Alongside Ambrose, several prominent figures exemplify other forms of knowledge-shaping practices in catechesis. Zeno of Verona and Gaudentius of Brescia taught new Christians to re-imagine time and the natural world guided by Christian principles. Rufinus of Aquileia and Peter Chrysologus stressed the apophatic reserve necessary for initial inquiries into the nature of God.

Chapter 7 considers how the event has been characterised in philosophy and the implications for theology. Concerned that opposition to it is generated by fear that it simply (re)asserts theistic beliefs, I examine how Marion’s understanding of the event can legitimately engage with the thought of others. Jean Grondin's views illustrate one extreme of that engagement. Caputo's analysis of the opposition between intuition and intention illustrates a need to discern whether a phenomenological approach to the event is being undertaken on the basis of theistic or atheistic beliefs, or whether a point earlier to that distinction is envisaged. Jean-Luc Nancy 's event takes place prepredicatively and it is cast in terms of an empty intentionality of faith. I suggest that this is reminiscent of hyperphasis. I look to Lieven Boeve to see how such a radical apophatics might work theologically. Boeve dialogues with Jean-François Lyotard, who thinks the event in terms of its emptiness and givenness to feeling. I then consider how Claude Romano thinks the event as prepredicative, and I use his criteria to discern whether a philosophical reading of the event would preclude a theological application.

The grammatically analyzed mode in which language is presented in Dante’s written vision illustrates the proclivity of writing to shiver and splinter meaning. Writing tends to partition and fissure the presumed wholeness of sense as it occurs originally in oral communication and in the indivisible event of intuitive understanding. It is precisely the mechanical and material, the artificial and mediated aspects of language – particularly its grammatical composition out of differentiated and coordinated parts of speech – that become conspicuous in Dante’s inspired vision of the transcendent “speech” of Scripture.Astonishingly, this anatomization of writing is plied to mediate an authentically divine vision. Endless mediation of the whole by its parts, in Dante’s vision of language, provides a plausible image of the infinity and eternity of God. Yet Dante’s deconstructive vision of writing anatomized into its parts and even disintegrating into apparent chaos opens a vista driving beyond the visible altogether. If the vision of God is presented concretely in the infinite mediations of language that Dante places on display, the logic of writing (écriture) is to dis-identify the object of the vision with anything positively given. Only the differences created by representation open a perspective upon the unmediated and the unrepresentable. Realizing an apophatic logic of ineffability, Dante claims an immediate vision of divinity in what these mediations are not – in the Im-mediate. He gives us an immediate vision of the divine Word in Scripture but dissolves it, then, into infinite mediation, leaving us oriented to the source of synthesis of the endless mediations in which our existence consists.