Mystical Theology III

What are the affirmative expressions respecting God, and what the negative.

After a long hiatus, thanks to a request from a loyal reader, I’m resuming my commentary on Dionysius’ Mystical Theology. If you haven’t already, you may want to read the previous chapters: I.i, I.ii, I.iii, II. The at times clumsily literal, but I hope therefore useful, translation below is mine.

In the Theological Outlines, then, we hymned the principal cataphatic scriptural words (theologiai): how the divine and Good nature is spoken of as singular, and as triple; what is the “Fatherhood” and “Sonship” predicated of it; what the scriptural term (theologia) of “the Spirit” is meant to show; how the Lights within the heart of Goodness grew out of the immaterial and unpartitioned Good, yet even as they shot up remained, not wandering from their co-eternal abode in It, in themselves, and in one another; how Jesus the Beyond-being is made being in human-natured truths (anthropophusikais alētheiais); and other such things expressed by the Scriptures are hymned throughout the Theological Outlines.

The fourth chapter of the Mystical Theology gives an overview of the trajectory of St Dionysius’ wider theological project. The Theological Outlines is not extant, and quite possibly never existed; likewise, the Symbolic Theology St Dionysius mentions below. The Divine Names, sandwiched between those two shadow tomes, famously does. What, then, might we make of the ordering of these three prospective works and the others which actually remain to posterity?

This entire chapter rests grammatically on the verb hymnēsamen, “we hymned,” from hymnein which I explained in the last installation of this series some time ago. The verb is omitted when Dionysius goes on to describe the contents of the Divine Names and Symbolic Theology, and must be understood there. Literal translation of this word does not work so well in English, hence both Parker and Luibheid render it more prosaically. But we must not lose sight of the fact that Dionysian theology is never an act of abstract or scientific speculation, but an act of prayer and praise. For him, the only language properly applicable to God is that which orients the speaker “hymnically” towards Him. The is the overarching medium of the entire Corpus may be rather different in tone from Augustine’s Confessions, but it is no less a work of prayer addressed to God, as evidenced by the trinitarian prayer with which the Mystical Theology began.

The framework, or perhaps better movement, of the works Dionysius outlines here is that typical Platonic motif of proodos and epistrophe, procession and return, here expressed vertically as descent and ascent. The putative Theological Outlines, like the Mystical Theology itself, begins at the top, as it were, with the highest things we can say (albeit only with the ever-present “hymnological” caveat) of God: that is to say, the highest positive or “cataphatic” statements one can make of God, namely that the Divine is by nature, inalienably, Good and Trinity (singular and triple). This Trinitarian revelation of God as Source, Word and Spirit (as found in Genesis 1) is prerequisite to understanding God’s Father and Sonship, and (it seems subsequently) as Holy Spirit – perhaps a springboard for discussion of the Filioque, but not now!

Given that St Dionysius is still praising the highest principles here, the Lights within the heart of the Goodness can only be a duly poetic, or “hymnic,” reference to what more prosaic theology calls the persons or hypostases of the Trinity. These Dionysius describes springing from the “heart” in organic, even vegetative terms which call to mind green growth (cognates of physics), shoots and buds (anablastēsis). The vocabulary is beautifully evocative of trees and flowers, but the Dionysian grammar seems to suggest that there is some kind of eternal generation not only of the Son and Spirit from the Father, but of the Father, Son and Spirit as three from a fundamental unpartitioned Good.

Hence, Dionysius, like Eckhart, has been accused of positing a fourth principle behind the Trinity, a closet Quaternity. This may be so; the pitfalls of Trinitarian theology are many. One may, if inclined, defend St Dionysius by recalling that he is claiming only ever to speak hymnically of God, rather than proferring definitions. His avoidance of strict Chalcedonian terminology may indicate caution against over-definition rather than promotion of any rival, viz. heretical, doctrinal stance.

Dionysius qualifies the threeness of the hypostatic Lights by way of that Proclean stable, monē, or abiding, the complementary principle to that of procession and return. Even as the hypostases bud forth from the heart of the Good, they remain eternally one with It, one in themselves, and one in each other. It is hard to avoid concluding from this distinction between “It,” i.e. “heart of the Good,” and “them,” i.e. the persons of the Trinity, that the threeness of God is at least conceptually differentiable from the Oneness: whether this necessarily implies an ontological distinction is another matter. Dionysius’ organic vocabulary, according to which the three Lights relate to the Good as limbs of a plant to its seed, softens what more strictly philosophical language might indeed have made too hard a distinction. Had he wished to use such language, other passages show him quite capable; that he did not should warn us to exercise caution in attributing to him any more than he has actually written, for in his hymnic mode of speech, form and content are inseparable and irreducible.

Dionysius concludes this first section with the mystery of the Incarnation. Jesus, who as God is Beyond-being, nonetheless is made being. A very curious phrase is deployed here: anthropophusikai alētheiai, which I find I can render no better than “human-natured truths” without going down Luibheid’s route of sacrificing the plurality of the noun, which is truths, and nominalising the adjective. “The truth of human nature” sounds more natural, certainly, but whatever it was Dionysius meant to convey by this strange usage is thereby obscured. If readers can suggest a reason for this, I would be grateful. I would note only that there is throughout this chapter a certain play between singular and plural nouns, with the higher names singular and the lower collapsing into plurality, which is itself a Platonic motif. The many unfold from the one. Hence, perhaps what is being implied here is that the Incarnation of Our Lord renders the One beyond-being — beyond even the distinction of oneness and multiplicity — into the multitudinous realm of those plural truths which constitute human nature, but are for all their plurality refractions of the one primal truth of the Image we reflect. That is as much as I can say at present on the matter.

The putative Theological Outlines start from these sublime and necessarily somewhat vague renditions of the highest scriptural data on God. Descending to the next stage, Dionysius leads us downward from the heights to the second and happily extant part of this supposed trilogy:

In the Divine Names, [we hymned] how He is named Good, Existent (ōn), Life, Wisdom, Power, and whatever else belongs reasonably to the naming of God (theōnumia).

One rung down the ladder from the Trinity, Dionysius invites us to contemplate those names which, while eminently philosophical, are no less revealed of God in Scripture. His brief exposition of the Divine Names follows the proper order of that work, in which he prioritised the Good, as beyond-being, over Being or the Existent (ho ōn). Not all Platonists would agree with this ranking, whether pagan or Christian. St Augustine, siding more with Porphyry, would render Being the highest name of God, prioritising God’s self-revelation to Moses in the Burning Bush by the Tetragrammaton YHWH. Dionysius, however, is with Proclus and Plato himself, who maintained that the Good is beyond being.

St Thomas Aquinas would later attempt to reconcile these positions with his doctrine of the analogy of being, reading Dionysius’ phrase beyond-being in what is called the “supereminentist” sense: it is not that God is utterly beyond all being per se, but that God as Act of Being (Esse) is infinitely and incomprehensibly Existent in a way that surpasses the existence of created things, but that our existence is nonetheless “analogical” to God’s, participating dimly in the existence that He enjoys. Whether this is a proper reading of Dionysius remains a disputed point.

The further categorisation of names follows Proclus’ order, but is always referenced by copious attention to Scripture. As we proceed through these names, we descend further and further from the purest conception of God as Good and Trinity towards the more comprehensible, perceptible and material images found in the Bible. This is what the third of the putative Dionysian trilogy purports to disclose as we go down one more rung:

In the Symbolic Theology, [we considered/hymned] what are the Names transferrable from sensible to divine things; what are the divine forms; what are the divine figures, parts and organs; the Divine places and decorations (kosmoi); the instances of anger, of grief and wrath, of drunkenness and hangovers, the oaths and curses, the instances of sleeping and awakening, and all the other sacred-moulded semblances belonging to the symbolic Typology of God (theotypia).

In this final work — to repeat, not extant and possibly never written — Dionysius considers the propriety of the sensible or perceptible cataphatic images which are applied in Holy Scripture to God. These proceed from attributions of physical descriptions of God in human bodily terms (figures, parts, organs) and to locating Him in space (places), downward to expressions of physical or emotional change. We might note the preponderance of plurals in this paragraph, regrettably elided in Luibhuid’s translation, but indicative of the descent from oneness to multiplicity.

These baser images St Dionysius calls “symbolic theotypology.” As it happens, although the Symbolic Theology is not extant, Dionysius does meditate on (or “hymn”) precisely these “more dissimilar” images of God in the Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies as well as in the Epistles, notably the ninth.

At this point, let us take stock of the descent so far and reorient ourselves, using the famed Divided Line of Plato’s Republic as our map:

From Pinterest, unattributed

The Theological Outlines, treating of the Good and Trinity, is at the apex, beyond noēsis. If the book was in fact never written, this might explain why. The Divine Names on this schema hymns the intelligible and existent forms, or Names, which are beyond material existence, corresponding to the realm of noēsis. There is no clear reference to realm of dianoia here, but the Symbolic Theology moves us below the line of the intelligible to that of the perceptible. Following this Platonic order, it first discloses the relationship of physical things in the realm of pistis to God, such as physical characteristics and temporal-spatial location, then moves to the bottom quartile and the realm of eikasia, where God is imaged in the basest terms of human emotion and changeability, even fickleness.

I suppose that you have noticed how the last things are more verbosely worded than the first, because the Theological Outlines and the unfolding of the Divine Names had to be more briefly worded than the Symbolic Theology. This is because as we ascend to the higher, words are cloaked in the visions (synopsesi) of intellectually apprehensible (noetic) things. Just so, even now, as we enter the Cloud which is beyond Intellect (nous), we shall find not brevity of speech, but total non-speech (alogia) and non-intellection (anoēsia).

The last things are more verbosely worded than the first: Dionysius has more to say about the multiplicity of sensible images applied in Scripture to God, because there are far more of them. And this must be so. If we were to return back up the line, once we are beyond the realm of “opinion” or probability, which is as far as the vast multiplicity of empirical data can take us, we find ourselves cutting back and back to successively fewer abstract concepts.

These, for Dionysius, as a Platonist and hence a realist, are more real than physical and sensible things, because the physical and sensible things depend on the prior existence of the intellectual concepts, the Names or Forms, rather than the other way around. You cannot, for instance, have one cup of tea unless “one” exists, but “one” can, does and would exist even if every tea field were burned to the ground and, for that matter, all physical matter completely obliterated.

But ultimately, in our ascent, we must go beyond even those unifying Names that give meaning to physical phenomena, even beyond number, and enter the Cloud which is beyond Intellect where all speech and acts of reason (logoi) end, for God is the one who ultimately beyond being and, as such, beyond intelligibility. All cloaks of vision and intellectual apprehension must be stripped away so as to enter the Cloud into which Dionysius has so far had Moses ascend in the short treatise we are reading.

In the former [two books], the argument (logos) descends from that which is above to the lowest things [eschata] and is broadened in proportion to the magnitude of its descent; but now, the argument goes up from the things below towards that which lies beyond, and is contracted in proportion to the measure of its ascent, and after the complete ascent is wholly voiceless and wholly unified with the unutterable [one].

Dionysius’ argument, if that is the right term given his emphasis on hymnic speech, is triangular, pyramid if you prefer, and entirely consonant with his entire hierarchical view of reality. The top point is so narrow as to vanish into imperceptibility. It broadens as it moves towards multiplicity, through the Divine Names, into the realm of created things which are mere shadows cast by the Divine Light. And as one climbs the pyramid, words, arguments, reasoning, discourse — for logos implies all these things — sputter out and are ultimately extinguished.

This raises a question. If Dionysius has, quite rationally, made cataphatic pronouncements about God all derived from first and highest principles, doesn’t this rather defeat his point? Did he not say that God is quite beyond such positive attributions? Yes: and hence, aphaeresis, literally abstraction, sometimes translated denial, is at least as necessary as cataphatic assertion:

But why, you say, given that we reckoned the positive attributions (theseis) about God from the first principle, do we begin abstraction (aphaeresis) about God from the last and lowest [eschata] principles? The reason is, when one is making attributions to that which is beyond all positive attribution, one has to attribute the hypothetical assertion (kataphasis) based on that which is most closely related to it. But when one is abstracting from that which is beyond all abstraction [aphairesis], one has to abstract from those things which are most distant from it. Are not Life and Goodness more (closely related to God) than air and stone? And is it not truer [to say] that He does not get drunk and rage, than that He cannot be described or intellectually apprehended?

Cataphasis, assertion, is the path by which God reveals Himself from above. However, for us to make any headway on that path, we must strip away all likenesses, remembering that God is beyond any image or likeness that we dare to imagine. Cataphasis applies analogies to God based on things we can perceive and reason. It is therefore limited by God’s utter transcendence beyond all such things, beyond being itself, even. Hence, we must make denials, we must strip away those supposed similarities. However, the similarities are necessary, because not all dissimilarities — all denials — are equally true of God. It is both true that God does not, despite the images in Scripture, get drunk and that God cannot be described or cognised. These are not, however, equally true statements. One is truer than the other. To recognise the hierarchy between these abstractions or denials, the cataphatic assertions are necessary. Hence, cataphasis is mutually intertwined with apophasis and necessary to it. We cannot abandon God’s self-revelation and fly into a mystic fancy. Revelation leads us through the proper hierarchy of denials to the Cloud of Unknowing whereby we encounter God.

Two more chapters to come!