How To Be An Agnostic
logos. Thomas Aquinas, of course, was nothing if not rational:
much of his work reads like logical puzzles and another of
his titles could easily have been the Father of Scholasticism.
However, he had the good fortune, theologically speaking, to
live before the scientifi c worldview took hold. He understood
that words, reason and argument must at some point give way
before God, lest the divinity it discussed ceased to be God. His
theology was a means to an end that it could not itself express.
He could enter into a positive silence having exhausted all pos-
sibilities and sit with the impossible without shame or retribu-
tion. For many modern-day theologians, though, such a move
is unspeakable – in the negative sense. Along with the athe-
ists, the attempt to use words to throw the individual onto the
unknowability of God is dismissed: different conservative reli-
gious parties would variously declare it ‘continental’, ‘relativ-
ist’, ‘liberal’ or ‘heretical’. The atheist’s preferred putdowns are
‘incommensurate’ or ‘incoherent’.
Varieties of silence
The story of Aquinas opens up a whole new dimension to what
Christianity has lost since the scientifi c revolution. In a word,
silence. It is why someone can graduate with a degree in theol-
ogy never having once written the word apophatic, and perhaps
not even knowing that it is God-talk by negation. It is why
silence is such a rarity in churches. Modern services tend to kill
it with two blows; fi rst, by fi lling every minute with words – be
they from the missal or the overhead projector; second, by
making those words ‘vernacular’ – commonplace in language
and meaning. It is why the ping-pong between conservative
religionists and militant atheists will continue ad infi nitum with
nothing much new being said: neither can bear the thought
that, if God exists, divinity ultimately lies beyond anything that
can be said of it. Or to put it another way, God to be God must
be heretical and inconsistent – beyond good and evil, and for
that matter existence itself.