Warning! Greek language alert. People with pacemakers, pregnancy or pneumonia should not attempt to read non-Latin alphabets. If dizziness, shortness of breath, or blurred vision occurs, stop immediately and contact your  φυσιcian.

In one of those happy coincidences that prove there aren't any, I helped clear out someone's garage last December and picked up a dilapidated copy of Vladimir Lossky's "In the Image and Likeness of God". I am almost certain the owner didn't know she had it, and having a $9.95 Notre Dame Bookstore price sticker on it suggested that the first owner had used it for a class. The highlighting implied that only the first three and last chapters were assigned. With a seminary degree under my belt, I refuse to be intimidated by theology books, though I usually find them soporific, so I turned on the bedside lamp one evening and idly flipped through the table of contents. The title of the first chapter arrested me. "Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology".  Well, I had been blathering about the Trinity a lot recently, but I had no idea what that first word meant. It was a challenge, so I opened to the preface.  Seems that Lossky was a Russian Orthodox theologian fluent in the Greek Fathers, but fleeing the Marxists in 1923 had landed in Paris, where he wrote books in French explaining Orthodoxy to Catholics, which had been now translated into English. Whew! 

(What is this about theologians, I wondered. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was a Jew born in Germany, married to a Swiss (hence the hyphenated name), converted to Christianity, and escaped to England before WWII, then to Harvard and eventually to Dartmouth College, a former Protestant missionary school to the Indians. One would think that it was as hazardous to be a theologian as, say, a terrorist bomber. Or perhaps, in God's economy, they are all anarchists, one never can tell.)

As I read Lossky to figure out what Apophasis was, I discovered he had so much insight to offer on the stubborn irrationalities in my seminary education, the speed bumps, the gotchas, the dogmas. Like the time I gave a passionate defense of the Atonement in class only to discover the next week that my views had been advanced at a school in France and declared heretical. How could it be so easy to be a heretic, I wondered, when all I was doing was trying to make sense of my faith in the light of scripture? Weren't heretics supposed to be, well, evil? Lossky explained (see previous post).

Now we use threadbare clichés (such as the word "threadbare")  to describe these events in our life, "a cold drink in a parched land", "an oasis in the desert", but that was the effect Lossky had on me. It is as if you have been served a speeding ticket you felt was undeserved and years later discovered that the judge in that jurisdiction was disrobed for running a racket. Lossky explained the racket.  But he did more than that, he explained the way it was supposed to work before the corrupt judge arrived. And as you might expect with all things legal, it got really technical and opaque, until I wildly started translating his Greek into Modern neuroscience-speak. (Yeah, I know I spent the last blog disparaging translation, but it is always the first step, like reading the table of contents.) And suddenly, the whole discussion took on a new meaning. Lossky was writing for the President's Panel on Bioethics!

It is my contention that nothing that consumed the thoughts and minds of the better part of the Church for three centuries will ever prove trivial or unimportant. It only requires the same conditions to recur and everything becomes as relevant as air. As the Church spread throughout the Empire in those first few centuries, it had to confront not only the Greek and Roman pantheon, but the Celtic (Arius was British) and Persian (Zoroastrian, Manichean) religions as well. What characterized all these prior religions was pantheism, the idea of multiple truths, multiple realities, that power trumps truth. Now, after 15 centuries, polytheism is back, and all the groundwork of those first four centuries is laid bare as streets of gold. 

You may think I am repeating what the great Cardinal Newman had said about the history of the doctrine of the Trinity.

[T]he doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian [Zoroastrian]; the connection of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin [Burmese and Cambodian Buddhists]; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian [pagan Greek]; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean; and honors to the dead are a polytheism.

But at the risk of receiving the ire of the good Fr Oakes, let me suggest that Newman had it exactly backward. The doctrine of the Trinity did not come about through some amalgamation of truths revealed by the faint light of general revelation now made bright through special revelation. Rather, the doctrine of the Trinity arose as a response, a defense against the pervasive polytheism of the dominant culture. Mind you, from Moses giving of the Law, the Jews had 1200 years of warfare with polytheism before Christ came, and yet prophet after prophet record the fragility of that outpost of monotheism before the ascendancy of Christianity. So unlike the soon-to-be-beatified Newman, I think a better metaphor than a wandering Jew is a guerrilla war against the pernicious poison of polytheism. But Newman lived in the century of the ascendancy of Materialism, and saw in that battle his greatest threat, even though as GK Chesterton observed early in the 20th, it could never be more than a passing fad, as passing it now is.

But I waste your time reviewing the history of the excavations, let us descend into the dig and find our own treasure.

"Apophatic" refers to the method or understanding a topic by denying its contrary. "Love does not keep a record of wrongs" might be one example from St Paul.  In his first chapter, Lossky asks if all apophatic theology of the Trinity will end up at the same place by studying two church father's use of the apophatic method. In this discussion, Lossky makes a distinction between God's essence and God's nature, where by "nature" he means how we perceive him, the "attributes" of God as he works, the  οικονομια, the economy of God's dealings with the world. Our response to this revelation, says Lossky, is θεολογια, theology, where we come to know essence of the person behind the actions or attributes. But in getting to know the person, we must not equate him with his actions, any more than our wives equate us with our business cards. Think of the crowds who came to see Jesus because he had fed the 5000, but when he told them that his flesh was the bread of heaven, not many hung around. This process of "getting behind", Lossky tells us, is "apophatic", a necessary step in meeting the "personal Lord and Savior".

(You're still reading, so I will assume you are strong of will and heart.) So where's the beef?

Well already, Lossky is telling us, this business of concentrating on the attributes of God--his Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnibenevolence--is for children and pagans. Real men move on to apophasis and theology. Remember that philosophical Matterhorn, that whole thing about theodicy, how can evil coexist with the big 3 O's? Well Lossky just said "Piffle, you're arguing about our impressions of God, not God himself or even his existence. You can't use someone's resumé to prove they don't exist." I'm translating, of course, what Lossky actually said was in French with the following English translation:

But in order to speak of the "Superessence," it is necessary, by means of apophasis to go beyond the economic manifestations and to enter Trinitarian theology, which is the summit of kataphasis according to the plan of Dionysian theognosis.

Ok, back to the translation. Lossky then goes on to deny the validity of the Platonic (and Hegelian) attempts to fake apophatic progress by opposing dualities (another favorite blog topic of mine). Trinities are not just a synthesis of thesis and anti-thesis, they are composed of "non-opposed negations", they are not paradoxical nor in tension with each other. We are learning positive things about God by "getting behind" his actions in a negative way.

The second chapter is entitled "Darkness and Light in the Knowledge of God", and the third chapter "The Theology of Light in the Thought of St Gregory Palamus". Here, Lossky is exploring how apophatic methods lead us to "light", and indeed, in most of the miracle stories of the Orthodox Church, light plays a major role. It seemed to me a mental quirk of the Orthodox until I realized that "light" played the same role for Lossky as "grace" did for Luther, and in fact, was a much easier concept to visualize than Luther's. But like Luther, we will never know God without it. "Cool", I thought, "I now have a metaphor for grace much better than that clumsy acrostic: God's Riches At Christ's Expense. And of course, a whole lot more bible verses in the ammunition belt."

So I was primed for chapter four, "The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Doctrine" (which might be subtitled, "and how the Roman Catholics Lost It"). That's when I discovered the roots of my Protestant malaise and the President's Ethics Panel, which I discuss in the next blog.