The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 14

The Neoplatonic closure carried into Christian theology through the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. The author (conventionally Pseudo-Dionysius) was an anonymous Christian Neoplatonist, probably of Syrian or Syro-Palestinian origin, writing around the turn of the sixth century, whose work was accepted as quasi-apostolic for a thousand years. He had read Proclus carefully, and the apophatic theology he developed in On the Divine Names and The Mystical Theology adapted the Neoplatonic hierarchy to the Christian God by pushing its top term into a silence more rigorous than anything Plotinus had formulated.

God is the cause of all beings and is therefore not one of them. Whatever is said of beings can be affirmed of God as their cause, and can equally be denied since God infinitely exceeds what the predicate captures. God is good is true in the sense that goodness has its source in God; God is not good is also true in the sense that the goodness of creatures falls infinitely short of what God is; and both must be transcended by a higher silence, in which God is recognized as beyond assertion and beyond denial. This threefold movement of affirmation, negation, transcendence of both, becomes the foundation of apophatic theology. The sixth rung receives a new defense: any positive statement about it is immediately qualified by the corresponding negation, which itself is insufficient and must be qualified further, until discursive thought comes to rest in a silence that Dionysius calls union with the divine darkness.

This looks like a deflation of the rung. An object that cannot be characterized is arguably no object at all, and a theology that refuses every predicate it offers has apparently given up on ontological commitment. But Dionysius is not deflat-ing the rung; he is fortifying it. The object remains ontologically real — God exists, is the source of all beings, is the end toward which everything returns.

What changes is that it has been placed beyond the reach of any objection that would operate through predication. A critic who objects that the attributes are inconsistent finds the apophatic theologian already agreeing — and proceed-57

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ing as if nothing had happened. Any articulate objection can be met with the observation that the objector is still operating in the realm of names, and the matter in question lies beyond names.

What the apophatic strategy does not do is ask whose inarticulable it is. The subject ascends through affirmation, negation, and the transcendence of both, arrives at union with God, and never raises the possibility that the summit is the darkness already examined in this book — the subject's own center, encountered from below rather than projected from within.

Nicholas of Cusa extended the apophatic tradition by bringing mathematical instruments to bear on it. De Docta Ignorantia argues that God is the maximum and at its limit coincides with the minimum. An infinite line is also an infinite circle; the center of an infinite sphere is everywhere and its circumference nowhere; the maximally curved coincides with the maximally straight. These coincidentia oppositorum are not rhetorical flourishes. In the finite world, opposites exclude each other, but at the infinite limit, they coincide: the distinctions that separate them presuppose finite boundaries. God, as the absolute maximum, is where all opposites coincide, and human thought can approach God only through learned ignorance, the recognition that the categories by which it thinks are inadequate to their object.

The apophatic tradition before Cusanus had relied on a rhetoric of negation.

Cusanus replaced it with a technical instrument and used the behavior of mathematical infinity as a model for the divine. The sixth rung was now expressed through the fourth rung, with infinity as the bridge. The infinite triangle whose angle at one vertex becomes a straight line; the infinite number that contains all numbers — these are demonstrations of how the finite-infinite relation has to work if the infinite is what the theological tradition says it is. Cusanus fused the fourth and sixth rungs in a way neither Plotinus nor Dionysius had managed, and he did it with an instrument that would later serve the scientific revolution for different purposes. Galileo and Kepler read Cusanus; Bruno took the coincidentia oppositorum and extended it to an infinite universe of infinite worlds. The fusion Cusanus achieved is one of the sources from which modern thinking about infinity descends, and it has never quite escaped its theological origin. Cantor's hierarchy of infinities, at the end of the nineteenth century,

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was received by its author as a disclosure of the divine. In the Grundlagen Cantor placed himself in a lineage that included Cusanus and Bruno — thinkers who had affirmed actual infinity without restricting it to the theological domain. Leibniz and Spinoza he treated as adversaries on this point: both accepted the infinity of God while denying actual infinity in mathematics, preserving the Aristotelian-scholastic thesis infinitum actu non datur wherever it mattered for the science of quantity. The Cusan coincidentia oppositorum, by contrast, offered Cantor a model in which the infinite was not partitioned between a theological ceiling and a mathematical floor.

For all originality, Cusanus preserves the ontologization. The maximum is real; learned ignorance is the subject's acknowledgment that it cannot comprehend what is nevertheless there to be acknowledged. The mathematical instrument has added accuracy to the apophatic tradition; it has not changed what the tradition is doing.

Meister Eckhart distinguished between God of religion, to whom prayers are addressed, and the Godhead, the groundless ground out of which God himself emerges. Eckhart's most notorious sermon prays to God to be rid of God, to pass beyond the person to the Godhead that has no name and no determinations. In another sermon he says that the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. The soul's deepest ground and the Godhead's are the same.

He sees that any God who can be addressed and worshipped is a construct (although he does not use the word) and that the real matter lies further in, or further back, in a source that cannot be distinguished. For that Eckhart was con-demned by the papal bull In Agro Dominico, shortly after his death; his works were preserved by students, and the Rhenish mystical tradition — Tauler, Suso, the anonymous Theologia Germanica — continued what he had begun.

Still, the Godhead remained an ontological ground, even if a groundless one.

The identity of the soul's substrate with the Godhead's was formulated as an identity between two grounds, rather than as the recognition that both terms name the same operation viewed from opposite sides. Eckhart saw that the distinction was provisional; he did not see that what he had intuited as one ground

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was the subject's own meta-position. The projection has become minimal, nearly pure, but it is still a projection.

Hegel, treated at length earlier, completed the dialectical fusion of the sixth rung with all the others. The Absolute Spirit that develops through nature, history, and the forms of human culture is the sixth rung in its maximally dynam-ic form, and the system built around it is the limit of what the operation can produce. Everything after Hegel that works the sixth rung stays in his shadow, whether by continuing his project or by revolting against it.

The twentieth century witnessed several attempts to work the rung in new ways. Tillich called God the ground of being, an explicitly post-theistic formulation that tried to preserve the rung while abandoning the anthropomorphism.

Whitehead constructed a process theology in which God is bipolar, with a pri-mordial nature that contains the realm of eternal objects and a consequent nature that registers the achievements of the temporal world. Hartshorne developed this into a systematic panentheism. Heidegger attempted to think being in distinction from beings and the Ereignis of his later work is a sixth-rung formulation that tries to evade the hypostasis of a divine object while preserving the rung's ontological role. Jean-Luc Marion proposed God without being, who gives himself outside the ontological register entirely. Each of these is inventive and a further variation of the pattern we have been describing. The rung is relocated, made more elusive or more immanent, but the projection of the meta-position into an ontological ground is preserved.

The aggregate weight of two and a half millennia of work on the sixth rung is enormous, and it has accumulated defenses against every form of criticism.

Apophatic theology blocks predicative attacks, mystical experience supplies apparent empirical confirmation. The Cusan use of mathematical infinity offers technical precision. Hegel's dialectical self-inclusion absorbs objections as moments of the system. The post-theistic formulations of the twentieth century adapt to criticism by relocating the rung's content. A critic who attacks any one of these positions finds himself offered another in its place, and the impression grows that something substantial must be there, because the tradition has been unable to stop talking about it.

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The analysis identifies what is there. There is a subject who cannot distinguish itself since every act of distinction takes the subject one step further behind what it distinguishes. There is the elaboration of the projection into doctrines, systems, and techniques, which acquire their own apparent self-subsistence.

And there is the persistent refusal, even in the traditions that come closest to the truth, to take the last step: the recognition that the inarticulable ground is the subject that has been doing the framework-building all along.

The refusal has a reason. The subject that recognizes the projection as its own retrieves what it had externalized as a capacity to be exercised. What had been called God becomes the subject's own meta-position. This is not atheism which is an ontologizing position too: it claims that a certain entity does not exist.

What the present analysis describes is the dissolution of the operation that produced the object in the first place.

This is also what the philosophical tradition of the Left-Hand Path has called the Black Flame, and it has meant by the term precisely what we have been pointing toward. The Black Flame is the subject's own capacity to draw distinctions. Every ontologization of the sixth rung is an attempt to secure this capacity by handing it to a cosmic principle. Mystical union tries to recover it by dissolving the subject into what it has previously projected. The two strategies differ in direction but share the premise: the capacity must be housed elsewhere.