Dionysius' Mystical Theology I.i

A commentary for newcomers to Dionysius the Areopagite

Dionysius the Areopagite, readers may have noticed, exercises a strong influence on my imagination, as well he might. Nobody really knows, after all, who he was. I am of the school which omits the prefix “Pseudo,” not because I think that the author of the Dionysian Corpus (hereafter abbreviated to CD, following the Latin Corpus Dionysiacum) was the historic Athenian convinced of the Christian faith by St Paul, but because beyond the constraints of linear chronology, I do think that he channels the spirit of that figure, and indeed through him something of the spirit of his Apostolic master. I see no more reason to attribute the Corpus to a Pseudo-Dionysius any more than I would attribute the Johannine epistles to a Pseudo-John or the Letter to the Hebrews to a Pseudo-Paul.

The ancients were closer to their sources than we are, and where those sources were written, had them in greater abundance. The hubris of modern scholarship has already led us down divers avenues of silliness: there are still plenty of biblical scholars who feel entitled to make claims of radical theological differences amid the early church on little more than the presumptive basis that the limited texts available to them grant them a superior knowledge of Jesus than St Paul or St John had. They also assume, equally perversely, that their posited early church communities did not communicate with one another, which rather makes one wonder why the earliest Christian texts are written in epistolary form.

I think of Dionysius not, as moderns have until recently been wont, as a plagiarist or fantasist, but as one spiritually connected through his monastic life and religious experience to the communion of saints, and as one who believed himself a faithful mediator of the tradition of St Paul’s Athenian disciple. We may now know precious little of that disciple – the one whom our historicist mindset conditions us to call the “real” Dionysius – but we cannot conclude from that lacuna that he or his thought were not known or transmitted via now lost lines of tradition, whether written, oral or both.

At any rate, “whoever he was,” as quipped Luther, Dionysius’ works are worth reading and digesting. Dionysius’ theological method, somewhat simplistically categorised as “apophatic” or negative, has exercised great minds and mystical intutions in both East and West over the centuries, and considers to influence continental philosophers to this day. What interests me, and a growing number of others, rather more is the way his theology of knowing/unknowing and naming the Divine is embodied in his liturgical and theurgical sacramental theology, and the implications of this on ontology and metaphysics. I aver that Dionysius’ thought provides a sacramental and soteriological metaphysics which can equip not only Christians but philosophers from non-Christian religious traditions with an outlook that help to re-enchant the cosmos and resist the ongoing onslaught of global technocracy, as enabled by atheist materialism.

But - Dionysius is not easy to read. To study him, one needs some background in both Platonic philosophy and Christian theology. There is a good commentary available by Paul Rorem, but even that is probably not for the novice. The most popular translation, by Colm Luibheid, is eminently readable, but sacrifices a great deal of the detail to that end, and in my view obscures the sacramental and ecclesiological implications of the text. So, on the question of which translation to read, I recommend the old-fashioned but very literal translation by the Rev’d John Parker, published in 1897. It is available in various locations around the internet, including here. I should warn the reader of the good parson’s prefatory matter that he considered the author of the CD to be St Paul’s historic convert from Athens, and that Proclus and others plagiarised from him centuries later. Suffice it to say that this view does not at present receive a sympethetic hearing in the academy.

So, for the sake of the more or less unitiated reader who wants to start reading Dionysius from scratch, here begins a series of my own study notes. I propose to guide you first through the shortest treatise of the Corpus, the Mystical Theology (hereafter MT). It is a summary of the whole, and whether it was written to be read before or after the rest of the Corpus is debated, but I think it offers a pliant springboard for the introduction of the Areopagite’s main themes. It, like the works of the Areopagite’s mentor Paul, is also written in epistolary form, in this case addressed to St Timothy.

Today, we begin with the first section of the first of the MT’s three chapters. More will follow sporadically, as the day job permits.

Mystical Theology I.i (Trans. John Parker, 1897)

Triad supernal, both super-God and super-good, Guardian of the Theosophy of Christian men, direct us aright to the super-unknown and super-brilliant and highest summit of the mystic Oracles, where the simple and absolute and changeless mysteries of theology lie hidden within the super-luminous gloom of the silence, revealing hidden things, which in its deepest darkness shines above the most super-brilliant, and in the altogether impalpable and invisible, fills to overflowing the eyeless minds with glories of surpassing beauty.

This then be my prayer; but thou, O dear Timothy, by thy persistent commerce with the mystic visions, leave behind both sensible perceptions and intellectual efforts, and all objects of sense and intelligence, and all things not being and being, and be raised aloft unknowingly to the union, as far as attainable, with Him Who is above every essence and knowledge. For by the resistless and absolute ecstasy in all purity, from thyself and all, thou wilt be carried on high, to the superessential ray of the Divine darkness, when thou hast cast away all, and become free from all.  

Commentary

Triad supernal,

Triad supernal: Platonic tradition, emphatically in Plotinus, its greatest and most systematic representative after Plato himself, begins with the pursuit of the One and the Good. Dionysius, however, for all Luther may have denounced him as plus Platonizans quam Christianizans (more Platonising than Christianising) opens the MT with a prayer to the Divine Three, the Holy Trinity of Christian doctrine. Yet his intution of the Trinity is not of a God in any way “tripartite,” separable into parts: the Trinity of persons is not tritheism. Rather, he will later demonstrate, God’s threeness and simultaneous oneness demonstrate that He is beyond number and beyond rational cognition.

both super-God and super-good,

Hence, the Areopagite continues, God is beyond-God and beyond-Good. Parker renders beyond as super, thereby avoiding a vexed question in Dionysian scholarship of which the reader should be aware from the start. Whichever word is chosen, it translates the Greek hyper, with which the entire CD is very liberally littered, a verbal obsession very difficult to replicate consistently in translation. Alas, in Luibheid, it is often lost, and even in Parker is not always translated consistently. The vexed question to which I allude is whether Dionysius means by hyper its literal sense of beyond or its more extensive sense of exceeding. That is, when he calls God, say, hyper-Good, does he mean that God is completely beyond goodness, beyond even the Good, or rather that God is good in a way so superabundant that exceeds our cognitive capacity? Parker’s super is patient of both senses. The former “privative” reading is more representative of Eastern theology and spirituality, the latter “supereminentist” reading of Western scholarship, especially in the wake of St Thomas Aquinas. These compounds of hyper will resound throughout the Corpus, and I shall endeavour to identify them as they occur, Englishing them as consistently as I can by the word beyond. Let us see whether they tend towards a privative or supereminentist reading as we progress.

Guardian of the Theosophy of Christian men, direct us aright to the super-unknown and super-brilliant and highest summit of the mystic Oracles, where the simple and absolute and changeless mysteries of theology lie hidden within the super-luminous gloom of the silence, revealing hidden things, which in its deepest darkness shines above the most super-brilliant,

My sense here is that Dionysius is echoing Plato’s remark in the Republic that the Good is “beyond being,” and employs all these hyper compounds as a kind of spiritual exercise, straching the bounds of language towards their source and target which itself exceeds words and reason. So, it is in preserving the tri-unity, beyond-divinity and beyond-goodness of God that the Holy Trinity is guardian of the Divine Wisdom of Christians (Theosophy of Christian men), guiding mortals to the Oracles by which Dionysius designates Holy Scripture. Whether this is an exclusive designation I am not yet sure, though we can be quite certain that the Christian Scriptures are Dionysius’ primary point of reference: his work is replete with scriptural imagery and analogy. Yet the Scriptures themselves, he here maintains, are beyond-unknown and beyond-brilliant (again, for Parker, everything is super), conveying the blinding intensity of God’s glory.

Here begins a helix of contraries which runs throughout the Corpus: that of light and darkness, knowing and unknowing, but in their intertwining, also the transcendence of duality between the pair. The Oracles bot conceal and real. Though the reflect the Divine Word, whom we must always remember is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Son of God, yet they are always shrouded in silence, like a light so exceedingly bright, beyond-luminous, that it appears like a cloud of darkness or gloom. Within that blinding-black miasma lie what Dionysius calls mysteries of theology, which are simple, absolute and unchanging.

The word theology is often rendered as “scripture,” following Rorem and Luibheid’s precedent, but for reasons I will come to should we get as far as the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, I do not think that this is necessarily the case; there, Dionysius qualifies theology by reference to theurgy, or what we nowadays call sacraments, and it is surely noteworthy even here that mysterion is the typical Greek word for a sacrament. Dionysius may be speaking even here of the sacraments of the Divine Word, the Theo-logos, without necessarily distinguishing them from the Word as manifest in Scripture. This perhaps confusing digression should, I hope, become clearer as we progress.

At any rate, here the simplicity of the mysteries implies that truth is always truth, in its ultimate source utterly simple and indivisible, and not in any wise relative to anything else. The simplicity of truth is not other than the simplicity of the Beyond-One and Good, and is a simplicity which transcends merely numerical oneness.

and in the altogether impalpable and invisible, fills to overflowing the eyeless minds with glories of surpassing beauty.

In Platonic thought, the triad of “transcendentals,” namely goodness, truth and beauty, is indivisible. What is good is truly so; and because it is truly good, it is beautiful. So, the conclusion of the prayer completes the transcendental triad, starting from the Good and progressing to the unchanging truths of Scripture, then concluding with how these fill to overflowing the eyeless minds, namely the minds of the angels who perpetually surround God in contemplation and worship, with glories of surpassing beauty.

This entire motif is compared to a summit, the nature of which, shrouded in darkness, will become clearer as we journey up it with Moses later in the MT. For now, note that the syntax of the opening prayer comprises one long sentence (in Greek, comprising over 61 words). This indicates the unity and indivisibility of its content, namely: that it begins with the three, the beyond-Divine and an extension of the Platonic principle of the Good as “beyond being” to beyond even the Good itself; that from this Good flow the remaining Platonic transcendentals of truth and beauty; that these mysteries, or hidden glories, beyond the duality of light and darkness, are the object of angelic contemplation; and that they are simultaneously revealed and concealed in Christian scripture (and, perhaps intimated here, by the sacraments). We have here a Christian-Platonic picture of the celestial realm, wherein immaterial spirits effect divine work by contemplation of God in His cloud of infinity and simplicity.

This then be my prayer; but thou, O dear Timothy, by thy persistent commerce with the mystic visions, leave behind both sensible perceptions and intellectual efforts, and all objects of sense and intelligence, and all things not being and being,

At this point, the prayer ended, Dionysius shifts his gaze from the celestial relam to the earthly, which he defines as Ecclesial; for as the celestial intelligences of the angels enact God’s work above, so the Church enacts it here below. He exhorts Timothy to join the vision of the angels, and so doing to leave behind both sensible perceptions and intellectual efforts; that is, to go further along the trajectory of Plato’s famous “divided line” in the Republic than reason itself will allow. For Plato posited that sensory perception and what we call the empirical knowledge gleaned from it can lead only to “opinion,” doxa, and not to any real knowledge with firm connection to the truth at all. The senses, after all, are limited, weak and compromised, easily misled. A single counterexample serves to disprove what moderns consider the highest form of knowledge, for which the term “science” would be, from a Platonic perspective, a most erroneous appelation. Modern textbooks tell us that this is the greatest point of tension between Platonic and Aristotelian epistemology, though Platonists in Dionysius’ time saw no such tension between the master and his pupil, and they had far more Aristotle to read than survives now, so we may wish to take them more seriously.

At any rate, for Dionysius, the partial evidence of “beings” which the senses can glean yields at best a very inferior kind of knowledge, if it can be called knowledge at all. For him, as for Plato, firm knowledge can be had only from that which is unchangingly true, examined by the incontestable tenets of a priori reason: hence, for example, Plato’s prioritisation of music theory and mathematics as the first stages of his proposed curriculum for children set out in the Republic. The highest knowledge of all, however, and in the end the only fully true kind, is the Sophia, Wisdom, which is the pursuit of her lovers, adherents of philo-sophia: philosophers. And while Sophia is approached by reason, she ultimately exceeds its reach. The prospective Christian philosopher whom Dionysius addresses is exhorted to go beyond not only sense-perception, but beyond even the realm of the nous, the noetic realm, generally translated as Intellect or Mind. Beyond, that is, not only things of being, but things of not being: a difficult concept which, given its syntactic equation with objects of intelligence (literally noetic/intelligible things), I take to have an idiosyncratic rather than systematic use here, and to mean things beyond material existence, such as mathematic realities and Platonic forms, albeit on a late Platonic understanding, the “forms” of things as ideas in the mind of God are more real than any of their concrete instantiations in the world below. Only by stranining beyond even the intellectual realm, even beyond the ideas of God, may Timothy or any of us be lifted up to unity/oneness (henōsis) with the One who is above (=beyond, hyper) all essence/being and knowledge.

and be raised aloft unknowingly to the union, as far as attainable, with Him Who is above every essence and knowledge. For by the resistless and absolute ecstasy in all purity, from thyself and all, thou wilt be carried on high, to the superessential ray of the Divine darkness, when thou hast cast away all, and become free from all.  

The “uplifting” of the Christian philosopher to oneness with God is qualified by two further Dionysian terms: 1. agnōsia, unknowing and 2. hōs ephikton, according to capacity. “Unknowing” in the CD does not mean ignorance. Rather, it indicates a contemplative approach of deliberate de-knowing, by which one extends teh metnal vision beyond reason, to the One who is beyond understanding. Agnōsia is the spiritual means of transport into the luminous cloud. This will become clearer in Dionysius’s later interpretation of the unknown god in Acts 17, where he reads Paul’s words to the Athenians, “him who you have worshipped unknowing,” not as an accusation of ignorance, but as praise for their philosophical apophatic method. This mirrors St Augustine’s experience, since it was through such broadly Platonic spiritual exercises in negative theology that he reached his first tentative glimpses of God, only to find them consummated in Christian prayer.

One can, however, reach such sublimities only insofar as one’s divinely ordained capacity allows. This is indicative of one of Dionysian theology’s more famous aspects: that of hierarchy. Although he is, as far as we know, the first to use that word, the concept comes from Platonism, and specifically from Proclus. I will cover it in greater detail later, but suffice it to say that different things in the cosmos have different capacities for union with God.

In what, though, does such union consist, and why might one want it? We will be led to understand that the desire for henōsis (oneness), also called theōsis (divinisation), is in fact inherent in all things, according to their capacity; but for now, at the opening of the MT, Dionysius leaves us with a tantalising foretaste of ecstasy (ecstasis), literally “standing outside” oneself, so that one is neither oneself nor another, but which is attained through purity, and comprises true freedom or liberation from the self-other distinction, and even from reason itself. Yet, reason, the soul, the body and material things are all necessary in that pursuit, and are ultimately perfected, not abandoned. Such is the reward of ascent into the Divine Darkness, for as Our Lord preached in the sixth Beatitde, the pure in heart shall surely see God.

For the next instalment, see…