Charles Simic and the Poetics of Uncertainty by Donovan McAbee

Author:Donovan McAbee [McAbee, Donovan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2020-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

Negation in the medieval and postmodern contexts

This section will digress briefly from direct engagement with Simic’s poetry in order to establish the relationship between apophaticism in the medieval and the postmodern deconstructionist contexts. The end of this section returns to Simic’s work and demonstrates the way his personal via negativa exists within the tensions between medieval and postmodern forms of apophaticism.

According to William Franke, the turn towards the apophatic in postmodern thought arises from a situation analogous to that which gave rise to Neoplatonic apophaticism in the early Middle Ages. Franke asserts,

If the quest for foundations is the inaugural project of modern philosophy since Descartes, it has fallen into crisis and in many quarters today is given up for lost. Neoplatonism was similarly born of a crisis of foundations in ancient philosophy that in crucial ways parallels that of modern and especially postmodern times.27

Even though the appeal of negation in both instances grows from uncertainty concerning the foundations of knowledge, certainly, there are differences in approach and emphasis between medieval and contemporary appropriations of apophaticism.

The medieval Christian appropriations of apophaticism, or negative theology, grew out of their Neoplatonic predecessors and primarily concerned the human’s ability to conceive of God properly within the conceptual parameters of language.28 The postmodern, especially deconstructive uses of negation emphasize the inability of language to communicate significantly concerning reality outside of the linguistic act itself. An oversimplified though helpful way of viewing the situation is to say that whereas the medieval thinker worried about the potential for language to falsify concepts of divinity, the postmodern thinker doubts language’s capacity to escape itself.

The apophatic approach in medieval Christian theology sought to avoid misrepresenting God through language,29 and especially to conceptually maintain the unity of God. If God is infinite, itself a term of negation, and humans are finite, then surely human language can never express the reality of God. Diogenes Allen contends that in:

the via negativa, the apophatic way: we have to say that the words or qualities adequate to describe creatures do not fully describe God, the creator. In order to speak with greater accuracy, we therefore have to negate or reject our affirmations because God surpasses anything that we can say about him.30

By avoiding affirmations, the medieval apophatic way approaches God by means of indirection, affirming what God is not in order to know what God is. With most medieval theologians, however, the negative (apophatic) statements concerning the nature of God are balanced with affirmative (kataphatic) statements concerning the nature of God.

The primary attraction of the postmodern mind to the via negativa results from a deep-seated anxiety concerning language. Through most of the medieval period, the view that language was unable to fully convey meaning was primarily limited to the sphere of God-talk. In the postmodern era, all language is viewed with suspicion. This seems to result from the advent of a secular mind. When the world is grounded in a transcendent reality, then language about the world seems vouchsafed, based on faith in the reality of the transcendent.

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