To Attain the Full Stature of the Perfect Christ

Strolling through the Oxford University Press of forthcoming publications is always a delight, but never more so than when espying names of friends and colleagues, as here: Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology: Attaining the Fullness of Christ by Alexis Torrance  (Oxford UP, December 2020, 256pp.)

Alexis and I gave papers at the Eighth Day Institute in Kansas just over a year ago--though it now feels like another aeon in a distant galaxy far, far away! If you don't know the lovely people of the Institute, and the unique and hopeful and admirable work they are doing--built around that fantastic bookstore--then stop at once and go here.

I've written to Alexis asking for an interview upon publication of his book, about which the publisher tells us this:

To what kind of existence does Christ call us? Christian theology has from its inception posited a powerful vision of humanity's ultimate and eternal fulfilment through the person and work of Jesus Christ. How precisely to understand and approach the human perfection to which the Christian is summoned is a question that has vexed the minds of many and diverse theologians.

Orthodox Christian theology is notable for its consistent interest in this question, and over the last century has offered to the West a wealth of theological insight on the matter, drawn both from the resources of its Byzantine theological heritage as well as its living interaction with Western theological and philosophical currents. In this regard, the important themes of personhood, deification, epektasis, apophaticism, and divine energies have been elaborated with much success by Orthodox theologians; but not without controversy.

Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology addresses the question of human perfection in Orthodox theology via a retrieval of the sources, examining in turn the thought of leading representatives of the Byzantine theological tradition: St Maximus the Confessor, St Theodore the Studite, St Symeon the New Theologian, and St Gregory Palamas. The overarching argument of this study is that in order to present an Orthodox Christian understanding of human perfection which remains true to its Byzantine inheritance, supreme emphasis must be placed on the doctrine of Christ, especially on the significance and import of Christ's humanity. The intention of this work is thus to keep the creative approach to human destiny in Orthodox theology firmly moored to its theological past.

Desire and the Darkness of God

The University of Notre Dame Press sent me their newest catalogue; but it was in reviewing the back lists that brought to my attention a book I missed when it was first published in 2015: Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God: Essays in Honor of Denys Turner, eds. Eric Bugyis and David Newheiser (UNDP, 2015), 480pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In the face of religious and cultural diversity, some doubt whether Christian faith remains possible today. Critics claim that religion is irrational and violent, and the loudest defenders of Christianity are equally strident. In response, Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God: Essays in Honor of Denys Turner explores the uncertainty essential to Christian commitment; it suggests that faith is moved by a desire for that which cannot be known.

This approach is inspired by the tradition of Christian apophatic theology, which argues that language cannot capture divine transcendence. From this perspective, contemporary debates over God’s existence represent a dead end: if God is not simply another object in the world, then faith begins not in abstract certainty but in a love that exceeds the limits of knowledge.

The essays engage classic Christian thought alongside literary and philosophical sources ranging from Pseudo-Dionysius and Dante to Karl Marx and Jacques Derrida. Building on the work of Denys Turner, they indicate that the boundary between atheism and Christian thought is productively blurry. Instead of settling the stale dispute over whether religion is rationally justified, their work suggests instead that Christian life is an ethical and political practice impassioned by a God who transcends understanding.

If you peruse the table of contents you will see a wonderful variety of essays, including those by such notable figures as Terry Eagleton in conversation with Turner over a topic both have written about: the relationship between Christianity and Marxism.

I found Turner's work in the late 90s, and since then have returned to him, not least because he's useful in debunking any efforts towards self-congratulation or self-promotion on the part of the Christian East, some of whose apologists sometimes give the impression of thinking the East has a monopoly on apophaticism in theology--in contrast, of course, to the West's apparent horrid old "rationalism" and "scholasticism." Turner is among those who handily debunk such hoary old tales.

On Political and Sexual Epistemological Crises

I have several times previously drawn attention to Adam Phillips, the English literary scholar and psychoanalyst, certainly the most prolific and quite likely also the most interesting analytic writer today. There is, I have suggested, a clear "apophatic" theme and impulse in much of his writing, and that is perhaps nowhere so clear as in one of his early, short books I have just finished: Terrors and Experts (Harvard University Press, 1997), 128pp. I hope to develop this apophatic connection in more detail elsewhere, showing how much in Phillips is very sympathetic to, and thus useful for dialogue with, Eastern Christian spirituality.

It is sometimes a cheap trick to claim that a book or an idea from decades or centuries ago is directly "relevant" in light of the headlines of today. But I would suggest that this book is not so much relevant now as superfluous, but in a good way, that is, as having fulfilled its purpose, albeit belatedly: the very thing it calls for is now to be found in abundance. Thus, with ongoing eruptions of "fake news," the uses and abuses of propaganda of all sorts--whether from Russia, ISIS, or others--and the widespread scorn for, and collapse of the authority of, "experts" (whether in politics, the media, Church, climate change science, and elsewhere), we seem more than ever to live in an age where "experts" are treated with skepticism at best, and scorn at worst.

This is precisely the sort of thing Phillips would seem to encourage: "psychoanalysis...radically revises our versions of competence." Here, as in his many other books, he sees the usefulness of psychoanalysis precisely insofar as it undermines unhealthy (neurotic) certainties and loosens things up, allowing people new thoughts and new freedom, including the freedom to forget about themselves. To the extent that psychoanalysis itself becomes an ideology enforcing various lines of authority and various forms of orthodoxy, it has, Phillips says, lost its usefulness and deserves to be ignored: "Psychoanalysts run the risk of believing that there is a King's English of the psyche and everybody is, or should be, speaking it." Psychoanalysis is, rather, at its best when it ranges itself "against the enemies of ambiguity" and gives free reign to its capacity "to both comfort and unsettle."

We have recently seen several attempts at understanding Western politics and politicians via psychoanalytic categories, including this very interesting article, as well as regular, and by now tedious, discussions of Donald Trump's "vulgarity" and his "id." Regardless of what one thinks of all this, Phillips argues that once one accepts the reality of an unconscious mind, all attempts at certainty and "dignity," at acting authoritatively or expertly or "presidentially," at speaking unequivocally, are perpetually undermined: "the unconscious, at least as Freud described it, is another word for the death of the guru." A guru claims to offer us a solution to a problem he has himself largely invented, and further claims there is only one solution, his, which will solve the problem. But the unconscious, Phillips reminds us by quoting Freud's The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest, "'speaks more than one dialect'." It is an unruly cacophony, and it mocks all gurus and bourgeois mandarins and prissy etiquette experts with their notions of what constitutes "appropriate tone" or "appearing presidential" rather than "vulgar."

Radically unsettling and undermining notions of competence, expertise, and authority are not things that most of us encourage others to do: "politicians in Western democracies do not get elected on the basis of their capacity for hesitation, or their willingness to sustain contradictory points of view, or their ability to change their minds, or their impassioned support for the opposition's point of view," Phillips notes. That is greatly to be pitied, for as Alasdair MacIntyre has often noted, the greatest need today is precisely the ability radically to put to the question all the claims of Western politicians on behalf of the structures of neoliberal capitalism, which too often largely remain hidden from us, offering us only a chimera of choice between alternatives that are, on closer examination, the same: conservative liberalism, liberal liberalism, or radical liberalism.

In such a context, the role of both a moral philosopher such as MacIntyre and an analyst such as Phillips (who both come out of the British left, and know each other's work) is to become, ironically, an "expert on the truths of uncertainty" and to resist the tendency, much in evidence in this country since 9/11, to defer to "experts" in the name of what I think has become the most pernicious American idol today, viz., "security." For part of the problem here is that, at least sometimes, "the expert constructs the terror, and then the terror makes the expert."

If Phillips, here and in other books (especially his Unforbidden Pleasures:Rethinking Authority, Power, and Vitality, which I reviewed here) offers much that is useful to undermining contemporary politicians and politics, with their bogus claims to certainty and authority, then in the latter parts of Terrors and Experts he offers much to put to the question the politics and ideologies of sexuality, not least in the grotesques of "gender ideology." Too much of what passes for discussion of these issues today is a cheap amalgam of essentialism, romanticism, and nostalgia; too much nonsense is spread about by those unwilling to recognize the legitimate differences between culturally conditioned and contingent gender roles on the one hand, and the sexual differentiation given by the Creator on the other. Here there is plenty of fault to go round: those demanding that nobody be permitted to deviate from preferred pronouns and nomenclature, and those resisting that with equal hostility and certainty. When it comes to sex and gender, most people, it seems, are, as Phillips might put it, themselves both terrors and experts! In a slightly different idiom, found in his book On Balance, when it comes to things we are most passionate about, including our sexual identities, we become unbalanced and instead emerge as intolerant fanatics.

As I have argued elsewhere, Catholic and Orthodox Christians are guilty of making the tradition say what it has not, of pulling the fabric too far to patch holes of their own making, when they attempt to argue that, from the premise "God created us male and female," certain prescriptive conclusions for how men and women are to act and think must inexorably follow. (It's the same slippery and over-hasty procedure used by those who assume that from a few vague buzzwords in Pastor Aeternus of Vatican I, the pope can do whatever he wants in any and all matters. Not so. Not in a month of Sundays.)

This is not to cast doubt on historic Christian teaching about sexual morality, which I support, but only to suggest that much of the contemporary theological debate on these issues is often unconsciously bound up with many other issues, especially those of social class, economic standing, and cultural conditioning, almost all of which go unrecognized. Moreover, it pretends to a certainty that I think few of us have, and then it attempts to enforce that certainty on others. From the Creator's "is" we are over-hasty in trying to draw our own "oughts." What and whom does that really serve well?

Instead of racing to unsustainable and intellectually vacuous "answers" about sexual differentiation, we need to be much more careful here about getting some of the questions right. My friend the Orthodox biblical scholar Edith Humphrey, whom I look forward to seeing next week at a conference in Minnesota, has recently done some of that here in a piece I commend to your attention.

Phillips will be radically unsettling to those who like their sexual roles and regulations highly detailed and prescriptive. Good luck with that. As he repeatedly notes, "there is nothing like sexuality...for making a mockery of our self-knowledge. In our erotic lives, at least, our preferences do not always accord with our standards." Moreover, Phillips rescues Freud's original insight into human bisexuality, and reintroduces Ferenczi's idea of "ambisexuality."

The result of all this is to note that "from a psychoanalytic point of view, nobody can know about sexuality" in part because "we are never one thing or another, but a miscellany. (For how long in any given day is one homosexual or heterosexual, and can you always tell the difference?)" We seek to be one thing and never another, and certainly Christians try to prescribe this, but that, at the very least, is, Phillips suggests, merely an expression of our "wish to be defined [which] is complicit with the wish to be controlled."

Rather than always and everywhere seeking control and certainty, seeking refuge from the terrors of the world and of love (including God's love, perhaps the most terrifying of all, though Phillips does not suggest this) in the shadow of the expert, the healthy mind is one that is free to forget, free not to focus on itself, free to avoid making a "fetish of memory," and free to kick out its own resident "enraged bureaucrat" who is always trying to organize, structure, and control thoughts. In the end, Phillips says that psychoanalysis, theology, politics, and anything else has to resist the descent into what he calls "Cartesianism," that is, into highly and tightly structured systems of thought in which we think we have thought everything there is to be thought, and no new or free thoughts are to be had. Psychoanalysis, like Christianity, works best when it reminds us that "too much definition leaves too much out."

Lying on the Couch of Unknowing: Apophatic Psychoanalysis (II)

Last week, I noted that the British psychoanalyst and literary scholar Adam Philips is a prolific fellow. I first came upon him recently in reading reviews (e.g, here, and especially here, which coheres with some of the ideological strains of the early psychoanalytic movement I discussed here) of his 2014 book, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, which is on my list to read.

One of the common themes of his work is the path not taken, the life not lived, and what one makes of that. Thus, e.g., his 1998 book On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life and then his more recent work, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life.

This latter book is an odd creation in some ways, and its oddness is well captured by this reviewer. Nevertheless, as I said last week, there is a great deal of wisdom in this book and its "apophatic" proposals, which I want to discuss here.


The appropriate place to begin is with Phillips flatly declaring, early in the book, that "reality matters because it is the only thing that can satisfy us" (25). This will get developed in the rest of the book's realist, anti-fantasist stance in which Phillips clearly comes out against spending time imagining what could have been--what sort of life we could have had, or worse, could yet have if we but overcome our limitations and frustrations. In this regard, as in much else in the book, Phillips puts me in mind of nothing so much as the counsel against the logismoi we find in Evagrius and the tradition following from him--the warnings against vainglory, against idle speculation, against imagining the future, or fantasizing about communion with God, and so on.

For to give ourselves over to such disordered fantasizing, to wondering after would-be satisfactions in some imaginary future, is to open ourselves to an endless frustration with our life, which is itself an enormous problem insofar as "frustration may be the thing that we are least able to let ourselves feel"(27); and again: "There is nothing more opaque about ourselves than our frustrations" (28).

Frustrations, if allowed--as Evagrius recognized long before Freud came along--to take root in our mind can become, as Phillips nicely puts it, "intractable because their satisfaction is too exactly imagined" (32) and as a result "there can only be unrealistic wanting" (33). What is the answer to this?

Here Phillips makes what I might call his "apophatic" turn, that is his turn to not knowing or, as he frequently puts it, to not "getting it," to letting go of the desire, one might say, to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. ("Omniscience... is the enemy, the saboteur, of satisfaction" [134].) Here he counsels and encourages us down an unexpected and unusual path: "We need...to know something about what we don't get" (33).

This, of course, immediately raises practical if not moral problems: "But how...would you teach someone to not get it?....Teaching them how not to conform without trying not to conform?" (48-49). As we teach others about the importance of not always "getting it" we need to see the benefit of doing so, asking ourselves and others: "In which area of our lives does not knowing, not getting it, give us more life rather than more deadness?" (80). In other words, rather than being despondent in our frustrations, why do we not see what we can learn from them?

Not surprisingly, Phillips does not give us many answers to his own questions. But he does repeatedly suggest that we need--in our relationships, including clinical relationships between analyst and analysand--to recognize what he calls "the unknowledges" not as bad things but as freeing things: in Phillips' conception--which is not without controversy in the psychoanalytic world--psychoanalysis is an exercise in learning how not to get it and not be bothered by that: to acquire an "understanding to the limits of understanding" and to "make sense of our lives in order to be free not to have to make sense" (63). Whether in psychoanalysis, textual analysis, or much else besides, he sides with Žižek's warning against "'the attitude of overinterpretation'" (70).

It is not hard, of course, to see Christian applications of this. It is not hard, it seems to me, for Christians with a robust mystical tradition, as one finds in both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, to be capable at least of understanding this, if not putting it into practice. It is not hard, that is to say, for people of faith to recognize what they do not know and graciously to accept their not knowing and to be reconciled to their remaining in a cloud of unknowing without frustration. (Such a state, I would stress, is not an excuse for anti-intellectualism or willful obscurantism justified by some fatuous appeal to "the holy fathers" or "the Bible.") In the famous words of Newman:

Lead, kindly Light, amid th'encircling gloom;

Lead thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home;

Lead thou me on!

Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene--one step enough for me.

This is nowhere more important, Phillips counsels, than sex: "When it comes to sexuality, we don't get it....It means that when it comes to sex we are not going to get it. We may have inklings about it....We can know the facts of life, but nothing else. We may, as we say, have sex, but we won't get it" (77). And again: "What psychoanalysts mostly know about sex is the strange ineffectuality of so much of their knowledge" (79).

I have to confess to finding this enormously refreshing, not only insofar as it breaks with what is often (unfairly, in my view) characterized as the Freudian--and more generally psychoanalytic--view of sex, which purports to be certain of its orthodoxies about sex and ostensibly seems to have little doubt about what it knows; but also and perhaps especially with Christians who claim to know--or certainly to talk as if they know--far more about sex than seems either possible or desirable. This is perhaps especially true of those who inflict on us their ghastly pop psychology or their unrelievedly tedious "theology of the body."

In discussions of communion with God, and communion with one's lover, there is, I would suggest, far too much talk from people with far too little to say. It is better to pass over both in silence, recognizing what we do not know, and likely will never know, and not being frustrated by that. To those always grasping, always talking, whether about God, sex, or (worse) both, I am so often and so sorely tempted to respond with Clement Atlee's famous response to the voluble and excitable Harold Laski: "A period of silence from you would be most welcome." Perhaps this desire for silence about such matters is what long ago attracted me to St. Philip Neri who famously said, when pressed for details about his inner communion with God, "secretum meum mihi." 

Adam Phillips makes two further points worth dwelling on, including that the quest for certainty, the quest to overcome our frustrations as manifested in perverse fantasies, are forms of erotic hatred motivated by hostility and a desire to convert childhood traumas into adult triumphs (164): the "quest for certainty in certain areas of our lives is a quest for revenge" (146). We seek revenge for not getting it, whether getting it is a simple joke, parental attention and affection, or sex from some high-school paramour. We seek revenge in the perverse as a result of not getting it, and vainly try to content ourselves with something less than love: "Freud has exposed our avoidance of love as an avoidance of satisfaction" (168).

In the end, Phillips says, there is one final reason to return to Freud for he "invites us to wonder what relationships would be like if we dropped the idea that they had anything to do with indebtedness or obligation" (134). Again, the theological usefulness and application of this should be obvious, for we relate--or we ought to relate--to God not out of any sense of guilty obligation or dread at not paying a debt back to him. We either relate to Him out of love or we are wasting His time and ours.

If, in that relationship, we experience frustrations, then perhaps, if Phillips is on to something--and I certainly believe he is--we ought to attend to those frustrations and see what they can teach us rather than necessarily seeking to solve the frustrations. For--if Job is our guide, inter alia--it seems clear that God is not in the business of always relieving us of our frustrations at not knowing what He is up to. And that is just as it should be.

Lying on the Couch of Unknowing: Apophatic Psychoanalysis (I)

I recently came across Adam Phillips, a literary scholar in England who is also a practicing psychoanalyst, the two disciplines being very often intertwined in his many books.

I picked up a copy of his recent book, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life and have read it with great interest. As I will show in the coming series, there is a very great deal here that could be of benefit to Christians in their spiritual life; and there is a good bit of material here that could be "methodologically" useful to the practice of theology.

The publisher tells us the following about this book:

A transformative book about the lives we wish we had and what they can teach us about who we are. 

All of us lead two parallel lives: the one we are actively living, and the one we feel we should have had or might yet have. As hard as we try to exist in the moment, the unlived life is an inescapable presence, a shadow at our heels. And this itself can become the story of our lives: an elegy to unmet needs and sacrificed desires. We become haunted by the myth of our own potential, of what we have in ourselves to be or to do. And this can make of our lives a perpetual game of falling short.

But what happens if we remove the idea of failure from the equation? With his flair for graceful paradox, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips suggests that if we accept frustration as a way of outlining what we really want, satisfaction suddenly becomes possible. To crave a life without frustration is to crave a life without the potential to identify and accomplish our desires.

In Missing Out, an elegant, compassionate, and absorbing book, Phillips draws deeply on his own clinical experience as well as on the works of Shakespeare and Freud, of D. W. Winnicott and William James, to suggest that frustration, not getting it, and getting away with it are all chapters in our unlived lives―and may be essential to the one fully lived.

It is the sort of book one needs to re-read not only because of Phillips' rather diffuse and somewhat undisciplined style (were I his editor, the book would have been tightened up considerably and therefore likely reduced in length by about a third), but also because of a series of very challenging theses he advances. I will say more about those in the coming days as I continue to reflect on this deeply challenging book whose importance for Christians, I hope to show, is considerable, notwithstanding the fact the author evidences no interest in theology and in fact clearly indicates at one point he does not understand what it is.
The overall, if likely unintentional, thrust of Phillips' book very strongly reminds me of another recent study: David Henderson's Apophatic Elements in the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis: Pseudo-Dionysius and C.G. Jung. I shall say more about the "apophatic" proposals of Phillips in the coming days.

The God Who is Dark

Among the self-congratulatory shibboleths some Eastern Christians like to use to disdain a Western tradition about which they know virtually nothing and thus bolster their shaky self-confidence is the claim that all Eastern theology is apophatic, while all Western theology is rationalistic, scholastic, kataphatic. Even before I became an Eastern Christian I knew this was bunk after Stanley Hauerwas told me in the late 90s that if I was going to Cambridge for doctoral studies then I had to get in touch with her Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, Denys Turner, and read his book The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism, which helped me to see that the West has its own deep tradition of apophatic mysticism even as the West also has had certain periods and persons who are indeed rationalistic and scholastic--and not always in a completely good way. These latter do not, however, represent the entire Western tradition (any more than one can say that everyone in the East is a hesychast).

Turner moved back across the Atlantic to Yale, and in November of this year is being honored with a Festschrift: Eric Bugyis and David Newheiser, eds., Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God: Essays in Honor of Denys Turner (UND Press, Nov. 2015), 480pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In the face of religious and cultural diversity, some doubt whether Christian faith remains possible today. Critics claim that religion is irrational and violent, and the loudest defenders of Christianity are equally strident. In response, Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God: Essays in Honor of Denys Turner explores the uncertainty essential to Christian commitment; it suggests that faith is moved by a desire for that which cannot be known.
This approach is inspired by the tradition of Christian apophatic theology, which argues that language cannot capture divine transcendence. From this perspective, contemporary debates over God’s existence represent a dead end: if God is not simply another object in the world, then faith begins not in abstract certainty but in a love that exceeds the limits of knowledge.
The essays engage classic Christian thought alongside literary and philosophical sources ranging from Pseudo-Dionysius and Dante to Karl Marx and Jacques Derrida. Building on the work of Denys Turner, they indicate that the boundary between atheism and Christian thought is productively blurry. Instead of settling the stale dispute over whether religion is rationally justified, their work suggests instead that Christian life is an ethical and political practice impassioned by a God who transcends understanding.

Contributors: Eric Bugyis, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, David Burrell, C.S.C., Oliver Davies, Terry Eagleton, John Hare, Karl Hefty, Robin Kirkpatrick, Karmen MacKendrick, Philip McCosker, Bernard McGinn, Vittorio Montemaggi, David Newheiser, Cyril O’Regan, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Denys Turner, Ludger Viefhues-Bailey, A. N. Williams

“Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God: Essays in Honor of Denys Turner is a testament to the range of Denys Turner’s influence and the varieties of modes of argumentation with which his work is conversant. The volume will be read with pleasure by scholars in the history of Christianity, particularly of Christian mysticism, Christian theologians, and philosophers of religion, as well as scholars across a range of subdisciplines." — Amy Hollywood, Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies, Harvard Divinity School

Apophasis and Dionysius

Studies on Dionysius the Areopagite, as I have noted before, continue to emerge regularly today. He remains an enormously influential figure on all theology, Eastern and Western. Along comes another study of his thought from Harvard University's Charles Stang: Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: "No Longer I" (Oxford Early Christian Studies, 2012), 272pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This book examines the writings of an early sixth-century Christian mystical theologian who wrote under the name of a convert of the apostle Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite. This 'Pseudo'-Dionysius is famous for articulating a mystical theology in two parts: a sacramental and liturgical mysticism embedded in the context of celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, and an austere, contemplative regimen in which one progressively negates the divine names in hopes of soliciting union with the 'unknown God' or 'God beyond being.'
Charles M. Stang argues that the pseudonym and the influence of Paul together constitute the best interpretive lens for understanding the Corpus Dionysiacum [CD]. Stang demonstrates how Paul animates the entire corpus, and shows that the influence of Paul illuminates such central themes of the CD as hierarchy, theurgy, deification, Christology, affirmation (kataphasis) and negation (apophasis), dissimilar similarities, and unknowing. Most importantly, Paul serves as a fulcrum for the expression of a new theological anthropology, an 'apophatic anthropology.' Dionysius figures Paul as the premier apostolic witness to this apophatic anthropology, as the ecstatic lover of the divine who confesses to the rupture of his self and the indwelling of the divine in Gal 2:20: 'it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.'

Building on this notion of apophatic anthropology, the book forwards an explanation for why this sixth-century author chose to write under an apostolic pseudonym. Stang argues that the very practice of pseudonymous writing itself serves as an ecstatic devotional exercise whereby the writer becomes split in two and thereby open to the indwelling of the divine. Pseudonymity is on this interpretation integral and internal to the aims of the wider mystical enterprise. Thus this book aims to question the distinction between 'theory' and 'practice' by demonstrating that negative theology-often figured as a speculative and rarefied theory regarding the transcendence of God-is in fact best understood as a kind of asceticism, a devotional practice aiming for the total transformation of the Christian subject.