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This book by Todd Ohara is an unobtrusively brilliant piece of work. While the book seems to be narrowly focused on negative predication in the works of Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius, I submit that this is not so for a number of reasons. First, and most obviously, these two figures are not just any two figures; they have played a vitally important role in Western thought when it comes to the problematic of whether and how we can name the ultimate and how this bears on our actual relationship to the “really real” which essentially escapes predication, whether negative or positive. Crucially, these figures articulate decisively different ways in which negative language or the language of unsaying functions. The former is significantly the more “radical” in that the ultimate referred to hyperbolically and intended in negative statement fundamentally transcends the relative order whose existence is the raison d’etre of the talk of ultimate reality in the first case. The latter is decidedly less radical in that negative predication is firmly anchored in affirmations about the divine even as these affirmations are unsaid and relativized. Second, it is not only that we are talking about two hugely important examples of unsaying in the Western philosophical and theological traditions, we really are talking about figures who provide us with paradigmatic instances of different grammars of unsaying. These grammars Ohara is convinced, are liberally illustrated throughout the later philosophical and theological traditions, and provide us with criteria whereby we can ask the difficult question of whether particular apophatic forms of theology we are interested in are non-radical or radical or, in Ohara’s figural way of proceeding, whether they illustrate a Plotinian or a Dionysian grammar of unsaying. The application procedure looks as if it would be especially helpful in sorting out such difficult cases in the Western tradition as Johannes Scotus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, Marguerite Porete, and Nicholas of Cusa, who seem, at the very least, to stretch the Dionysian (and also Augustinian) grammar of divine naming.

As I see it, in addition to offering illuminating readings of the texts of Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius, this book makes three major interventions in contemporary philosophy and theology interested in strategies to chasten expectations with regard to our ability to name the ultimate. First, and most obviously, it introduces a new voice in the ongoing attempt by analytic philosophy to address divine naming. One can think here of Michael Rae’s recent Gifford Lectures on the hiddenness of God, but perhaps also earlier attempts by Denys Turner to tease out strategies of unsaying that are necessary in the naming of God by looking at such major historical figures such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Bonaventure, and Meister Eckhart. One way of thinking of Ohara’s work is that it represents a third way in analytic philosophy and theology in that while the historical interest is genuine, as is the case in Turner, the analytic tools are sharper and considerably more to the fore. Conversely, however, in contrast to Rea, Ohara does not so much apply ready-made analytic tools to the texts of Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius, so much as generate them in his very reading of the texts of these significant historical figures. Ohara’s method remains resolutely hermeneutic, even as it is committed to fine-grained conceptual analysis of various forms of negation in both his authors.

Second, and relatedly, Ohara makes a contribution to our understanding of Christian mysticism with respect to which negative naming has been associated and explicitly defended in the tradition of mystical theology. If we are talking about two different paradigms or even grammars of how to operationalize and understand negation, Ohara is anxious to underscore that the purpose of this is participation in the divine that has been freed by means of language of the very constraints language put on the divine and especially on the divine’s appearing. Ohara believes that all naming of the divine in the mystical theology tradition, however negative, intends a “transcendental signified.” In contrast to Derrida, however, the language of negation in either of its two basic forms relentlessly tends towards a referent that it cannot command, but with which it achieves contact. Here Ohara remains on the essentially realist side of the conversation in mystical theology represented perhaps best by Turner and McGinn. From Ohara’s point of view, neither Plotinus nor Pseudo-Dionysius, nor any of their successors in negative theology, confuse apophaticism with agnosticism, or allow skepticism into an unsaying regarded as genuinely ecstatic and fulfilled when in unsaying or silence contact is made with the divine at the deepest and highest of levels. The goal of unsaying is an experience of the divine and participation in the divine, even if this experience has features that will resist being translated into language and concept, and to avail of a trope of Maximus the Confessor to which Ohara does not recur, in the most extraordinary of paradoxes the mystic comes to participate in the “inparticipatable” ground of all physical and spiritual reality.

A third intervention is far more latent. Ohara has deep training in continental philosophy and is particularly adept in contemporary discussions about the nature and limit of phenomenology, and expert in the debate between Marion and Derrida on the radicality of naming. While none of this is to the fore in the present book, behind the screen one sees Ohara agreeing with Derrida concerning the difference between negative theology and deconstruction and with Marion concerning the inadvisability of postmodern forms of thought of moving beyond the stance proper to all negative theology, whether in its less or more radical forms. In his analysis of the paradigmatic negative theology discourses of Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius Ohara effectively admits that they are, indeed, “hyperousiological,” not only lexically, but substantively, as Derrida says they are. For Ohara, however, this is a compliment rather than an insult. He sides with Marion in celebrating the hyperboles of the Western philosophical and theological tradition as shattering language against a givenness that cannot be contained, and that it is just this feature of subversion by “too much” that suggests its superiority over the self-referentiality of language and deferral of meaning championed by Derrida and his epigones. Against Marion, however, and more in league with the thought of the revisionist metaphysician William Desmond in his God and the Between (2008) Ohara is not at all shy about the metaphysical register of the language of negative naming, which finds its ground in the provocation in a reality that is superabundant and excessive.

That this book manages in a very subtle way to do all of the above is not to deny that it is primarily an interpretation of Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius. At the outset it should be said that this book is not in the strict sense a historical study. Ohara does not track down Plotinus’s Platonic, Middle Platonic, and Stoic sources as might be the case with a scholar such as John Rist. Nor does he track down the philosophical sources of Pseudo-Dionysius as Stephen Gersh does so incomparably, nor the theological (Syrian) sources as Alexander Golitzin does so well. His is primarily a conceptual treatment, even when he attempts to define the relation between a later (Pseudo-Dionysius) and an earlier (Proclus) thinker. Convinced with regard to their massive influence, and persuaded that they still have something to say to contemporary philosophers and theologians caught up with the issue of naming the ultimate, Ohara wishes to lay bare the “internal logic” of both, or what I have referred to already as “grammar.” Now if the method adopted might in general be called conceptual analysis, I would want to record that the analytic mode falls within that of ordinary language. In my view Ohara operates with as pleasing an analytic philosophical style as can be imagined, and shows what can be delivered when used with subtlety. The method does not bring attention to itself; there is nothing in it that smacks of mere cleverness.

A constitutive part of the excellence of the writing, and perhaps its condition, is its interpretive finesse. By this I mean no more—but also no less—than that Ohara never draws conclusions that do not follow in an obvious way from detailed analyses of the passages cited. Moreover, Ohara never gerrymanders the evidence; he always submits to our attentions passages that seem to go in the opposite direction to his interpretive judgment. Sometimes he shows that read aright the passages are not inconsistent with each other, and indeed favor the kind of interpretation he is offering. Sometimes, however, the passages draw attention to tensions in Plotinus’s and Pseudo-Dionysius’s thought that appear to be structural rather than accidental. The enactment of scholarly humility pays off big time; since having taken oneself out of the equation means that not only are the conclusions more nuanced, but their validity far more evident.

The achievements of the first part of the book, devoted to Plotinus, are considerable. In a series of probes, and especially in its treatment of negation (apophasis) and denial (aphairesis), over the course of three chapters Ohara unearths the fully radical nature of Plotinus’s position in the Enneads. The ground of all subsequent reality, immaterial or material, the so-called “One” or “Good” is strictly speaking unnamable, since the ordinary meaning of these terms cannot be applied to the reality that is referred to. The analytic pair that gives Ohara most interpretive traction throughout his sober but always luminous analyses is that of “non-reciprocal likeness” and “non-reciprocal relation.” Ohara suggests that the first concept is sufficient for characterizing the relative inadequacy of all language with respect to the ultimate, since likeness is at the very least seriously qualified by unlikeness. Thus, if not to the same extent, and certainly not in the same way, inadequacy marks negations and denials as well as affirmations. “Non-reciprocal relation,” he contends, represents a step that Plotinus does not consistently take throughout the Enneads, but one sufficiently in play to regard as typical of his position. Essentially what this means is that the relation between the ultimate reality, which finds linguistic placeholders in the “One” and the “Good,” and everything else is notional rather than real. The “One” or “Good” can be conceived as defined in no way by the relation to what is ontologically subsequent to it. Ohara does nothing less than isolate and name the conceptual production of an asymmetrical relation that gets insinuated deeply into Western philosophy and theology and which is echoed, for example, by Aquinas in the Summa when he talks of the created world having a real relation to God, but God not having a real relation to the world (Prima Pars Q13; article 7). Although it is not his explicit aim, Ohara helps to contextualize and thereby demystify what Aquinas is saying and why he is saying it. For were ultimate reality to bear a positive relation to that which is subsequent (consequent), then both its transcendence and simplicity would come to be threatened with a kind of compromise that Plotinus finds invidious.

It is important to Ohara, however, that we recognize that “non-reciprocal relation” is Plotinus’s particular, even peculiar, position and that it should by no means be identified as the classical Neoplatonic position tout court. For instance, while Ohara does not go into much detail concerning Proclus’s metaphysical scheme, in part 2 in his discussion of Pseudo-Dionysius he makes it clear that the triad of procession, remaining, and reversion qualifies divine simplicity in a significant way, and forbids Proclus from pulling the rug from under participation in the way Plotinus does. And it is precisely pulling the rug from underneath participation that defines the “internal logic” or grammar of Plotinian apophasis. Now, it should be noted Ohara does not reduce Plotinus to the aporetics of language regarding the ultimate—although this is constitutive. He both understands and appreciates what might be called the anagogic function of language, especially negative language in Plotinus, which is to unite the seeking mind with the One, which—however contradictorily—is a reality that forbids participation. Ohara by no means denies, therefore, that the Enneads articulates a form of mysticism. He simply wants to affirm that this particular form of mysticism, which both continues and develops the prior Platonic traditions of discourse and proves so generative throughout Western history, is connected with a rich and determinate metaphysics and semantics.

The four chapters on Pseudo-Dionysius, which make up part 2, represent a similar level of achievement. Although Ohara’s choice of Pseudo-Dionysius is in part motivated by the mystical theologian’s prominence in postmodern appropriations of classical negative theology, the warrant for the kind of meticulous examination undertaken is provided by such important questions as whether the relatively greater adequacy of negation and denial over affirmation is underwritten by the same or similar metaphysical commitments as evinced in Plotinus and whether the express theological commitments, influenced by—if not dictated by—the biblical text essentially ameliorate the radicalism of Plotinus’s version of Neoplatonism. To make a long story short, Ohara answers yes to both questions. Under the influence of the Plotinian scheme Pseudo-Dionysius’s commitment to divine transcendence is accompanied by an allergy with respect to any differentiation at the level of ultimate reality (the divine thearchy) because of its implication of multiplicity. This has the effect—Pseudo-Dionysius’s declaration to the contrary notwithstanding—of introducing a metaphysical distinction between the divine Godhead considered as One and the Godhead considered as Triune. All the better for being a somewhat reluctant conclusion, in a brilliant analysis Ohara makes a contribution to the study of Christian Neoplatonism by disturbing the reigning orthodoxy. The conventional view, propagated by such eminent scholars as Andrew Louth and Bernard McGinn, is that Pseudo-Dionysius is a perfectly orthodox Christian who is given to paradox and hyperbolic language that sometimes results in confusion. Ohara reveals convincingly the tendency in such interpretation to suggest that Pseudo-Dionysius has successfully domesticated the metaphysical scheme on which he hangs his Christian hat. Without arguing the contrary, Ohara shows himself more inclined to side with Pseudo-Dionysius’s orthodox critics, for example, Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Catholic side and Vladimir Lossky on the Eastern Orthodox side, who judge that there are times when Pseudo-Dionysius’s philosophical commitments run interference with the theological commitments which he takes up from the Cappadocian Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzen, and Basil. For example, the metaphysical commitments to unity and simplicity put under pressure the specifically Christian commitment to the triune God as ultimate. At the same time, and in a balancing move, Ohara also shows that Pseudo-Dionysius resists Plotinus. For Pseudo-Dionysius, the “Good,” which is interdefinable with “Love,” shows a shift in the meaning of procession and participation relative to what one finds in Plotinus. Specifically, procession is no longer regarded as external to the “Good” in quite the same way it is in Plotinus, nor is participation regarded as quite so equivocal.

Ohara judges that the alteration in metaphysical posture, which sees the ultimate more as superdeterminate than indeterminate, is due in quite definite respects to Pseudo-Dionysius’s Christianity. At the same time he does not deny that this modification has been prepared at least in part by the system of Proclus, which emends that of Plotinus in crucial ways. This is the topic of chapter 5 (and the appendix). Ohara does not attempt to do the kind of historical-philological work of Gersh when it comes to adjudicating the influence of Proclus on Pseudo-Dionysius. Accepting the consensus historical view that there are Proclean elements in Pseudo-Dionysius’s corpus, the mode of analysis is internalist: by means of a close reading of Pseudo-Dionysius Ohara simply wants to ask what tendencies in his account of the ultimate and process of procession and return recall positions and strategies one finds in the Elements of Theology. Here Ohara does not so much compete with Gersh as complement him. It is also extremely interesting how in Ohara’s hands the horizon of the question of the relation between Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius has changed. Usually when the issue of the relation of Pseudo-Dionysius to Proclus is raised, the horizon of the question is whether Pseudo-Dionysius’s Christianity is being compromised by a philosophical regime. Thus, there are incentives to deny the relation or downplay it, or if forced by the evidence to accept the reality of Proclus in the Dionysian corpus, one turn elsewhere for a purer form of mystical theology. With Ohara, however, the issue is not whether a biblical (and possibly liturgical) form of Christianity negotiates with (or can negotiate with) with Neoplatonic philosophy, but whether it negotiates with one that at worst does not interfere too much with some of its more basic commitments (e.g., the goodness of creation) and at best helps Christianity articulate its basic beliefs more clearly to itself and others. It is more certainly his judgment that Proclus helps underwrite and develop basic Christian convictions whereas Plotinus hinders their development and ultimately subverts them.

In the final substantive chapter of part 2 Ohara links in a concerted way the strategies of apophatic naming with mystical ascent towards the God who is beyond being. Ohara, of course, did much the same in part 1 when he discussed Plotinus. Here the connection between language of God and participation in God, however, is provided detailed treatment. Even if the realized destination involves an overcoming of language and an entry into silence, naming and especially apophasis will have been constitutive, and the metaphysical backdrop, which makes sense of this naming, essential. Here Ohara in the most gentle way possible seems to take on the purists, both premodern and postmodern, who want their mysticism free from pyrotechnics of apophasis and the weighing down of metaphysics.

While the deftness of analysis and the gradual nature of the unfolding of the “internal logic” of both Plotinus’s and Pseudo-Dionysius’s naming and un-naming of ultimate reality sometimes makes this a challenging book, the book rewards all the way through. It rewards because of the scrupulous nature of the interpretation of passages, but also because of the larger implications of the reading of two paradigmatic forms of unsaying in the Western tradition. I have drawn attention to a number of these in my opening framing of the book. I will end by making another. I indicated previously that by exposing the “internal logic” of Plotinian and Dionysian forms of unsaying, and by supplying us with conceptual tools to make a real distinction between these grammars, at the very least Ohara allows us to formulate more perspicuous interrogations of forms of philosophical and theological discourse where prima facie the level of unsaying seems abnormal. I gave as examples Eriugena, Eckhart, Porete, and Cusanus. I neglected to point out, however, that we are not dealing purely with a matter of taxonomy, such that all or any of these discourses laced with negation and teeming with denial are Plotinian or not Dionysian. While, of course, logically any one of the four could represent a pure retrieval of one or the other, it is antecedently more likely we might see that they are influenced to different degrees by both logics or grammars and that we are talking in the end about a dominant-recessive relation. I am convinced that the implications go further and that Ohara’s excavation of two contrasting “internal logics” of unsaying also helps us with the more standard cases of unsaying in the Western philosophical and theological traditions. I am thinking here of Albertus Magnus and, of course, Aquinas. There is a copious modern literature on Aquinas and apophasis beginning with Victor Preller and David Burrell, proceeding through Denys Turner, and finding expression in detailed works of Fran O’Rourke and Gregory Rocca. None of these thinkers would deny the force of the Dionysian tradition on Aquinas in the Summa, nor neglect to draw attention to Aquinas’s famous commentary on the Divine Names, even if they might not be anxious to play Pseudo-Dionysius against an apophatic Augustine in terms of influence. What Ohara gives us, I submit, is a complexification and a gift of another question. While it might well be true that Aquinas’s views of divine naming operate in general within a Dionysian horizon, might it not also be the case that there are moments even in Aquinas where one sees the interference of a different, more Plotinian grammar of unsaying?

Cyril O’Regan

Huisking Professor of Theology

University of Notre Dame