Mystical Theology & the Sublimation of Gender
Suppose an ecstatic lover (voluble but sincere) were to tell his beloved, “Darling, my love for you surpasses the bounds of human understanding—in fact, the strength of my affection is of such transcendent intensity that ‘love’ as used in human discourse does not suffice to describe my feelings for you.” Suppose then she snorted back, “You see there, I knew it all along—you don’t really love me at all!” Would she not have inferred the very antithesis of what he meant? Similarly, what are we to make of the claim that ecstatic theology’s insistence that human thoughts and words cannot contain or describe God means that the words and thoughts we apply to him must be denials of the reality for which they stand? Let us think that here, too, something has gone far wrong.
In his response to my article “God, Gender and the Pastoral Office,” Steven L. Foster, serenely inspecting a field of battle his knowledge of mysticism and semantic philosophy allows him to remain above, suggests that I consign the mystical tradition to heresy and dally with idolatry by defining God within the confines of patriarchy. This, indeed, is one of the principal charges leveled these days against those who defend the Christian tradition in these matters: We do not understand the way in which what is unutterable—here, the relation of God to gender—does away with the merely utterable—such as the gender aspect of titles like “Father” and “Son.” Since we fail to perceive how gender terms cannot be applied to God as he truly is, naturally we fail to grasp the deeper things of the doctrine of the ministry, where in like manner the law of gender distinction is allegedly to be relativized by the gospel of sexual equality.
While he does not confess full agreement with Thomas Torrance’s argument for women’s ordination [from “The Minstry of Women,” in the same issue], Foster apparently concurs with this part of it.
Any images taken from creaturely being such as “father” and “son” have to be understood in a diaphanous or “see-through” way . . . in such a way that the creaturely relations they express in ordinary mundane usage are not projected into Deity. When used theologically they are forms of thought and speech that refer to truth independent of themselves . . . . (p. 9).
Here Professor Torrance lays claim to a venerable Christian teaching on the nature of God—that his transcendence places him beyond human gender, thought and speech—connecting this to our own happy discovery of the transcendence of gender as touching pastoral ministry.
I think that Dr. Torrance and Mr. Foster (who really has joined the battle) have erred, but precisely how have they done it? The difficulty in explaining the error as an error arises from the fact that what they affirm is correct; it is what they deny or will not profess consequent to their affirmation that causes the problem. They are as right as the Arians who insisted that Jesus was a man, as right as the Docetists who claimed that he was God, as right as the feminists who confess that the woman is the man’s equal. In the same sense, those who are invoking apophaticism on feminism’s behalf are right: it is true that human language and conceptualization cannot define or contain God. The attempt to do this is idolatry. One cannot, however, leave it at that. To be half right on such matters is to be wholly wrong.1
Apophaticism, the theological method associated particularly with the mystical theology of Eastern Orthodoxy, emphasizes that God in his uncreated essence lies beyond categories we can entertain, that the symbols through which his life is conveyed to us—whether they be words or other elements of creation—must be understood as provisional, standing for the Divine Life into which we are called to enter in an ever deeper and more intense way, but ultimately unable to hold it in its fullness. This being the case, the most accurate statements that we can make about God are not to say what he is (kataphatic theology), but what he is not (apophatic theology).
Apophatic theology, however, cannot stand alone. It can never become, to use Dr. Torrance’s word, “independent.” To express the fullness of the faith, negative theology must be accompanied by the positive. The dark rays of the Light beyond light may fall upon the mystic, but what they touch and affect in him is the flesh and blood and senses of someone who exists in a human body, and will for eternity. When mystical theology thinks to slip its moorings in creation, when kataphatic theology—the theology of icon, Scripture, confession and creed—is replaced by an apophatic theology that claims to leave it behind, something is amiss. It is, I think, no accident that Eastern Orthodoxy preserves alongside its mystical element a devotion to iconic, “material” theology so dogged and emphatic that to the Western eye it appears to verge upon idolatry. (And one should wonder, if apophatic theology teaches us what is being alleged here, why the Eastern Church—which, after all, named it to begin with—remains the part of Christendom most implacably opposed to all these new revelations!)
Mystical theology denies no tenet of confessional theology. In Christian mysticism “negation” is supercession, not variance or deletion, a point which must be eliminated or made ambiguous by those who are using the mystical to obscure the iconic. Positive theology is fulfilled (in the same sense that the gospel fulfills the law), not exterminated, in the negative. The transcendence of gender is not its destruction, but its perfection. We also need to understand this clearly: something that uses the language of apophaticism, and can pass for it among those who are not sufficiently alert, may be actually anti-Christian and must be tested by observing its response to the Christian confession, that is, in accordance with what it does when turned loose in the realm of kataphatic theology. If apophaticism “moves toward God by asserting that he is not, in fact, any of the things he is called” (R. C. Bondi), and in doing so cuts itself loose from the positive theology—the theology of word and symbol, of earth, water, body, and blood—that must accompany it in order for it to be true, then it must be rejected.
Here again is one of those perils in which something true falls from grace when it denies or destructively assimilates that which must stand with it. When the humanity of Christ is used to overcome his deity, when gender equality consumes and digests the hierarchy in which it rests, when “divine darkness” is employed to eclipse “that which we have heard, we have seen with our eyes, felt with our hands and preach to you,” it is no longer true. When it is forgotten that even in his final beatitude redeemed man remains man, and contemplates the glory of God with senses and categories still those of the creature—this being his peculiar glory!—then Christian doctrine has been corrupted.
Proclamations declaring the inadequacy of human language to express the being of God must be given close scrutiny, for they are analogous to assertions of the inadequacy of human flesh to contain him. On one hand it is true (this we dare not forget) that there is a radical separation between Creator and creature, and from this point of view the incarnation of God, the salvation of men, the inspiration of humanly produced Scriptures, or the application of human categories of understanding to God, are indeed impossible. On the other hand, however, the great Paradox of our faith is that all these things are not only possible with God, but have actually happened through the Lamb who was slain at the world’s foundation,2 and by happening open the way for human conceptualizations and metaphors about God to partake, in accordance with their nature, in the truth of their divine object.
What we are hearing from people who wish to advance feminism in the churches is, however, the insinuation that because metaphors are “merely” metaphors, they must in some sense be false—that if “Father” is a metaphor, God is not “really” Father. But true words about God (or anything else) are never “merely human” in the sense that my interlocutors imply here, for the very possibility of human discourse, that is, of the interchange of true words, words that have meaning, is based upon the incarnation of God. The divine act that makes it possible for human words to contain truth is the same one that made it possible for human flesh to contain God, and is dependent upon it. And yes, this is to say that semantics rests upon a Christological basis, and that philosophies of language may ultimately be judged on the clarity of their consciousness of how this may be.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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