anthropomorphism and the apophatic god

ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND THEAPOPHATIC GOD

CHRISTOPHER INSOLE

Philosophers and Anthropomorphic Projections

Amongst theologians there is frequently an aversion to a certain philosophical

mechanism for arriving at a view of God’s properties. The mechanism which

people find objectionable can be represented (although would never be

acknowledged by the offending philosopher) in the following four-stage

movement:

Stage One:

(i) Dwell on a favoured model of the human subject.

This model will be a social and political construct, favoured generally by a

cultured bourgeois elite. Almost the definition of being a “philosopher”,

according to this critique, is that the constructed and parochial nature of this

model is not acknowledged as such, but is held to be a neutral and accurate

representation of the “subject”.

Stage Two:

(ii) According to this favoured model of the human subject, draw up a list of

the subject’s perfections.

So an “Enlightenment” list will feature properties such as: power, control

over nature, rationality, benevolence, autonomy and knowledge.

Stage Three:

(iii) To arrive at a correct account of God, simply perform the “infinity”

function on each of these perfections.

Modern Theology 17:4 October 2001ISSN 0266-7177

Christopher InsoleHeythrop College, University of London, London

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 MainStreet, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

04_Insol 22/10/2001 12:40 pm Page 475 (Black plate)

Hence where Enlightenment-man is rational, autonomous and knowledge-

able and benevolent, God is omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly free and

omni-benevolent.

Stage Four:

(iv) Proclaim to have arrived at a thorough understanding of the nature of

God.

In fact, we have no more than a construction inferred from parochial vision

of the nature of the subject. So the theological critic insists that such a God

is a grotesque construction of a super-(human)subject, a bloated infinitely-

magnified mirror-image of the fiction of the rational, powerful and benevolent

man. When a theologian announces that the God whose death Nietzsche

reported was a monster anyway, it is this anthropomorphic God who is

being attacked. In the face of such an anthropomorphic construction, so

transparently reflecting a particular self-serving-and-subverting-model of

the human subject, apophaticism can be seen as a way of letting God be God,

of refusing to repeat the mistake of seeing our own projected reflection at the

bottom of the well.

My intention here is not to support this “anthropomorphic” God. In

many ways I consider the momentum of thought described above to be an

accurate reflection of how philosophical theology can so often proceed after

Descartes. In the Third Meditation the idea of the infinite God arises in

intricate connection with the idea of myself, such that Descartes writes:

By the name “God” I understand an infinite substance, eternal, im-

mutable, independent, omniscient, omnipotent, and by which I and all

the other things which exist (if it be true than any such exist) have been

created and produced.1

Corresponding to the (i)–(iv) scheme outlined above, the unproblematised

notion of human subjectivity doing the work—upon which the infinity

function is performed—is that of a finite substance, temporal, mutable, auto-

nomous in some crucial respects, knowledgeable to an extent, potent, the

proximate cause of some (but not all) of the things which are created and

produced.

Richard Swinburne is a happy hunting-ground for those hostile to an

“anthropomorphic God”, in that he is so clear and explicit about adopting

something like the “infinity function”. Grace Jantzen, for one, complains that

… many Anglo-American philosophers of religion … take as funda-

mental that the human self is an analogue of the divine self, and that

the understanding of each is reciprocal to the other. Thus, for example,

Richard Swinburne takes his own selfhood entirely for granted, and

uses it as an analogate for God, whom he conceives of as a divine self.2

476 Christopher Insole

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.


Jantzen focuses on a passage from Swinburne where she considers that he

argues that because he can imagine himself as a disembodied person,

that is, as a disembodied subject who can nevertheless still have experi-

ences and can still act in the world, this shows that it is conceptually

coherent to think of God as an infinite disembodied subject.3

When we look at the passage from Swinburne, we must admit that the

“thought experiment” he presents fits beautifully into the schema (i–iv) set

out above:

Imagine yourself (stages i and ii), for example, gradually ceasing to be

affected by alcohol or drugs, your thinking being equally coherent how-

ever men (sic) mess about with your brain (unacknowledged parochialassumption, with perfection perceived as coherently thinking, increas-ingly disembodied men empowered against both nature and technology)

… You gradually find yourself aware of what is going on in bodies other

than your own … You also see things from any point of view … You find

yourself able to move directly anything which you choose (stage iii) …You also find yourself able to utter words which can be heard anywhere

… surely anyone can thus conceive of himself (sic) becoming an infinite spirit.So it seems logically possible that there be such a being (stage iv).4

This gloss on what the likes of Swinburne are doing, and the critique of

this as inappropriately anthropomorphic are to my mind fairly persuasive.

That is not my concern here. My anxiety is with the unproblematised sense

of self-satisfaction which the apophaticist could easily fall into, perceiving

herself as enjoying a religious integrity which is so lacking in the anthro-

pomorphic approach.

A Warning to Apophatic Solutions

This paper is intended as a warning to a tendency of thought which is fairly

persuasive in theological discussion and literature. This tendency considers

that a God about whom we know nothing, who is most present to us in an

experience of absence, will escape being understood anthropomorphically.

Such an apophatic God is “present” whenever it is held that although God is

real, we cannot in principle have true beliefs about God. Such a God is not only

ontologically transcendent, but conceptually so, so that we can say nothing

true at all (or only the most schematic truths) about God-as-God-is-in-Godself.

The most we can do is to talk about the phenomenal God (Hick) or the “avail-

able referent” of God (Kaufman), which is our imaginative God construct.

In God the Problem5 Gordon Kaufman denies that the real referent of “God”

can be directly known or experienced:

The religious significance of the unspecifiability of the real referent for

“God” is precisely this sense of an unfathomable depth of mystery and

Anthropomorphism and the Apophatic God 477



meaning … this implies that the real referent can never be more than a

limiting concept for us, a strong reminder that our ideas and experience

are far from adequate: for all practical purposes it is the availablereferent—a particular imaginative construct—that bears significantly on

human life and thought.6

One of the most important reminders of this unfathomable God is to ensure

that the God we believe in

is not simply a kind of extrapolation or extension of what we already are

(with our little idolatries and petty loyalties, our narrowness of interest

and vision, our self-centredness, and our anthropocentrism) but must

refer us to that which is truly other than we, different from us, mysterious,

ultimately beyond our ken.7

This will help us avoid what Kaufman critiques elsewhere as

the contention that the originative and ultimate reality behind everything

(God) is to be understood largely in terms of images and metaphors

derived from and peculiar to human existence—indeed, male human

existence: God is pictured as lord, king, creator, judge, father, and so on.

The defining model on the basis of which the conception of God is built

up is that of an agent, and actor, a notion which gains its distinctive

meaning almost entirely in and through human exemplifications.8

Those familiar with Denys Turner’s fine book The Darkness of God9 will

know that he critiques modern constructions of apophaticism, such as I have

outlined above. Turner demonstrates, effectively in my view, that the medieval

tradition of apophaticism is much richer and substantially supported than

modern “mystical” constructions, and that “not only would it be dangerous

to assume that the similarities of language entailed a similarity of purpose,

but that it would actually be wrong to suppose this”.10 Turner identifies two

principal differences. First of all, in “the classical period of medieval theology,

the metaphors of negativity are interpenetrated by a high Neoplatonic

dialectics of negativity”.11 Negation was part of a spiritual ascent, premised

always upon a rich and substantial view about the ontological structure of a

universe which emanated from God, and yearned through both cataphatic

and apophatic moments to ascend back to God. So Turner comments that

“this constructive interplay of negation and affirmation, embracing ontology,

dialectics and metaphor is, as I understand it, the defining characteristic of

the medieval apophatic medieval tradition”.12

Modern constructions of mysticism are weak in that they have no explicit

context of ontology, dialectics and metaphor, but simply focus on what

Turner calls “experientialism”,13 where the heady Neoplatonic metaphors

are “psychologized” so that the mystical is characterised as—with McGinn

and Weil—the experience of absence. Against this construal of the mystical



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Turner suggests that the apophatic is rather the absence of “experience”

rather than “ ‘the consciousness of the absence of God’ … as if such a con-

sciousness were an awareness of what is absent”.14

I should state here that I defer completely to Turner’s verdict on the

relationship between the apophatic tradition and modern constructions

of apophaticism. His summary judgement here is a masterpiece of succinct

demolition:

This medieaval tradition of “mysticism” conceived of as the moment of

negativity immanent within the ordinary practice, theoretical and moral,

of the Christian life, disappears when the dialectic is detached from the

metaphoric, leaving the metaphoric discourse stranded, as it were, in

isolation, minus its underpinning hierarchy of ontology and epistemology.

What emerges from the decline of the apophatic tradition is no longer a

true dialectic, but rather a two-term, anti-intellectualist, experientialist

“voluntarism” …15

It should therefore be clear that this paper is an attack not on the apophatic

tradition, nor of all apophatic theology; it is, rather, a warning about the

potential vanity and negligence of some sloppier modern constructions of

the apophatic God. I agree with Turner that modern apophatic constructions

lack a well-understood and explicit ontological underpinning, but my fear is

that they are motivated by poorly understood, implicit, and so all the more

dangerous presuppositions about the human and the political.

Rotten Compromises and Narcissism

The notion that an apophatic God avoids anthropomorphism works well

when we have in our sights a particular manifestation of anthropomorphic

projection, namely the Cartesian/Enlightenment variety discussed above.

But a critique of the Cartesian cogito is not a critique of how the human

subject is pervasively understood. So to focus on projections which are based

on the Cartesian cogito is to be in danger of overlooking other ways in which

we may project the human agent, and human political arrangements, onto

the God-head. Perhaps academics have a particular propensity to see the

danger of a Cartesian view of personality, more because it is a contortion

they as thinkers are likely to be drawn to.

The situation is complex in that the apophatic God can be seen to be a

projection of not one view of the human person, but of a disastrous com-

promise between two rival views, both of which are at large in society. For

the analysis of the two views of the person, and the pervasive compromise

at work in our culture, I am indebted to the work of Charles Taylor.16

The first view of the person, which Taylor outlines, views human agency

as unproblematic in that the human is conceived as being no different from

animals, which in turn are no different than complex machines. The ultimate




furniture of the universe is physical matter, and to attain an ultimate con-

ception of the universe we must strip away all so-called “anthropomorphic”

properties such as colour, heat, beauty, morality and so forth. Thus in the

human and social sciences we get a reductive drive for absolute, significance-

free explanation. In a fascinating move, Taylor aligns this desire for a

significance-free world with a gnostic-spiritual desire to not be thrown into

a world of imperfectly understood meaning, but to be in a position of con-

trol, where one’s own ends are understood, just because we are disengaged

from the world. The desire for reductive absolute explanations can be under-

stood as an aspiration to rise above the merely human and worldly cares that

press upon us.

Taylor’s second view of the person is harder to articulate, just because it is

more subtle. On this view the person is distinct from animals and machines in

that things matter for the person in a way for which there is no real analogue

amongst non-humans. By “things mattering”, Taylor has in mind the way

in which the person is constituted by interpretation. The person expresses

him or herself through language, which is mediated to that person through

culture. In so expressing herself the person is partly attempting to be faithful

to her pre-articulate sense of what she was (was doing, thinking, intending),

but is also actually constituting what she is (in expressing her feelings/inten-

tions, the person comes to a new realisation, which then constitutes her). The

person constitutes herself within, and is constituted by, a world which is rich

with pre-given significance, and which cannot be described without attributing

“imports” to situations. By an “import” Taylor means a description such as

“shameful”, which is dependent for its meaning upon a tapestry of language-

constituted relationships, but which is not therefore merely a “subjective”

feeling. Taylor sums up his claims about imports in five points:

1. That some of our emotions involve import-ascriptions.

2. That some of these imports are subject-referring.

3. That our subject-referring feelings are the basis of our understanding of

what it is to be human.

4. That these feelings are constituted by the articulations we come to accept

of them; and

5. That these articulations, which we can think of as interpretations, require

language.17

The person, on this second model, has a rich language-like structure.

There is an element of expression which is irreducible to more physicalist

models. The person is multi-textured and deep in a way that the person

on the first model is not. She is not to be understood merely by reporting

her physical actions or putative-intentions. Neither is the person fully

self-perspicuous to herself. The person is rather disclosed to herself through

her self-expression, which is always mediated through historical, social,

culturally-saturated languages.




Taylor describes the way in which we feel the force of both the first model,

which he calls an Enlightenment model, and the second approach, which he

describes as being Romantic:

… in our bafflement, we naturally split into two camps. This reflects the

pull on us of the contradictory metaphysical demands: for the clarity

and control offered by an objective account of ourselves and our world,

on the one hand, and towards a recognition of the intrinsic, irreducible

nature of expression, on the other. There are perhaps very few of us who

do not feel the force of both of these demands. And perhaps just for this

reason we divide with polemical fervour into opposing parties.18

Now the stage of Taylor’s analysis which is really interesting to our pur-

poses is his suggestive claim that as a civilization we live with a disastrously

ill-thought compromise between the two models, such that

in our scientific understanding we tend to be men of the Enlightenment,

and we accept the predominance of Enlightenment—one might say,

utilitarian—values in setting the parameters of public policy. Growth,

productivity, welfare are of fundamental importance.

On the other side, Taylor comments that

… it is recognized that, without prejudice to the perhaps ultimately avail-

able scientific explanation which will be reductive, people experience

things in expressive terms; something is “more me”; or I feel fulfilled

by this, not by that; or that prospect really “speaks to me”. Along with this

tolerance of experience goes a parallel in the public domain. The main

limits of public policy are set by the requirements of production within

the constraints of distribution, and these are meant to be established by

scientific means, and in a utilitarian spirit. But private experience must

be given its expressive fulfillment. There is a “Romantik” of private life,

which is meant to fit into a smoothly running consumer society.19

Quite correctly, Taylor complains that this compromise is intellectually

“rotten” combining “the crassest scientism (objectivism) with the most sub-

jectivist forms of expressivism”.20 The subjectivism, which operates in the

“private” sphere (a sphere marked out and exploited by the market) tends

towards, in Taylor’s opinion, a “formless sentimentalism”.

At this point I will go beyond Taylor, although in a friendly trajectory. The

sentimentalism of the subjectivism, I would say, is one of its less offensive

manifestations. Much worse is the phony-privatisation of the inner world

of each hermetically sealed individual, of each romantic monad in a mech-

anical merely-objective public domain. The romantic monad is infinitely

interested in their own expressive depths (which we are told can never be

expressed “by language alone”), their own “spirituality” (which can never

be bound by the ties-that-bind, which is religion), and their own feelings




(which are both unfathomable but ethically authoritative in personal relation-

ships). One particularly fascinating feeling, which reveals to the romantic

monad depths of their own pathos and beautiful loneliness, is guilt. The

guilt is necessarily impotent, in that the person must remain unfathomable,

mis-understood and inexpressible within the public domain (which is too

objective and mechanical to do justice to the romantic monad); the person’s

political impotence is symptomatic of, and necessary to, their spiritual,

expressive plenitude. Very little that is important about the romantic monad

can be revealed in the public domain; we adopt certain roles, produce certain

behaviour and attempt inter-action, but always there is a veil between this

public behaviour and myself-an-sich, the unfathomable source of all effects

in the public domain, which only ever distort and veil my true nature. We

might say, we can only ever say what we are not.

My bald assertion here is that the romantic monad, as outlined above,

is the prevalent model of how our personhood is addressed and articulated

by society; more prevalent anyway than the Cartesian model, which is a

relatively elitist self-understanding, to which only academics are much

attracted and so sometimes also repelled. It is the romantic monad who is

seduced in advertising; the monad who because he is worth it, is invited

to create his own universe in the process of being.me.com. Whole dramas

are dedicated to the lives and loves of the romantic monad. So the television

lawyer Ally McBeal operates in the public domain as a lawyer, which domain

only conceals her intensely private and unfathomable world of feelings,

characters, moral-norms, fantasies and magic events. The public domain is

made to look foolish, and ironically pompous, just because of its necessary

failure to contain or express Ally’s super-abundant, unfathomable and inex-

pressible inner-world.

Do we not begin to feel the shudder of recognition when we regard some

modern constructions of the apophatic God? A being who is inexpressible,

unfathomable, infinitely fascinating and self-fascinated, who is politically

impotent, although perhaps “suffers” in an empathetic manner which only

further enriches the inner world of self-suffering, and glorious self-sensitivity.

This being is the romantic monad which fills our television screens, advert-

ising bill-boards, conversations, diaries and all other manifestations of our

sloppy, intellectually disastrous, self-understanding. The apophatic God can

be as straight-forward a projection of this intensely private romantic self

as the Swinburnian model is of the Cartesian self. The apophatic God may

be the ultimate source of the cosmos and the public domain, but just as with

us, nothing is revealed to us in this domain about God, except what God

is not. Again, just like with us, God’s political and historical impotence, and

God’s impassibilty to petitionary prayer, is a necessary symptom of God’s

inexpressible self-absorption.

So the proclamation of the apophatic God, far from being a letting God-

be-God, is the projection into the heart of the created order of our loneliness,




our political despair, and the conviction that in principle it is only ever worth

being misunderstood, because to be understood is to fail to be romantically

rich and self-sufficient.

NOTES

1 René Descartes, “Third Meditation”, in Discourse on Method and the Meditations trans. F. Sutcliffe, (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 123.

2 Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 28.

3 Ibid.4 Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 104–105—

italics Jantzen’s.5 Gordon Kaufman, God the Problem (Cambridge, MA:, Harvard University Press, 1972).6 Ibid., p. 85. See also pp. 84, 88, 97, 113.7 Gordon Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1993), pp. 313–314.8 Ibid., p. 76.9 Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1995).10 Ibid., p. 3.11 Ibid., p. 7.12 Ibid., p. 271.13 Ibid., p. 8.14 Ibid., p. 264.15 Ibid., p. 272.16 In particular the essays “Self-Interpreting Animals” and “Language and Human Nature”

in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996).

17 Ibid., pp. 75–76.18 Ibid., p. 246.19 Ibid.20 Ibid.




anthropomorphism and the apophatic god

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