Author: LI Bingquan, Associate Professor of School of Liberal Arts, Renmin University of China.
Abstract:
The dialectic of faith and reason has always been the driving force of Western thinking ever since the Christian encounter with Greek culture. The tension becomes more obvious in modernity dominated by a philosophy of subjectivity which delimits a determinate understanding of knowledge and rationality. The conventional oppositions between natural and revealed theology, dogmatic and mystical theology, result from the paradigm shift in truth and knowledge. By tracing its origin back to Platonism, this paper focuses on the grammar of mystical theology in Christian tradition, aiming to show the boundary of human reason and language in the face of the transcendent God and the unknowability. As a stance against the self-centered reason and conceptual idols, mysticism preserves the transcendence of the absent God in the post-metaphysical milieu and opens a space for thinking the unknowable.
Keywords:
Mysticism, Platonism, Logos, Reason, Unknowability
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