“Religious” language

Turner corrects a widespread misunderstanding of the Pseudo-Dionysian view of religious language.  For the pseudo-Denys (Turner’s designation), everything comes from God and thus “every creature retains within it a trace of its divine source, every creature in some way reflects, or is in some way an image or ‘similitude’ of, the divine nature from which it flows.”

At some point, for the pseudo-Denys, all language fails, but “before anything we say of God fails it leads us some part of the way back up the ladder of language to that exact point at which it fails.  All language about God has to be stretched before it snaps.  But everything we can truly say about something God has created can be stretched out towards the representation of God.  And this is because in its creation each thing is the stretching out of God towards it.”

In other words, the pseudo-Denys doesn’t say we cannot say anything about God with ordinary language.  On the contrary, all our language is fit to be used of God: “language about God is truly unrestricted in range.”  For him, “religious language” is “simply ordinary language stretched to the limit of its significance.”  “God is a rock” is not meaningless; it fails because God is so far transcendentally rocklike that our conception of rockliness doesn’t encompass His rockliness.

Turner warns that the current fashion for Dionysian apophatic theology can go wrong: “The renewal of interest in the pseudo-Denys’ theology in our own time rises predominantly from his exposition of the via negativa , the recognition that when all talk about God has been exhausted, the rest is silence.  There are no doubt very good reasons for this – but we misconstrue the point of the via negativa if we tear it out of its context of relationship with the via affirmativa and represent it as an independent or even as an alternative theological strategy – or, more paradoxically still, as an independent avenue of knowledge of God.” The silence of theology doesn’t come at the outset; it comes at the end, when language exhausted itself, and fallen short.