meaning nor in terms of fact does the intentional relation of subject to object refer beyond
itself. Marion's response is important nevertheless. He reminds us that for Dionysius both
affirmation and negation are surpassed by a third way, the via eminentiae, and he
interprets this third way in terms of his earlier claim that “predication must yield to
praise” (1991, 106). This could have two meanings. It could mean that predication must
be teleologically suspended in praise, that speech acts of assertion are not ends in
themselves but serve to make possible acts of adoration. (It is by forgetting this that
ontotheology becomes religiously otiose.) Predication is not abandoned but relativized; it
is recontextualized as ancillary to a higher purpose. Or it could mean that predication is
abolished to make way for praise, as if the two were somehow mutually exclusive.
For Aquinas, to speak of eminence is to speak of analogical predication. Since it does not
give us quidditative knowledge of God it is not “true” in the classical sense of being the
adaequatio intellectus et res. But it is the right way to talk about God. This would seem
to be the view of Dionysius as well, for he does not abandon predication. After reminding
us in The Mystical Theology that none of our images or ideas is adequate to the reality of
the hyperessential Trinity, he spends a great deal more time in The Divine Names telling
us how to name God (outside of mystical experience) with names given to us in scripture.
As with Aquinas, these names signify perfections that God possesses more perfectly than
creatures. We attribute them to God analogically on the basis of the imperfect
participation in them by creatures. If one asks the point of this predication that does not
yield truth as adequation, Dionysius will answer, “Praise.” But so far from abandoning
predication, he devotes great attention to how to do it properly.
So it is surprising that Marion's interpretation of “predication must yield to praise” is the
second one given above. The third way is not only beyond affirmation and negation but
beyond true and false as well, so that “one can no longer claim that it means to affirm a
predicate of a subjectIt is no longer a question of naming [the God who is praised]It
concerns a form of speech which no longer says something about somethingbut which
denies all relevance to predication, rejects the nominative function of names, and
suspends the rule of truth's two values” (1999, 26–27).
Beyond the fact that this is hard to reconcile with what Dionysius does in The Divine
Names, it is highly questionable in its own right. Consider the following words of praise
from the Gloria of the Mass:
tu solus Sanctus
tu solus Dominus
tu solus Altissimus
end p.491
Do not all acts of praise, these included, presuppose acts of predication? One need not
claim that these predicates, as we understand them, are adequate to the God who is
addressed in this praise. But suppose there is no sense in which they are appropriate to
God, no sense in which they point us, however imperfectly, in the right direction, no
sense in which they are “true” (even if inadequate in the technical sense, though not
inadequate to call forth praise). Is not praise then undermined? Is not the speech act
inappropriate through futility?