APOPHATIC THEOLOGY SUSANNAH TICCIATI
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- Опубликовано: 13 окт 2024
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Wow! I really lack the words to express how much I appreciate your explanation, but I guess that's the point. Your students are blessed indeed! Thank you so much for this!!!
Just fantastic. Excellent analysis! thank you so much. -Pastor Kent Simmons
While I admire the mental gymnastics here, I wonder why it is that we think we can use mere human reason to understand an entity which is not even created, unlike everything else in the universe we know about, and is infinitely more intelligent that we are, as inspection of any aspect of the universe will show. Why not just accept that we do not and cannot know God?
Because while we cannot know the essence of God, we can know Him Through His energies, because we do not base our view of God on pure philosophical reasoning we based in on revelation.
An alternative version of this video could just be this lady mimicking Cratylus' heavenward finger.
I teach theology online and appreciated this much. thanks.
“There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia.
I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blossom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. ...
Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can't take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower...
I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism_, less well defined: an open hearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assisi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant moments: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God's arms.
When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, 'Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.' That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism.
But, I'm sorry, I'm going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.”
― Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
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100% agree. ALL words about god are useless. Nothing more need be said. So, now we turn to ways of directly experiencing God and here the Eastern paths are way ahead of Western methods.
@ACkrion-b3ptp4 When you cannot distinguish between the finger and the object it points to, you will always see contradiction.
To say that creatio ex nihilo isn't a biblical doctrine is not entirely true. Yes, you won't find it in the so-called 'Protestant' old testament, but you do find it in 2. Maccabees 7:28: "I beseech you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed. Thus also mankind comes into being." And St. Paul at least hints at it, in Romans 4:17, when he says that God "calls into existence the things that do not exist."
I realize no one's commented on this video in a while. Just now getting to St. John's timeline myself. But, wondering, if a state of apophasis is beyond words...is it also true to say it is beyond thought as well?
Charles Bivens Off the top of my head: If we can only speak about what we can think and vice-versa, then it would be logical to say that what is beyond speech is also beyond thought. My hunch is that this beyond-thought beyond-speech “being” is the goal-free “goal” of contemplative monks and nuns in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions as well as in other belief systems and practices such as certain schools of Buddhism. So you get one of the best-known Buddhist sayings: If you meet the Buddha on the path of contemplation, kill him! Or the famous Zen koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping? Like the few other koans I know, the aim of this one would be to break through the boundaries of human ways of thinking, though real practitioners of contemplation would probably object to the word “aim”! 🤪
God's nature is beyond mortal thought. It isn't impossible for the human mind to grasp the fullness of His magnificence, so, yes, that makes any true conception of Him ineffable, inenarrable. The best that we can hope to do is to try to describe some of His aspects.
Yes apophaticism relies on non-discursive thought as against discursive thought - “beyond” can be an artificial or irrational metaphor and there may be better ways to understand this
Excellent work. Thank you.
Why wasn't this presented to me in church?
Because at best, most churches would not understand, nor agree with it - at worse it makes them redundant.
It would've been if you were Eastern Orthodox. The west is uncomfortable with the concept of Divine Mystery and seeks to explain God when they should seek to experience Him.
It doesn't seem as if language fails as we couldn't have known beforehand if it was up to the task of elucidating God. So, the failure is one of desire. If we curb our desire, then language is perfectly adequate. Maybe you want to ask, "Whence the desire?" Ok, but shouldn't the starting point be temporal and biological as opposed to eternal and immaterial?
I think there is a misunderstanding here. Language can express an idea, However the difficulty arises when people confuse what the language hints at vs what the thing is.
For example, language can hint at the flavour of a unknown fruit - by trying to compare it to other flavours, or to abstract concepts. However, language does not tell us what the experience of that fruit will be. Only exprience can tell us that.
Language is fine when all it is doing is to suggest the idea of a God. The problem is, what does that mean?
In Zen Buddhism there is an expression, 'Do not confuse the moon for the finger that points at it.' This sums up the language problem perfectly.
Wow...It seems to me that if this is truest speech we can have about God, we should just stop talking about Him altogether.
But if we stop talking about God we will never know what we don't know about God.
That's why we should know Him in the Mysteries. The same reason Aquinas stopped writing. (He was supposed to write a follow-up to Summa but had a mystical experience in Church and realized he couldn't write the requested book, didn't have the words.)
Your voice is easy on the ears.
Great summarization on the subject.
Non-dual. God is simply All (which includes Nothing). Or more succinctly, I Am.
It’s impossible to talk meaningfully about something that is by definition beyond language
Fantastic
It is called catharsis and it works... As a matter of fact, the method stands on its own two feet, strongly, as we speak.
I don't understand what you are suggesting. What is the connection between catharsis and apophatic philosophy?
@@SolveEtCoagula93 It works and it strongly stands on its feet.
@@HansLiu23 Well done - you can copy words already written. Good explanation.
@@SolveEtCoagula93 It's called Catharsis
@@HansLiu23 With respect, neither you, nor in fact @cyberpunkworld, are making any sense.
Catharsis is, essentially, the release of a repressed emotion. Apophatic Theology is the understanding of God via a process of negation. What I am asking is what have these two ideas got to do with each other? What links to the two entirely different concepts?
There is no logical connection between them and, whilst they may occur together, there is no necessity for them to do so.
All you have done so far is to repeat words written by @cyberpunkworld.
So, can you supply meaning to the connection between these two concepts, or not?
Taking your point, yet it is called the “via negativa”
Enjoyed this talk very much thank you.
Great! Yet, via negativa is experienced by mystics, not by preachers.
I think it is funny that when she discusses the Pseudo-Dionysius they show a picture of a saint with a halo. He was a faker, plain and simple. That he had some interesting ideas does not contradict that basic fact, which does not get emphasized here. So it seems a tad unrealistic, ironically when talking about ultimate things.
It doesn’t really matter who the author is, because what’s more important is that the Church recognized his writings as Orthodox, authoritative, and beneficial.
He wasn't a fake, others mistook his identity. They should have called him Dionysius the Later (or the New). He is a saint in the Orthodox church and there is no confusion about him.
@@sdnlawrence5640 Critical scholarship clearly shows that this "Dionysius" meant his writings as a deception; that is, to be something they in fact were not. You are free to call this saintly, but that begs several questions in itself about your notion of saintliness. Scholarship has also pointed out that one of the chief purposes the corpus was written was to bolster a more hierarchical view of the heavens, since it was not found in Scripture. As has been pointed out trenchantly by one scholar this de-emphasized the centrality of Christ as Mediator, replaced it with a larger hierarchy. The apophatic qualities of the Corpus remain interesting, but there is zero doubt that it was principally about deception.
@@diegobarragan4904 Deception has often been taken as beneficial in the history of Christianity, alas.
It’s not that all language fails there is deceptive language in every language and this is not the language of the Lord. Think of a naturally created thing or attribute. then think of a word that describes that thing with no negative connotations, that is the correct way of reasoning. Words with only negative connotations or meanings that have the opposite of the lords language is language used to deceive. holy🤚wholly✋Holy for example
Apophatic theology's philosophical ancestor is probably the Upanishad (see Swami Sarvapriyananda and Deepak Chopra) which was adopted and heightened by Buddhism's on Nothingness, hence if Pilate were to ask "What is Truth?"-- Buddha would answer, "The Truth cannot be said" and like Jesus, remain silent. 😊 Considering the Indo-European roots of most western languages, so much theological thinking along with the Sanskrit vocabulary was borrowed from India.
Jesus did not "remain silent." He offered a Via Positiva.
Very true!
1:30 bookmark
Is apophatic theology just deconstruction?
I think it's certainly part of the package, yes.
its probably better to think of it the other way around; is deconstruction just... secularized apophatic theology?
mutiepie Derrida himself has a few essays trying to distance himself and deconstruction from apophaticism and negative theology, though plenty of people have written about the relationship between the two
No.
Well if you get into it, it definitely will deconstruct a lot of fallacies, out right b.s.
They all need to give up the word God.
1 kings 8 1-12.
What a pointless idea