On apophatic political theology

Abstract

The usual reference points for considerations of hope in political theology have been in the twentieth century writings of Ernst Bloch, Jürgen Moltmann and the virtue ethicists of more recent years. Newheiser returns to this classic political theological theme in this book, but via a different route. In so doing, he offers a tantalizing glimpse of what a renewed negative political theology of hopemight look like. Newheiser’s book is important for at least three reasons. The first reason lies in his brokering a dialogue between deconstructive continental philosophy and Christian patristic and mystical theologies. The second reason builds upon the first; Newheiser writes for a secular audience, who may also happen to be religious, and he writes in such a way that he does not presuppose the commitments of his reader or their field of knowledge. He takes his reader into a newly created territory and argues his case with simplicity and clarity. In doing so, he writes political theology that takes the conditions of both its religiosity and its secularity seriously. The third reason this text is important relates to the field of political theology itself. The argument that Newheiser offers here is for a renewal of ethical negativity as the grounds of a political theology suitable for our age. It is in this last regard that the text is perhaps most timely. It is on this final point that I will focus in what follows. Newheiser (2019, 40, 48, 68) defines apophasis as a form of “unsaying” that creates in its practitioner “an ethical discipline that enacts the dispossession of the self,” or as he also expresses it, a discipline “oriented towards future transformation.” As such hope and negativity belong together, they are practices of the will that reinforce each other. The practice of negativity seems to refine hope, enabling it to become properly itself, shorn of pretention. Negativity enables the owning of uncertainty, the speaking with a pebble in one’s mouth, as Newheiser notes on the closing page of the book. Negativity does not mean silence. Speech must proliferate, for divine creation begets speech in the creature, but speech turns against itself, living diachronically between and with the dual practices of affirmation and negation. This is the necessary “unsaying” of faith. Newheiser is clear that his project is not primarily about linguistic or propositional negativity, but rather ethical, embodied negativity: the way in which faith bears itself into the world as a practiced disposition across a lifetime. One of Newheiser’s most suggestive, although not fully developed, themes concerns the ways in which a negative theology relates to questions of time and temporality. He notes that he is not arguing for a synchronicity of affirmation and negation, but rather a diachronic lived experience of