Dionysius' Mystical Theology I.2

On affirmation, denial, unknowing and hymning

Welcome to the second in my series of commentaries on Dionysius’ Mystical Theology. If you missed the first, you can find it here. I’m grateful to Fr Kringlebotten for pointing readers to a recent reprint of Parker’s translation, which I recommend above the more readily available ones.

But see that none of the uninitiated listen to these things- those I mean who are entangled in things being, and fancy there is nothing superessentially above things being, but imagine that they know, by their own knowledge, Him, Who has placed darkness as His hiding-place.

But, if the Divine initiations are above such, what would any one say respecting those still more uninitiated, such as both portray the Cause exalted above all, from the lowest of things created, and say that It in no wise excels the no-gods fashioned by themselves and of manifold shapes, it being our duty both to attribute and affirm all the attributes of things existing to It, as Cause of all, and more properly to deny them all to It, as being above all, and not to consider the negations to be in opposition to the affirmations, but far rather that It, which is above every abstraction and definition, is above the privations. (Trans. John Parker)

Having established the mission of what one might call the “apostolic philosopher,” Dionysius proceeds to contrast his type with two lower and inimical ones: first, the merely uninitiated into the Mysteries (amuētoi), which is to say unbaptized; and second, the idolaters who fashion no-gods (atheoi) by themselves.

The former are too attached to things of the world, and fancy that they can derive firm knowledge of God purely by their own knowledge of things here below. The Neoplatonist’s Aristotelian sensibilities may allow that what we now call empirical knowledge, gleaned by the evidence of the senses, can indeed tell us something of the transcendent cause from which those things we perceive ultimately derive, but the Platonic corrective to this insists that sensory data remains a base form of knowledge, ultimately consigned to the fleeting realm of opinion, as potentially deceptive as the shadows on the proverbial cave’s wall. Might this criticism be aimed at pantheists, who insist that there is only an immanent God, and no transcedent, or even at the proto-materialism of the Hedonists? At any rate, Dionysius is critical of those who believe that there is nothing beyond being (superessential) or even beyond beings, but are satisfied with a mere WYSIWYG world.

If the former are damned only by ignorance, the latter are all the more so and by intent. Better a pantheist who equates divinity absolutely with the cosmos, even if he denies transcendent deity, than someone who thinks that only one, limited element of the cosmos is divine, especially if that something is made by his own hands. To  equate divinity with any one specific, limited form or aspect of the cosmos, such as a piece of wood or stone, is to make the gods lesser even than humans, and all too readibly comprehensible. As Dionysius’ great western Platonic brother St Augustine opined, si comprehendis, non est Deus: “if you understand it, it is not God.”

So, if it is a mistake to think that we can know God either by identifying Him with the cosmos as a whole or with any isolated part of it, how can we Him? Dionysius proposes agnōsia, unknowing, as mentioned previously. At this point, Dionysius gives us a foretaste of the theory, briefly introducing the distinction of negations (kataphaseis) and affirmations (apophaseis) which will occupy the Divine Names. Here, he adopts the aetiological Aristotelian terminology from Plotinus and Proclus, which is to say, the terminology of cause and effect. Remember that those we now call Neoplatonists did not recognise the great discontuinity between Plato and Aristotle that moderns have, until recently and on the basis of only the relatively small proportion of the Aristotelian corpus still extant, assumed. Here, Dionysius telescopes the Platonists’ reasoning that causes contain their effects, so since God is is Cause of all being, one must affirm the attributes of all beings to God; yet since any cause also logically precedes and therefore differs from its effects, one most simultaneously deny or negate all attributes of beings to God. For instance, insofar as wisdom, say, can be an attribute of sentient beings, one must ascribe wisdom to God as cause and source of wisdom; however, one must simultaneously deny wisdom of God, to avoid falling into the idolater’s trap of thinking that by knowing the wisdom of the world, we can know the wisdom of God. This is a relatively simple example. You can probably imagine more difficult ones, but allow me to leave them for Dionysius to explain later in his treatise.

The negations are not simply denials of the affirmations. It is not true to say “God is wise,” or to say “God is not wise.” One must say both together. And indeed, Dionysius avers, only the simultaneous affirmationa and negation of all attributes, or “names,” to God constitutes anything like a proper way of addressing Him who is beyond all distinction of affirmation and denial, light and dark, even being and non-being: for in the one “in whom there is no variation or shadow of change,” as St James puts it (James 1:17), there can be no contradiction or opposition.

This, we will later discover, sets the scene for the only really appropriate use of language towards God at all, and indeed, the purpose of all language, including the silent language of the heavens that “declare the glory of the Lord” (Ps 19), and indeed of everything, insofar as all things are vehicles of God’s self-proclamation. This is what Dionysius calls hymning (hymnein). Not even the cosmos in its entirety can exhaust the plenitude of God’s self-expression. Our grunts and gestures most certainly cannot. No words or signs, not even all the words and signs in creation, can presume to define or to comprehend God. The best we and all creation can do – and for all its limitations, this is nonetheless very good indeed – is to address ourselves to God, to become part of His theophany, His self-revelation in all things, and so to join the chorus of stars and angels.

Continued here…