Metaphors, Mysticism, and Modern Misreadings

William Placher and Denys Turner, though separated by geography and academic focus, converged on a shared mission: to confront modernity’s relentless effort to shrink the mystery of God into categories palatable to human reason or emotion. Placher, an American theologian and philosopher of religion, spent much of his career at Wabash College in Indiana, where he became a leading voice in postmodern theology. Trained at Yale, his work—including The Domestication of Transcendence (1996) and Narratives of a Vulnerable God (1994)—sought to dismantle Enlightenment-era assumptions that reduced God to a puzzle solvable by logic or a therapist catering to personal needs. His intellectual journey was marked by ecumenical dialogue and a commitment to recovering the mysterium tremendum, the awe-inspiring otherness of God that defies human domestication.

Denys Turner, a British theologian and philosopher, carved a parallel path through the dense forests of medieval mysticism and Marxist critique. Teaching at institutions like Yale and Cambridge, Turner’s scholarship—most notably The Darkness of God (1995) and Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait (2013)—bridged the worlds of apophatic theology and social theory. His work excavates the radical negation at the heart of figures like Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross, arguing that their “darkness” and “unknowing” were not mystical experiences but tools to dismantle all human concepts of God, including the self. Turner’s engagement with mysticism is inseparable from his critique of modernity’s commodification of spirituality, a theme that aligns unexpectedly with his earlier writings on Marxism.

At first glance, Placher and Turner might seem an unlikely pair—one a systematic theologian wrestling with postmodernism, the other a medievalist probing the limits of language and selfhood. Yet their works resonate with a shared diagnosis: modernity’s attempt to tame divine transcendence. Placher’s The Domestication of Transcendence traces how post-Enlightenment theology, from Descartes to Schleiermacher, reframed God as a being among beings, subject to empirical proofs or moral utility. For Placher, this shift betrayed Christianity’s core confession of a God who “dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Timothy 6:16), a mystery irreducible to human systems. Turner, meanwhile, exposes how the same anthropocentric impulse corrupted Christian mysticism. In The Darkness of God, he argues that medieval metaphors like “interiority” and “ascent” were never about cultivating spiritual experiences but about negating them—a tradition he claims modern readers have distorted into self-help techniques.

The overlap between Placher and Turner becomes clearest in their appeal to pre-modern traditions as correctives. Placher turned to Reformation figures like John Calvin and modern theologians like Karl Barth, who insisted on God’s “wholly otherness,” while Turner anchored his work in the apophatic rigor of medieval mystics like Eckhart and The Cloud of Unknowing. Both saw postmodern thought as an unlikely ally: Placher embraced narrative theology’s rejection of universalizing claims, while Turner drew parallels between medieval negation and postmodern deconstruction. Yet their projects diverge in emphasis. Placher’s focus on doctrinal theology reveals how rationalism flattened God into a concept, whereas Turner’s mysticism shows how spirituality itself became a commodity—a privatized “experience” stripped of its destabilizing power.

Their biographies illuminate these divergences. Placher, the Midwestern academic immersed in ecumenical dialogue, sought to reclaim transcendence for a church increasingly skeptical of mystery. Turner, the Cambridge scholar steeped in Marxist critique, framed apophaticism as a radical politics of the soul—a refusal to let God (or the self) be co-opted by capitalist or consumerist frameworks. Together, they challenge modernity’s cult of accessibility, whether in the form of dogmatic certainty, therapeutic spirituality, or the “spiritual but not religious” trend.

What Placher and Turner offer today is not nostalgia for the past but a prophetic call to recover a faith that unsettles. In an age where spirituality is often reduced to mindfulness apps and emotional uplift, their works remind us that true encounter with the divine begins where language, experience, and even the self dissolve. As Turner writes, the medieval mystics invite us not to “like them for what they are not” but to confront the austere truth of a God who resists all domestication—a lesson as urgent now as it was in the age of cathedrals and cloisters.

Ancient Light, Modern Shadows

In the opening chapter of The Darkness of God, Turner excavates the bedrock of Western Christian mysticism: the seismic collision of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and Moses’ encounter with Yahweh on Mount Sinai. These two narratives—one Greek, one Hebraic—forge the metaphors of “ascent,” “light,” and “darkness” that would shape apophatic theology, a tradition that insists God is known only by unknowing. For Turner, this synthesis is not merely historical but dialectical, a fusion of philosophical and scriptural currents that produced a language capable of articulating transcendence through negation. At the heart of this synthesis stands Pseudo-Dionysius (Denys the Areopagite), the enigmatic fifth-century Syrian monk who welded Platonic epistemology to Exodus’s theophany, crafting a “mystical theology” where God is encountered not in light but in the “luminous darkness” that shatters human comprehension.

Turner’s analysis begins with Plato’s cave, where prisoners mistake shadows for reality until one is dragged into the blinding light of truth—a light so overwhelming it first blinds, then illuminates. This allegory, Turner argues, mirrors Moses’ ascent into the “thick darkness where God was” (Exodus 20:21). Both narratives depict a paradoxical journey: the closer one approaches divine reality, the more language and perception fail. For Denys, Moses’ entry into the cloud becomes the paradigm of apophatic theology, where the soul “plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing” and is “supremely united [to God] by a completely unknowing inactivity of all knowledge.” Here, Turner identifies the core of medieval mysticism: union with God is not an experience but an ontological un-knowing, a dissolution of the self’s categories.

Yet Turner’s deeper project is polemical. He contrasts this medieval apophaticism with modern “experientialism,” which reduces mysticism to subjective feelings or techniques (e.g., contemplative prayer). Where Denys and Gregory of Nyssa saw darkness as the excess of divine light, modernity interprets it as a psychological state—a shift Turner traces to the erosion of Neoplatonic dialectics. The medieval mystic, he insists, did not seek spiritual “experiences” but sought to critique them, using metaphors of ascent and darkness to dismantle all idolatrous claims on God.

Beyond Words and Silence

In Chapter 2 of The Darkness of God, Turner further explores the interplay of cataphatic (affirmative) and apophatic (negative) theology in the works of Pseudo-Dionysius (Denys the Areopagite). At its core, this chapter interrogates how language—both overflowing and failing—can gesture toward a God who transcends all categories. For Denys, theology is a dialectical dance: affirmations multiply to the point of contradiction, negations unravel their own limits, and silence emerges not as an endpoint but as the collapse of speech itself. Turner argues that Denys’ apophaticism is not a rejection of language but its fulfillment, a strategy where words self-destruct to reveal the “brilliant darkness” of divine transcendence.

Denys’ cataphatic theology is a “verbal riot,” a profusion of metaphors drawn from every corner of creation—God as rock, light, mother, even a “hungover” deity. Yet this excess is purposeful: by straining language to its breaking point, Denys exposes its inadequacy. Affirmations must be negated, but negations too must be negated, for God is “beyond assertion and denial.” Turner illustrates this with Denys’ prayer in Mystical Theology:

“Lead us up beyond knowing and light, up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture where the mysteries of God’s Word lie simple, absolute, unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.”

Here, paradox becomes the only adequate mode of speech—God is “neither darkness nor light,” yet both, transcending even the logic of contradiction.

Crucially, Turner confronts the tension between Denys’ hierarchical ontology (where beings exist in degrees of “proximity” to God) and the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo (where all creatures depend immediately on God). While Denys’ Neoplatonism suggests a “volcanic” emanation of creation—cooling into multiplicity as it flows from the divine source—his Christianity insists that God’s causality is unmediated. Every worm and cherub is “equidistant” from God, a paradox Turner resolves by emphasizing that hierarchy exists within language, not ontology. The “ascent” of negations is linguistic, not spatial—a dismantling of metaphors, not a ladder of beings.

Restless Hearts, Interior Depths

Let me highlight just one more chapter in Turner’s book. In Chapter 3, he turns to Augustine’s Confessions. He seeks to illuminate the text’s radical synthesis of autobiography, theology, and philosophy, challenging modern genre distinctions that might dismiss it as fragmented. Turner argues that Augustine’s work defies categorization by interweaving personal narrative with metaphysical inquiry, framed around the metaphor of “interiority”—a journey from the mutable distractions of the external world to an inward discovery of God, who is paradoxically both the origin and destination of the soul’s restless seeking. The structural divide between the autobiographical Books 1–9 and the theological Books 10–13 is reinterpreted as a cohesive unity: the former chronicles Augustine’s existential crises, while the latter philosophically unpacks the nature of seeking itself. For Turner, Confessions transcends mere conversion narrative; it is an act of self-creation, where writing becomes the vehicle for constructing a coherent selfhood through divine grace. Memory emerges as the linchpin of this process, serving not merely as psychological recall but as the metaphysical bridge between human finitude and eternal truth, where the soul recognizes its pre-existing yet obscured union with God.

Turner’s exploration resonates with the paradoxical tensions celebrated by many other theologians, who locate divine truth in unresolved binaries. The interplay of “interiority” and “exteriority”—where God is immanent within the soul yet transcendent beyond it—reflects a deep appreciation for mystery in Christian thought. Similarly, Jaroslav Pelikan’s historical lens on doctrinal continuity sheds light on Augustine’s adaptation of Platonic themes, reframing memory not as a relic of pre-existence but as participation in God’s eternal present. Yet Turner critiques Augustine’s rejection of Platonic anamnesis, proposing instead a “revisionary Platonism” where memory becomes the locus of divine encounter, a dynamic interplay of discovery and creation. This duality reflects a sacramental critique of modernity’s fragmented self: Augustine’s narrative oscillates between retrieving a pre-existing divine imprint and actively reimagining identity through grace, a tension that speaks to contemporary quests for wholeness amid disenchantment.

While Turner’s interdisciplinary approach is compelling, his dismissal of modern genre distinctions occasionally risks anachronism, projecting postmodern notions of narrative identity onto Augustine’s late-antique context. His focus on memory as a redemptive force also glosses over Augustine’s darker reflections on its role in sin and fragmentation, such as the “vast palaces” of memory haunted by disordered desires. Nevertheless, Turner’s analysis revitalizes Confessions as a living dialogue between experience and doctrine, offering fresh insights into its relevance for debates on identity, desire, and transcendence. His work bridges literary, theological, and philosophical realms, restoring the text’s complexity as both personal testimony and universal metaphysical journey.

The broader significance of Turner’s scholarship lies in his ability to reclaim pre-modern wisdom for postmodern spiritual crises. By framing figures like Augustine as both proto-existentialists and orthodox theologians, he dismantles false binaries—apophatic vs. kataphatic theology, reason vs. emotion, selfhood vs. divine union—revealing their coherence within the Christian mystical tradition. His interdisciplinary rigor, akin to Eugene McCarraher’s critique of capitalist modernity or Pelikan’s historical depth, positions him as a pivotal voice in reconnecting ancient texts to contemporary existential searches. Turner’s work remains indispensable for understanding the restless heart seeking rest in God.