John Kenney: :"Silence and Apophasis in St. Augustine"

“The incomprehensibility of God as cause of concern. Augustine as a Negative Theologian and the Merging of Orthodoxy.”

A revival of interest in religion is evident in current Western society. Society has become more and more pluriform, and as a result this growing interest has gone hand in hand with an awareness that the divine could be conceptualised in many different ways. For those who wish to reflect on the Christian faith could it be of considerable benefit to consult Augustine. He made a contribution to the development of Christian doctrine. But he also consistently questioned the adequacy and suitability of images of God that emerged in Christianity. He qualified them, especially when they obstructed the original experience of harmony and transcendence. But in contrast to a certain culturally and philosophically motivated negative discourse about God, he did not hesitate to explain the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, and to interpret this Incarnation as the truth of man. How can his uncertainty or – expressed in non-psychological terms – his reticence about the image of God be reconciled with  his confidence in explaining  the essence of Christ?  These are the crucial questions in my lecture. The presupposition is that throughout his life Augustine maintained a balance between speaking about God and remaining silent about him. On the one hand, as a priest and a bishop, he wished to prevent misunderstandings concerning the nature of God’s essence and activity. The things revealed in Scripture about this subject were sacred to him. On the other hand, as a young priest, he already showed his concern to drive home to the faithful the idea that God was a mystery. For Augustine, negation of the possibility of comprehending God stood in sharp contrast to any negation of God. There even were signs that Augustine was also aware early on that unknowing was the highest form of knowledge of God.

                                                P.J.J. van Geest

                                           Amsterdam and Utrecht

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paper #2

“Apophasis and Interiority in Augustine’s Early Writings”

                                           

            In reading the libri Platonicorum, Augustine encountered the classical apophatic theology of the Plotinian school. Yet his early works articulate divine transcendence in a fundamentally different fashion from Plotinus or Porphyry. This paper will explore Augustine’s departure from classical apophasis in his early treatises. The function of apophatic discourse will be initially considered and its centrality to Platonic monotheism reviewed. Augustine’s early representation of God and his account of the soul’s grasp of the divine word will then be analyzed. Special consideration will be accorded to Augustine’s account of divine transcendence. The paper will conclude with a discussion of Augustine’s early theology in reference to the ascension narratives of the Confessions.

John Peter Kenney                                                  Colchester,Vermont

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paper #3

“Augustine's Use of Silence in his Teachings on Original Sin and
  Predestination”

  In this presentation, I examine Augustine’s use of silence in his
  teachings on evil, original sin, and predestination. Starting from
  Ad Simplicianum, through the Confessions and the City of
  God to his late writings on Semi-Pelagianism, I show that
  Augustine uses silence and God’s unsearchable ways to cross a tragic
  zone of fate and the ineluctable. Silence and the apaphatic way
  introduce him to the freedom of a gift economy where he finds a
  gracious God of superabundant goodness and generosity.

Paul Rigby

Ottawa

Paper #4

Can Plotinus’ Statements About Apophaticism and Negative Theology Save His System from a Contradiction?

This paper brings to our attention a problem with Plotinus’ account of the relation between the One and Divine Intellect, which is suggested by a passage of Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis.  (Possibly Augustine had in mind most proximately an Arian position that is Plotinian in its essentials; but my concern is primarily with the philosophical merits of the Plotinian model, rather than the textual question of whether Augustine alludes to Plotinus himself, or to that position as recapitulated in another source.)  In brief: Arguing on Platonic and Aristotelian lines, it seems that Intellect, the complete set of Forms, cannot have been made by the Good/the One, nor be a distinct being from the Good/the One.  This is because the relation of the complete set of Forms to Goodness in the Platonic tradition is one of species to genus.  So, the complete set of species-Forms lacks no content that Goodness is.  This means that they cannot be two distinct entities.  For given that there is no matter by which Intellect could be individuated from the One, the two must be individuated by a difference in essence, which the taxonomic relation between them precludes.  So, they could be two different relations within one entity (Augustine’s Father and Son), but not two different entities/gods.  The paper then considers two ways that Plotinus does or might respond to this critique: (1) his contention that knowing multiple ideas is an inferior kind of intelligence to the simple awareness possessed by the One, and thus must be a lower and distinct god; (2) the One is not a something (tis) – which is the foundation of his apophaticism – and thus is not vulnerable to the critique which would see it as a definite genus, goodness.  It concludes that neither of these routes, as explained by him, is sufficient to refute the Augustinian argument.

Sarah Byers

Boston