Ryan Haecker: "The Apophatic and Analogical Grammar of Pseudo-Dionysius’ ‘Divine Names’"

For the Inaugural Dionysius Circle 2022 Symposium, Ryan Haecker presents "Gothic Fireflies: The Apophatic and Analogical Grammar of Pseudo-Dionsyius’ ‘Divine Names’". Here is the abstract for Haecker's talk:
The 'Divine Names' of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite represents a radical advance in late-Patristic grammatical speculation on the possibility of naming God. The Church Fathers had inherited from Plato the grammatical problematic of speaking of a simple and transcendent God: for if God is prior to created multiplicity, and all names designate or predicate of an other as multiple, then, it would seem, God cannot be a subject that can be designated or predicated by any name at all. Since, however, for Christian theology, God becomes multiple in Christ, and Jesus speaks of God, we can, in imitation of Christ, speak of God with the theological grammar of the divine names. In a style that anticipates the Gothic, this theological grammar is distinguished by speaking hyperbolically beyond yet within the world: first in the positive or kataphatic grammar, a positive judgment speaks of God; second in the negative or apophatic grammar, a higher or ‘hyper-negative’ judgment annuls the positive, even as it speaks of God ‘beyond being’, and ‘beyond intellect’, as the absolutely originary source of any such positive judgment; and, third in the proportionate or analogical grammar, the divine Logos dialectically annuls the infinite repetition of all such hyper-negative judgments, even as it constitutes the higher ground from which we are authorized to speak of God. The Latin-Scholastic 'analogy of being' (analogia entis) is expressly anticipated in this via analogia, in which, for Pseudo-Dionysius, the infinite repetition of hyper-negative judgments is annulled, and yet, in a reciprocal determination, equally constituted to virtually proceed from a higher ground in the essential proportions of analogy. What, however, remains most puzzling for Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, and others is precisely this reciprocal determination, in which, once annulled, such a hyper-negativity can be essentially proportioned and intrinsically mediated from a higher ground. Like fireflies that carry the torch of the Sun before the jaws of night, Pseudo-Dionysius' theological grammar can, contra Derrida and postmodern nihilism, be shown to be radically determined by a theological logic, in which, beginning in Origen of Alexandria, Christ the Logos is the ground and source, not only of the hyper-negative, but, once annulled, of the reciprocal determination and essential proportions of the metaphysical hierarchy of analogia entis.

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