a lesser, created, quasi-divine being. What is not a binding aspect of the definition is the conceptual framework within which it is formulated, as though we were being unfaithful to Chalcedon if we supposed that nature and person might not be the most fruitful concepts in terms of which to construct a contemporary christology. Much analytic discussion has worked with these concepts, and their later patristic and medieval development, offering careful definition and attempting to resolve apparent difficulties.15 The resulting work contains much of value, but the project to me seems ill-conceived. Theologians are not called to conciliar metaphysics, but rather to emulate the scribes of the Kingdom of God, who ‘bring out of [their] treasure what is new and what is old’.16 We must look carefully at Chalcedon, understand what it was trying to rule out, and find ways of saying that in the terms least likely to cause confusion, and most likely to serve the Church and the Kingdom, in our own context. Macquarrie describes the project well,

ries, but fails to draw the moral that the denial is mis-using a common English word (2009, 255–7). If we want a technical term to express the truth that there is nothing about Christ’s reality which cannot be attributed to the divine Word, that in his entirety he is the enfleshment of the Word, then anhypostasia does that without engendering confusion. 14  See e.g. ‘On the concept of infallibility in Catholic theology’ (TI 14). 15  Particularly rich and interesting is Pawl 2016. See also Crisp 2003. 16  Matthew 13:52.

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[I]n spite of the differences in language and conceptuality encountered in any ancient document, we have to enter into what has been called its ‘governing intention’ and ensure that whatever was of importance in that intention is preserved and passed on in any new formulation.17

When all of that is said, however, philosophical difficulties might appear to remain. Chalcedon, as the culmination of earlier conciliar development, wants to rule out any position which denies either that Jesus is God or that Jesus is a human being. This is motivated, not least, by soteriological concerns: that the saviour be both human and divine, writes Leo in the tome canonised at Chalcedon, is an ‘appropriate remedy for our ills’;18 earlier, Gregory Nazianzen had written of the divine humanity, ‘what is not assumed is not healed’.19 Yet if it is important for the work of salvation that the agent of that work be both human and divine (why this might be the case is beyond the present scope: I just take it as a datum), then it is important that it is genuinely one agent that is both human and divine. One and the same man, Jesus Christ, is both human and divine. But isn’t this affirmation – free of all language of person and nature – exactly where the problem lies?

The Incarnation and Logical Space ‘God’ and ‘a human being’ seem to be answers to the question ‘what is Jesus?’20 But it might seem unacceptable that there could be two distinct ultimate answers to this question which do not admit of further unpacking. It is true that I can ask ‘what is Pope Francis?’ and get back two distinct correct answers ‘the Bishop of Rome’ and ‘a human being’, but a small amount of probing will elicit the further information that, in spite  Macquarrie 1998, p. 13.  DS 143. 19  Epistle 101, cf. DS 25. 20  Of course, following Rahner and others, we ought rightly to stress that it is God the Word who is incarnate in Christ. Christology and trinitarian theology ought not to come apart. Since, however, philosophical difficulties around the incarnation have focused on the Word as God, and on the supposed incompatibility of humanity and divinity, I will write about God. (After all, we profess creedally that the Son is ‘Deum de deo’). 17 18

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of some occasional evidence to the contrary, a bishop is just a human being with a certain sacramental character. But suppose I were to ask of some entity, of which I had heard, but had never encountered, call it Derek, ‘what is Derek?’, and got two answers back: ‘a human being’ and ‘a hamster’. Then I will be utterly confused. One and the same entity cannot be both a human being and a hamster; so at least one of my informants is radically mistaken about Derek. Now, in terms encountered in Chap. 6, this kind of what question is usually a question about the kind a given entity falls under. However, there is a special case, namely when a correct answer to the question is ‘God’. For if I say that something is God, I cannot be specifying a kind under which this entity falls;21 God is no kind of entity. If I say that something is God, I am saying just that – this is God. I might well go on to add, ‘whose nature I cannot define, and whose being lies beyond my conceptual capacities, and to whom the appropriate response is simply worship’. So to this extent at least no metaphysical problem is being courted when we say of Jesus that he is both God and human: we are not implying that one entity falls under two distinct maximally specific sortal concepts, since no such concept is the meaning of ‘is God’. Perhaps, though, a problem remains. Even if to be God is not to fall under a sortal concept distinct from human, isn’t what it is to be God disjoint from what it is to be human, such that it just cannot be the case that one and the same entity is simultaneously both God and a human being? Considerations not unrelated to those appealed to above come to the rescue of the doctrine of the Incarnation here. McCabe articulates the line of defence well, [B]eing human and being, say, a sheep occupy mutually exclusive territories in the common logical world of animals. It is part of the meaning of being human that one is not a sheep… But just what or where is the common logical world that is occupied in mutual exclusion by God and man? A circle and a square make two shapes; a man and a sheep make two animals: God and man make two what? It may be part of the meaning of man  For this reason, if we do want to indulge the pull towards conciliar metaphysics, I do not think it is consonant with the Church’s subsequent acceptance of DDS to read ‘nature’ in the Chalcedonian definition as univocal with respect to divine and human natures. 21

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that he is not any other creature; it cannot be part of the meaning of man that he is not God. God is not one of the items in the universe which have to be excluded if it is just man you are talking about. God could not be an item in any universe.22

That God and creatures do not occupy a shared logical space was a conclusion of Chap. 6 above, and one thing McCabe is saying in the quoted passage is that God and humanity are, in the terminology of that chapter, radically dissimilar, so that we do not have the conceptual capacity to rule out an entity’s being God merely on the basis of its being human (of course, most of the time, we will not be justified in saying of a human being that they are God, but that is a different matter). There is such a difference between what it is to be God and what it is to be human that, by contrast with less extensive differences, we are unable to rule out that one and the same entity could be both God and a human being. McCabe’s writing of the meaning of humanity is likely to provoke philosophical disquiet. Surely humanity in general (as distinguished from individual human lives) is not the right kind of thing to possess meaning. Meaning is a property of entities possessing intentionality: linguistic expressions and mental states. This is correct, but McCabe’s form of words is comprehensible as a denial that any real definition of human beings can exclude divinity. And that in turn has to be the case because there can be no real definition of God, and so in particular no real definition of God which conflicts with the real definition of human beings. The approach I’ve been describing is therapeutic in the following sense: it dissolves an apparent philosophical difficulty with belief in the Incarnation. But it does so in a very particular way, through insisting that we do not know what God is, and that therefore any suggestion that God cannot be such as to possess a human life through the kind of union usually described as hypostatic must be trading on the illicit importation of definitional content into the objector’s conception of God. Viewed this way, apophaticism is not a barrier to a robustly Christian confession of the Incarnation, but rather a support for that confession, making it safe from a certain line of attack. In so doing, moreover, it reinforces what  McCabe 1987 p. 57–8.

22

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ought always to have been apparent, that the Incarnation is a mystery to be worshipped, not a puzzle to be solved. Of course, theology, including philosophical theology, has the task of situating incarnational faith within the broader structure of dogmatics; and of course it has the obligation to defend that faith against charges of incoherence. Yet when all that is said, we do not know the nature of the reality we signify with the word ‘God’ and which has lived a human life in Jesus. We know that this reality has created us and, in Jesus we see him reaching out to us, in him healing our sick, feeding our hungry, including our oppressed; above all we see him conquering our death and inviting us to share, in a way we cannot yet understand, his life. We know enough, but what we do not know in this life is the nature of our God, encountered in Christ. We are, says Thomas quoting pseudo-Dionysius, ‘united to him as to one unknown’.23

The Trinity Holy, holy, holy! though the darkness hide Thee, Though the eye of sinful man. Thy glory may not see; Only Thou art holy; there is none beside Thee, Perfect in power, in love, and purity. Reginald Heber.

In developing an apophatic approach to the doctrine of the Trinity, Karen Kilby describes, in order to criticise, the faulty outlook noted at the start of this chapter, Apophatic theology and trinitarian theology normally sit in rather different parts of our theological textbooks, and indeed of our mental landscape. We  STh Ia, q13, a13, ad. 1. There’s clearly much more that needs to be said about the theology of the Incarnation in an apophatic context: in particular the topics of the hypostatic union and the anhypostasia need deserve attention. That is work for elsewhere, although the pattern of what I would say about these topics ought to be clear from what is said here (resisting the pull of including God in a general metaphysics; appealing to the fact that God (or the Word) is not a person in the same sense as we are; offering a deflationary philosophical theology orientated towards divine mystery). 23

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usually imagine apophaticism as something which is an issue, if at all, when God is considered abstractly, when questions are posed in a very general way about divine transcendence and knowability, and not when central Christian doctrines are at play. Some indeed may hold it against apophaticism that it seems to forget, or at least to bracket, that God is known through revelation not in some sort of abstract transcendence but concretely as Trinity.24

Kilby goes on to argue that it is a mistake to counterpose apophaticism and trinitarian theology in this fashion, and she proceeds to gesture towards an apophatic trinitarianism. In this section I will voice agreement with her, in a manner attentive to currently dominant ways of thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity within philosophical theology. Trinitarian doctrine can seem to pose a particularly hard challenge for the apophatic theologian. As with incarnational belief, belief in God as Trinity builds on New Testament formularies25 and responds to Christian experience, in this case the experience of salvation in Christ and the gift of the Spirit. What is encountered in these two ‘missions’, of the Son and of the Spirit, is divine. And yet it is not right to identify the Son or the Spirit, either with each other (Jesus, after all, sends the Spirit),26 or to identify either with the Father: God (the Father)27 sends the Son, whilst his Spirit brings us to cry out to the Father, ‘Abba!’28 But God’s self-­ communication in the economy of salvation is faithful; the revelation of God as Father, Son, and Spirit shows us how God is, not simply how God appears to us. The contrast here is with Sabellianism; the contemporary slogan ‘the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity’ captures the orthodox position.29

 Kilby 2010, p. 68.  In particular, Matthew 28:13. 26  e.g. John 20:22. 27  See Rahner “Theos’ in the New Testament’ (TI 1). 28  Romans 8. 29  Rahner 1970, p. 36. 24 25

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But now there are obvious worries. If we affirm DDS, but yet think that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, where each of these hypostases30 is distinct from the other, then aren’t we committed to complexity within the divine reality of the sort that DDS rules out, and hence in a contradictory position? This, directed against Aquinas in particular, is the argument of Chris Hughes’ On a Complex Theory of a Simple God.31 More generally, doesn’t the doctrine of the Trinity fly in the face of apophaticism for a simple reason, that the apophatic theologian tells us that we cannot say what God is, but the doctrine of the Trinity looks like a paradigmatic case of attempting to say what God is? On this last point, the apophatic trinitarian has a prima facie response available. DDI, as developed in earlier chapters, makes precise the sense in which we cannot say what God is. We cannot, on this account, possess a real definition of God. Yet this does not seem to be what the doctrine of the Trinity claims; rather what that doctrine claims is that whatever God is, this exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – ‘as the Father is, so is the Son, so also is the Holy Spirit’ as one formula has it.32 Furthermore, however it may be that these three are together one God, it cannot be as parts or constituents. In fact we cannot know how these three are one; we simply believe that they are. This raises questions, and we will return to discussion of what an apophatic trinitarianism might look like after turning briefly to the state of analytic disputation of the topic. Here, I want to claim, there are lacunae and difficulties arising from non-apophatic conceptions of God, such that a properly apophatic theology points a better way forward. Recent analytic treatments of the doctrine of the Trinity have concerned themselves with rationally reconstructing it so as to navigate around an apparent tension between God’s unity and her triunity.33 The  I consider hypostasis to be a formal expression of trinitarian theology, a way of talking about whatever it is that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, considered as distinct, are. It does not designate a category of a general metaphysics, such that – say – the Father is a hypostasis, but so am I. (The use of ‘person’ in trinitarian theology is dangerous in this respect; see Lash 1992, pp. 30–3.) 31  Hughes 1990. 32  DS 75 (Qualis Pater, talis Filius, talis et Spiritus Sancti). 33  Tuggy 2016. As it stands the tension really is only apparent, for the Fregean reason that counting is sortal relative (this is Geach’s starting point for his relative identity treatment): Frege 1953; Geach 1972, pp. 238–47. Now, since God falls under no sortal, for us it will turn out that there is some30

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central division is between so-called one-self theories and three-self theories. One-self theories, as the name suggests, hold that God is a single self, where ‘self ’ is an approximate synonym for ‘person’ in the sense of Chap. 8; Tuggy writes of ‘[a] being which is in principle capable of knowledge, intentional action, and interpersonal relationships.’34Amongst theologians, Tuggy instances Barth and Rahner as one-self theorists.35 I find this doubtful in both cases, but happily we do not need to adjudicate since recent philosophical theology provides clear examples of one-self views. Harriet Baber defends a thoroughgoing one-self theology.36 Widely known but more moderate than Baber (in allowing communication and interaction within the life of the one divine self ) is Leftow’s account of a Latin Trinity.37 According to this, a single divine life is lived in three streams. Leftow employs the analogy of a time-traveller, who may exist in three instantiations at a given time, and may indeed interact synchronically with herself.38 God on this view lives one life (or is one self ), but his life has three strands. Three-self theories meanwhile have been developed within Western Christianity by philosophers and theologians alike, by the latter under the description social trinitarianism.39 For this family of views, the starting point for understanding the divine life has to be primarily in terms of there being three distinct persons (in something like the modern sense of that word), or selves, or even (in Swinburne’s phrase) individuals.40 thing peculiar about our use of number words of the divine reality. We have already encountered this concerning ‘one’; we will have cause to remark on ‘three’ below. 34  Tuggy 2016. 35  The difficulty is with the selfhood of God. Both are certainly alert to the dangers of tritheism and accordingly careful to stress the divine unity. 36  Baber 2019. 37  I register here an objection to that description as at least misleading. DDS, a central component of the doctrine of God (and inter alia the trinitarian theology) of characteristically Latin theologians – Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas, is lacking from, and not obviously compatible with, Leftow-style trinitarianism. 38  Leftow 2004. 39  The restriction of interest to Western Christianity here is in order to bracket the question whether the frequent appropriation of Orthodox theology on behalf of social trinitarianism is warranted. Note, however, that Swinburne is a member of an Orthodox church, even if his general theological approach is untypical of that context. 40  Swinburne 1994.

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Amongst theologians, appeal to social trinitarianism has been motivated often by the thought that there is some political or ethical advantage to imagining God‘s life as that of a community. Moltmann writes, The triune God is reflected only in a united and uniting community of Christians without domination and subjection and a united and uniting humanity without class rule and without dictatorial oppression.41

Social trinitarians, or three-self theorists, take the view that God is three persons, in a robust sense of ‘person’. The divine unity is to be understood in terms of the shared life of a community, or a shared project (thus Swinburne), this perhaps being taken as an explication of the traditional notion of perichoresis. I can see no way for the three-self theorist to escape the charge of tritheism. If there are three divine individuals then there are three gods. And Swinburne’s use of the word ‘individual’ is simply a fleshing out of the implications of thinking that in God there are three (Lockean) persons, or selves, or centres of consciousness. In any case, it is a lot less clear that the cause of social emancipation is well served by social trinitarianism than that doctrine’s proponents seem to think. We have encountered already, and will revisit in the next chapter, the contention that anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine exist in mutually reinforcing relations with oppressive social structures. Kilby has argued persuasively that social trinitarianism is an exercise in projection.42 It is a dangerous one at that since, once we have projected our favoured account of human society onto the divine life, that image then gets reflected back to us as a divinely authorised social order. What was once recognised as a human product acquires a halo, and what a more honest appraisal would attribute to our own political imagination gets, in an act of theological hubris, claimed as directly given from God. But such socio-political considerations are not essential to a rejection of three-self theories. DDS is sufficient for that; God is not a composite or conglomeration of individuals. But nor, as we saw in the previous 41 42

 Moltmann 1983, p. 57.  Kilby 2000.

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chapter, is God a person in the way that we are persons. So it seems that one-self theorists do not fare any better than their three-self opponents. The point of contention from a perspective affirming of DDI is, in both cases, summed up in the word ‘self ’. Both one-self and three-self theories have in common the presupposition that in order to offer an intellectually satisfying elucidation of trinitarian doctrine it is necessary to get clear about what there is one of in God (what, that is, we should understand by the dogmatic expression ousia, or substantia) and what there are three of in God (hypostases, personae). One-self theories begin by saying what there is one of, and go on to offer an account of the threeness, whereas three-self theories do the opposite. But DDI ought to cause us to doubt that a true specification of what is one and what is three in God is possible, let alone desirable. We do not know what God is, so we do not know what it is that is one (following Aquinas, the predication of oneness itself is, for the apophatic theologian, not the application of a ‘principle of number’, but rather an affirmation of God’s existence as simple and not as a repeatable kind of individual).43 Likewise, the trinitarian hypostases are, whilst distinct from each other, each of them God (the apparent problems here with the logic of identity assume that we have a good grasp of what we are saying when we say ‘is God’,44 and that we ought to deny.) As such they lie beyond our ability to categorise in a useful fashion or elucidate. We are licensed in our trinitarian talk by the Church’s encounter with Christ and with the Spirit, and we know that certain understandings of that talk would be incompatible with Christian faith (were we to say that there are three Gods, or that God’s presentation as Father, Son and Spirit is only an appearance). But more than that we are not in a position to say. The presupposition that gives rise to oneself and three-self theories alike ought to

 STh Ia, q11, a3.  Identity is transitive, so if the ‘is’ in ‘the Father is God’ is the ‘is’ of identity, we quickly arrive at the heterodox conclusion that the Father is the Son. But we need not admit that it is identity that is being affirmed. This does not mean that we ought to allow that we have here some other kind of well understood ‘is’, familiar from creaturely cases – predication, say – which is at issue either. In any case, DDS problematises the identity/predication distinction in the case of God. All that God has, God is, and our ability to understand what this involves is entirely negative. 43 44

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be rejected. Once again philosophical theology can be at peace and rest content with mystery. Kilby’s already-mentioned work is an insightful laying out of the possibility of an apophatic trinitarianism, consonant with the case being made here. In an intriguing passage she describes a conversation with a Muslim neighbour who tells her that, whilst Muslims believe in one God, Christians believe also in Jesus and the Spirit. Kilby rightly rejects the patronising response that the Muslim is going wrong through lacking a grasp of a trinitarian conception of God. Rather, insists Kilby, Christians, too, lack any grasp of a trinitarian conception of God. We learn to worship the Father through the Son in the Spirit, but we do not have some very sophisticated idea with which to put all this together, with which to envisage or explain or understand that the three are one, with which to put to rest on a conceptual level worries about the coherence of a claim to monotheism. This is why attention to the doctrine of the Trinity should serve to intensify rather than diminish our sense of God’s unknownness: believing in the Trinity, we are not so much in possession of a more fully textured concept of God than a mere Enlightenment deist has, but in fact much less than any deist in possession of any sort of manageable concept of God at all.45

This seems to me fundamentally right. It articulates a reaction to the kind of robust trinitarianism of recent decades, of the neo-Barthians and more recently the Radically Orthodox. Such a reaction requires a balancing of its own. Trinitarian worship is at the heart of Christian life: ‘in the name of the Father…’, ‘Gloria Patri…’ Furthermore, I think it in order to write, as I did in a recent paper, that prayer ‘is a participation in the triune life of God through the Incarnation of the Word as one-who-­ prays’.46 We encounter the Trinity in prayer and as mystery and we can, and should, speak about that. What we do not have, and cannot possess, is a theory of the Trinity. For that would be to understand the Unknown God. 45 46

 Kilby 2010, p. 76.  Hewitt 2019b, p. X.

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Simplicity, Trinity, and Number Still, the Unknown God is three. The well-schooled Fregean response is, ‘three what?’ The conciliar and credal answer is hypostases or personae. The rendering of the latter into English as ‘person’ is treacherous for reasons already minuted. More generally, however, we ought to resist the temptation to think that in deploying some grammatical count noun in answer to the ‘three what?’ question we have somehow made progress with respect to a metaphysics of God: once we were in the dark about what these three were, but now – theology be praised – we know that they are hypostases! On the contrary, Augustine writes, When… it is asked what the three are, or who the three are, we seek to find a generic or a specific name which may include the three together. But we come across none, because the supereminent excellence of the divinity transcends all the limits of our wonted manner of speaking.47

A better way to see things is as follows. We know, by revelation, that God is triune, and so we use expressions like ‘person’ and ‘hypostasis’ as purely formal terms, marking whatever it is that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, considered as distinct, may be. In calling these persons we have certainly not succeeded in categorising them, for we cannot categorise God. It may be useful, as Thomas found it, to go on to say things about how the distinction of these persons is compatible with the unity of the simple God. For Thomas, appeal to subsistent relations does the work: there is no more to being the Son, for example, than being begotten by the Father, but this relationship of paternity (and its converse, filiation) are not distinct from God.48 And creeds compel us to talk about generation within the life of God; this of course finds an echo in our experience of the missions of the Son and the Spirit. But none of this means that we have a secure grasp on how things are with God. We do not know what it would be for there to be relations in God, nor can we get any c­ onceptual  De Trin VII, 4, 7.  STh Ia, q 28. For an argument that Aquinas’ trinitarian theology is fundamentally apophatic, see Kilby 2005. 47 48

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purchase on what it might be for the Father to generate. We can, at best, rule out inadequate views – the heresies which were at once the motor for and the opposition to trinitarian doctrine – using the best words we can find to distinguish ourselves from them. But, then, how can we so much as count the hypostases? Counting is sortal relative and, by DDS, nothing in God falls under any sortal. Here is one way of thinking about this: we cannot count God in se, but we encounter the missions of the Son and the Spirit in our history. These we can count, the life of Jesus is one thing, so to speak, and Pentecost another. Through these, moreover, and through the history of Israel, we come to hear of the one Jesus calls Father. We perhaps count events – the life of Jesus, the coming of the Spirit, and the sending of both by the Father which we trust lies behind these; in any case, there are, by God’s saving action in the world, some realities which we can count and say, ‘these are three’. And because God is faithful in communicating himself, we conclude that this threeness must reflect the reality of God (Sabellianism is false). Our counting of the three comes from creaturely experience. Our refusal to let go of the language of threeness issues from our trust in God. But when we say, truthfully, that there are three hypostases in God, we are not saying that there are numerically three individuals, countable as though in a series. What are countable are the events of salvation history. That will not sound adequate to many philosophical theologians, but that is because they hanker after a metaphysical theory of God. We can have no such theory.

10 Politics, Kingdom, Beatific Vision

In the introduction to his Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx writes some of his best known words, and some of the most famous ever penned concerning religion, Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.1

In spite of the heroic efforts of some theological readers to suggest otherwise, it is perfectly obvious that Marx is criticising religion in this  Marx 1844a.

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passage.2 Religion, Marx thinks, arises out of the alienated condition of human beings living under exploitative economic systems. It reconciles on an imaginary plane those hopes and capacities which lack fulfilment in material reality. Critical thought exposes the secular basis of theology, and in so doing hopes to deflate its appeal. Marx’s only quarrel with his anti-religious contemporaries, albeit a significant one, is that he thinks that they fail to locate the basis of religious alienation in social exploitation, and so lack insight into how to transform the situation.3 Like the New Atheists before their time, the left Hegelians and Feuerbach argue against religion, hoping to change peoples’ ideas in an atheistic direction; whereas Marx thinks that hope lies with a collective movement against the social conditions which give rise to religion. ‘The criticism of heaven’, as he puts it, ‘must give way to the criticism of earth’. There is none of this with which Christian theology ought to disagree. It is a biblical theme that idolatry and domination are mutually complicit, and, moreover, if the good news revealed in Jesus Christ promises human flourishing in its fullness, then any form of religiosity which is detrimental to that flourishing stands condemned.4 The challenge for the Christian theologian is to show how her doctrine of God escapes the Marxian critique. DDI provides her with the resources to do this. Religion under capitalism, thinks Marx, is caught up in a Feuerbachian trade-off: the more humankind invests in God, the less it retains for itself. I am lowly, but God is all-powerful. Marx does not, so Denys Turner has persuasively argued in a number of places,5 want to win the trade decisively in favour of humanity, denying all perfections of God in order to affirm them of humankind. Instead, Marx wishes to support a political  On the inadequacies of much theological reading of Marx see Kee 1990.  ‘The criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics’ (Marx 1844a). 4  In spite of the tendentious efforts of some exegetes to suggest ‘a man’ ought to be read as a reference to Christ, a reading which only makes an interpretative difference if wedded to an inadequate theology of the relationship between Christ and the rest of the human race, Justin Martyr’s ‘the glory of God is a man fully alive’ is very much salient here. 5  Turner 1987, 2007. See also Hewitt 2020, Ch. 1. 2 3

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movement against the conditions that cause humankind to understand itself as caught up in competition for primacy with God. When class exploitation is ended, so, in time, will disappear the choice between encountering ourselves in an alienated form as divine, or else understanding ourselves in terms of a static human nature, conceptualised through the negation of God. Marx rightly sees this latter option as tacit theology and holds instead that under communism religion and atheism alike will be superseded.6 The apophatic theologian should see Marx as pointing the way towards the social conditions in which non-idolatrous thinking about God can flourish. She agrees with him that God and humanity do not compete for space, such that one can be exalted only at the expense of the other. To suppose otherwise would be to miss the radical dissimilarity between God and God’s creatures. To this extent, then, apophatic theology confirms the biblical theme that to fall into idolatry is to side with the oppressors, to the extent that it confirms that the person who denies DDI lacks one motive for wanting to overcome alienating social conditions, this being a proper recognition that they generate a distorting conception of God. Thus apophaticism as a doctrinal topic does not lurk in the distance away from considerations of salvation history. Rather, since human social and political liberation is integral to the coming of God’s Kingdom in human history,7 and since idolatry is an ideological product of the absence of that liberation, vital connections have already been made. As we will  ‘Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man – a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation’ (Marx 1844b). 7  Terminology: it has become increasingly common to talk not of the Kingdom of God but to replace the phrase with alternatives Reign, Commonwealth etc. which are supposedly less likely to express support for dominating political arrangements. This objection seems to me questionable (are reigns really that much better than kingdoms?) and literal in its approach to theological language in a way a proper apophaticism would counteract. In any case ‘Kingdom’ is the best quick rendering of the NT basileia. For what it’s worth, I see talk of God’s Kingdom as obvious irony. What is given in Christ is so utterly disjoint from, so completely apart from, anything to which we would apply regal language, that it mocks earth’s kingdoms even as it leads beyond them. 6

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see next, there are more connections to be made, since idolatry is not only a product of alienating social conditions, it is also a barrier to understanding and transforming them.

Idolatry and Oppression What is my purpose in this late seeming swerve of topic towards Marx? In part, I want to show how apophaticism, far from being a rarefied retreat into abstract speculation, is of immense importance for Christian life. We have already seen how it allows us to negotiate our way through central doctrinal loci – Incarnation and Trinity – without encountering defeating difficulty. Through discussing Marx, I’ve introduced the suggestion that apophaticism is important for Christian political engagement. In this section I’ll continue that line of thought by revisiting McCabe’s thought, so important to the argument of the middle chapters of this book.8 God is not an item in the inventory of the world, the universe within which we live and which we encounter with our senses. He is not an object within the causal nexus studied by our sciences.9 God cannot be contained within our conceptual frameworks, and as such cannot be coherently manipulated so as to justify worldly power. She does not compete causally with creatures, and so cannot be invoked as an exhaustive explanation for worldly injustice, so as to silence critics. In these respects McCabe contrasts God the Creator with biblical presentations of the gods of the nations, [I]t is the God of the Hebrews (who in the Jewish interpretation comes to be seen as creator) who is hailed in the decalogue as liberator; it is the gods (parts of history) and the whole religion of the gods that is seen to stand for

 For a fuller engagement with McCabe’s political theology see Hewitt 2018d. See also Eagleton 2010.  This is compatible with affirmation, found in Aquinas amongst others, that there is a certain sense in which God, as Creator, is a cause of creatures. See STh Ia, q19, a4. For this reason I find the suggestion in Mulhall 2015 that Aquinas (and, following him, McCabe) denied that God may be meaningfully spoken of as a cause unsatisfactory. 8 9

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alienation and dependency. ‘I am the Lord10 your God who brought you out of slavery; you shall have no gods.’

God the creator, who is not one of the participants in history but the mover of Cyrus and of all history, is the liberator fundamentally because he is not a god, because there are no gods, or at least no gods to be worshiped. This leaves history in human hands under the judgement of God. Human misery can no longer be attributed to the gods and accepted with resignation or evaded with sacrifices. The long slow process can begin of identifying the human roots of oppression and exploitation, just as the way now lies open for the scientific understanding and control of the forces of nature.11

As the Christian churches have receded from public importance in Western capitalist societies, some theologians have suggested that we can only understand human societies properly in the light of revelation, thereby promoting a continuing place for theology if not for the panoply of Christian practice.12 McCabe would agree only to a limited extent: we are certainly not telling the whole truth about human beings if we do not say that they are created by the eternal Trinity, redeemed by God in Jesus Christ, the recipients of grace and destined to share the fullness of God’s life in the Kingdom. It does not follow from this, however, that a Marxist economist or a feminist cultural theorist are not telling important truths, perhaps ones which need to be heard in order that human beings be able to transform our world away from exploitation and oppression. These thinkers can be understood, and their insights taken on board, in their own terms, in isolation from theology. To suppose  In the original the tetragrammaton is filled out.  McCabe 1987, p. 43. 12  As thus presented, the issue of the places of religion and theology in the modern goes back at least to Schleiermacher 1994 (1799). A curiously idealist feature of the prominent Radically Orthodox response is the prominence given to theology over the day-to-day life of the whole People of God. 10 11

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otherwise, thinks McCabe, is to be trapped in a false picture of God as one of the gods. If God competes causally with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as an explanation for economic recessions then of course if we are to be able to talk theologically about economic crisis, the economist’s explanations must recede accordingly. But the items of economic discussion, whether concrete (like factories or farms) or abstract (like bitcoin or the rate of profit) do not occupy a shared logical space with God: they are radically dissimilar from God, and so there cannot be a genuine dispute between speaking theologically of a crisis and explaining it economically.13 This much follows from DDI as it has been developed in earlier chapters. For the relata of the causal relations discussed in science and everyday language, and the objects, terms for which feature in laws of nature,14 are just that – objects, entities of the type referred to by singular proper names. And no object is God. Against the view that would see the disenchantment of the world as monopolised by secular modernity,15 the doctrine of creation affirms that history is empty of gods. Having heard the Decalogue, assured that we have been led from slavery to freedom and that there are no gods, we are left free and responsible to understand and to make history.

 One source of confusion here is a widespread elision of epistemological and metaphysical questions by theologians (here really is a point at which the input of some analytic philosophy over the past half century would have been useful!) In the light of the nouvelle theologie it has become common to insist that there is no such thing as pure nature, that human society (the point is usually put more individualistically: human beings) is always-already in receipt of divine grace. That I do not dispute. However it simply doesn’t follow from this that human life cannot be studied, and knowledge arrived at, without deploying theological concepts. The first claim is about reality, the second about our knowledge of that reality, and the first does not entail the second. 14  I do not assume, in Humean fashion, that all causation is law-governed in a way that would render the conjunction here superfluous. 15  Secular modernity itself in fact gives birth to a plethora of monsters which entrap us in a god-like enchantment, not least of which is the invisible hand of the market – seemingly omnipotent and unavoidable, whilst supposedly explanatory. 13

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Providence Against this, it might be thought, stands the doctrine of providence. Christ is the Alpha and Omega, the author of Revelation tells us,16 and the Easter liturgy goes on to proclaim of Christ that ‘to him belongs all time and all the ages; all glory and dominion is his now and forever.’17 Surely if time belongs to God in Christ, there has to be some sense in which it is true that history is divinely governed and guided. Aquinas, answering affirmatively the question whether providence can suitably be attributed to God, quotes from the book of Wisdom, ‘but it is your providence, O Father that steers its course’.18 The immediate context of the quoted passage is interesting: it is the course of a ship that is being described, so the concern is with the providential governance of matters on a less than world-historical or cosmic scale, and the author is making a case against prayer to idols. Jewish creator monotheism, sharply distinguished from the idolatry of the nations, is nonetheless compatible with belief in providence.19 God is guiding creation towards its fulfilment, towards what scripture terms the Kingdom of God (and which will receive attention presently). This is true if we consider creation at a cosmic level, and it is true if we consider our own lives as part of that creation. It is religiously important for many of us that we can say, and say truthfully, that God may have been guiding us through (say) a difficult period of our life, that God used another personal upset for good, and so on. The best known scriptural expression of ideas of this sort is in Paul’s letter to the Romans, For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves,  Revelation 1:10  Preparation of the Paschal Candle, Easter Vigil, Roman Rite. 18  Wisdom 14:3. STh Ia, q22, a1. 19  Compare Wisdom 14:3 with 14:11. 16 17

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who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience…. We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.20

If history is in human hands, susceptible to social scientific investigation, and the potential stage for political transformation, as I suggested in the previous section, how can it also be the case that ‘all things work together for good for those who love God’? Doesn’t it depend on us whether particular historical outcomes are good, and aren’t we perfectly capable of bringing it about that they are not? The answer here is of a kind that by now ought to be predictable: God, radically dissimilar to created beings and our creator, certainly can bring it about that history culminates in the Kingdom of God (and can bring it about, similarly, that the victory of Christ finds an echo in our individual lives and loves). But God does not do so as a worldly cause, as excluding creaturely causation. We can give accounts of those flourishings of justice and peaceable living which we identify in human societies in social scientific and historical terms; but it does not follow that these are not truthfully said to be the beginnings of the creation ‘being set free from its bondage to decay’. There are perfectly good this-worldly accounts to be had of an individual’s recovery from depression, say, and the renewed flourishing of a romantic relationship associated with this. She is not, however, wrong to see the hand of God at work in her life. God is not the kind of thing who competes explanatorily with neurons, or mental states, or social relations. God is not any kind of thing. Two particular topics deserve a mention in the context of the doctrine of providence. A likely worry with the view I’ve outlined here concerns  Romans 8:18–25, 28–30.

20

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human freedom. If God brings it about that a state of affairs obtains through some action of mine, it might be objected, I cannot have performed that action freely. And if it belongs to human dignity that we shape our own lives and history freely, then it looks like we are forced to choose between a robust doctrine of providence and a belief in significant human freedom. Lying behind this dilemma is a certain kind of libertarian account of freedom of action: An agent acts freely only if her action is not caused by any entity wholly distinct from herself.

‘Wholly distinct’ here is intended to allow that free actions might be caused by an agent’s proper parts or properties. Now, supposing that God is wholly distinct from any human agent, it seems that any human action which is caused by God is not free. But this is unacceptable (that this might not seem obvious – as it doesn’t, for instance, to those who offer free will defences to the problem of evil  – issues from a forgetting of God’s being the transcendent creator). God is the creator of all things other than God ‘visible and invisible.’21 The libertarian view stated above, then, leads to an error theory concerning attributions of freedom. This cannot be right: we know how to use the word ‘free’, and if our attributions of freedom were universally incorrect it would be entirely magical that we possessed this linguistic know-how (we learn how to apply expressions by initiation into correct applications). I conclude therefore that the word ‘entity’ in the above statement of libertarianism about free action, a view which I endorse in its modified form, ought to be replaced by ‘creature’. God does not compete with my free actions. God is the basis of my free actions as their creator.22 Secondly, something ought to be said about the role of the miraculous in God’s action in history (both cosmic and local). There is more than one concept of miracle; there is a perfectly legitimate usage of the word according to which it is applicable to any event which speaks of God to  On van Inwagen’s attempt to exclude abstracta here see his 2009 (one can imagine a similar move being made with respect to human actions). Craig’s reply in his 2018 seems entirely successful to me. 22  See further McCabe 1987, pp. 10–24. 21

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witnesses or which fits somehow into a narrative according to which God acts in the world.23 Miracles in this sense do not pose a problem for the view of apophaticism and divine action I’ve been developing in this chapter. Indeed, on this account, the miraculous sunset which restores my appreciation of divine beauty can be (and because of the doctrine of creation, must be) understood as brought about by God without objectionable supernatural intrusion on the natural causal order. But there is another concept of miracle on which we might be tempted to worry about that sort of intrusion.24 A miracle according to this concept is something25 brought about by God which, considering only the possibilities inherent in the natural causal order, could not have happened. It is an unavoidable entailment of Christian orthodoxy that miracles, in this sense, are possible and have happened; reflection on Jesus’ resurrection ought to suffice to convince us of this. What is important for present purposes is to reassure ourselves that the occurrence of these miracles does not undermine the integrity of the natural order, since a theme up until this point has been that an apophatic approach to God safeguards that integrity. Such reassurance is available. The complaint is vague, but corresponds to real anxieties: it can be summed up as follows – the believer in miracles holds that God interferes, or intervenes, in the created order, but this is beneath the dignity of both Creator and creature. Now whilst someone who holds that God is an extremely powerful inhabitant of a shared universe with creatures can coherently speak of God intervening, as the US intervened in Iraq or a medic might intervene in the course of an illness, this talk is not available to a proponent of DDI. On the one hand, the shared logical space needed to make sense of talk of intervention is absent. On the other, God is supremely intimately present to every creaturely situation as its creator (‘you are more inward to me than my most inward part’, writes Augustine).26 God, we ought to say, cannot intervene in any

 A useful overview of views on miracles, with references is Clack & Clack 2019, pp. 195–212.  Thanks to Sussana Ticciati for prompting discussion of this. 25  ‘Something’ here ranges over states of affairs, events, and cases of the existence of entities. 26  Conf 3.6.11 23 24

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situation because God is already in no way absent from that situation.27 Rather what happens in the case of non-natural miracles is not that God is unusually present but rather that creaturely causes are absent.28 The world, apart from any given miracle, carries on in its law governed way, with created causes acting as they usually do. The miracle is given by God ex nihilo. In this of course it does not differ from natural events, which are equally sustained over and against nothing by God’s creating action. It differs from natural happenings only in lacking a created cause, and this neither damages the integrity of the natural order nor indicates a case of divine intervention. When someone is healed from leprosy with antibiotics, God is a cause of their healing. Were someone to be healed miraculously of leprosy, as in the gospel accounts, the difference is not the causal presence of God, but rather the absence of the pharmacological cause.

The Kingdom We can know by reason that there exists an indescribable God who is the creator of everything other than herself; this was the argument of Chap. 5. As a matter of Christian faith, furthermore, we believe that the same God will bring the created order to fulfilment in the Kingdom. One of the great gains in Christian theology over the past century has been the recovery of a scriptural understanding of the Kingdom as not simply a ‘spiritual’,29 individual, or post-mortem reality, but rather the bringing to completion of the entire creation, not least in its cosmic, material, and social dimensions. Muñoz writes, In reality [the Kingdom] is not just one ‘theme’, but the living reality that forms the nucleus of Jesus’ preaching and the raison d’etre of the whole of  Thus the doctrine of divine omnipresence, which of course is not the claim that God is present to creatures as occupying space, but rather than God is present to every creature as its creating cause (STh Ia, q8, a2, ad. 1). 28  McCabe 2007, Ch. 5 is a useful discussion. 29  The Kingdom is, of course, spiritual in the New Testament sense of pneumatikou: of (the Holy) Spirit. Those of us who live after Descartes, however, need reminders to prevent us hearing ‘spiritual’ as entailing ‘not material’. 27

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his historic ministry. We are discovering that God’s Reign – as Jesus proclaimed it and showed it already present through his historical stance and concrete gestures – comes to us from below, through the ‘hidden’ door of the oppressed and marginalised; comes from there with ‘signs’ and ‘powers’ that heal bodily and spiritual wounds, liberate the oppressed, prepare for and anticipates the fullness of life and communion… in the encounter with the God of Life, the universal Father.30

From many contemporary theological perspectives it is natural to see apophatic theism as in conflict with this kind of historically-orientated politically-valenced theology. And indeed, liberation theology was at the forefront of challenging traditional conceptions of God in the cause of affirming God’s siding with the poor in history.31 Contrary to this line of thought, as we have seen, more anthropomorphic conceptions of God run the risk of becoming ideologically enmeshed, and thereby complicit in exploitation and oppression. It is the God who is not a god who can be truthfully said to be at work in our history, liberating us and establishing his Kingdom, without thereby depriving us of agency. God is not in causal competition with us. We come from God and are being led back to God. That is to say, we are created by God and, under God’s guidance and by God’s grace, are building his Kingdom, which in his providence will be established at the end of all things. Apophatic theology, as this has been developed in the present book (following traditional precedent), issues from reflection on our coming from God, on creation. It also, contrary to the concerns of those who view the classical doctrine of God as remote from concerns about suffering and liberation, deflates philosophical worries concerning our going back to God. Apophaticism escapes the dilemma Marx exposed in Feuerbach and which we encountered earlier on: to the extent that you build powers into your conception of God, you deny them of human beings. There is no shared logical space within which this trade off can  Muñoz 1991, p. 140  Muñoz 1991, p. 28. Much to McCabe’s annoyance; he wrote ‘The praxis of liberation theology, that unity of theory and practice taking place in base communities and elsewhere, especially in Latin America, seems to me clearly the most important thing going on anywhere in the Christian movement today  – much too important to get entangled in an incoherent theology of God’ (1987, p. 40). 30 31

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happen. Human beings are therefore free to make history, all the while hoping that our history will issue in the Kingdom.

The Beatific Vision We presently only have a dim sense of what the fullness of the Kingdom will be like. We recognise our own union with God through prayer and the sacraments, we look for the places in the world where justice is being done and domination resisted and say: here the Kingdom is coming into being. Schillebeeckx helpfully develops from Adorno the idea of negative contrast experiences as a key to the epistemology of Christian eschatology.32 In our experience of suffering and injustice, through our rejection of these and our consequent commitment to humanise the world, we come to understand something of the Kingdom.33 However things may be in the fullness of the Kingdom, Christian tradition has insisted that we will enjoy the vision of God, the Beatific Vision. That this is our destiny presents philosophical difficulties in the light of apophatic theology. For the Beatific Vision is supposed to consist in a radically immediate sense of God’s presence and capacity to recognise that presence, along with a contemplative engagement on our part with the divine reality. Aquinas spells out what, given DDS, must be the case: that in the Beatific Vision we contemplate the divine essence (what God is, which is in no way distinct from God).34 But we cannot know what God is, so how can we be destined to contemplate her essence? One response here has it that we do not know what God is in this life, but that we will know when we enjoy the Beatific Vision. Paul’s celebrated words to the Corinthian church can certainly be marshalled to support this position, ‘Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face’, as can the Johannine ‘we will see him face to face’.35 Aquinas, moreover, adopts this view. Considering the question whether final  The idea is prominent in Schillebeeckx 1990.  See Kennedy 1993, Ch. 7. 34  STh IIi, q3, a8. 35  1 Corinthians 13:10. 1 John 3:2. 32 33

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human happiness consists in the vision of God’s essence, he takes as an objection pseudo-Dionysius’ that we are united to God ‘as to one unknown’. Thomas responds that ‘Dionysius speaks of the knowledge of wayfarers journeying towards happiness’.36 When we are no longer wayfarers, the implication runs, then we will know. Suggestive though this is, it does not on its own suffice to answer the worry. The case made in Chaps. 5 and 6 that we cannot say (and inter alia cannot know) what God is did not turn on anything peculiar to human beings in the present mortal life. Rather it was an eternal truth about God, DDS, and a constitutive fact about ourselves as rational agents, that the social practice of language is foundational for our thought, that led us to an apophatic conclusion. Why should these considerations cease to be operative eschatologically? One possible way beyond the impasse here is suggested by Efird and Worsley.37 Whilst propositional knowledge of God’s nature is, by apophatic hypothesis, impossible, there is another kind of knowledge, the kind we have when we are personally acquainted with a person, which is not ruled out by apophaticism in the case of God. The Beatific Vision, Efird and Worsley suggest, ought to be understood as the possession of this kind of knowledge. As will be evident from earlier discussions, I do not think that our knowledge of God can be knowledge of a person, but I think that can be conceded whilst preserving the important part of the Efird and Worsley proposal: that the knowledge of God enjoyed in the Beatific Vision is non-propositional (we might add: and can be understood by analogy with our knowledge of persons). We can speak of a sui generis contemplative knowledge of God. This suggestion is, I think, along the right lines. However, Aquinas’ discussion of the Beatific Vision in the prima secundae raises a difficulty. Working with the distinction between speculative and practical intellect, Aquinas argues that our happiness in the Beatific Vision must be an operation of the speculative intellect.38 His reasoning is threefold: first, that the speculative intellect is the highest operation of human beings, and so  STh Iii, q3, a8, ad 1.  Efird & Worsley 2017. 38  STh IIi, q3, a5, co. 36 37

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is fitted to being constitutive of our highest happiness with respect to our highest object (God); second, that contemplation is a good for its own sake, whereas practical reason is instrumental; and, third, that in the contemplative life human beings have something in common with that which is higher (namely God and the angels), whereas things pertaining to the active life are to some extent shared with other animals. Aquinas is defending the view that the Beatific Vision involves the speculative intellect against the view that it involves the practical intellect, and as such it is unsurprising that some of his reasoning makes no contact with the suggestion that the Vision consists in a sui generis non-­ propositional encounter with the divine. After all, the potential for such an encounter might be distinctive of the kind of creatures we are, and certainly seems as though it ought to be valued non-instrumentally. So the second and third of Aquinas’ reasons listed above seem satisfied. The first, however, presents more difficulty. Even if we retreat from the kind of intellectualism which would see the speculative intellect as humankind’s highest operation, it is surely both distinctive of us and its proper exercise important for our flourishing. It would seem fitting that our final good involve the speculative intellect. To put the point in a more contemporary idiom, there is a pull towards thinking that in our final state we not only know God but also possess knowledge-that. At this point an aspect of the final human good which is clearly present in scripture and Christian art provides a possible way forward, which can only be gestured towards here. Our salvation is collective. The Christian hope is not for an individual eternity spent alone with God, but rather for what the book of Revelation pictures as ‘a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages’39 and Bernard describes as ‘social joys.’40 If we are to share together with our fellow redeemed human beings in the vision of God’s glory, then we not only know God but can together share our experience, if not saying ‘this is what it is that I am experiencing’ (which apophaticism sits uncomfortably with), still saying ‘this is how it is for me’ and ‘I am, with  Revelation 7:9.  Thus Neale’s (accurate) translation of sociala gaudia from De Contemptu Mundi in Jerusalem the Golden. Recent revisions of hymnals have often replaced ‘what social joys are there’ with ‘what joys await us there’, a case study in playing down the social content of Christianity. 39 40

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you, sharing the vision of God’, in this way bringing the Beatific Vision to conscious, reflective, awareness. There could be, in this way, an involvement of our cognitive capacities (which are intrinsically social) in our final state. When all is said and done, these matters must remain speculative, on pain of both undermining the apophaticism which it has been the purpose of this book to defend and of failing to recognise the partial nature of our knowledge of our final destination whilst still in this life. We have come from God, and we are called back to God. We encounter this call as sheer love, as opposed to the lack of fulfilment, the injustice and the loss of present experience. But the one who makes the call is hidden from us, not by distance or indifference, but because the fullness and sublime simplicity of his life escapes any concept we could form, “tis only the splendour of light hideth thee’.

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Index1

A

B

Analogy the problem of the perfections, 113 Radical Orthodoxy on, 112 Analytic theology, xvi–xx, 13n37, 15, 143 Aquinas, xiv, xxi, xxii, 2, 3, 3n6, 5, 7n18, 9–11, 9n24, 12n33, 21, 23, 24n18, 31, 44, 46, 52n39, 53, 71, 73, 74n12, 79, 80, 83, 85, 90–93, 90n2, 95–97, 99, 101, 106–108, 110, 111, 113, 115–117, 130n7, 139, 153, 154n37, 156, 164n9, 167, 173–175 Augustine, 7, 7n18, 16, 20n3, 38, 80, 86, 90, 154n37, 158, 170

Baber, Harriet, 154 Barth, Karl, xix, 3, 154 Beatific Vision, 161–176 C

Category mistakes, 22, 33, 73, 98, 100–106, 112, 119 D

Davies, Brian, xviii, 9n24, 71, 71n3, 74n12, 92n7, 93, 127 Devoted talk, xxiv, 112, 112n10, 118–124 locally fictional religious language, 120

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Hewitt, Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49602-9

189

190 Index

Divine hiddenness, 15–16 Divine personhood, 16, 53, 120, 121, 127–129, 129n5, 131–135, 137–140, 142n33 Divine simplicity, 23, 44, 76, 90–97, 118 Dummett, Michael, xvii, xviiin14, xviiin16, 37n1, 58, 66, 69, 75, 76n17, 82, 84, 85, 103n37, 132n12 E

Eckhart, Meister, 11, 12, 12n33, 17, 18

K

Kerr, Fergus, 53n42, 72n5 Kilby, Karen, 151, 152, 155, 157 Kingdom of God, 17, 147, 163n7, 167, 168 L

Lebens, Samuel, 22, 38, 45–53 Linguistic priority, xvii, xviiin14, 117, 118, 133–135 Logical space, 14, 89, 93, 100–103, 105, 132, 138, 148–151, 166, 170, 172 M

F

Fictionalism, 58n9, 110n3, 120, 121, 121n31 Frege, Gottlob, xvii, 4, 8n20, 66, 95, 96, 111 G

Grammatical thomism, xxi, 53, 53n42, 71–87 I

Incarnation, xxiv, 14n41, 62, 72n4, 121n30, 129, 143–159, 164 Ineffability, 7, 7n18, 13–15, 38, 40, 50, 52 Islam, 90

Magidor, Of ra, 103 view of category mistakes, 105, 106 Maimonides, 46, 47 Marx, Karl, 129n5, 161–164, 162n3, 163n6, 172 McCabe, Herbert, xviii, xxii, 14n41, 53n40, 53n42, 71n2, 74–76, 82, 85, 86n45, 89, 101, 107, 113, 115, 116, 122, 146n13, 149, 150, 164–166, 164n9, 172n31 Metaphor, xiv, xxiv, 49, 76, 98, 110–112, 112n9, 119, 123 Miracles, 169–171 Mulhall, Stephen, 53n42, 74, 94, 164n9 Murphy, Francesca, 83, 85, 86

 Index  P

Plantinga, Alvin, xvii, xxiii, 21–28, 22n12, 38, 40, 45–47, 46n24, 82, 93, 99 Providence, 167–172 Pseudo-Dionysius, xiii, xiv, 8, 9, 15, 17, 20, 89, 151, 174 R

Rahner, Karl, xix, xx, 3n8, 128, 146n13, 147, 148n20, 154 Referentialism, xxiv, 55–70, 72, 81, 94, 105, 106, 119, 134 S

Schillebeeckx, Edward, xv, 173 Semantic externalism, 61, 134 Stump, Eleonore, xvii, xx, 9, 9n24, 10, 90n2, 97 T

Thomism, xxi–xxii, 77, 117 Ticciati, Susannah, 21n6, 80–82, 80n26, 80n27, 81n31, 113, 116n22, 140

191

Trinity one-self theories, 154, 156 three-self theories, 154–156 Truthmakers, 94n14 V

van Inwagen, Peter, xvii, 94n15, 169n21 W

Williamson, Timothy, 66, 66n27, 83, 84 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xvii–xix, 3–5, 5n12, 5n13, 13n37, 16n44, 20n5, 34n40, 37, 48–50, 48n30, 50n35, 53–56, 53n42, 57n3, 64–66, 67n28, 69, 71, 72n5, 74, 75, 133, 134, 141 philosophical investigations, 55–57, 134 resolute interpretations, 48n30 Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus (TLP), 3–5, 4n10, 5n12, 5n13, 48–50, 48n29, 48n30, 56, 66