Week 2: The apophatic turn

Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides and the Cloud of Unknowing --- a tradition that got more precise about God by refusing every positive sentence about him

1 March 2027

Pseudo-Dionysius’s move, formalised: God is not good, not wise, not existent — not because these are false, but because any word drawn from creation is too small for what it’s describing, and saying so is more accurate than reaching for a bigger word. Maimonides ran the same argument through Aristotelian logic seven centuries later and called it the only theology that doesn’t eventually lie. The Cloud of Unknowing took it further still: not just unsayable, but unthinkable, approached by “a dart of longing love” rather than an idea at all.

The lecture isn’t a detour into religious history — it’s the vocabulary the rest of the semester borrows. “Apophatic” (saying by unsaying) versus “cataphatic” (saying by saying) is the pair every later week’s discipline turns out to have its own local version of.

Outline#

• three apophatic theologians, three different reasons for the same move
• why “unsayable” is not the same claim as “unimportant”
• the vocabulary we’re borrowing: apophatic / cataphatic, and where it will resurface