On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite
Overview
This volume, one of the earliest by Christos Yannaras, was first published in 1967 and has become a contemporary classic. Yannaras begins by outlining Heidegger's analysis of the fate of western metaphysics, which ends, he argues, in a nihilistic atheism. Yannaras's response is largely to accept Heidegger's analysis, but to argue that, although it applies to the western tradition of what Heidegger calls "onto theology" (which regards God as a “being,” even if the highest), it does not take account of the Orthodox tradition of apophatic theology, of which Dionysius the Areopagite is a pre-eminent example. A God “beyond being” escapes the criticism of Heidegger, and provides an alternative to Heidegger's nihilistic conclusion.
Top Highlights
“For apophaticism consists primarily of a stance against knowledge and the verification of knowledge. It is the denial of ‘conceptual idols’, denial of the psychological props of egocentric assurance and the sentimental protection offered by conceptual certainties.” (Page 17)
“I began by studying the differences between the Greek and the western understanding of the apophaticism of knowledge” (Page 15)
“The proclamation of the ‘death of God’ is a testimony: it indicates a vacuum, an absence” (Page 22)
“The starting-point for Heidegger is the question about the difference between beings and Being. This difference consists in the fact that beings are for us phenomena, they appear, while Being ‘likes to hide itself’: we know beings only so far as they come true (ἀληθεύουν), that is to say, as they emerge from oblivion (λήθη) into dis-closure (ἀ-λήθεια, truth) (as they manifest themselves as phenomena).9 Yet beings, as phenomena, only manifest themselves, while Being remains outside, it escapes notice, the truth of Being is elusive. We do not know Being-in-itself, we know only the mode in which anything that is is, and this mode becomes accessible to us as disclosure, emergence from oblivion or self-concealment—that is, out of nothingness.” (Page 53)
“No intellectual definition (whether conceptual or verbal) can ever exhaust the knowledge afforded us by the immediacy of relationship, consequently the logical definition of essence (as the common principle of examples of the same form) follows and does not precede the otherness of each existent, which I know in immediate relationship with it. Thus, if God exists, he is primarily known as a person (hypostasis) in the immediacy of relationship, and not primarily as an essence with its conceptual definition.” (Page 29)
Product Details
- Title: On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite
- Author: Christos Yannaras
- Publisher: T&T Clark International
- Publication Date: 2004
- Pages: 128
About Christos Yannaras
Christos Yannaras is Professor of Philosophy at the Pantion University, Athens.