Christian Agnosticismtheir apophaticism is, strictly speaking, pointless. The case can
be fl eshed out using another mystical theologian, Dionysius,
also called the Pseudo-Areopagite. He makes the familiar moves
implied by the inevitably slippery nature of theological lan-
guage, moving through calling the reality beyond knowledge
‘it’, and even moving into the negation of negation, saying ‘it
is also beyond every denial’. His aim is to move his reader to a
very profound silence indeed.
However, and this is where the challenge to the agnostic
comes in, his multiple negations are made on the basis of a
single affi rmation: the negations negate the ‘it’. Without that
fi xed point, Dionysius says, the force that drives the mystic
into ever deeper contradictions becomes unstable, and the
specifi city of the apophatic silence disintegrates into unfocused
intellectual turbulence. He uses the analogy of the sculptor,
searching for the ‘pure view of the hidden image’ inside the
stone or wood. The accusation is that the agnostic will obliter-
ate the hidden form like a bad sculptor who chips too much
away and so destroys the image.
This difference is, I think, substantial. It turns on the fact
that the agnostic does not adhere to a faith; the believer does.
Even if the believer’s exploration of God reduces all that can
be said to an ‘it’, and then negates that since an ‘it’ implies an
object which God is not, faith allows the believer to affi rm the
‘it’ knowing it is provisional, which the agnostic, u nequivocally,
cannot. The question then is whether there is a difference
between the agnostic and the believer that disqualifi es the
agnostic’s mysticism on the outside of faith?
Anthony Kenny has written about how both can still share
the silence in relation to the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough
was a contemporary, colleague and correspondent of Matthew
Arnold, the poet famous for ‘Dover Beach’, with its metaphor
of the ‘withdrawing roar’ of the ‘Sea of Faith’. Kenny shows
how, of the two agnostics, Clough captures the ineffability of
God more precisely, and in so doing provides an example of a
genuine agnostic apophaticism.