Negation in Poetics and Theology

Abstract

There is a certain parallel between ‘negative capability’ in poetics and negation in theology. However, the former should be understood after Coleridge, not Keats, as blending empathetic self‐estrangement with expressive subjective involvement. Yet this only makes sense in terms of a participation in the transcendent. Similarly, negation in mystical theology is one moment in oscillation with the cataphatic. Negative theology, so understood, only makes sense at all within a broadly Neoplatonic metaphysical framework, as can be shown both historically and conceptually. Neither phenomenological nor grammatical approaches to negation are by comparison sufficient, though they have their supplementary illuminating place. Today, however, we need to supplement the Neoplatonic metaphysical framework with a stronger sense that the mystical approach to God involves in itself our poetic activity which inversely has to be understood as participative.