Of Galaxies and Breakfast: An Apophatic Account of Divine Commands
Abstract
The apparent incongruity between a transcendent Creator and seemingly trivial divine commands presents a challenge for religion, raising the risk of either misrepresenting God’s nature or rendering the commands meaningless. This paper starts by examining how conventional frameworks, such as rationalist theism and projectionist psychology, either domesticate divine transcendence or reduce orders to human fabrication, failing to avoid these errors. Then, it argues that an apophatic linguistic analysis, grounded on contemporary theories of metaphor and semantic underdetermination, offers a reconciling model based on Thomas Aquinas's triplex via and more effectively illuminates the inherent limitations and function of religious language. This method reinterprets some commands as “floating signifiers” whose meaning is operationalized in practical contexts. Lastly, it examines the implications of this apophatic-reconciliatory framework, showing how it reframes the human struggle against finitude as the lived site of encounter with the divine, grounds obedience in Kierkegaardian “fear and trembling,” and converts the paradox of scale into a pedagogy of relational trust.
References
- Van Elswyk, Peter (2025). Metalinguistic apophaticism. Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, 11, 139-167.
- Alston, W. P. (1989). Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology. Cornell University Press.
- Hesse, Jacob (2023). Metaphors, religious language and linguistic expressibility. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 93 (3), 239-258.
- De Haan, Daniel D. (2023). Thomist Classical Theism: Divine Simplicity within Aquinas’ Triplex Via Theology. In Robert C. Koons & Jonathan Fuqua, Classical Theism: New Essays on the Metaphysics of God. Routledge, 101-122.
- Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of philosophy (A. Bass, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
- Kierkegaard, S. (1843). Fear and trembling (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Trans.). Princeton University Press.
- Gordon, Noah (2023). Theism and Secular Modality. Dissertation, University of Southern California.
- Otto, R. (1923). The idea of the holy (J. W. Harvey, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
- Feuerbach, L. (1841). The essence of Christianity (G. Eliot, Trans.). John Chapman.
- Burrell, David B. (2008). Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.