that my senses were left
deprived of all their sensing,
and my spirit was given
an understanding while not understanding,
transcending all knowledge.
. . .
The higher he ascends
the less he understands,
because the cloud is dark
which lit up the night;
whoever knows this
remains always in unknowing
transcending all knowledge.
This knowledge in unknowing
is so overwhelming
that wise men disputing
can never overthrow it,
for their knowledge does not reach
to the understanding of not understanding,
transcending all knowledge.
And this supreme knowledge is so exalted
that no power of man or learning
can grasp it;
he who masters himself
will, with knowledge in unknowing,
always be transcending.48
In apophatic or negative theology, it is in these terms—“transcending all knowledge,” a knowing that is, conceptually, inaccessible to “men disputing”—that the Divine is beyond words, an abstract experience that can only be recognized or intuited; human beings cannot describe the essence of God, and therefore all descriptions, if attempted, will be by necessity false. And this failure or loss of speech manifests a negation of human capacities and an annihilation of the self.49 William Franke explains:
Linguistic apophasis thus appears as nothing but an expression for apophasis as a condition and a dynamic of negation and self-annihilation that remains indefinable and unutterable. It cannot be formulated adequately in linguistic terms, not even as ‘what cannot be said,’ but can only be practiced in the wordless straining of the soul trained upon what it can neither know nor say.50
Again, we can turn to St. John directly: “Since God is inaccessible, be careful not to concern yourself with all that your faculties can comprehend or your senses feel, so that you do not become satisfied with less and lose the lightness of soul suitable for going to him.”51
Neither existence nor nonexistence as we understand it applies to God; in this sense, God is beyond existing or, as contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Marion will have it, “God without Being.” In other words, God, the divine, or to use the terminology of the postmodern, the “Wholly Other,” is not a creation, not conceptually definable in terms of space and location, and not conceptually confinable to assumptions of temporality.
Yet it is not nothing. Again as William Franke has argued, “this very nullity is itself something. We conceive of something which we cannot conceive . . . Our conceiving and saying relates itself to what cannot be conceived or said. The capacity for such relating (without concepts and language) can be verified as an existential fact by every individual who attempts, for example, to conceive of ‘God’ . . .”52 There is still something, an encounter which defies talking about; but to talk about it we must still try. Such “Ultimate Reality,” as Bulhof and ten Kate account for it, “is inaccessible to human thinking, inexpressible in human language, invisible to human eyes, unimaginable for the human mind”53—but at the same time, I would add, it is an experience there for the having, if one knows how to seek it.
Much of Bill Viola’s work is precisely about that cultivation of individual experience of inexpressible divine reality as beyond the realm or limits of ordinary perception. In an interview published in 1993, the artist sounds a familiar note:
The basic tenets of the Via Negativa are the unknowability of God: that God is wholly other, independent, complete; that God cannot be grasped by the human intellect, cannot be described in any way; that when the mind faces the divine reality, it becomes blank. It seizes up. It enters a cloud of unknowing. When the eyes cannot see, then the only thing to go on is faith, and the only true way to approach God is from within. From that point the only way God can be reached is though love. By love the soul enters into union with God, a union not infrequently described through the metaphor of ecstatic sex. Eastern religions call it enlightenment.54
Room for St. John of the Cross is a dramatic metaphor for solitude, anguish and abjection as sources of strength, conveyed through the dialectic of nature’s terrifying tumult and the mind’s inner tranquility. As historian David Morgan has put it: “Viola’s installations bear the conviction that the conditions of traditional religious ritual can be simulated in works of art, in order to achieve something of the spiritual transformation wrought in the original context.”55 And in a note published in 1982, while the artist was still at work on the piece, Viola himself confirmed: “Initiation rites and age-old spiritual training ordeals . . . are all controlled, staged accidents, ancient technologies designed to bring the organism to a life-threatening crisis.”56
This life-threatening crisis and its spiritual dimension, I shall argue in the following chapter, invoke the rich philosophical tradition of the sublime, and more specifically its basic duality of pain and pleasure. Viola’s art investigates our human condition as embodied beings, and urges us toward the experience of vulnerability, longing but ill-equipped for transcendence and ultimate renunciation of self, and it does so via the ancient traditions of mysticism and, more specifically, via apophatic theology and the idea that God is best identified in terms of “hiddenness” and “revelation.” This, ultimately, will have resonance in contemporary notions of “negation” and “excess” as developed in continental philosophy and in particular in postmodern deconstructive critiques of Enlightenment ideals. First, however, it is important to trace its Early Christian foundations, as called upon by Viola himself.
The Dionysian Tradition
In the 1993 and 1997 interviews cited above, Viola makes frequent reference to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the anonymous theologian and philosopher of the late 5th to early 6th century who was at one time erroneously identified as Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of St. Paul mentioned in Acts 17:34, and in 1 Timothy 6:16, where Paul says of God: “It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.” “Pseudo-Dionysius” is now widely supposed to have been a Syrian monk, who formulates one of the first articulations of apophatic theology.
In Dionysius’ canonical treatise De Divinus Nominibus (The Divine Names)—a text with strong Neoplatonic influence that grew to be immensely popular amongst medieval theologians—beauty is identified as an attribute of God and inseparably conjoined with the Good. It is an idea based on Plato’s notion, set out in the Timeaus, that the world is the product of a rational, purposive design, and that it is meant to be a good environment for human beings and non-human entities, which have themselves been deliberately produced (created) by that greater intelligence that designed the world. Plato’s Timeaus concludes:
For with this our world has received its full complement of living creatures, mortal and immortal, and come to be in all its grandeur, goodness, beauty and perfection—this visible living creature made in the likeness of the intelligible and embracing all the visible, this god displayed to sense, this our heaven, one and only-begotten.57