Newheiser, D. Hope in a Secular Age. Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith (Cambridge) (original) (raw)

2023, Journal of Anglican Studies

Dionysius the Areopagite was not much of an eschatological thinker. In one of the only passages where he reflects on final union with God, he mentions an obscure 'Christoform feast' by which we shall be filled up with a light that is 'above' intellect, above illumination itself (Divine Names, 1.4, 592b-c). Instead of eschatology per se, Dionysius loved to play with the term 'hyper', prefixing it in odd places and wedding it to already charged philosophical terms like 'being'. The 'beyond' and the possibility of its processing out to meet human intellects was essential to the Dionysian task of describing our naming of the Divine as altogether inadequate. Further, in the Dionysian idiom, 'beyond' initiates an approach to the dialectical (a word we should now use with extreme caution after reading this book) that is a process of speaking about, or as he characteristically puts it, 'hymning' God. Hope in a Secular Age brilliantly reclaims this process as an ethical exercise. In using names that refer always imperfectly to God, there is an engagement with self-critical responsibility. Newheiser thereby grasps the temporal dimension in religious epistemology, that is, faith-affirmations, because they are inherently tenuous given their object, open to the possibility that things might be different in the future. The twentieth century undoubtedly witnessed a remarkable new chapter in the rich history of the reception of the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus, for it became a landmark among deconstructionist thinkers like John Caputo, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jacques Derrida. This latter constitutes the nodal point through which Newheiser reads Dionysius. Newheiser addresses the concern that despite claiming that God is beyond being, Dionysius nonetheless secures access to God and therefore to the possibility of a secret political authoritarianism (pp. 100-101). After all, the same Dionysius who wrote that the light of God is beyond intellect also spent chapters of his work describing the theurgic process that initiates cooperation with this divinity who gives substance to legal hierarchy and society (see Eccles. Hier., 429c-d). If there is a weak point to this monograph, it is in the lack of engagement with this latter element of Dionysius's own thought, influenced as it was by an Iamblichan-Proclan doctrine of securing synchrony with the divinity through ritual.