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On Not Knowing Too Much About God
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2010
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Christianity stands out among the three great Abrahamic religions in its willingness to make extremely precise dogmatic statements about God. The Christians who make these statements have generally regarded them as universally and absolutely true, since they are divinely revealed, or divinely guaranteed interpretations of revealed texts. Of course from the beginning there has not been universal agreement (to put it mildly) among Christians about what statements should be so regarded and how they should be worded: and the seriousness with which this need for dogmatic precision has been taken is shown by the way in which the inevitable disputes did not only involve theologians but the general body of Christians, and have led to divisions of churches, long continuing and flourishing mutual hatreds, and an overwhelming amount of theoretical and, where opportunity offered (i.e. where a Church party could get a secular power on its side), practical intolerance. Two areas of Church history which seem to me to provide particularly clear evidence of the incompatible verbal precisions demanded in dogmatic statements and the serious consequences of these demands are the Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries and the Filioque dispute between East and West (though there is plenty of choice, and others may have other preferences). In both of these, theologians with a real and deep sense of the mystery of God often seem to an outside observer, in spite of their passionate assertions that this is not at all what they are doing and the rhetorical reverence of their language, to be arguing as if the God-Man or the Trinity were small finite objects which they had pinned down firmly in their theological laboratories and were examining under the microscope.
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1 A grim comment on this, which became more and more manifestly true as the Christian centuries went on, was made very early in the period of Christian dominance by a fair-minded non-Christian observer, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus. Speaking of the Emperor Julian's advice to Christians of all parties (which he knew very well would not be taken) to live at peace with each other, observing their own beliefs freely, he says ‘Julian knew from experience that no wild beasts are such enemies of humanity as most Christians are deadly dangerous (ferales) to each other’ (Ammianus XXII, 5.4).
2 I prefer to use ‘conversation’, ‘conversational’ rather than the more technical and precise-sounding ‘dialectic’, ‘dialectical’ because ‘dialectic’, both in ancient and modern times, has had so many meanings, some of which in the present context would be unduly restrictive or misleading.
3 Letter VII, 3448, 4–9, ‘But by rubbing each of them strenuously against each other, names and definitions and sights and perceptions, testing them out in kindly discussions by the use of questions and answers without jealous illwill, understanding and intelligence of each reality flashes out, at the highest intensity humanly possible’ (trans. A.H.A.).
4 Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica XI, l–2; XV, 4–9; 12F: Atticus, Fragments, ed. Places, E. Des (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1977).Google Scholar
5 On philosophy, rhetoric and education in antiquity see Hadot, I., Arts Liberaux et Philosophic dans la Pensée Antique (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1984).Google Scholar
6 Cf. Hillman, James, ‘On Paranoia’, Eranos 54 (1985; Frankfurt: Insel, 1987), 269–324.Google Scholar
7 The works of E. P. Meijering, notably his books on Harnack, Von, Theologische Urteile uber die Dogmengeschichte (Leiden: Brill, 1978)Google Scholar, and Die Hellenisierung des Christentums im Urteil Adolf Von Harnacks (Amsterdam, London and New York: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1985)Google Scholar, are to be recommended to those unfamiliar with this predominantly Lutheran-inspired controversy. I agree generally with his conclusions.
8 Hadot, P., Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique, 2nd edn, revised and extended (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987).Google Scholar I. Hadot, ‘The Spiritual Guide’, in Armstrong, A. H. (ed.), Classical Mediterranean Spirituality, Vol. 15 of World Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 1985), 436–459.Google Scholar Cf. Armstrong, A. H., Expectations of Immortality in Late Antiquity (Milwaukee: Marquette University, 1987), 22–23.Google Scholar
9 Armstrong, A. H., ‘The Hidden and the Open in Hellenic Thought’, Eranos 54 (1985), 96–99.Google Scholar
10 A. Wallis, ‘The Spiritual Importance of Not Knowing’, in Classical Mediterranean Spirituality (above n. 8), 465. I have not yet been able to see Wallis's ‘Scepticism and Neoplatonism’, to be published in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Romischen Welt (Anrw), W. Haase and H. Temporini (eds), II, 36.2. Runia, David T., ‘Naming and Knowing: Themes in Philonic Theology with special reference to the.De mutatione nominum’, in Broek, R. van den, Baarda, T. and Mansfeld, J. (eds), Knowledge of God in the Graeco-Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 69–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has a very interesting discussion (iv, 82–89) of Philo's theological use of the rhetorical term katachresis, the ‘abusive’ or ‘improper’ use of language, in which he cites a somewhat analogous use of the word in Sextus Empiricus (Outlines of Pyrrhonism I, 207). Though the word katachresis is rare in philosophical authors of the first three centuries CE (as Runia notes), and nobody else exploits it theologically as Philo does, the discussion does suggest at least the possibility that there may be some sceptical influence detectable in Plotinus's frequently expressed conviction that all our ways of speaking about the One are improper (particularly evident in VI, 8 (39), 13–18, where he uses the most strongly positive language to be found anywhere in the Enneads: cf. also, for the way in which we can use language about the One, VI, 9 (9), 4, 11–14).
11 Instead of the rather silly and in intention derogatory word ‘pagan’, I prefer to use in this context ‘Hellene’, ‘Hellenic’ which were used both by the philosophers and their Christian opponents during the period of conflict between Christianity and the old religion when referring to the adherents of the latter and their beliefs and practices.
12 The adverb Mustikōs is used once in the Enneads (III, 6 (25), 19, 26), referring not to anything like ‘mystical union’ but to the secret symbolism of ordinary Greek mystery-rites: the adjective Mustikos and the substantive Mustēs do not occur at all. Ekstasis may be used once (VI, 9 (9), 11, 23) in the sense of ‘being out of oneself’ in speaking of union with the One: but here there is a good deal to be said for an emendation of Theiler's which would eliminate the word (see my note ad. loc. in the Loeb Plotinus).
13 ‘… all men are naturally and spontaneously moved to speak of the god who is in each one of us as one and the same. And if someone did not ask them how this is and want to examine their opinion rationally, this is what they would assume, and with this active and actual in their thinking they would come to rest in this way, somehow supporting themselves on this one and the same, and they would not wish to be cut away from this unity’ (VI, 5 (23), 1, 2–8; trans. A. H. Armstrong). It is worth reflecting on the fact that Plotinus regards this as commonplace and generally acceptable. It does something to illustrate the closeness in some ways of Neoplatonic thought to that of India, and the change made by centuries of Christianity in the kind of religious statements we regard as obvious and commonplace, whether we believe them or not.
14 Iamblichus in the fourth century and Damascius and Simplicius in the sixth separated the absolutely transcendent Ineffable from the One/Good. But Proclus (fifth century), the greatest and most precise systematizer among the Hellenic Neoplatonists, does not find this necessary: and Plotinus, I believe, would have thought that it showed an insufficient understanding of the odd, flexible, paradoxical, detached use of language which becomes necessary at this level.
15 Cf. Midgley, Mary, ‘Sneer Tactics’, Guardian (Wednesday, 7 October 1977)Google Scholar: an excellent comment on negation by flippant dismissal.
16 There is a good account of the negation of negations at the end of the part of the Commentary on the Parmenides of Proclus which survives only in Latin: Parmenides, then, is imitating this and ends by doing away both with the negations and with the whole argument, because he wants to conclude the discourse about the One with the inexpressible. For the term of the progress towards it has to be a halt; of the upward movement, rest; of the arguments that it is inexpressible and of all knowledge, unification…. For by means of a negation Parmenides has removed all negations. With silence he concludes the contemplation of the One (Plato Latinus III, trans. Anscombe, and Labowsky, (London: Warburg Institute, 1953), 76–77).Google Scholar
17 Cf. Armstrong, A. H., ‘Pagan and Christian Traditionalism in the First Three Centuries A.D.’, in Studia Patristica XV, No. 1, Livingstone, E. A. (ed.) (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1984), 414–431.Google Scholar
18 Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 10, 33–37. On the significance of this story in the context of what we are told in the Life about the position of Amelius in the group see Armstrong, A. H., ‘Iamblichus and Egypt’, Les Etudes Philosophiques 2–3 (1987) 182–183 and 188.Google Scholar
19 Enneads II, 9 (33), Against the Gnostics, 9: the key sentence is 1.35–39. ‘It is not contracting the divine into one but showing it in that multiplicity in which God himself has shown it, which is proper to those who know the power of God, inasmuch as, abiding who he is, he makes many gods, all depending upon himself and existing through him and from him’ (trans. A.H.A.). I have tried to bring out the full significance of this in ‘Plotinus and Christianity’, to be published in a volume of essays in honour of Edouard des Places.
20 The precise study of ancient Scepticisms from Pyrrho to Aenesidemus has now been made very much easier by the admirable source-book recently produced by Long, A. A. and Sedley, D. N., The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press, 1987).Google Scholar Their documentation and discussion of the varieties of Scepticism is particularly full, exact and illuminating.
21 Cf. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism II, 2. ‘In the way of ordinary life we affirm undogmatically that the gods exist and we give them honour and affirm that they exercise providence but against the headlong rashness of the dogmatists we have this to say’: … there follows a very full statement of the reasons which make it impossible to be certain that anything is the case about the gods.
22 There is a good statement of the difference indicated here, of course from the Neo-Pyrrhonian point of view, in Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism I, 228–231.
23 Symmachus, Relatio III, 10; Themistius, Oration 5, and the summaries of his lost speech on tolerance before the Emperor Valens in the church historians (Socrates IV, 32, and Sozomen VI, 6–7): cf. Chadwick, Henry, ‘Gewissen’, Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum X (1978), viii d, col. 1101–1102Google Scholar; Armstrong, A. H., ‘The Way and the Ways’, Vigiliae Christianae 33 (1984), 8–11.Google Scholar
24 Beierwaltes, W., ‘Eriugena und Cusanus’, in Eriugena Redivivus (Heidelberg: O. Winter, 1987), 328–338.Google Scholar
25 R. Cudworth, True Intellectual System of the Universe, I.4.36, 558. Cudworth was consciously opposed to Scepticism and to the tolerant pluralism of the fourth-century Hellenes: cf. I.4.26, 434–433 and 446–447. The weakening of dogmatic absolutism, especially among the clergy, had not gone very far in his time. There is, however, much more positive attitude to Scepticism in Benjamin Whichcote's Select Notions (Aphorisms) 1.7.
26 Cf. Wiley, Margaret L., The Subtle Knot (London: Unwin, 1952Google Scholar; reprinted New York: Greenwood Press, 1968); Creative Sceptics (London: Unwin, 1966).Google Scholar
27 I have attempted to suggest and illustrate some of them in a contribution, ‘Apophatic-Kataphatic Tensions in Religious Thought from the Third to the Sixth Centuries A.D.’, to a volume of essays to be published in honour of John O'Meara.
28 Trouillard, J., ‘Valeur critique de la mystique Plotinienne’, Revue Philosophique de Louvain 59 (August 1961), 431–434.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Trouillard has influenced my personal understanding of the Via Negativa greatly; my memorial tribute to him is in ‘The Hidden and the Open in Hellenic Thought’, Eranos 54 (1987), 101–106.Google Scholar