Post-Atheism: from Apophatic Theology to "Minimal Religion"

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Mikhail Epstein

Post-Atheism: from Apophatic Theology to "Minimal Religion"

In the book: Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (with Alexander Genis and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, in the series Studies in Slavic Literature, Culture, and Society, vol. 3). New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999, 528 pp.345-393.

1. From Apophatic Theology to Atheism

2. Secularization and the "New Middle Ages"

3. Theomorphism: the "Other" in Culture

4. Angelism as a Postmodern Religion

5. Post-Atheist Spirituality in Russia: Minimal Religion


 
 

We are turning demystification

inside out: within the profane, we are discovering the sacred.

Mirca Eliade

There are numerous philosophical investigations into the relationship between religion and art. However, what interests me in the present chapter is not the eternal question traditionally broached, but the phenomenon of a new type of religious consciousnessor, more precisely, a religious unconsciousthat is coming into existence in twentieth century Russian culture. The term 'religious unconscious' is applied here specifically to the state of Russian spirituality in the Soviet epoch and in particular to its latest phases when the official atheism is succeeded by various forms of post-atheist mentality.

What is commonly understood by the term 'unconscious' is the sphere of primal drives and vital instincts, which the religious consciousness seeks to repress and eliminate. However, what was repressed and excluded during the Soviet epoch was precisely the religious consciousness, which occupied the sphere of the unconscious in place of the baser instincts of hate, aggression, cruelty and destruction, ousted from it, transformed into consciousness, and promoted into ideological doctrine. This unique historical experiment, which reversed the relationship of these two spheres of the psyche and relegated religion to the sphere of the unconscious, requires radical theoretization to match the radical nature of the revolution that it represents. The West, too, has witnessed a similar process of relegating religion to the unconscious. However, as will be seen later, this process of secularization was much more moderate, and it has already received theoretical explanations from a theological point of view.

In his late text, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Freud establishes a close connection between religious feeling and the unconscious. Both appear to share their origin in what Freud describes, alluding to a letter from his friend, Romain Rolland, as the "oceanic feeling." "It is . . . a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded  as it were, 'oceanic.'" According to Rolland, who is paraphrased by Freud, "[T]his feeling . . . is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them. One may . . . rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion." Freud then goes on to explain the nature of this oceanic feeling by positing that there is no impenetrable barrier between the conscious Ego and the unconscious Id. The Ego is only the façade of the unconscious, an island, as it were, surrounded on all sides by an ocean. The same image recurs in C. G. Jung's writings, in his reflections on psychology and religion. "[T]he psyche . . . reaches so far beyond the boundaries of consciousness that the latter could easily be compared to an island in the ocean. Whereas the island is small and narrow, the ocean is immensely wide and deep and contains a life infinitely surpassing, in kind and degree, anything known on the island . . . " Using this metaphor, it is possible to compare the atheization of Russian society in the Soviet epoch to the sinking of the ancient island of Atlantis, when all forms of conscious religiosity were not so much destroyed as banned into the depths of the unconscious, relegated to the bottom of that ocean from which they were once raised by the consciousness of many generations of religious believers.

A few remarks on the use of terminology in this investigation. The concept of 'the unconscious' is not used in any strict psychoanalytic sense but rather as the notion of a general cultural paradigm, which can be pinpointed at various levels, including the psychological level, on a par with the historical, social, aesthetic and theological. The unconscious is thus a sphere of either the psychic, the social or cultural life of the human subject, which lies beyond the boundary of his/her consciousness and is in a conflictual relationship with the individual's conscious attitudes. Thus the unconscious can be defined only in terms of the conscious  as its other. 

1. From Apophatic Theology to Atheism

Under the pressure of censorhipin both the social and psychoanalytic meaning of the termthe religious unconscious acquired new depth during the Soviet period. However, the repression of religious consciousness was not imposed from the outside alone, by an external force. This repression was rooted in the very heart of the religious and theological tradition dominant in Eastern Christianity and particularly in Russia. It is by no means an accident that huge religious persecutions and the rise of mass atheism took place within this cultural domain. This is because ever since the Byzantine period, Eastern Christianity has been home to the tradition of apophatic, or negative theology.

According to the spiritual precepts of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite (writing around the 5th or beginnning of the 6th century AD), God can neither be represented in images nor designated by any name, because He is more profound than any definition. God, or "the supreme Cause," "is neither knowledge nor truth. It is not kingship. It is not wisdom. It is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness. Nor is it a spirit, in the sense in which we understand that term," wrote Pseudo-Dionysius, author of the Areopagitica, who rejected all the names for God without leaving us his own name. "I pray we could come to this darkness so far above light! If only we lacked sight and knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing, that which lies beyond all vision and knowledge. For this would be really to see and to know: to praise the Transcendent One in a transcendent way, namely through the denial of all beings." What we can conclude from this is that God has no place in consciousness, since the latter operates by the use of positive terms. To paraphrase Husserl, consciousness is always "consciousness of something", while God is not "something" and so escapes the definitions offered by consciousness. If our consciousness of God is false, that means that only through overcoming and negating consciousness can we reveal the truth about Him. Since consciousness is correlated with being, the aim is to reach non-being; and to do so, the aspirant must remain on the other side of consciousness. The locus of faith is thus transferred to the unconscious, and all positive sources of knowledge are extinguished and dispersed in its dark abysses.

Negative theology found expression above all in the Eastern branch of Christianity. According to Vladimir N. Lossky, an eminent Russian Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century, apophaticism "constitutes the fundamental characteristic of the whole theological tradition of the Eastern Church."

The early 18th century Russian icon, entitled "John the Evangelist in Silence," symbolises this tradition. As is known, the Gospel of St. John is generally regarded as the most secretive, the most 'mystagogic' of the Gospels and hence mystically connected with Orthodoxy. By the same system of symbolic correspondences, inherited from Church traditions, the Apostle Peter is connected with Catholicism, and St. Paul, by the the freedom of his theological speculations, with Protestantism. To St. John is attributed not only the Fourth Gospel but the concluding chapter of the New Testament, Revelation. Hence the apocalyptic vision of the end of the world and the extinction of its visible and tangible forms also has a figurative connection with the Eastern theological tradition.

This icon depicts John the Evangelist, using his right hand to hold open the beginning of his Gospel. We read: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him . . ." John's left hand is raised to his lips, as if to make the sign of silence over the words themselves, sealing them with the mark of the inexpressible. At first glance, the meaning of these gestures might seem contradictory: the right hand reveals "the Word" while the left hand conceals it. But this is the very paradox of negative theology: it is because "the Word was God" that it must be enunciated in silence. All other words may be uttered: only this one mysterious Word must remain unuttered, through which everything came to be. In Eastern theology, this "rule of the left hand" was particularly respected. It barred the Word preached by the Gospel from the speaking mouth.

There have been many manifestations of apophaticism in Russian theology. The most fundamental was the suppression of theo-logy itself, the cutting off of logos, or discourse on God. This Russian "anti-theology," with its fervent adherence to the principle of "inexpressibility," surpassed even Byzantine theology, which despite its advocacy of "wise silence," remained noisy and effusive. This perplexing self-erasure determines the peculiarity of Russian theology, in the sense that Georgii Florovsky defined it in his classic study The Paths of Russian Theology: "The history of Russian thought contains a good deal that is problematic and incomprehensible. The most important question is this: what is the meaning of Russia's ancient, enduring, and centuries-long intellectual silence? . . . Old Russian culture remained unformulated and mute. The Russian spirit received no creative literary and intellectual expression. The inexpressible and unexpressed quality of Old Russia's culture often appears unhealthy."

Certainly, no one would deny that Russian theology produced numerous works in the fields of liturgy, dogmatics, and other disciplines, and that it experienced a particular upsurge in the second half of the 19th and early twentieth centuries. The point is in the fundamental attitude: in Russia, theology has never been regarded as a particularly important function of faith. Instead, the shortest path to God was either through the incessant repetition of the eight-word prayer to Jesus, or via "inexpressible sighs." Even when, on occasion, Russian theology reclaimed its right to speak about God, it used as its inspiration the very tradition that denied the possibility of speaking about God. This is what happened in the period of Metropolitan Makarii (the 16th century), when the theological foundations were laid for the culture of Muscovite Russia, and when for the first time perhaps, according to Florovsky, the attempt was made "to build culture as a system." Here, while taking a very selective attitude toward the Byzantine heritage, Muscovy betrayed its predilection for the works of the Areopagite: "Contemplative mysticism and asceticismthe best and most valuable part of Byzantine traditionplayed no role in the conservative Muscovite synthesis. . . However, the Athonite translation of Areopagitica did pass into Makarii's Great Reading Compendium or Meneloges [Velikie chet'i minei ] and generally enjoyed an unexpectedly wide circulation and popularity (Ivan the Terrible greatly admired the Areopagitica)."

It remains something of a mystery why Ivan the Terrible, whose reign was marked by alernating bouts of unbridled sinfulness and equally intense repentance, was so drawn to this work of negative theology. Perhaps there was a kind of correspondance between the apophatic paradox of knowing God through lack of knowing Him and the Russian Tzar's style of behavior, his mixture of extreme cruelty and fool-in-Christ (iurodivyi) humility: perhaps he found a confirmation of his superhuman calling in the very horror of his acts. According to this logic, if non-knowledge of God is the surest way to knowledge of God, then deviation from God's commandments is the way to God, a way to fulfil His unspoken will. Ivan the Terrible's piety was in itself a paradox: while filled with self-denial and repentance, it also drove him to commit new crimes or at the very least could be easily reconciled with them.

It is useful to remember that negative theology developed in a Monophysite environment, which rejected the idea of Christ's human nature, accepting only his divine nature and hence attributing a certain virtuality, conditionality and illusoriness to his human incarnation. It is noteworthy that "the initial proclamation of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite provoked discussions between the Orthodox and the Monophysites in Constantinople in 533 AD, during which the head of the Orthodox rejected their authenticity." Later, however, these works became part of the canon of Orthodox patristic literature. It is also a fact that the ideas of negative theology played an important part in Western mystical heresies, mixing with Manichaeanism and Monophysitism  for example, the Cathars, Manichaeans and Anabaptists saw the elevation of the divine in the desecration of the human. Since matter constituted absolute evil, any method by which it could be erradicatedincluding lying, murder, betrayal, extreme asceticism or its opposite, reckless debaucherywas considered a good. . Such an interpretation of "saintliness through blasphemy" is close to the religious philosophy of Ivan the Terrible, although whatever else he may be accused of, he remains innocent of deliberate sectarian deviations. However, while Monophysitism itself was always deemed heretical among the Orthodox, a certain element of "negative theology" became part of Orthodox religiosity.

We are not in a position to pursue all the lines of development of the apophatic theological tradition, but they very clearly lead us to the Russian Nihilism of the 19th century and the Soviet atheism of the twentieth, in which negative theology becomes the negation of theism itself. God is transposed beyond the region of knowledge as such, and all predicates of being attached to the notion of God are rejected. This dark and unhealthy side of apophaticism has been part of Russian theology through its entire history. According to Florovsky, "many believers acquired a dangerous habit of doing without any theology whatsoever, substituting it with whatever came their way  the Book of Rules, the tipikon , myths about ancient times, customs, or lyricism of spirit. What came into existence was a retrograde renunciation and avoidance of knowledge, a kind of theological aphasia, a surprising adogmatism and even agnosticism, for the sake of a self-deluding piety. This was the heresy of the new gnoseomachists. . . . This gnoseomachy threatened the very health of spirituality."

The anti-intellectual stance of Orthodoxy may account for the atheistic inclination of Russian thought. The opposition to knowledge of, and thought about, Godgnoseomachydrove faith into the unconscious, clearing the way for the conscious cult of science, revolution, and social ideals. Theological 'aphasia' and 'agnosticism'the malaise of word and knowledgeprepared the ground for atheism as a spiritual neurosis, a phenomenon of exiled religiosity. Superficially, it seemed that the nihilist negation of "everything," beginning with society, government, art and morality, extended ultimately to the negation of "the holiest of holies." This is how the trend is described in a conversation between the "first nihilist" Bazarov and the gentleman Pavel Petrovich in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. In reality, however, nihilism began with the 'sacred,' from which it spread to more peripheral areas, sanctified by religion. "There is no God" was the beginning of Russian youth's fascination with Buchner and Marx, with chemistry and revolution.

But where did this "there is no God" come from? Is its origin not in the ambivalence of apophatic theology itself, which by denying God any cognizable features plunges us into the depths of thoughtlessness-about-God and non-knowledge-of-God, ultimately leading to indifference toward or simple rejection of God?

According to Lossky, " [a]ll knowledge has as its object that which is. Now God is beyond all that exists. In order to approach Him it is necessary to deny all that is inferior to Him, that is to say, all that which is. (...) Proceeding by negations one ascends from the inferior degrees of being to the highest, by progressively setting aside all that can be known, in order to draw near to the Unknown in the darkness of absolute ignorance." Nihilism is the ultimate and most extreme of such negations. Faith is plunged into the sphere of non-knowing about its own subject and about itself, while in atheism this non-knowing evolves into a militant ignorance and deliberate rejection of God.

It is in this sense that Soviet atheism can be regarded as the paradoxical development of apophatic theology, as its logical next step, leading to the erasure of its 'theistic' and 'theological' components. God is not only deprived of all His attributes, but of the predicate of existence itself. Godlessness and lack of faith become as it were the natural consequence of the apophatic negation of God and of the erasure of conscious faith. S. L. Frank noted this remarkable convergence of theology and atheism in the negation of the existence of God himself. "If the word 'to exist' is to be understood in the sense of 'to be constituted in objective reality,' paradoxically the absence of faith and faith must converge in the negation of this predicate in its application to God . . . The concept of atheism consists in the fact that in our immediate experience of objective reality, we do not encounter an object such as God . . . This proposition as such is incontestable, and with regard to it faith is essentially concordant with non-faith." The only difference is that in the first case the negation of God is but a step towards attaining God, while in the other it is the final point, at which reason stops and is petrified. That which serves to purify faith in apophatic theology becomes the negation of faith in atheism, and it is difficult to define logically where extreme apophaticism ends and nihilism and atheism begin. Clearly, God does not exist in the same way a visible object or perceptible phenomenon does. If this world exists, then God does not exist. If this tree exists, then God does not exist in this sense of 'existence.' In the final analysis, negative theology negates itself as theology, becoming atheism.

One might ask at this point why apophatic theology is most intimately, though not exclusively, connected with Eastern Christianity. Perhaps it is for the same reason that the Orient has been the cradle of religions embodying a negative infinity, represented through a "no"  nirvana in Buddhism, tao in Taoism. According to S. L. Frank, "negative theology is guided by the intuition that God's being as the primal source and primal foundation of being is super-logical and super-rational . . . Consciousness here becomes immersed in a completely new, usually unknown dimension of being, receding into some sort of dark depths, which remove it endlessly from the ordinary 'earthly' world . . . The practical sum total of this attitude is a limitless and excessive spiritual aloofness, which makes it in some respects similar to Hindu religiosity."

Byzantium and Russia are thus close to the Orient in this respect but are not to be equated with it. Since apophatic theology still remains a Christian theology, it cannot deny the positive manifestation of God in the image of His Son, sent in flesh and blood to expiate the sins of man. But precisely because Christian revelation is essentially positive, and even iconicthat is, it is revealed in the fullness of the human personality of Christ,the development of negative theology in Christianity had to lead to atheism.

It is one thing when Shankara, the great Hindu thinker, attains to Brahman through the negation of all its definitive traits: "Now there is no class of substance to which the Brahman belongs, no common genus. It cannot therefore be denoted by words which, like 'being' in the ordinary sense, signify a category of things. Nor can it be denoted by quality, for it is without qualities; nor yet by activity because it is without activity . . . Therefore it cannot be defined by word or idea; as the Scripture says, it is the One 'before whom words recoil.'" Or when Chuang Tsu, the great Taoist thinker, attains Tao through the negation of all positive characteristics in order to clarify the empty and formless nature of Tao itself: "The Tao cannot be heard; what can be heard is not It. The Tao cannot be seen; what can be seen is not It. The Tao cannot be expressed in words; what can be expressed in words is not It. Do we know the Formless which gives form to form? In the same way the Tao does not admit of being named."

It is a different matter when a similar method is applied to the God of Christian theology; for this is a God who revealed himself, who descended to earth to assume human form, who died, was resurrected, and whose crucifixion wounds were physically touched by the apostle Thomas. Negative theology thus denies the positive attributes of a God whose very essence, according to Christian revelation, became visible and tangible in the figure of Christ:

It is not soul or mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction, speech, or understanding. Nor is it speech per se, understanding per se. It cannot be spoken of and it cannot be grasped by understanding. It is not number or order, greatness or smallness, equality or inequality, similarity or dissimilarity. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity or time . . . It is not sonship or fatherhood and it is nothing known to us or to any other being. It falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor of being.

Pseudo-Dionysius' formulations, so similar to those of Shankara and Chuang Tsu, acquire a different meaning in the context of "positive" religion. They dissolve its very core, the humanness of Christ, his "sonship," his existence in time and his possession of speech. They potentially border on atheism.

In the Orient, the negative forms of knowledge of God do not lead to atheism. They remain forms of knowledge of God to the extent that their divine object is the absolute nothing, a pure and all-embracing emptiness. Nihilism is here not a denial of religion, but represents its profound essence and dignity. Within the Christian tradition, issuing from the fullness of the incarnation of God, the development of the negative moment in the knowledge of the divine is at first directed towards the cleansing of faith from idolatry and pagan superstitions. However, it ends by falling outside the framework of the knowledge of God -Man, and leads to atheism. The negation of the positive attributes of Nothing is a religious extension into that Nothing. The negation of the positive attributes of God, who appeared in the flesh and who continues to nurture the faithful with his flesh, is already atheism.

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However, this does not lead to the conclusion that atheism, in developing apophaticism to extremes, completely annihilates the religious principle. The paradox lies in the very fact that while apophaticism contained the seeds of atheism, atheism retains the seed of apophaticism. That is, atheism retains its own unconscious theology. Apophaticism is a liminal phenomenon, through which faith crosses into atheism, while atheism itself reveals the unconscious of faith. Radically expelled from consciousness, the religious descends into the bowels of the unconscious, from whence it makes its presence felt by means of numerous clear or blurred signals. In the same manner repressed ...

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