The Cloud of Unknowing, with its central metaphors of negativity and hiddenness, draws on the mystical tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius—of whom, in fact, the Cloud author writes “Anyone who reads Denis’ book will find confirmed there all that I have been trying to teach in this book from start to finish”—which has inspired generations of mystical searchers including John of the Cross. It draws also on the 14th-century Dominican philosopher-preacher Meister Eckhart, whose mystical speculations are grounded in linguistic opaqueness and paradox, in unusual metaphors and neologisms, in order to provoke unknowing through the very demonstration of language’s inadequacies. Eckhart, argues William Franke, “brings to its full maturity the apophatic theological speculation of the Christian Middle Ages” and “makes peculiarly palpable the fundamental transformation of apophasis in a direction that has sometimes been conceptualized as a species of Christian existentialism.”82 In Sermon 83, Eckhart advises:
So be silent, and do not chatter about God; for when you do chatter about him, you are telling lies and sinning . . . And do not try to understand God, for God is beyond all understanding . . . If you can understand anything about him, it in no way belongs to him, and insofar as you understand anything about him, that brings you into incomprehension, and from incomprehension you arrive at a brute’s stupidity . . . So if you do not wish to be brutish, do not understand God who is beyond words . . . You should love him as he is a nonGod, a nonspirit, a nonperson, a nonimage, but as he is a pure, unmixed, bright “One,” separated from all duality; and in that One we should eternally sink down, out of “something” into “nothing.”83
Eckhart’s very language is saturated with tropes of “nothingness,” “emptiness,” and “abyss,” and steeped in images of stepping outside the self.84 His sermons are expressive events charged with the sublime. “Negative theology,” as least as Eckhart practices it, “is not just metaphysical speculation but is lived out in the diverse spheres of intellection, connotation, emotion, and sensation.” Franke elaborates:
On the basis of this new valorization of the existential world as inhabited by and answering to an unspeakable absolute, one that had become no longer a detached principle or indifferent origin but was infinitely active and present in conscious life, the later Middle Ages and Renaissance were to develop a broader understanding of spirit as the element in which what cannot be said or grasped or mastered by any human faculty is nevertheless encountered and experienced, so as to become effectual in every human act and apprehension.85
It is Eckhart, in fact, who, we might speculate, can be credited as a principle driving force in the contemporary, postmodern, revival of apophaticism. The Dominican monk, preacher, and master teacher of theology in Paris, in his rhetorically and theologically confrontational sermons essentially invents a language that tests the very limits of language: “his daring neologisms, his peculiar employment of negative particles and prepositions, and his apophatic strategies of hyperbole, paradox, antithesis, and chiasmus . . . repeat but dialectically reverse[s] the order of a verbal sequence.”86 And through this rhetorical strategy he, like apophatics before him and like postmodern thinkers after, develop the theme of God as a Being that is beyond all limits of identity, Being opposed to any finite determination of being. Eckhart himself explains:
That which is above every name excludes no name, but universally includes all names and in an equally indistinct way. None of these names will, consequently, be proper to it, save that which is above every name and is common to all names. But existence is common to all beings and names, and hence existence is the proper name of God alone.87
Thus, unnameabilty in Eckhart is not simply asserted as theory or theology—negative in the sense that it denies that the transcendent can be named or given attributes—but it is performed, in a continuous chain of denials and retractions in an endless chain of signifiers, as postmoderns will have it, and as Michael Sells argues “a propositionally unstable and dynamic discourse in which no single statement can rest on its own as true or false, or even as meaningful.”88
Eckhart, then, preached the experience of God through the detachment from all objectified being, beyond language, beyond concept, eternal and outside time. St. John, too, had spoken of the negation—the poverty, nakedness, void—of the dark night as theological communication itself, in the sense of the emptying of the self transformed into the fullness of God. And that divine abyss was, for Eckhart, the hidden source from which all proceeds and to which all returns. Both men speak of an “interiority” wherein the self “detaches” from the world, moves “inward” to itself, and then “upward” to its source of Truth (God), liberating that self from the limitedness of the corporeal and emptying the self of self-will. By going inward, one escapes; that is the very imagery of Bill Viola’s Room for St. John of the Cross. The dual images of “inwardness” and “ascent” are consistent in the theorizing of detachment as a dispossession or dismantling of selfhood, a human groping up toward the Wholly Other, to be formed again by God, who meets us in gracious self-revelation.89 According to Eckhart, we must abandon the picture we have of God, let go of God as property or possession—hence the monk’s infamous prayer: “Therefore pray God that we may be free of God.” Every speaking, every image, every concept is insufficient. Human language and its conceptual apparatus are surpassed and affirm a not-knowing and a silence (a not- or un-saying). The absolute ineffability of God provides the motive for the bewildering and paradoxical ways in which Eckhart speaks about divine nature.90 His is a rhetoric designed to induce—through its refusal of stability, ultimacy, and coherence—the unknowing and the dispersal of meaning, a tendency not lost on Derrida and other postmodern theologies.
Moreover, Eckhart’s disorienting discourse has been characterized as Christianity with a Zen outlook, particularly in its emphasis on the process of emptying the self of self-will in order to recognize that union with God as already existing in the soul. This connection would not have been lost on Viola who early on in his career turned to close study of Eastern enlightenment philosophy and spiritual engagement from Buddhism to Sufi mysticism.91 In fact, it was through the study and practice of Zen meditation that Viola first became aware of Eckhart and John of the Cross: “After moving away from my Christian upbringing,” recounts Viola, “I got interested in Eastern culture, and I went to Japan, and I was practicing Zen meditation . . . They [Zen scholar Daisetz Suzuki and Sri Lankan art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy] began writing about people I was not familiar with, such as Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Hildegard von Bingen, and Plotinus, as well as Plato and Aristotle. They recognized these people . . . as part of the other side of the Western tradition, a tradition that was carried on in the East and developed well beyond the advent of rational positivist thinking (which took over in the West) and right up into the twentieth century.”92
Finally, this “deconstructive” activity in language signals the disablement of the intellect, as Denys Turner argues, in the same sense, I will show, that makes operative and relevant the encounter with the sublime. Apophaticism simply shows, Turner writes, “that God cannot be known intellectually. The clutter of intellect and language being cleared away, room is left in a darkness of the consequent intellectual unknowing; and there it is love which yields a direct experience of God unmediated by any work of thought or intellect.”93 But while the negative theologian and the deconstructivist share a similar interest in that which escapes total description, mystical language and its imagery, I think, retain the gesture beyond themselves into the realm of unmediated wisdom in the sublime and the transcendental signified.94 That is to say, there is something that is unsayable; we know from faith it is not a nothing, an absence. It is, in fact, as Derrida himself called it in Languages of the Unsayable, “the language of promise,” or, perhaps better I would posit, a language of hope, situated in the midst of promise, of the not-yet or the unfinished, and in hope, trust and openness to infinite and overwhelming possibilities. And so it is to the Sublime that we now turn.