The deflections of desire: negative theology in trinitarian disclosure

Abstract

The spirituality of the first Christian centuries was shaped by two convictions – that Christian identity was a matter of coming to share by God's gift the relation that eternally subsists between the Logos and the divine Source; and that what we encounter in prayer is never capable of being reduced to a finished conceptual scheme, however much we may labour to remove obvious inadequacies and misunderstandings in our speech about God. Both convictions have roots in pre-Christian concerns about the relation between God and ‘being’ in general or between God and mind; but these themes are given new and pretty specific content in relation to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth: the language of divine relatedness gradually supersedes that of a descending scale of participation in divinity, and the personal quality of relation between Logos and Source becomes determinative for trinitarian language. As the scheme was slowly matured in the fourth and fifth centuries, however, emphasis was laid upon the idea that the divine essence constituted the mysterious heartland of Godhead.

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