Apophaticismn of essence and apophaticism of person (Christos Yannaras)

The ontological meaning which Greek patristic literature of the. Byzantine period gave to the term prosôpon ("person") became the occasion of an ontology radically different from that which the Western theological and philosophical tradition represents in the course of its historical development. The West was trapped in a polarized view of Being as either analogically absolute and ontic or else mystical. This came about as the inevitable consequence of the priority Westerners gave, even in the first Christian centuries, to the intellectual definition of essence over the historical and existential experience of personhood — in contrast to the Greek East, which always relied for its starting-point on the priority of person over essence. [26] The priority of the need to define essence within the context of the ontological question requires the objective definition of the existence of beings and an intellectualist (analogical-ontic) and etiological explanation of Being. The Scholastics established the threefold way ("via triplex') in the West of the analogical cognition of Being: the way of negation ("via negationis"), the way of eminence ("via eminentiae"), and the way of causality ("via causalitatis").[27] In contradictory but historical conjunction with its cataphatic-analogical determination of Being, the West was also preoccupied with the apophaticism of Being, with the impossibility of the human intellect to exhaust the truth of Being by means of definitions. Apophaticism in the West arose from the need to protect the mystery of the divine essence. That is to say, it is always an apophaticism of essence. It is characteristic that the two thinkers who did most to shape the positive-analogical approach to the knowledge of God, Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), at the same time proclaim the apophatic nature of this knowkdge, the essential unknowability of God, the inaccessibility of Being. [28] And we find following this line on the apophaticism of essence not only the leading Scholastics but also the great mystics of the Middle Ages — Peter Abelard (d. 1142), Albert the Great (d. 1280) and John Duns Scotus (d. 1308), as well as Meister Eckhart (d. 1327) and Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464). But it is impossible for the apophaticism of essence to confront the ontological problem as an existential problem, as a question about the mode by which whatever is is, about the "mode of existence." [29] The absolutizing of the existential fact by the Scholastics, with regard to God, who is defined as "pure act" ("actus purus" [in Greek katharê energeia tou hyparchein]), interprets the mode in which the essence is and this mode is to exist ("essentia est id cuius actus est esse").[30] But it does not touch upon the mode of existing (tropos tou hyparchein), and consequently it continues to limit the ontological problem to the field of abstract definitions. By contrast, Eastern theology had always rejected any polarization between the analogical-ontological and the mystical determinations of Being. The ontology of the Easterners was primarily existential because its basis and starting-point is the apophaticism of the person, not the apophaticism of essence. In the tradition of the Eastern Church there is no place for a theology, and even less for a mysticism, of the divine essence .... If one speaks of God it is always, for the Eastern Church, in the concrete: "the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob; the God of Jesus Christ." It is always the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. When, on the contrary, the common nature assumes the first place in our conception of trinitarian dogma the religious reality of God in Trinity is inevitably obscured in some measure and gives place to a certain philosophy of essence .... Indeed, in the doctrinal conditions peculiar to the West all properly theocentric speculation runs the risk of considering the nature before the persons and becoming a mysticism of "the divine abyss," as in the Gottheit of Meister Eckhart; of becoming an impersonal apophaticism of the divine nothingness prior to the Trinity. Thus by a paradoxical circuit we return through Christianity to the mysticism of the neo-platonists.[31] The distinction between the apophaticism of the person and the apophaticism of the essence cannot be fully accounted for as a theoretical difference. It represents and constitutes two diametrically opposed spiritual attitudes, two modes of life, in short, two different cultures. On the one side, life is based on truth as relation and as existential experience; truth is actualized as life's social dynamics and life is justified as the identification of being true with being in communion. On the other side, truth is identified with intellectual definitions; it is objectivized and subordinated to usefulness. And truth as usefulness objectivizes life itself; it comes to be translated into technological hype, into the tormenting and alienation of humanity. But the historical and cultural consequences arising from the differences between East and West in the realm of ontology must remain the subject for another book. [32] Here I simply draw attention to the brilliant formulation by Martin Heidegger (perhaps the last "essence mystic" in the West) of the quandary created by the priority of the apophaticism of essence. [33] Heidegger's approach showed clearly how the apophaticism of essence defines and respects the limits of thought, and consequently the limits of metaphysics or of the ineffable, but leaves the problem of ontic individuality on the borders of a possible nihilism, reveals Nothingness as an eventuality as equally possible as Being, and transposes the ontological question to the dilemma between being and Nothingness: "warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?" [34] With Heidegger the apophaticism of essence proves to be as much a possibility of ontological and theological nihilism as an ontic-intellectual definition of essence. --- 26. "Latin philosophy," says The. de Régnon, "first considers the nature in itself and then proceeds to the person; Greek philosophy considers the person and afterwards passes through it to find the nature. The Latins think of personhood as a mode of nature; the Greeks think of nature as the content of the person" (Etudes de theologie positive sir la Sainte Trinité 1:433, quoted in Vladimir Lossky, Teologie mystique de l'Egllse d 'Orient [Paris: Aubier, 19441,57; ET, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church [London: James Clarke, 19571,57-58). See also H.-M. Legrand, "Bulletin d'Ecclesiologie: Introduction aux Eglises d'Orient," Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Theologiques 56: 709, where, commenting on the Western scholastic structure of P. N. Trembelas's Dogmatics, he notes: "puis vient le traité de Dieu (livre I), où le De Deo uno précède le De Deo Trino, comme dans la Somme de S. Thomas d'Aquin (cognossibilitd de Dieu, vrai notion de Dieu, attributs divins et aprés seulement le dogme trinitaire 'en general' puis 'en particulier')." 27. See M. Schmauss, Katholische Dogmatik, vol. I (Munich, 1960), 306ff.; Karl Barth, Die kirchliche Dogmatik, 2:390; Ch. Androutsos, Dogmatiki (Athens, 1907), 47ff.; P. N. Trembelas, Dogmatike, vol. I (Athens, 1959), 186ff. 28 See Etienne Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, 2nd ed. (Paris: Payot, 1962), 2411T. , and Johannes Hirschberger, Geschichte der Phi-losophie, 8th ed., vol. 1 (Freiburg: Herder, 1965), 504-5. See also M. -D. Chenu, La Thiologie comme science au XIIIe siécle, 3rd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1969), 97ff., where the author affirms in the works of Thomas Aquinas a "grandiose" synthesis of theology's mystical-theoretical character with the demands of scientific rationality: "Verbe éternel ou Verbe fait chair, speculation contemplative ou règles de vie morale, symbolisme sacramentaire et communauté des saints, relevent tout uniment du mêrne principe de connaissance. Les catégories si fermement tranchées du philosophe entre le spéculatif et le pratique ne divisent plus ce savoir ... ces savoirs sont campés dans un même champ d'intelligibilité, que constitue la lumiere de foi en oeuvre de science: intellectus fidei." 29. This is an expression well established in the theological literature of the Greek East, and the starting-point of its approach to the ontological problem. Cf., for example, Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua (PG 90:285a) and Mystagogia (PG 91:701a); Gregory of Nyssa, Against Enomius 1 (PG 45:316c); Justin Martyr, 1 Apology 3 (PG 6:1209b); John Damnscene. Against the Jacobites 52 (PG 94:1461b). 30. See Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, 589-90: "Il y a, dans le thomisme, un acte de la forme elle-même, et c'est l'exister ... L'acte de l'essence n'est plus la forme, quo est du quod est qu'elle est, mais l'existence." 31. Lossky, La théologie mystique, 63-64 (ET, 64-65) 32. I have tried in an earlier study, again on the level of theoretical differences, to demonstrate on the basis of Heidegger's writings how the scholastic theological tradition of the West leads inexorably to the modern phenomenon of "European Nihilism." See Christos Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God, ed. Andrew Louth, trans. Haralam-bos Ventis (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2005), with reference to the Dionysian corpus and Martin Heidegger. 33 Cf. his characteristic aphorisms: "Sein erweist sich also einhoch-stbestimmtes volig Unbestimmtes" (Einführung in die Metaphysik, 59); "Das Sein ist das Naschte. Doch die Nahe bleibt dem Menschen am weitesten" (Ober den Humanismus, 20); "Die Unbestimmtheit de-sen jedoch, wovor und worum wir uns angstigen, ist blosses Fehlen der Bestimmtheit, sondern die wesenhafle Unmoglichkeit der Bestim-mbarkeit" (Was ist Metaphysik? 32); "Das Sein als das Geschick, das Wahrheit schickt, bleibt, verborgen. Aber das Weltgeschicht kundigt sich in der Dichtung an" (Ober den Humanismus, 26). Cf. also J. Hirsch-berger's revealing comment on Heidegger's philosophy: "Was bleibt, ist eine Art Mystik und Romantik des Seins, bei der alles auf die Hinnahme ankommt" (Geschichte der Philosophie, 2:648). 34. Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, 1. - Artículo*: Unknown - Más info en psico@mijasnatural.com / 607725547 MENADEL Psicología Clínica y Transpersonal Tradicional (Pneumatología) en Mijas Pueblo (MIJAS NATURAL) *No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí enlazados
The ontological meaning which Greek patristic literature of the. Byzantine period gave to the term prosôpon ("person") became the occas...

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