Per Caritatem

 

[Part I]

Turner acknowledges that surface level analyses of both the stylistic and temperamental contrasts between St. Thomas and Eckhart cannot be denied.  For example, it is certainly the case that Thomas’s theological discourses emphasize clarity,[1] understatement and sobriety in contrast with Eckhart’s “hyperactively paradoxical extravagance.”  Likewise, one might rightly conclude that these stylistic differences are related to temperamental differences between the two and   manifest themselves in, as it were, Thomas’s confidence in theological language given its subalteration to apophaticism, and the acknowledgment that our theological language always fails,[2] in contrast to Eckhart’s more “anxious” view of language.

One reason for these great differences in theological temperament and style is that Eckhart “wants to constrain all the paradoxical tensions of the theological project into each and every theological speech-act” (p. 103).  In other words, Eckhart wants the material rhetorical aspect of his language to match up with its formal significance.  Thus, “he must bend and twist and stretch theological language, because he wants theology as language ‘poetically’ to do what it says, and so, as it were, to speak its own failure as speech” (p. 104). 

Turner then addresses the ways that some postmodern thinkers have tried to employ Eckhart for various projects of deconstruction and claims that Eckhart would have had “little sympathy with the anti-metaphysical implications” of endeavors of this sort.  According to Turner, to attempt to remove Eckhart’s apophaticism from its metaphysical underpinnings would be to reduce his theology to “mere rhetoric.”   In spite of all the stylistic and temperamental differences, Turner believes that Eckhart’s theological purpose is in no way at odds with St. Thomas’s.  For both Thomas and Eckhart,

all theology must begin in, be mediated by, and end in the darkness of unknowing; and if, that being so, all creation in some way speaks God as irreducibly ‘other’ than it, why should not our language itself, being the natural expression of human rationality in its created materiality, speak God as unutterably other, not only in what we say in it, but also in the manner in which we say it, in its rhetorical forms themselves? [...] Thomas says:  all theological language fails.  Eckhart’s rhetoric gets theological language itself to fail, so that its failure says the same.  Thomas says:  all talk about God breaks down.  Eckhart gets the breakdown of language to say the same:  the rhetoric says what he and Thomas both say in it.  The material voice of the rhetoric speaks theologically at one with the formal significance which it utters” (pp. 105-106). 

Thus, in Eckhart’s theological discourse we find a strong emphasis on the materiality of language itself.  God is, as it were, found (and not found) in the materiality of the “foregrounded signifier.”  Moreover, since Eckhart’s language does what it signifies, it manifests something of a sacramental character.  For Eckhart, “reason, language, ‘at the end of its tether’ has the same shape it has for Thomas, the form of an openness to an unknowable otherness.  Thus does Eckhart’s rhetoric say for itself that which cannot be said in it” (p. 106). 

Notes

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[1] Turner’s description of Thomas’ discourse is helpful, viz., “Thomas is famous for his lucidity; as it were, the materiality of his theological signifiers disappears entirely into what is signified by them, and there is, in Thomas, an almost ruthless literary self-abnegation, a refusal of eloquence:  the language is made to absent itself in any role other than that of signifying.  Hence, for the most part, Thomas’ theology aims for a language of pure transparency; it has the transparency of the language of physics, or of any strictly technical discourse” (p. 102). [2] By Thomas’s “confidence” in theological language, Turner has in mind “a trust that our ordinary ways of talking about creation are fundamentally in order as ways of talking about God, needing only to be subordinated to a governing apophaticism, expressed as a second-order epistemological principle:  that all theological affirmation is both necessary and deficient.  We must say of God anything true of what he has created, because that is all there is to hand with which to say anything about God, because there is no special ‘hyperessential’ meaning available to the theologian, and because we therefore know that whatever we say is in any case inadequate.  Once we know that everything we say about God fails anyway, we can freely indulge the materiality of those metaphors, the carnality of that imagery, and calmly exploit all those possibilities of formal inference and logic, which appear to unnerve the anxious Eckhart” (pp. 102-103). 

 

In chapter 5, “Reason and Rhetoric,” of his book, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, Turner engages in a fascinating discussion of Meister Eckhart’s theological rhetoric.  By the terms “rhetoric” and “rhetorical,” Turner has in mind, not some sophistic mode of communication, nor a derogatory label, but rather all the ways in which human speech-acts communicate qua performed in distinction from what is communicated merely by the words themselves regardless of how they are performed/uttered.  Summarizing his previous, more detailed discussion of “uttering performances,”[1] Turner writes, “[a]ctions ‘speak’, as gestures do.  Verbal utterances are actions too, and so ‘utter’ as all actions speak, and not just as words uttered.  Therefore, within verbal utterances we may distinguish between what is said in saying the words, and the meaning which the action of saying them bears” (p. 98).   To illustrate, Turner gives the example of Judas’ kiss-a kiss, which communicates irony because in the action of greeting Jesus with a kiss, Judas’ is actually betraying Jesus.  We are able to grasp two meanings in the one act of kissing because we perceive a distinction to be made between what is said by the action or utterance, and what is communicated in its being acted out or uttered.  This distinction is also seen in our willfully refraining from acting or uttering.  For example, consider what is communicated by silence when one spouse decides to engage the other in what is commonly called silent treatment.   As Turner explains, “these two ways in which a communicative act can ‘mean’ may stand in many different kinds of relationship with one another” (p. 98).  In the case of Judas, we have a relationship of contradictory meanings.  However, a complementary relationship may also exist, as in the case of a kiss between a bride and groom. 

With these material and formal distinctions of communicative meanings in mind, Turner embarks on his discussion of the differences in rhetorical “feel” between Eckhart and St. Thomas.  Though both men were Dominicans, educated in the same priory and perhaps both studied under Albert the Great, the Eckhart and Aquinas manifest stark, and one could even say, polar opposite rhetorical strategies.  According to Turner, these strategies are not simply due to differences in temperament and use of stylistic imagery, but instead flow from a more fundamental difference of “theological strategy.”[2]  

Oliver Davies, who is well-known for his work on Meister Eckhart, describes Eckhart’s theology as a kind of “poetic metaphysics,” in which there is a “foregrounding of the language itself, of the signifier.”[3]  To this description, Turner adds that Eckhart’s poetic theological discourse is itself rhetorically performative or exhibits, as it were, “a quasi-sacramental character” (p. 100).  That is, Eckhart’s language not only says something, but “it is intended to do something by means of saying,” which is, as Turner mentions in an earlier chapter, according to the classical medieval account, the nature of a sacrament-”a sacred sign which effects what it signifies” (p. 100).  With regard to Eckhart, it is commonly claimed that his abundant use of negative imagery and language is indicative to his strand of apophaticism. Turner, however, regards this surfeit of negative imagery as merely incidental because it doesn’t get to the heart of what apophaticism truly is.  Negative metaphors, after all, are still metaphors and hence still language;  “and if the ‘apophatic’ is to be understood as that which surpasses all language, then, as the pseudo-Denys says, it lies beyond both ‘affirmation’ and ‘denial’” (p. 101). In other words, the apophatic is not a particular kind of language, but is the failure of language.  Hence, the extreme negativity that marks Eckhart’s theological discourse

is not just something said by means of emphatically negative vocabularies, for it consists in his sense of the failure of all language as such, even of negative language.  Nonetheless, Eckhart the preacher wants theological language in some way to participate, as one might put it, in the event of its own failure.  Negativity, therefore, is not just a stylistic or decoratively metaphoric emphasis of Eckhart’s theology; it is a living, organizing, feature of the language itself and is intrinsic to its compositional style as theological writing (p. 101).

In one sense then, it is a language, but this language simultaneously says and unsays.  As Turner so aptly put it, Eckhart,

‘foregrounds’ the signifier only immediately to disrupt its signification, block it, divert it, postpone it.  Thereby the language performs rhetorically what it says technically:  the performance utters what the utterance performs.  And this rhetorical device, as it were of forcing the sensuous, material sign the character of its own self-subversion as signifier, is what accounts for that most characteristic feature of Eckhart’s language:  its rhetorical self-consciousness, its strained and strenuous, hyperactively paradoxical extravagance-its apophasis by excess.  The language, naturally, bursts at the seams under the pressure of the excessive forces it is being made to contain, the language as body bursts open under the pressure of it overloaded weight of significance
(p. 102). 

 Notes

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[1] Cf. chapter 3, pp. 68ff. 

[2] Turner notes that from the late thirteenth century onward, we find sharp turn towards “a more conscious cultivation of a distinctive theological rhetoric,” and that it is possible that these new rhetorical techniques in theology were connected with “the emergence of vernacularity as a major theological medium” (p. 99, 100).

 [3] Meister Eckhart:  Mystical Theologian, London:  SPCK, 1991, p. 180, as quoted in Turner, p. 100.