Representations and Apophaticism

On Trinitarian Symbolism

Isabelle Chareire

Abstract

Christanity affirms God’s radical transcendence even as it is structured around symbolic (creeds), historical (revelation as a narration inscribed in a text) and institutional (churches) representations. A tension between representations and what lies beyond them runs through the entire history of theology. Analogously, mystical experience (as suggested in the writings of Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Henri Le Saux-Abhishiktananda), with its tendency towards subjectivity and interiority, raises the question of its relation to shared doctrine and Christ’s mediation. What is at stake here is how to maintain historicity, with its mediations, in order to avoid a flight beyond the created realm, while simultaneously preserving the analogical dimension of representations and concepts, so as not to reduce the divine to what is being used to designate it: what is signified must always have more weight than the figures that render witness to it.
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