apop and apophatic and apophasis and apothetmatic and apophlegmatic

I remember quite clearly when I first heard the word "apophatic." It was not when Kennedy was assassinated or the Challenger exploded; it was in my first year of graduate school, and I was speaking to a fellow student (a Roman Catholic) who was studying "apophatic theology." I, who had just finished studying theology at an Evangelical Protestant school, had never heard of it and was intrigued. All he said at that time, with an air of mystery, was that apophatic theology was "negative" theology. This began a long acquiantance for me with this term.

Apophasis and Apophatic

Both these words come from the Greek, and literally mean "to speak off"--i.e., "to deny." Like literally hundreds of words with Greek and Latin roots, apophasis finds its home in ancient rhetoric, and is a technique, also called paraleipsis or preteritio (preterition), which, in the language of a seventeenth century writer on rhetoric, is when "we deny that we say or doe that which we especially say or doe." In other words, it is a rhetorical strategy of mentioning a subject as you apparently pass over it. By so doing, the subject sticks more fixedly in a person's mind.*

[*Professor Burton describes apophasis as "the rejection of several reasons why a thing should or should not be done and affirming a single one, considered most valid," but he doensn't sufficiently defend that definition to remove it from the paraleipsis/preteritio orbit.]

Apophatic is defined by the OED as "applied to knowledge of God obtained by way of negation." This brief and rather drab definition masks a depth and richness of thought regarding God carried on in Eastern (Greek) Orthodox theology that continues to this day. The central affirmation of apophatic theology (in contrast to the cataphatic or affirmational theology of the Latin West) is that God is not only unknowable in his essence but that the way to "reach" God is by affirming that he is "beyond" all the positive attributes one can ascribe to Him. God is not simply merciful, but "beyond mercy," "beyond justice," "beyond measure." The so-called Cappadocian fathers of the 4th Century, including Basil and the two Gregories, were the first systematic thinkers to breathe life into this view of God.

For example, in Epistle 234 Basil the Great (d. 379) says, in speaking of God, "I do know that God exists. What His Essense is, I look at as beyond intelligence...The object of our worship is not that of which we comprehend the essence, but of which we comprehend that the essence exists." One can easily see how this view of God can be wed with a mystical theology (as in the Pseudo-Dionysian literature) and lead to a way of approaching, seeing or experiencing this God who is beyond all of our categories. After a while some of this becomes a language game, and I can imagine people wanting to "out beyond" each other, by claiming that their God is beyond the God described by someone else. It was language games like this that eventually drove me from the study of theology. However, I want to be emphatic about apophatic theology: there is more there than negativity.

Apopthegmatic and Apophlegmatic

Though near neighbors of apophatic, these two words could not be more different. An apothegm (though this is the original spelling in English, it was rendered as apopthegm by Johnson in his 18th century dictionary, though Webster adopts apothegm) is a pithy or terse saying, embodying an important truth in few words. I once made a list of all the terms to express the same idea (such as proverb, maxim, gnome, etc.); I came up with about ten before I lost the list. Thus if a person is apopthegmatic, s/he is "addicted to the use of apopthegms." Some people speak apopthegmatically but are usually not highly regarded in our culture, addicted as it is to economic, military and businesspeak. Maybe someday we will honor those who speak with apophthegmatic sententiousness. It is harder than you think.

When you try to speak apophthegmatically, however, you ought to take care that you not speak apophlegmatically, which would mean that you are spitting on the audience. Look real closely and you can see the plegm flying in apophlegmatic, which the OED defines as "promoting the removal of phlegm; expectorant." The noun form of the word is apophlegmatizant: thus an 18th century writer can say that "apophlegmatizants are of two kinds, one administered by the way of the mouth...the other given by the nostrils." An apophlegmatizer then must be a person who spits, even though the 17th century definition of it stresses the pill or nostrum that prepares one for spitting: "Apophlegmatizers are such as by chewing or gargling, draw down Plegmatick excrements from the brain by the Pallet." So THAT is where phlegm comes from. I would like to use apophlegmatizer to describe the person who spits. I think that is the only realistic way of saving the word for today.

Apophony

One needs no epiphany, meaning some kind of heavenly manifestation or revelation, to understand apophony. Derived from "apo" meaning "from" and "phone," meaning "sound," apophony is a word taken from grammar and is used to describe a variation in vowel quality in the formation of gramatically-related words, usually verbs. For example, "give" turns into "gave" by apophony. Germans use the term ablaut to describe the same phenomenon, and we have dutifully taken over the word ablaut as we speak ("sprechen") or spoke ("sprach") our words.