Unsaying God

What cannot be said about God, and how can we speak about God by negating what we say? Traveling across prominent negators, denialists, ineffectualists, paradoxographers, naysayers, ignorance-pretenders, unknowers, I-don't-knowers, and taciturns, Unsaying God: Negative Theology in Medieval Islam delves into the negative theological movements that flourished in the first seven centuries of Islam. Aydogan Kars argues that there were multiple, and often competing, strategies for self-negating speech in the vast field of theology. By focusing on Arabic and Persian textual sources, the book defines four distinct yet interconnected paths of negative speech formations on the nature of God that circulated in medieval Islamic world. Expanding its scope to Jewish intellectuals, Unsaying God also demonstrates that religious boundaries were easily transgressed as scholars from diverse sectarian or religious backgrounds could adopt similar paths of negative speech on God. This is the first book-length study of negative theology in Islam. It encompasses many fields of scholarship, and diverse intellectual schools and figures. Throughout, Kars demonstrates how seemingly different genres should be read in a more connected way in light of the cultural and intellectual history of Islam rather than as different opposing sets of orthodoxies and heterodoxies.

What cannot be said about God, and how can we speak about God by negating what we say? Traveling across prominent negators, denialists, ineffectualists, paradoxographers, naysayers, ignorance-pretenders, unknowers, I-don't-knowers, and taciturns, Unsaying God: Negative Theology in Medieval Islam delves into the negative theological movements that flourished in the first seven centuries of Islam. Aydogan Kars argues that there were multiple, and often competing, strategies for self-negating speech in the vast field of theology. By focusing on Arabic and Persian textual sources, the book defines four distinct yet interconnected paths of negative speech formations on the nature of God that circulated in medieval Islamic world. Expanding its scope to Jewish intellectuals, Unsaying God also demonstrates that religious boundaries were easily transgressed as scholars from diverse sectarian or religious backgrounds could adopt similar paths of negative speech on God. This is the first book-length study of negative theology in Islam. It encompasses many fields of scholarship, and diverse intellectual schools and figures. Throughout, Kars demonstrates how seemingly different genres should be read in a more connected way in light of the cultural and intellectual history of Islam rather than as different opposing sets of orthodoxies and heterodoxies.

The subject of Mystical Languages of Unsaying is an important but neglected mode of mystical discourse, apophasis. which literally means "speaking away." Sometimes translated as "negative theology," apophatic discourse embraces the impossibility of naming something that is ineffable by continually turning back upon its own propositions and names. In this close study of apophasis in Greek, Christian, and Islamic texts, Michael Sells offers a sustained, critical account of how apophatic language works, the conventions, logic, and paradoxes it employs, and the dilemmas encountered in any attempt to analyze it. This book includes readings of the most rigorously apophatic texts of Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, with comparative reference to important apophatic writers in the Jewish tradition, such as Abraham Abulafia and Moses de Leon. Sells reveals essential common features in the writings of these authors, despite their wide-ranging differences in era, tradition, and theology. By showing how apophasis works as a mode of discourse rather than as a negative theology, this work opens a rich heritage to reevaluation. Sells demonstrates that the more radical claims of apophatic writers—claims that critics have often dismissed as hyperbolic or condemned as pantheistic or nihilistic—are vital to an adequate account of the mystical languages of unsaying. This work also has important implications for the relationship of classical apophasis to contemporary languages of the unsayable. Sells challenges many widely circulated characterizations of apophasis among deconstructionists as well as a number of common notions about medieval thought and gender relations in medieval mysticism.

The term Ethical Monotheism is an important marker in Judaism’s tumultuous transition into the modern era. The term emerged in the context of culture-wars concerning the question of whether or not Jews could or should become emancipated citizens of modern European states. It appeared in arguments whether or not Judaism could be considered a Religion of Reason—a symbolic, motivational representation of a universal morality, and in debates about whether or not Judaism could or should reform itself into a Religion of Reason. This book is both a decisive departure from such discussions and an attempt to add a further, post-modern, statement to their ongoing development. As departure, it refuses to take for granted a philosophical conception of Religion of Reason as the standard for Ethical Monotheism according to which Judaism was to be evaluated or reformed. As continuation, the book undertakes a phenomenology of Jewish modes of ethical religiosity that allows it to inquire what kind of ethical monotheism Judaism might be. Through sophisticated analysis of select "snapshots," or "fragments of a hologram," guided by a robust theory of religion, the author discloses Judaic ethical monotheism as an ongoing wrestling with the meaning of justice. By closely examining five main "snapshots" of this long process—the Bible, rabbinic Judaism, Maimonides, The Zohar, and the modern philosophers, Buber and Levinas—the author offers his own constructive philosophy of Judaism and his own distinctive philosophy of religion. Ethical Monotheism offers a new way to think about Judaism as a religion and as a coherent philosophical debate, and demonstrates the need to integrate philosophy, history, cognitive psychology, anthropology, theology, and history of science in the study of "religion."

In Relating to God: Clinical Psychoanalysis, Spirituality, and Theism, Dan Merkur conceptualizes religious discourse within psychoanalysis. He proposes that God be treated as a transferential figure whose analysis leads to a reduction of the parental content that is projected onto God. Merkur notes that religious conversion experiences regularly involve theological intuitions that are either rational or, owing to morbid complications, have undergone displacement into irrational symbolism. Analysis renders the religiosity more wholesome. Traditionally, psychoanalytic thought has been dismissive of religion. Freud is on record, however, as having called psychoanalysis a neutral procedure. He argued that religion, with its dependency on a providential God who punishes disobedience, imagines spirituality on the model of human parents and fails to approach spirituality in an appropriately scientific manner. He wrote little of spiritual phenomena, but mentioned both the rationality of the universe and the parapsychological occurrence of thought transference. Occasionally, later psychoanalysts used different language in order to contrast wholesome and morbid forms of religion. Erich Fromm distinguished authoritarian and humanistic religions, while D. W. Winnicott condemned fetishistic behavior while approving of playful illusions that require “belief-in.” These formulations constructed a middle position for clinicians, neither categorically opposed to religion as classical psychoanalysis was, nor do they embrace cultural relativity as “spiritually oriented” psychotherapists are currently advocating. What sorts of spiritual practices does psychoanalysis find unobjectionable? As examples of humanistic religion, Fromm named Zen Buddhism, Buddhist mindfulness meditation, and the via negativa or “way of negating” that some Christian and Jewish mystics have followed. Because the Bible-based approaches are little known, Merkur discusses their histories, procedures, and psychoanalytic understanding.

Mirabai, a sixteenth-century Indian princess, wrote passionate love songs to Lord Krishna. Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century European Beguine, wrote of her yearning to become Love itself, to be "God with God." Each woman practiced a full-bodied, sensuously-imaged longing for love; at the same time, each also practiced certain ascetic disciplines. Spanning centuries, continents, and religious traditions, this book juxtaposes Hadewijch's and Mirabai's inextricable energies of longing and letting go as resources for a comparative theology of passionate non-attachment. Within both Hinduism and Christianity, desire and renunciation are often presented as opposites; yet, both Mirabai and Hadewijch, in their own distinct ways, illuminate the integral, tensile relationship between these concepts. Rather than choosing one or the other, each woman's dual practices of longing and letting go not only take her on an inward spiritual journey but also deeply involve her in the beauty and suffering of the wider world. Drawing out crucial differences and intriguing resonances between these two women of faith, Hillgardner develops a Hindu-Christian comparative theology that argues for an interreligious ethic of passionate non-attachment, one capacious and brave enough to hold together our own longings with the desires of others in an interconnected, fragile world.

Many today may see the relationship between God and humanity as one of passive submission and thus unquestioning. Two outstanding Dominicans, Timothy Radcliffe and Lukasz Popko. suggest otherwise. Questioning God explores Biblical conversations with God and there is no genuine conversation without true questions. Our God question us, from the first conversation of God and humanity in the Bible, where God asks Adam, 'Where are you?', to the Risen Lord's questioning Peter on the beach: 'Do you love me more than these others?' But humanity questions God too, as in the audacious questioning of Jesus by the Samaritan woman at the well. In this process of mutual questioning, humanity is drawn ever deeper into the life of God, the eternal conversation of the Trinity. Insights into these transformative conversations are helpful as the Church questions how to be faithful to God in this uncertain time. Fr Popko offers a fresh translation and insights of Biblical scholarship, and Fr Radcliffe extends his rich experience as a preacher, theologian, and an inspiring commentator.

Christopher C. Knight's study re-examines religious pluralism, combining 'mystical theology' with insights from science-theology dialogues.