A Negative Way: Dionysian Apophaticism and the Experiential

Modern spirituality often assumes that spiritual experiences are experiential events, but this 'experiential bias' misreads pre-modern texts like those of Pseudo-Dionysius, which describe faith through negative dialectics rather than positive experiences. Scholars Denys Turner and Bernard McGinn argue that classical apophatic tradition denies 'mystical experience' as experience per se. Yet theologians Sara Coakley, Karl Rahner, and Louis Dupré have integrated experiential interpretations into their theologies—Coakley through spiritual sense in bodily theology, Rahner through spiritual touch in grace, and Dupré through religious significance in atheistic emptiness. This paper contrasts these integrations with the classical critique of mystical experience.

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Abstract

The experiential bias in modern understandings of spirituality has led to readings of the pre-modern texts of Pseudo-Dionysius as referring to “negative experiences” of faith. Denys Turner, Bernard McGinn, and others have outlined the mistaken “spiritual positivism” of such readings and their contrast with the negative dialectics of the classical apophatic tradition. Indeed, the philosophical parameters of the Christian mysticism of the Dionysian tradition would deny “mystical experience” to be “experience” as such. Nevertheless, several modern theologians have attempted to integrate interpretations of the experiential in Christian mysticism into their theology. These include Sara Coakley in the idea of spiritual sense in her theology of the body, Karl Rahner in the conception of spiritual touch within his theology of grace, and Louis Dupré’s view that there is religious significance in the experience of “emptiness” in modern-day atheism. I shall contrast these attempted integrations with the critique of “mystical experience” within classical understandings of apophaticism.