Negative anthropology

Theology known as `negative' undoubtedly is the approach doing the less violence to the truth of the divine mystery. It professes that what we deny of God is further away from the error than what we affirm. The divine ‘gaping' refuses mostly our concepts and stands up to our intellectual possibilities. Only a mystical approach, an approach by the vacuum, makes it possible to meet, in limits, the inexpressible mystery. So why not, analogically, speak about something like ‘negative anthropology’? Such an analogy is justified and is funded on the relationship of man with God, created as his image and resemblance, and revealed `divine' by grace. But one can also speak, and in the logic of our approach, of an anthropology of `gaping'. “Man passes man”, as noted by Pascal with relevance. The human mystery remains properly inexpressible. The human being is essentially `through'.

Negative anthropology is in deep intelligence with the `not', the ‘no’ contemporary with the appearance of mankind and his culture. Man arises in the rupture with an animal which becomes man only through this violence. Negative anthropology cannot say ‘yes’ if it’s not through a `no'. Its truth passes between the words and in the bursting of enclosures and labels. Beyond the accumulative mass of articulations, it points ‘towards’… Just don’t follow the imbecile who, according to the Chinese proverb, looks only at the finger when the wise points his index towards the moon!

It speaks in the gaping of the full. Negative anthropology shares out with silence. And yet it must be said too. While knowing that it can never be articulated into a complete speech buckled on itself. It speaks always ‘around’. It speaks in the gaping of fullness. It cultivates always its astonishing thought behind. With a smile! Like humour, negative anthropology starts by reading between the lines of the human phenomenon. With a smile!

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