"Principium, qui et loquor vobis" (Évangile de Jean, 8, 25) De l'adresse apop

Abstract

The ancients Greeks thought of the name as “theurgic”: to name a god is to make him present by addressing him. Now, linguistics shows that address is constitutive of all discourse, even those that are “apophatic”, that say nothing, that deny reference to anything that is present. This is why the more the apophatic theologian denies, the more he anchors his addressee, in this case “God”, in his discourse. Even the most negative discourse does not suppress the address but lays bare the device of the address as in a prayer. In order to express that, some modern thinkers (e.g., Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida) proposed a notion of transcendence of a different type than the one usually attributed to the divine. But already in the second century A.D., Origen, the Greek theologian of Alexandria, showed that the paradox of the enunciator offers a dizzying proof of the existence of God. In this respect, a certain modernity, rather than driving out the Gods, paradoxically reinforces the persuasive power of the old theurgic paradigm.