William Franke

Self-reflection, as the hallmark of the modern age, originates more profoundly with Dante than with Descartes. This book rewrites modern intellectual history, taking Dante’s lyrical language in Paradiso as enacting a Trinitarian self-reflexivity that gives a theological spin to the birth of the modern subject already with the Troubadours. Dante’s thought and work indicate an alternative modernity along the path not taken. This alternative shows up in Nicholas of Cusa’s conjectural science and in Giambattista Vico’s new science of imagination as alternatives to positive empirical science.

Are there deep differences between these cultures in their ways of thinking? How can they be described? There is no neutral language for doing so. One can doubt all claims to deep essence as being metaphysical illusions and figments. However, the differences are certainly experienced. They can be characterized negatively. This is where Chinese and Western viewpoints meet. Whereas Jullien finds the cultural Other enabling him to think otherwise and effectively to keep the recursive self-negating aspect of discourse active and alive in his own discourse, I attempt to do this by reference to the apophatic current underlying Western philosophical reflection in all its most radically critical and especially self-critical manifestations. Especially from consideration of Eastern approaches to universality, the apophatic wisdom that can be gathered here can serve to put us on guard against any universality that can be thought. Universality is not what it is thought to be by the universals that we can think. The naïve faith in thought and education as per se emancipatory is belied by history. The universal remains an ideal rather than a manifest fact in the course of history. It cannot be approached except always by way of the negative.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 29.1 (2005) 73-88 [Access article in PDF] Virgil, History, and Prophecy William Franke Vanderbilt University Virgil has been very widely acclaimed as a prophet, but the grounds of this acclaim have shifted in the course of history. From ancient and especially from medieval times, this recognition was traditionally accorded him first and foremost, if not exclusively, on the basis of a passage from the Fourth Eclogue celebrating the birth of a new progeny ("progenies nova") from heaven and the consequent renewal of the world.1 This passage lent itself to Christian messianic interpretations, thanks especially to its reference to a Virgin ushering in a return of the golden age of peace on earth ("iam redit et uirgo, redeunt Saturnia regna"). Historical research reveals Virgil to have, in all probability, intended in this text to hyperbolically hail the birth of a son to a particular Roman consul.2 Yet, even apart from historical intentions and inevitable doubts about them, to pin Virgil's claim to being a prophet to this text is to miss the momentous discovery that makes him truly a prophet in a way unprecedented in pagan antiquity.Modern treatments of Virgil as prophet have not remained beholden to this Christian medieval framework and have opened suggestive avenues for more accurate elucidation of Virgilian prophecy, particularly in terms of its own historical context and the role of the Latin vates in Imperial Rome.3 What I wish to propose, however, is not a more accurately historicized understanding of prophecy in Virgil, but rather a philosophical interpretation of the conception of history as prophetic that is realized in the text of the Aeneid. This is actually analogous to the medieval Christian misprision of Virgil in that it focusses on Virgil's potential significance in a new and different historical context, our own. The justification for this approach lies in the fact that historical research into prophecy during the Augustan Empire cannot exhaustively [End Page 73] explain the significance of Virgil's text in its astonishing creation of an original conception of history as prophetic, nor in its potential to illuminate the nature of prophecy as it may concern us today. Study of Virgil can help make the concept of prophecy vital to reflection on history and the structure of time in our own post-Heideggerian era.The question of whether Virgil foresaw the birth of Christ concerns prophecy only in the relatively banal sense of being able to foretell the future. In this, Virgil would be no different from myriad seers and divines and sorcerers with which the ancient world was rife. But the originality of Virgil, his particular claim to being an authentic prophet rather than simply, like many other major Roman authors, to have incorporated prophetic topoi into his works rests on his surpassing prophecy in precisely this sense. It is Virgil's single-handed invention, as if out of nowhere, of a genuinely prophetic mode of understanding history that is the seeming miracle on which his justly deserved fame as a prophetic poet has every right to rest.Whereas the certainly rather forced Christian interpretation of the Fourth Eclogue concerns "prophecy" only in a surface sense of factually foretelling the future, the deep meaning of prophecy as it develops in Virgil and Dante and the whole lineage of prophetic poets they foster down through Tasso, Spenser, Milton, and Blake, concerns rather the interpretation of history from its endpoint and seen as a whole, so that every moment in that history receives new meaning in light of a synoptic vision. In the biblical prophetic tradition, this perspective extends even beyond history and time altogether, and this marks a crucial difference from Virgil, whose end-vision is envisaged primarily as intrahistorical rather than as eschatological or as beyond the end (eschaton) of history. Still, in Virgil, just as in the Bible, the prophetic vantage point transcends history in order to understand it as a whole. This transcendence is expressed, among other ways, in the claim to divine inspiration. Whether this claim to inspiration be understood as a figure for heightened human potency or...

Examples of unsayability of the most disparate sorts are cited from literature (Shakespeare, Melville, James, Aeschylus, and others) in order to suggest the uncircumscribable diversity of motives for unsayability. The question is whether they all have anything in common. When something cannot be said because of politeness or obscenity or deceit or strategy, does this have anything to do with the metaphysical motives for unsayability? These things are not per se unsayable but only conditionally so, under certain circumstances. The problem is that any way of distinguishing accidental from essential unsayability is itself circumstantial. Any essential unsayability must necessarily remain, precisely, unsayable. Therefore any determinate distinction between essential and contingent unsayability itself proves to be inarticulable. Questioned in this way as to its final purport and significance, all discourse, in effect, falls under the sway of what cannot be said.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dante's Inferno as Poetic Revelation of Prophetic TruthWilliam FrankeIDante's Inferno demands to be understood as the culmination of a series of visits to the underworld in ancient epic tradition. Dante's most direct precedent is Aeneas's journey to meet his father in Hades, as told by Virgil in Book VI of the Aeneid. Aeneas's voyage is modeled in turn on Odysseus's encounter with shades of Hades in Book XI of the Odyssey. The epic quest in each of these models pivots, in various ways, on a visit to the world of the dead, a discensus ad inferas, as a climactic episode at its center. However, Dante makes this episode the general framework of the whole poem: from beginning to end, Dante's poem represents a voyage through the world beyond the grave. In this respect, Dante's Inferno, and indeed the whole Divine Comedy, is conceived primarily as an expansion of the ancient epic motif of the katabasis or "going down" of the protagonist to the underworld for a revelation of his destiny from beyond the threshold of death. Like Virgil, Dante interprets history prophetically, finding in it the essential pattern of things to come. But this projection now reaches to an eschatological future beyond history altogether—to an uncannily dynamic realization of eternity.The other world that is visited by Dante asserts itself unequivocally as ultimate reality. It is not just some shadowy world of bloodless phantasms like the shades that approach Odysseus, nor is it vacuous and inane, as are Virgil's "houses void and empty realms of Dis" ("domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna," Aeneid VI.269). This "other" world shows up as even more vivid than the world of ordinary sense-perception by virtue of a strikingly realistic, indeed surrealistic imagery. Dante heightens the [End Page 252] mythological topos of the visit to the underworld that he inherited from Virgil and Homer to a level where it represents the true essence of life on this earth transposed into a transcendent dimension. The world of the dead is not just one in a series of episodes befalling the protagonist but rather the final and definitive experience that reveals the true meaning of all possible experiences and thereby the meaning of the world as a whole. This is perhaps implicit and incipient in Homer and Virgil, since the journey to the underworld in each case encloses a revelation that illuminates the meaning of everything else and orients the protagonist's subsequent life in the world up to his death. But Dante's other world is more than the place for a miraculous glimpse into the true meaning of life: it is itself the vera vita, the "true life."Of course, Virgil had interpreted the whole of Roman history through the optics of prophecy, but his prophetic history was directly disclosed only in privileged moments within his poem. Dante's entire poetic narrative transpires in an eschatological dimension of existence; it thereby aspires to reveal beyond the limits of history a full-blown vision of eternity—that is, history as projected into the eternal worlds that it prefigures. While at the level of content Dante expands the theme of a visit to the underworld into an entire poem of epic proportions, more deeply, at the level of genre and in terms of its mode, Dante's whole poem is prophetic in character. History and narrative become in themselves prophetic rather than only forming a background for prophecy and framing it.The descent to the world of the dead—a symbol for the place of revelation of the meaning of life—is a thematic issue that runs as a thread through each of the epic works that have been mentioned so far. But in Dante it becomes the central axis of a poem that emerges in its entirety as religious revelation, and Dante greatly intensifies the self-conscious grasp of this function of poetry. His work represents an unprecedentedly powerful reflection on poetry as revelation in the mode of prophecy, for the customary literary means of poetic expression are now revealed in their intrinsically prophetic potency. From the Aeneid Dante could learn...

This essay represents part of an effort to rewrite the history metaphysics in terms of what philosophy never said, nor could say. It works from the Neoplatonic commentary tradition on Plato's Parmenides as the matrix for a distinctively apophatic thinking that takes the truth of metaphysical doctrines as something other than anything that can be logically articulated. It focuses on Damascius in the 5—6th century AD as the culmination of this tradition in the ancient world and emphasizes that Neoplatonism represents the crisis of Greek metaphysics on account of the inability to give a rational account of foundations for knowing and of the ultimate principle of beings. Neoplatonism discovered how all such ultimate principles were necessarily beyond the reach of reason and speech. This apophatic insight is drawn out with the help of contemporary criticism of Neoplatonic philosophy, defining also some points of divergence. The essay then discusses the motives for thinking the unsayable in postmodern times on the basis of this parallel with Neoplatonic thought. Discourse's becoming critical of itself to the point of self-subversion animates them both. However, the tendency in postmodern thought to totally reject theology, including negative theology, is a betrayal of its own deepest motivations. This tendency is debated through an examination of the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. While any traditional discourse can be negated, the negating and self-negating capacity of discourse itself is infinite, and this is where a perennial negative theological philosophy of the unsayable is to be located. Language, eminently the language of philosophy, as infinitely open, points in a direction which becomes equally and ineluctably theological.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.2 (2000) 137-153 [Access article in PDF] Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance William Franke Metaphor has gained a new lease on life through the revival of rhetoric in recent decades. For promoters of "la nouvelle rhétorique," such as Gérard Genette and Roland Barthes, rhetoric came to coincide with a total science of language that is practically coextensive with all social and human knowledge, while in the Anglo-Saxon world, Wayne Booth, in the wake of Kenneth Burke, repristinated rhetoric as, not just a technical discipline, but a moral one, and, in fact, an all-embracing criticism of the humanities. 1 The fortunes of metaphor have revived and flourished in tandem with those of rhetoric as a whole. Over the more than two millennia of a progressive eclipse of rhetoric, during which it shrank from its original primacy as the master art of persuasion in law, literature, and politics and, moreover, as the general framework of culture, to the status of an ancillary art of elocution of exclusively formal import, metaphor was eventually confined to being just one particular instance within the schemes of classifications of tropes. It became an affair of style, an ornament of decorative discourse, as rhetoric came to be identified with mere elocutio and was no longer essentially also inventio--the finding of arguments, in which metaphor's role is actually paramount--and dispositio--the ordering of discourse into its syntactic parts, such as exordium, narration, discussion, peroration. As the originally tripartite art and science of rhetoric was amputated of two of its main divisions in the classical model established on the basis of Aristotle's three-book treatise, 2 metaphor became a merely formal enhancement and lost its roles as substantive and structuring for knowledge and discourse.The decline of interest in philosophical, Aristotelian rhetoric had much to do with metaphor's reduction to a merely technical or decorative device. But with the recent widening practically without limit of the terrain of rhetoric, and particularly with its restoration to its original standing as a philosophical discipline comprehending the substance of argument, metaphor [End Page 137] has once again acquired cognitive status and, moreover, has tended to become the name for figurative language in general and even, emblematically, for the rhetorical or rhetoricity as such. Where the power of rhetoric to reshape cognitive meaning and even to reinvent, or at least reconfigure, reality was once again recognized as irresistible throughout all the realms of discourse, the source and unity of this power seemed to require a name, and more often than not metaphor--on account of the transformative, inventive power associated particularly with it--has been adopted to serve this purpose.Today, under the aegis of metaphor, the power of figurative language, arguably the originating power at the source of all language and even of an articulated world as such, has newly become an object of research and general theoretical speculation. This extension of the concept of metaphor is bound up with a renewed view of figurative language in general as not only a substantive bearer of the content of discourse, but also as ontologically constitutive of the world, as operative at the origins of things and their identities. It has become possible to view all language as being metaphorical, and accordingly metaphorical operations of transfer and redefinition have been recognized as being the very essence of language and of all that comes to articulation through it. Furthermore, as witnessed by burgeoning publications and conferences, metaphor has become a topic onto which practically all the classic philosophical problems of ontology and epistemology are projected and appear in a new, specifically linguistic, light. 3This new ascendency of metaphor is certainly not uninflected or uncontested, even within the camps of the new rhetoricians. Genette, in "La rhétorique restreinte" (1972), resists the "inflation of metaphor" to become the trope of tropes and the figure of figures in a wide range of writers epitomizing modern poetics--particularly Marcel Proust, Roman Jakobson, and Michel Deguy (1969). Genette argues against reduction of...

Porphyry‘s “On the Cave of the Nymphs” inaugurates a style of philosophicoallegorical interpretation of literary texts that flourished in antiquity and finds analogues in criticism down to the present. It is distinguished by its use of literary interpretation to think through speculative problems of philosophy and theology. Although it became suspect in terms of Enlightenment philological principles prescribing interpretation of the text “on its own terms,” this kind of criticism reveals the originally philosophical motives and purpose of literary criticism and restores to literature the vocation of disclosing a properly poetic truth higher than that of fact or history. The history of this type of speculative criticism stemming from Porphyry‘s reading of Homer is traced forward through Latin allegorical readings of epic revolving around Virgil. This itinerary highlights the perennial and inevitable tensions between philological and philosophical approaches to interpreting literature as a revelation of truth.

RésuméLa connaissance herméneutique est généralement définie comme un savoir engagé, par opposition au savoir détaché que produit la méthode scientifique. La tension entre ces deux modèles dans la théorie psychanalytique de Freud est ici mise en évidence avec l'aide de Ricœur: cette théorie interprète des intentions conscientes, mais explique en même temps la vie psychique d'une façon mécaniste en termes depulsions somatiques. On montre ensuite comment le développement lacanien de la psychanalyse rend l'être habituellement caché de la subjectivité—l'inconscient—accessible comme langage. Structuré comme un langage, l'inconscient est articulé et interprétable; et son interprétation est accès au langage du «réel», par-delà les limites de l'objectivité scientifique.

The humanities represent a type of knowledge distinct from, and yet encompassing, scientific knowledge. Drawing on philosophical hermeneutics in the tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, as well as on the Latin rhetorical tradition and on Greek paideia, this essay presents humanities knowledge as "involved knowing." Science, in principle, abstracts from the subjective, psychological conditions of knowing, including its emotional and willful determinants, as introducing personal biases, and it attempts also to neutralize historical and cultural contingencies. Humanities knowledge, in contrast, focuses attention on precisely these subjective and historical factors as intrinsic to any knowledge in its full human purport. In particular, poetry, which historically is the matrix of knowledge in all fields, including science, deliberately explores and amply expresses these specifically human registers of significance. The poetic underpinnings of knowledge actually remain crucial to human knowing and key to interpreting its significance in all domains, including the whole range of scientific fields, throughout the course of its development and not least in the modern age so dominated by science and technology

This essay represents a contribution to rewriting the history metaphysics in terms of what philosophy never said, nor could say. It works from the Neoplatonic commentary tradition on Plato’s Parmenides as the matrix for a distinctively apophatic thinking that takes the truth of metaphysical doctrines as something other than anything that can be logically articulated. The hymn is taken to epitomize the kind of discourse that arises in the wake of apophatic negation and witnesses to what the Logos cannot say. The essay contends that metaphysics as a discourse of the unspeakable may prove more viable than any purely logical system could.

There is an obvious paradox in any attempt to map the topography of Paradise, for Paradise, theologians assure us, is outside of space as well as time. Yet mapping Paradise is what Dante's poem, the Paradiso, attempts to do. For the two preceding realms of the afterlife, hell and purgatory, Dante provides numerous finely articulated descriptions of rigorously ordered regions. And again for Paradise, the variegated states of the souls making up the spiritual order of the realm are expressed very precisely by a topographical scheme, one in this case based on Ptolemy's system of the heavens. The seven planetary spheres are followed by the sphere of the fixed stars and the primum mobile, the whole finally bordering on the completely nonspatial heaven of the Empyrean. But this last “sphere” alone is Paradise in the full and strict sense. As Dante has Beatrice explain in canto 4.28–48, the whole poem attempts to describe this totally nonspatial order in terms of the array of the nine physical heavens as metaphorical correlatives for the successive degrees of beatitude experienced by the souls “in” the Empyrean. Paradise in this sense—as the Empyrean—is thus utopic, if any place is: it is literally “no place” at all

Western intellectual tradition is brought to focus through the lens of Dante’s Comedia around the idea of the identity of being and intellect. All reality is dependent on God as pure Being, pure actuality of self-awareness (“thought thinking itself ”); everything else is or,equivalently, has form by its participation in this Being which is Intellect. The human soul can experience itself as divine by realizingthis identity of Being with Intellect through its own being refined to pure intellect and form. This is arguably the seminal idea of Westernmetaphysics relayed by Dante, but he transforms it so that it is no longer “metaphysics” in the sense current in Western thought.

By exposing itself as fiction, Dante’s poetry becomes true. Especially the Malebolge stages a relentless self-critique by Dante of his prophetic voice and the presumption of a human poet who imitates divine prophecy through merely human counterfeits. This self-deconstruction opens the poem to being informed from above and beyond itself by an authority not its own: divine grace can work the revelation of truth directly within interpretive acts of readers focused on the “doctrine hiding beneath the veil of the strange verses.” The apex (or nadir) of infernal irony is that Dante’s Inferno becomes prophetic revelation of truth by undermining its own merely human claim to be capable of delivering just such revelation.

On the one hand, we find secularized approaches to theology stemming from the Death of God movement of the 1960s, particularly as pursued by North American religious thinkers such as Thomas J.J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, Charles Winquist, Carl Raschke, Robert Scharlemann, and others, who stress that the possibilities for theological discourse are fundamentally altered by the new conditions of our contemporary world. Our world today, in their view, is constituted wholly on a plane of immanence, to such an extent that traditional appeals to faith in an other world become difficult to take as more than self-deception and willful blindness to our human reality. On the other hand, we hear the assertion of a new lease on life for theology and its traditional affirmation of divine transcendence over and against the putative arrogance of all claims of human autonomy. This claim is advanced particularly by theologians grouped under the banner of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy. Emanating from England, originally from the University of Cambridge in the 1980s and 1990s, this movement includes such theological thinkers as John Milbank, Graham Ward, Rowan Williams, and Catherine Pickstock. It has also explicitly styled itself “post-secularist.” I propose that both approaches are based on not very fully acknowledged and often explicitly denied premises in negative theology, which surprisingly emerges as key to fostering genuine possibilities for dialogue among apparently antagonistic theological approaches

This paper develops an interpretation of nature in classical Chinese culture through dialogue with the work of François Jullien. I understand nature negatively as precisely what never appears as such nor ever can be exactly apprehended and defined. For perception and expression entail inevitably human mediation and cultural transmission by semiotic and hermeneutic means that distort and occult the natural in the full depth of its alterity. My claim is that the largely negative approach to nature that Jullien finds in sources of Chinese tradition can also be found in the West, particularly in its apophatic currents or countercurrents that contest all along the more powerful positive conceptions and systems for construing and mastering the natural world. These insights grow especially from the critique of idolatry, in which worship of nature, in concrete, objective forms taken as gods, is negated. Bringing out this negative-theological matrix can give us a perspective on Jullien’s treatment and expose some of his own biases notably in favor of immanence to the exclusion of metaphysical transcendence. Comparative philosophy serves in this negative-theological key self-critically to identify blind spots in one’s own culture

ABSTRACTAs a contribution to comparative East-West poetics, this essay descries a common resource of Western and classical Chinese literatures in certain “apophatic” modes of thought and discourse that are oriented to what cannot be said, to what is manifest only in and through a certain evasion and defiance of all efforts to verbalize and conceptualize it. This argument is developed in critical counterpoint with the work of interpreting Chinese classical poetry and thought by the French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien. Jullien acutely apprehends and elegantly expounds the deeply apophatic bent of Chinese poetics. However, he sets Chinese thought and poetry categorically apart from Western approaches, whereas my analysis brings them together under the aegis of their common inspiration from the experience of the limits of language vis-à-vis an unspeakable origin of thinking and its source in reality.

The generic paradigms for Augustine’s discourse include not only autobiography but also theology, philosophy, exegesis, and “confession.” However, most importantly of all, Augustine’s discourse is cast into the form of a dialogue with God. His life story, unfolding in a succession of anecdotes, forms a horizontal axis that is traversed by and wholly subsumed under a vertical axis, along which he converses directly with God. The point of view evoked through this dialogue is not a temporally finite point of view but rather the totum simul vision of divinity.

In _Poetry and Apocalypse_, Franke seeks to find the premises for dialogue between cultures, especially religious fundamentalisms—including Islamic fundamentalism—and modern Western secularism. He argues that in order to be genuinely open, dialogue needs to accept possibilities such as religious apocalypse in ways that can be best understood through the experience of poetry. Franke reads Christian epic and prophetic tradition as a secularization of religious revelation that preserves an understanding of the essentially apocalyptic character of truth and its disclosure in history. The usually neglected negative theology that undergirds this apocalyptic tradition provides the key to a radically new view of apocalypse as at once religious and poetic

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dante's Inferno as Poetic Revelation of Prophetic TruthWilliam FrankeIDante's Inferno demands to be understood as the culmination of a series of visits to the underworld in ancient epic tradition. Dante's most direct precedent is Aeneas's journey to meet his father in Hades, as told by Virgil in Book VI of the Aeneid. Aeneas's voyage is modeled in turn on Odysseus's encounter with shades of Hades in Book XI of the Odyssey. The epic quest in each of these models pivots, in various ways, on a visit to the world of the dead, a discensus ad inferas, as a climactic episode at its center. However, Dante makes this episode the general framework of the whole poem: from beginning to end, Dante's poem represents a voyage through the world beyond the grave. In this respect, Dante's Inferno, and indeed the whole Divine Comedy, is conceived primarily as an expansion of the ancient epic motif of the katabasis or "going down" of the protagonist to the underworld for a revelation of his destiny from beyond the threshold of death. Like Virgil, Dante interprets history prophetically, finding in it the essential pattern of things to come. But this projection now reaches to an eschatological future beyond history altogether—to an uncannily dynamic realization of eternity.The other world that is visited by Dante asserts itself unequivocally as ultimate reality. It is not just some shadowy world of bloodless phantasms like the shades that approach Odysseus, nor is it vacuous and inane, as are Virgil's "houses void and empty realms of Dis" ("domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna," Aeneid VI.269). This "other" world shows up as even more vivid than the world of ordinary sense-perception by virtue of a strikingly realistic, indeed surrealistic imagery. Dante heightens the [End Page 252] mythological topos of the visit to the underworld that he inherited from Virgil and Homer to a level where it represents the true essence of life on this earth transposed into a transcendent dimension. The world of the dead is not just one in a series of episodes befalling the protagonist but rather the final and definitive experience that reveals the true meaning of all possible experiences and thereby the meaning of the world as a whole. This is perhaps implicit and incipient in Homer and Virgil, since the journey to the underworld in each case encloses a revelation that illuminates the meaning of everything else and orients the protagonist's subsequent life in the world up to his death. But Dante's other world is more than the place for a miraculous glimpse into the true meaning of life: it is itself the vera vita, the "true life."Of course, Virgil had interpreted the whole of Roman history through the optics of prophecy, but his prophetic history was directly disclosed only in privileged moments within his poem. Dante's entire poetic narrative transpires in an eschatological dimension of existence; it thereby aspires to reveal beyond the limits of history a full-blown vision of eternity—that is, history as projected into the eternal worlds that it prefigures. While at the level of content Dante expands the theme of a visit to the underworld into an entire poem of epic proportions, more deeply, at the level of genre and in terms of its mode, Dante's whole poem is prophetic in character. History and narrative become in themselves prophetic rather than only forming a background for prophecy and framing it.The descent to the world of the dead—a symbol for the place of revelation of the meaning of life—is a thematic issue that runs as a thread through each of the epic works that have been mentioned so far. But in Dante it becomes the central axis of a poem that emerges in its entirety as religious revelation, and Dante greatly intensifies the self-conscious grasp of this function of poetry. His work represents an unprecedentedly powerful reflection on poetry as revelation in the mode of prophecy, for the customary literary means of poetic expression are now revealed in their intrinsically prophetic potency. From the Aeneid Dante could learn...

“Any writer worth his salt knows that what cannot be spoken is ultimately the thing worth speaking about; yet most often this humbling awareness is unsaid or covered up. There are some who have made it their business, however, to court failure and acknowledge defeat, to explore the impasse of words before silence. William Franke has created an anthology of such explorations, undertaken in poetry and prose, that stretches from Plato to the present. Whether the subject of discourse is All or Nothing does not matter: the struggle of speech to name the unnameable is the same. This ambitious two-volume undertaking demonstrates a preoccupation as old as Western civilization itself: the limits of language and the virtue of being at a loss for words. How long we have been raiding the Inarticulate!” —Peter S. Hawkins, Boston University “Developments in critical theory during the past two decades have led to renewed interest in negative theology. Books like _Languages of the Unsayable_, _Negation and Theology_, _Derrida and Negative Theology _, and _The Otherness of God _ have signaled the resurgence of this ancient tradition. William Franke’s distinctive contribution is to provide the background and texts from which these recent developments have emerged.” —Mark Taylor, Williams College Apophasis has become a major topic in the humanities, particularly in philosophy, religion, and literature. This monumental two-volume anthology gathers together most of the important historical works on apophaticism and illustrates the diverse trajectories of apophatic discourse in ancient, modern, and postmodern times. William Franke provides a major introductory essay on apophaticism at the beginning of each volume, and shorter introductions to each anthology selection. The first volume, _Classic Formulations_, offers excerpts from Plato, Plotinus, Damascius, the Bible, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Rumi, Thomas Aquinas, Marguerite Porete, Dante, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and more