not equality, not inequality,
not likeness, not unlikeness,
not having stood, not moved, not at rest,
not powerful, not power,
not light,
not living, not life,
not being,
not eternity, not time.
not intellectual contact with it,
not knowledge, not truth,
not king, not wisdom,
not one, not unity,
not divinity,
not goodness,
not spirit (as we know spirit),
not sonhood, not fatherhood,
not something other [than that] which is known
by us or some other beings,
not something among what is not,
not something among what is,
not known as it is by beings,
not a knower of beings as they are:
There is neither logos, name, or knowledge of it.
It is not dark nor light,
not error, and not truth.
There is universally
neither position nor denial of it.
While there are produced positions and denials
of those after it,
we neither position nor deny it.
Since,
beyond all position is
the all-complete and single cause of all;
beyond all negation:
the preeminence of that
absolutely absolved from all
and beyond the whole.65
Similarly with respect to movement and steps on a journey, St. John declares:
Thus, if it is true—and indeed it is—that the soul must journey by knowing God through what he is not rather than what he is, it must journey . . . by way of the denial and rejection of natural and supernatural apprehensions . . . God cannot be encompassed by any form or distinct knowledge.66
And just as the Cloud author, as we shall shortly see, will maintain the cataphatic basis of negative theology—its anchoring in the corporeal liturgical and devotional life and language of the monastery which is then “transcended” through a “forgetting”—apophatic theology proceeds by making affirmative statements that are then “un-said” in an ever-regressive movement. Yet “this movement,” argues Gabriel Rochell in “Apophatic Preaching and the Postmodern Mind,” “leaves traces in the mind of the hearer that become contemplative clues to the experience of God.”67
For Dionysius, true speaking about God is a speaking that strikes human language dumb, speech linguistically taxed to the point of excess or exhaustion, and therein is its inadequacy—its “spiritual deserts,” “silences,” and “dark nights.” It is language deployed to realize the language-defeating reality of the divine. “If talk about God is deficient,” says Denys Turner, “this is a discovery made within the extending of it into superfluity, into that excess in which it collapses under its own weight . . . [T]he silence which falls in the embarrassment of prolixity is transformed into awe.”68 Negative theology, then, affirms a not-knowing, a silence; it is a “language of unsaying,”69 or a “self-subverting utterance.”70 Silence here, or the refusal of discursive reflection, is a form of communication, wherein something is known at the somatic level. Likewise, for St. John the joy of encountering God is itself unspeakable—he is “unable to express the plenitude of [its] meaning in ordinary words.”71 Just as Plato’s newly released prisoner at first faces the blinding intensity of light, what St. John first feels as absence is, rather, a resounding and almost unbearable fullness of meaning. As our ordinary language approaches the mystery of divine reality, one writer puts it, “it begins to break up and enter a new mode. Ordinary speech becomes extraordinary poetry, and extraordinary poetry shifts to exquisite music, and music in turn gives way to breathtaking design until a ‘silent’ word becomes the only adequate name for God.”72 In the Spiritual Canticle St. John had maintained:
In contemplation God teaches the soul very quietly and secretly, without its knowing how, without the sound of words, and without the help of any bodily or spiritual faculty, in silence and quietude . . . Some spiritual persons call this contemplation knowing by unknowing.73
This denial of all nameable divine essentiality will be central to contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Marion’s thinking, and to our sense of a theological aesthetics in Viola’s work, founded on an analogy between aesthetic experience and that of revelation—a new sense of Beauty that reveals something beyond our experience and unites us to that revelation, or intimation of the sublime beneath the material surface of observable phenomena.
The Cloud of Unknowing
Another of the medieval thinkers consistently invoked by Viola is the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a practical spiritual guidebook believed to have been written in the latter half of the 14th century by an English monk who counsels his young student to seek God not through knowledge but through affectivity, what he calls a “naked blind feeling of being”—a directly experiential mysticism no longer beholden to the “intellectual exercise and dialectical discipline that had generally characterized negative theologies since ancient Greece.”74 The Cloud author urges his disciple to negate all cognitive activity, an active effort of denial and unknowing which allows for the irruption of grace into the ordinary.75 Cheryl Taylor has compellingly theorized this notion of transcendence within the context of liminality, a condition of open-ended betweenness—that is, between the traditional dualism of the active and contemplative lives, a space of “potential,”76 and what, in the postmodern arena, Luce Irigaray has theorized as intervalle, a liminal identity which is the place or possibility of the divine—a “sensible transcendental” she calls it.77 This sense of transitus in liminality, the passing into a state of being that cannot truly be materially depicted, only perceived or experienced—or rather, believed, held in mind or faith—is often invoked by Viola himself in the allusive words used in the titles of some of his works such as “Crossing,” “Passing,” “Surrender,” “Unspoken,” etc. In this way the subject, rendered “naked,” is stripped of the familiar, of the stable and the normative, and is placed in a transitional or liminal space, challenged and then transformed by the very impress of the unfamiliar. In this fissured subjectivity the subject is a self-in-process, open to the functioning of grace within the soul.78 The Cloud Author counsels of this process:
For when you first begin to undertake it, all that you find is a darkness, a sort of cloud of unknowing . . . This darkness and cloud is always between you and your God . . . and it prevents you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason . . . When I say “darkness,” I mean a privation of knowing.79
And again further on:
Try as you might, this darkness and this cloud will remain between you and your God. You will feel frustrated, for your mind will be unable to grasp him, and your heart will not relish the delight of his love. But learn to be at home in this darkness.80
This metaphor of darkness or obscurity converges with Scripture in the Exodus story of Moses’ encounter with God “in a dark cloud” on Mount Sinai (Exodus 20:21). In these meanings, faith is the darkness of un/non-knowing, the stripping away of material elements that hamper apprehension of the divine. Dark knowledge is dark in the sense that it is not a conceptual—enlightened—knowledge; St. John’s Bride refers to it as an “I-don’t-know-what” since it is not understandable, it is indescribable, unspeakable, a “primordial knowing.”81 This process of privation or renunciation of the attachments of the self to the self’s own operations and its objects is dark because it removes from us our foundations of familiar comfort and sources of fulfillment, and transplants us into blinding nothingness—again the feeling of abandonment or “powerlessness” as St. John describes it.