Steve Watson

Crossing the Via Negativa

We do not generally think that it is acceptable to discuss a thing only in terms of what that thing is not, or in terms of what qualities may not be used to characterize it. Nor do we typically think it reasonable to declare that comprehension of some important concept is in principle impossible and we shouldn’t even try. Apophatic theology, however, takes exactly that approach in treating of the nature God and we should wonder why this is the case.

The standard justification is just that God’s qualities are by definition infinite and therefore beyond the power of positive comprehension by the finite human brain, and therefore the only possible approach is to limit ourselves to the sorts of finitely comprehensible predications involved in saying only what is not the case. By this means we can suggest the qualities of God, without committing ourselves to any positive claims concerning God’s qualities.

I’m not so sure about that: it seems to me that there are plenty of such concepts, like the concept of infinity itself, that are perfectly comprehensible to our finite minds. Cantor showed that even if we cannot hold an infinity in our minds, we can define it positively, describe its characteristics, distinguish its kinds, and generally manipulate it in all the ways that we would need to be able to in order to say that we understand it. Moreover, to say that God lacks the quality X, where X is a finite concept, may very well be making a claim of infinite possibilities un-foreclosed, which means that to understand it would require understanding an infinity; while saying that God lacks some infinite quality would require an understanding of that quality in order to understand the thought that God did not have X. In either case, being able to comprehend the negative thought involves comprehending an infinite concept, and that justification for the via negative fails.

A less charitable proposal is that the impossibility of describing or thinking of God at the same time positively and coherently is a consequence of the fact that the very concept of God is not well-formed. The problem seems to be that it began as a positively defined concept within comprehensible limits but been subsequently expanded into incoherence by the necessities of philosophical argument – in particular, philosophical arguments for His very existence. One can give a Just-So story: primitive man wanted to explain how the world came into being; he looked at examples of things coming into being that he could understand, like his making a flint tool, and analogised a world-knapper. The world-knapper was just like him but bigger, distant, more powerful, wiser. More than that though, the world-knapper became, as devotion and reverence demanded, not just bigger but as big as possible, and so on, and thus we arrived at the qualities of omniscience, omnipotence, omni-benevolence, as well as ineffability, eternality, ubiquity, etc. These unlimiting concepts are, however, both difficult to directly comprehend and collectively incoherent. The puzzles that arise are well-known. Can God make 2+2=5? Can He make a rock He can’t move? Can He do wrong? Can there be evil in the world He made? And so on. The ultimate point of this is that the seeming necessity of the via negative should be taken not as a sign of the transcendence of God, but as a sign of the ill-discipline of thought about God.