Turner on St. Thomas and the Excessiveness of the Divine Plenitude
In a sub-section entitled, “Thomas and ‘onto-theology’”, of chapter nine of Denys Turner’s book, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, Turner discusses possible ways that Thomas’ acceptance of a famous dictum by the Pseudo-Denys might be taken, and whether any of the interpretations can avoid falling into the error of onto-theology. According to the Denys, “There is no kind of thing that God is.” One way of interpreting this statement is that God’s existence is unspecified. This would then suggest that the name “God” means existence in general, that is, existence of no particular kind. As Turner explains, this reading might then be taken in two possible ways. The first way would land one in pantheism, as the name “God” would simply name the “overarching category of ‘being’ of which all other beings other than God are instances” (p. 187). In this picture, it follows that creatures are just instances of God; hence, onto-theology is unavoidable. The second possibility would likewise be guilty of onto-theology, as here both God and creatures are instantiations of being in general. Thomas, however, rejects these options and insists both that God is ipsum esse subsistens (and hence, not “any kind of thing”) and that this does not mean that the name “God” points us to an “empty category.” Rather, as Turner puts it,
[t]hat we cannot form any ‘concept’ of God is due not to the divine vacuousness, but, on the contrary, to the excessiveness of the divine plenitude. That excessiveness eludes our language because we could not comprehend it except in a surplus description which utterly defeats our powers of unification under any conception, an excessiveness which is exactly captured in the full text of the Dionysian formula, ‘There is no kind of thing which God is, and there is no kind of thing which God is not.’ If ever there were a compendious statement of the relationship between the apophatic and the cataphatic in the pseudo-Deny’s writing, this is it: for it says that God is beyond our comprehension not because we cannot say anything about God, but because we are compelled to say too much. In short, for the pseudo-Denys, and for Thomas following him, the ‘apophatic’ consists in the excessus of the ‘cataphatic’ (pp. 187-188).
3 Responses so far
1:52 pm
There are two types of apophaticism. One type is linked to the limitation of created being. God is Incomprehensible to humans, who as creatures cannot comprehend the Infiniteness of His Being, which is in Itself Most-Knowable (i.e., the excessiveness of the divine plenitude). The other type is that which affirms that the absolute transcendence of God is a property of the Divine Being; i.e., God is in Himself Unknowable. The latter type is the determining principle of Palamite Theology. Thus, it is not simply a negative theology, an ascent of the intelligence towards God by negation, rather “Dieu n’est pas seulmente au-dessus de la connaissance, mais au-dessus de l’inconnaissance” (Triadi, I, 3, 4; ed. Meyendorff, 114-115). Hence, if God is Incomprehensible in se, how can we know Him and experience Him? Here Palamas distinguishes God in se, Unknowable in His Nature (kat auton) and God in His Energies (peri auton or en energeisas), Who can be known by experience. On account of his concept of apophaticism, Palamas recognises the existence of an antinomy in our attempt to approach God – an Unknowability and a Knowability. He attempts to overcome this cognitive antimony by distinguishing between abstract-intellective knowledge of God and experience of God. For Palamas spiritual experience is contrasted to intellective knowledge as reality to a mere idea. Sounds nice, sounds mystical, but really undermines commonsense by going against the priniciple of identity: a Knowable God cannot at one and the same time be an Unknowable God. Maybe that is why Thomists have had a hard time with Palamas’s doctrine. As Chesterton once wrote: “St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions…” In the end, eggs are eggs!!!
12:45 pm
Hi Fr. Gregory,
Your distinctions are very helpful. Would a Palamite say that since God is incomprehensible in se (and not merely to us), he is incomprehensible to himself?
Best wishes,
Cynthia
3:28 pm
First of all, Palamites, like good Thomists, disagree amongst themselves. For example, as regards the essence/energy distinction in God, one of the most strenuous advocates of the reality of the distinction is Vladimir Lossky, who claims it is no abstraction. Against this large group of interpreters of Palamas stands a smaller group who are less sure Gregory intends the distinction to be real but take it rather to be conceptual or nominal [which is, in reality, to say nothing!]. Meyendorff, on the one hand, asserts: “The triple distinction — essence, hypostasis, energy — is not a division of God’s being; it reflects the mysterious life of the ‘One-who-is’—transcendent, tri-personal, and present to His creation.” Similarly, he writes; “[Byzantine theology crystallised in Palamism] affirms in God a real distinction between the Persons and the common ‘essence,’ just as it maintains that the same God is both transcendent (in the ‘essence’) and immanent (in the ‘energies’).” Note that Meyendorff does not here claim there is a real distinction between the essence and the energies, as he does between the persons and the common essence [whatever that is?].
Now to address your question: is God Incomprehensible to Himself? In short, we will never know. It simply transcends us.
Palamas, in the Triads, makes the point regarding transcendence both in the distinction between the essence and creation and in the distinction between the essence and energies. “God is entirely present in each of the divine energies… although, it is clear that he transcends all of them,” (III.2.7); more strongly, he maintains: “[The essence of God] is not only transcendent to any energy whatsoever, but… it transcends them ‘to an infinite degree and an infinite number of times’ (III.2.8). However, what these texts from the Triads point to is not so much the desire to emphasize the transcendence of the essence in relation to the energies for its own sake as to use that comparison as a way of making the strongest possible case for the transcendence of divine essence over everything: “The essence of God, surpassing every name, also surpasses the energy” (III.2.10), “God is not only above all created things, but is even beyond Godhead” (II.3.8) and more strongly still: “If God does not possess energies without beginning . . . how would he be anterior and superior to that which is without beginning?” (III.3.8). God, then, is the One who transcends all and is separated from all (I.3.18).
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