Here Viola threads a connection, as he understands it, between the 16th-century saints John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila and their medieval mystic forebears, tracing the history back even further to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the ancient fabric of apophatic theology—that is, a speaking of God only in terms of what may not be said about God, a “negative theology,” often allied with, but not reducible to, the intuitive approaches of mysticism.
Negative theology, as Ilse Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate amongst others have shown, is an ancient tradition the sources for which are found in late antiquity reaching as far back as Plato’s Parmenides and the early Christian era with Gregory of Nyssa (4th century), St. Augustine (4th-5th century), attaining its first significant high point in the Neoplatonic philosophy of the 3rd century CE, with yet more radical representations found among the mystics of the early-to-late Middle Ages, from Johanes Scotus Eriugena (9th century) to Thomas Aquinas (13th century).36 Aphophatic theology is a form of discourse that fundamentally consists of language that negates itself in order to evoke that which is beyond words, beyond the limits of saying altogether. “‘Apophasis’ reads etymologically,” explains William Franke, “as ‘away from speech’ or ‘saying away’ (apo, ‘from’ or ‘away from’; phasis, ‘assertion,’ from phemi, ‘assert’ or ‘say’), and this points in the direction of unsaying and ultimately of silence.”37 Apophasis is, paradoxically, a rich genre of theological discourse that articulates the utter inefficacy of the Logos to name ultimate reality. This tradition is fostered by a notion fundamentally opposed to the central tenet of classical Greek philosophy of Being (or ontology) and its claims for autonomous human reason; rather, says apophatics, what human desire truly seeks—the divine—cannot be defined, pronounced, or known because it is radically transcendent, incommensurably Other, beyond the (human) subject and outside the limits of rationality and the hubris of classical metaphysics.
Negative theology’s emphasis on the unknowableness and the unutterableness of the Divine informs the notion that “transcendence is best approached via denials, via what according to earthly concepts is not. Hence the name ‘negative theology.’”38 Denying what is given and speaking in contradictions is the very means for communicating transcendent or hidden realities. “The apophatic,” argues theologian Denys Turner, “is the linguistic strategy of somehow showing by means of language that which lies beyond language.”39 Thus, for St. John of the Cross, silence and the experience of divine absence is understood to be the veiled presence of divine fullness—for in hiddenness is revelation.40 “[R]evelation is nothing more than the disclosure of some hidden truth,” writes St. John.41 Put another way, rather than a concept of God, negative theology looks to a positive and intimate experience of God and theological insight into the ineffability of God. While ineffable, God is encountered.
In language, Turner further argues, this deliberate refusal of a materialist clarity is precisely what appeals in medieval mysticism to postmodern thought and to a contemporary apophatic revival, with its “messages of the decentering and fragmentation of knowledge, of the collapse of stable relations between cognitive subjects and the objects of their knowledge, of the destablizations of fixed relations between signifier and signified.”42
Regarding the inadequacy of linguistic communication itself, regardless of its intended reference (sacred or secular), founding father of deconstruction Jacques Derrida has famously argued the case against “an intimate link between sound and sense,” against the “inward and immediate realization of meaning which yields itself up without reserve to perfect, transcendent understanding;” in its place he posits the recognition of an infinity of meanings deferred, an “endless displacement of meaning which governs language and places it forever beyond the reach of stable, self-authenticating knowledge.”43 We will have occasion later to assess this view of the (in)adequacy of language seemingly shared between apophatic theology and postmodernist deconstruction and, more specifically, to mark the crucial distinctions between them—and where Viola aligns himself. While there are indeed certain resonances between these epistemologies, the distinctions between them will require clarification. But first, it is important to draw a closer connection between John of the Cross, his own Reformation context, and the traces of such in Viola’s 1983 installation.
St. John of the Cross and Mystic Forebears
As a founder, along with Teresa of Avila, of the reformist order the Discalced (“Barefoot”) Carmelites, John of the Cross (Juan de Yepes, 1542–1591) was imprisoned in Toledo by his superiors in December of 1577 for his refusal to desist in reform efforts within the Carmelite order, particularly amidst the fervor of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.44 Incarcerated for nine months, he was subjected to regular torture and public flogging, managing to escape in August of 1578. During that time, seeking relief he composed the greater part of his poem Spiritual Canticle, a symbolic variation on the Song of Songs (itself filled with lyrical images of mountains, valleys and rivers, not unfamiliar to the symbology of the sublime). The Canticle narrates the nighttime journey of a bride (the human soul) as she searches for her lost lover (Christ): “Faith and love will lead you along a path unknown to you, to the place where God is hidden,” the Saint writes. The story unfolds as a dialogue between the two lovers and tells of a love that moves forward in degrees or stages and through experiences of restlessness, incompleteness, impediment and various other “wounds of love,” to ultimate consummation in spiritual union. The Bride’s “dark night of the soul” narrates the hardships and difficulties she endures in her progressive detachment from the world—a detachment characterized as the deprivation of sensible appetites for external things of the material world and gratifications of the will—all toward reaching the light of union with her lover; it is a painful experience of spiritual maturation, through loss, dissolution and the transformation of the self toward ultimate union with God. And just as in darkness there is privation of light, this journey demands—common also to Jewish, Islamic and Eastern strains of mysticism—privation and purgative suffering in the pursuit of unity, oneness, or identity with spiritual truth or God.
A Poetic and Mystical Tradition
It is not incidental that arguably St. John’s greatest work he titled The Ascent of Mount Carmel—“ascent” of the soul from the crudities of this limited world and the attachment to things, ideas, and one’s own self; and “Mount Carmel,” the place where Elijah called down the true God to overthrow the claims of idolaters (1 Kgs 18:20–40). Verses 11 and 12 read: “Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.”