What is Negative Theology?

I’ll speak of negative theology in a specific context — that of the form of Thomistic Existentialism which I’ve been struggling to develop.

This sort of God-centered existentialism begins with the negative-theological insight that God is not This, where This can be any sort of thing or living creature. Some who try to read the theological writings of past centuries see silliness in some statements produced by careful thought in the vein of negative theology.

An example that I’ve used before is: God is simple. This is not intended as a primary claim. Medieval theologians didn’t imagine their Creator as being some sort of undifferentiated blob. They were teaching that God doesn’t have parts and doesn’t change or develop in the way of a created being.

So what about the basic being of God? Aquinas mounted a critique of efforts to see God in essentialist terms, that is, in terms of creaturely substance. His critique resulted in a somewhat obscured but also powerful claim that God is not substance but rather His own Act-of-being, the Supreme Act-of-being, the Act-of-being who executes all other acts-of-being, bringing things and living creatures into being from nothing.

What of more modern views of God? Nearly all, Catholic and Protestant Jewish and pagan, are essentialist views. God is tied down to a divine substance, making it easy to see Him as being localized. He sits in Heaven, far away from us, looking down upon us, perhaps kindly or perhaps indifferently.

That is but one of the problems with imagining God in terms of creaturely substance — substance or stuff is localized in time and space. The Christian faith has traditionally taught us that God is always present everywhere and at each instant of time. So, there is a conflict between divine substance and that fundamental teaching of Christianity.

Various thinkers have produced negative-theological critiques of the traditional views of God. In other words, they attacked the idea that God can be seen as a Being of divine substance — that would mean God is some sort of super-creature in the way of pagan gods who co-exist eternally with matter. Those critics have included Luther and the young Karl Barth (at the time he produced the last version of The Epistle to the Romans).

More clearly, Kierkegaard’s philosophy seems to have been based upon a basic insight that the relationship between God and man is not that of a Being of divine substance and a being of flesh-and-blood. That Dane died young and may have been capable of going on to a more positive theology but he did produce a powerful critique of theologies that view God as a Being of divine substance. (Kierkegaard was a philosopher in the same sense that Aquinas was a philosopher — some philosophical analysis was necessary for thought that was more generally concerned with God and with Creation as being the work of the God of Jesus Christ.)

Etienne Gilson criticized Kierkegaard for not seeing that substance remains important and necessary for creatures, though he said that Sartre didn’t make that error. In any case, my reading of “The Epistle to the Romans” (I’m about a third of the way through and bogged down by my general schedule) leads me to believe that Barth’s attacks upon liberal Protestant theology were equivalent to an attack upon all essentialist views of God, that is, God as a Being of divine substance. Unfortunately, I see little sign so far that Barth has a way of constructing a true theology. (Eventually, I’ll read some of his later books and see where he headed.)

This is to admit that negative theology is important but not sufficient. We must move on from a critique of wrongful ways of viewing God and our relationship to Him. We are forced to try to construct less erroneous analogies from creaturely thought to God. In my view, this is to say that we must try to view God in His free-will decision to be a Creator of a particular world. From there, we can try to make imaginative leaps to a wider and deeper understanding of God. We need to try to understand the Almighty in His necessary Being — as His own Act-of-being, but we must ascend to such a view by way of analogies drawn from God in His freely chosen role as Creator of a particular Creation.

There is a certain density of ideas in the prior paragraphs but there is no way to break those ideas down so that they can be stated in our current words and concepts, so tied up with of erroneous ways of viewing God as a Being of divine substance. It is necessary that I approach my task in such a way because a more proper view of God needs new human words and concepts and new ways of understanding empirical knowledge in terms of that view of God. Before I can mold new vessels of thought, I must make a new type of clay. And that produces a muck of sorts before the task reaches a more mature form. (To be honest, the end of the task has reached a somewhat mature form in my own mind.)

In my view, Luther and Kierkegaard and — at least — the young Barth left themselves in the position of a cartoon character who has stepped off the cliff and is hanging in mid-air. He remains suspended until he realizes his position and then he begins to fall. Many of those who followed Luther and Kierkegaard seem to have done exactly that — fall. It takes a powerful will and intense constant concentration to avoid looking down. And there’s no need for that. Aquinas carried out the same critique as Luther and Kierkegaard — compromised because Aquinas had an exaggerated view of papal authority and Church authority in general. The interested reader can see a complete description of those compromises, in a complex historical setting, by reading Gilson’s discussions of Thomistic thought.

The Thomistic version of existentialism, corrected a little and updated to allow for modern empirical knowledge, allows a more complete and positive understanding of God, in His own necessary Being and also in His freely accepted role as Creator of a particular world.