Nietzsche and apophaticism. Indecent proposal?
The article takes into consideration the radical and debatable option of the important contemporary Greek theologian Christos Yannaras for Friedrich Nietzsche’s anti-rationalist doctrine as an alternative to the modern (rationalist) nihilisms, which, as Yannaras believes, have evolved from the common trunk of early Western apophaticism. Nietzsche, though a critic of Christianity, openly favors the tragic and Dyonisiac experimentation of life’s reality; Yannaras finds this to be the solution to the extreme abstractization and conceptualization of the rationalist discourses on God – which have finally replaced God with Reason. Therefore, Yannaras thinks that the Nietzschean empiricism (more exactly, Heidegger’s intepretation of it) may prove beneficial for the contemporary Christian thought.
Keywords: apophaticism, apophatic theology, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Christos Yannaras
1. Christos Yannaras, Abecedar al credinţei – Introducere în teologia ortodoxă, Bucureşti, Editura Bizantină, 1996.
2. Christos Yannaras, Heidegger şi Areopagitul, Bucureşti, Editura Anastasia, 2009.
3. Cititorul interesat de bibliografia specifică temei poate consulta studiile deja clasice ale lui Ronald F. Hathaway, Hierarchy and the definition of order in the letters of Pseudo-Dionysius. A study in the form and meaning of the Pseudo-Dionysian writings, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1969 [1970], Eric Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite, Albany, SUNY Press, 2007 sau, în fine, cartea profesorului de la Princeton Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence,
New York, Oxford University Press, 1993.
4. Christos Yannaras, Heidegger şi Areopagitul, p. 10.
5. Ibidem, p. 25.
6. Ibidem, p. 50.
7. Ibidem, p. 65.
8. Basarab Nicolescu, Teoreme poetice, Iaşi, Editura Junimea,2007.
9. Christos Yannaras, Heidegger şi Areopagitul, ed. cit., p. 39 et passim.
10. Martin Heidegger, Über den Humanismus, Frankfurt, Klostermann Verlag, 1947, pp. 19-20, apud Christos Yannaras, Heidegger şi Areopagitul, ed. cit., p. 52.
11. Serghei Bulgakov, Lumina neînserată, Bucureşti, Editura Anastasia, 1999.
