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Dionysius The Areopagite, probably a Syrian monk from the late 5th or early 6th century,
brings out the true and unknown nature of God, neither a "He" nor a "She" but an "It,"
being incomprehensible to the human intellect, in many ways reflecting the second century wisdom of the Egyptian
Plotinus. Dionysius sees outside the narrow fundamentalism of biblical literalism and far beyond the erroneous
man made creation of theism (An external God person, who lives somewhere in a heaven), to the both the true essence
of God and that of objective truth being far beyond the human intellect and grasping hold of knowledge.
The following extract is of the fifth/early sixth century, where many would write
under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. To say it was written directly by this person is unsure, as the medieval
church established contact with Neoplatoism - the teachings of second century Egyptian Plotinus which the doctrine
of Plato fused with the most important elements in the Aristotelian and Stoic systems and Eastern (Indian) speculations.
Thus metaphysical
thought was incorporated in Christian thinking.
Such eastern thought and meditation may have been with Jesus himself during his entire
life, as the Jewish community was influenced by the Hellenization of the prior Babylonian and Persian rule. Those
times of Christ's daily periods spent alone, along with long periods seem to suggest much more than simply prayer,
but meditation. This also takes into consideration the later account of Luke's description of the 120 disciples
at Pentecost in the upper room appearing to be more than sitting in prayer, but meditation in practice. (Mark 1:35;
Acts 2)
"And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out,
and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed." (Mark 1:35)
The idea of Rudolph Otto's, Idea of the Holy, is the essence
beyond human conception, the Platonic teaching of Plotinus and the concept of God as unconceptual, which can be
found in all forms of mysticism, the early Christian church, in Jewish Kabbalic and Talmudic teaching, in Hindu,
Sufi and Buddhist teachings. The early church recognized the difference between kerygma and dogma. Kerygma meaning
the rational truth, the intellectual and external explanations that contained conceptual and rational thinking,
which conveyed a message of understanding to others, while the dogma was the unexplainable essence beyond all thought and analysis, that
could not be taught with words, but only with symbolism, mythology and liturgical worship that pointed to this
essence of this truth beyond articulation. It was here that the trinity doctrine of the 4th century developed.
a doctrine that intellectually, using kerygma, it was unrational and even blasphemous to the Jews and Muslims, while
in dogma,
it pointed to an essence of three in one that was symbolic, outside the logical framework of Greek reasoning. While
the Eastern Greek minds were able to understand the meaning of dogma
as that of indescribable and incomprehensible esoteric
experience, the West failed to perceive such and defined dogma
as merely the various opinions of theological structures.
It was with the Greek thought of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
that defined God as static, remote and as an unmoved mover who did not intervene in human affairs. Divinity was
found in the human mind, in the power of reason, in divine wisdom which was said to emit in two parts. The first
part was that of logic and rational thinking, which conceptualized, analyzed and scientifically measured objective
reality. The second part being that of intuitive awareness of the essence of Being that is indescribable in human
language and beyond all conceptual thought. To convey such meanings, mythology, rituals, liturgical worship were
used as symbols, not taken as literal, but symbolic, archetypical descriptions of what can only be experienced,
catching glimpses of essence of the indescribable unknown. This unseen essence could be experienced and understood
mystically in what Plato called theoria
- contemplation and expressed symbolically.within
the hidden, secret traditions of religious teachings. Basil, Bishop of Caesarea
and also the Cappadocians, used this idea in their definition of Christianity in the
terms kerygma - the explicative logic of clear reasoning and dogma, the unexplainable only perceived of intuitive thought and expressed through symbolism.
With the Neoplatoism of Plotinus, who described all Being as the "One," the later the writings of an unknown author
under the name of Dionysius The Areopagite,
took this a step further as God being not entirely static and remote, but rather a moving conscious that somewhere
meets the human in mystical experience of theoria. Such mystical understanding has been understood by the Eastern
Greek Orthodox Church in Christianity, along with various schools of thought in Jewish Mysticism, Sufism, Hinduism
and Buddhism. That is, the awareness of this unknown essence beyond human thought, language and conception - dogma. While the West, the descendants from the Latin frame of mind, more so the fundamentalists of
all religious cultures, have failed to conceive the unseen dogma, literalizing
words and mythological accounts as "the inerrant Word of God," - as literal, factual history, using logic
and rational reasoning - kerygma, that legalizes, literalizes and misinterprets symbolic expressions
of the unexplainable in the straight jacket of fundamental theological terminology.
It was later in the second century where Plotinus derived much of his thinking in
Neoplatonism and metaphysical thought. His words on the "One" where the "One" that all life
permeates from, and as Plato and Aristotle taught, all life yearns to return back to the one, the entire natural
direction of life is to transcend the self back to the "One,"a single self-consciousness where all beings
are drawn toward Being itself, as it is beyond personification and objectiveness. All life being the projective
expansion of the "One" thus evolves to higher consciousness by contracting to the universal and collective
Being, the only "One" where all life manifests as projective attributes of distinctive matter and consciousness.
It was here in the 5th century under the authority of the name "Dionysius the
Areopagite," a name the church recognized and tolerated, that others could write their non-theistic and metaphysical
thought without persecution, as the Catholic church mistakenly identified Dionysius the Areopagite with St. Paul's
first Athenian convert and therefore he was considered untouchable according to the Catholic game of hierarchy.
Thus Greek mystical, esoteric and metaphysical thoughts transpired in Christianity, as they had with St. Paul's
mystical experience, and were conveyed symbolically, hidden under the name of Dionysius The Areopagite.
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'The Mystical Theology'
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Dionysius The Areopagite
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Chapter V
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God, who is the Preeminent Cause of everything cannot be adequately
perceived, as he is not a self or a any one thing that can be perceived.
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ONCE more, ascending yet higher, we maintain that It (God) is not soul, or mind, or
endowed with the faculty of imagination, conjecture, reason, or understanding? ; nor is It any act of reason or
understanding; nor can It be described by the reason or perceived by the understanding, since It is not number,
or order, or greatness, or littleness, or equality, or inequality, and since It is not immovable nor in motion,
or at rest, and has no power, and is not power or light, and does not live, and is not life ; nor is It personal
essence, or eternity, or time ; nor can It be grasped by the understanding since It is not knowledge or truth;
nor is It kingship or wisdom; nor is It one, nor is It unity, nor is It Godhead or Goodness; nor is It a Spirit,
as we understand the term, since It is not Son-ship or Fatherhood; nor is It any other thing such as eye or any
other being can have knowledge of; nor does It belongs to the category of non-existence or to that of existence;
nor do existent beings know It as It actually is, nor does It know them as they actually are; (3) nor can the reason attain to It to name It or to know
It ; nor is It darkness, nor is It light, or error, or truth; (4)n :act or faculty of thought ; nor an Object of Thought. (Divine Nanres, II. 7). (3) The Godhead is regarded as the property
of Deified men, and so belongs It's relativity. It (God) knows only Itself, and therefore knows all things in their
Super Essence and substance. (4)
Truth is an Object of Thought. Therefore, truth lives behind and beyond in objectivity, the ultimate Reality (our
thoughts) are not Truth, but are less and in Error.
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 Quoting from Karen Armstrong's A
History of God:
"In 529 the emperor Justinian closed the ancient school of philosophy in Athens,
the last bastion of intellectual paganism; its last great master had been Proclus (411-485), an ardent disciple
of Plotinus. Pagan philosophy went underground and seemed defeated by the new religion of Christianity. Four years
later, however, four mystical treatises appeared which were purportedly written by Denys the Areopagite, St. Paul's
first Athenian convert. They were, in fact, written by a sixth-century Greek Christian, who has preserved his anonymity.
The pseudonym had a symbolic power, however which was more important than the identity than the author: Pseudo-Denys
managed to baptize the insights of Neoplatonism and we the God of the Greeks to the Semitic God of the Bible.
Denys was also the heir of the Cappadocian Fathers. Like Basil, he took the distinction
between kerygma and dogma
very seriously. In one of his letters, he affirmed that there were two theological
traditions, both of which derived from the apostles. The kerymatic gospel was clear and knowable; the dogmatic
gospel was silent and mystical. Both were mutually interdependent, however, and essential to the Christian faith.
One was "symbolic and presupposing initiation," the other "philosophical and capable of proof -
and the ineffable is woven with what can be uttered. The kerygma persuades and exhorts by its clear, manifest truth, but the silent or hidden tradition of
dogma was a mystery that required initiation.
"It effects and establishes the soul with God by initiations that do not teach anything," Denys insisted,
in words that recalled Aristotle. There was a religious truth which could not adequately be conveyed by words,
logic or rational discourse. It was expressed symbolically, thought the language and gestures of the liturgy or
by doctrines which were "sacred veils" that hid the ineffable meaning from view but which also adapted
the utterly mysterious God to the limitations of human nature and expressed the Reality in terms that could be
grasped imaginatively if not conceptually.
The hidden or esoteric meaning was not for a privileged elite but for all Christians.
Denys was not advocating an abstruse discipline that was suitable for monks and ascetics only. The liturgy, attended
by all the faithful, was the chief path to God and dominated his theology. The reason that these truths were hidden
behind a protective veil was not to exclude men and women of good will but to lift all Christians above sense perceptions
and concepts to the inexpressible reality of God himself. The humility which had inspired the Cappadocians to claim
that all theology should be apophatic became for Denys a bold method of ascending to the inexpressible God.
In fact, Denys did not like to use the word "God" at all - probably because
it had acquired such inadequate and anthropomorphic connotations. He preferred to use Proclus's term theurgy, which was primarily liturgical: theurgy in the pagan world had been a tapping of the divine
mana (the unseen forces that pervade the physical word and were experienced
as sacred or divine) by means of sacrifice and divination. Denys
applied this to Godtalk, which, properly understood, could also release the divine
energeiai (the activities of God which enable man to
glimpse something of him. Like dynameis - the term used to distinguish the human conception of God from the ineffable
and incomprehensible reality itself) inherent
in the revealed symbols. He agreed with the Cappadocians that all our words and concepts for God were inadequate
and must not be taken as an accurate description of a reality which lies beyond our ken. Even the word "God"
itself was faulty, since God was "above God," a mystery beyond being." Christians must realize that
God is not the Supreme Being, the highest being of all heading a hierarchy of lesser beings. Things and people
do not stand over against God as a separate reality or an alternative being, which can be the object of knowledge.
God is not one of the things that exist and is quite unlike anything else in our experience. In fact, it is more
accurate to call God "Nothing": we should not eve call him a Trinity since he is "neither a unity
nor a trinity in the sense in which we know them." He is above all names just as he is above all being. Yet
we can use our incapacity to speak about God as a method of achieving a union with him, which is nothing less than
a "deification" (theosis) of our own nature. God had revealed some of his Names to us in scripture, such as "Father,"
"Son" and "Spirit," yet the purpose of this had not been to impart information about him but to draw men
and women toward himself and enable them to share his divine nature.
In each chapter of his treatise The
Divine Names, Denys begins with a kerygmatic truth, revealed by God: his goodness,
wisdom, paternity and so forth. He then proceeds to show that although God has revealed something of himself in
these titles, what he reveals is not himself. If we really want to understand God, we must go on to deny those
attributes and names. Thus we must say that he is both "God" and "not-God," "good"
and then go on to say that he is "not-good." The shock of this paradox, a process that includes both
knowing and unknowing, will life us above the world of mundane ideas to the inexpressible reality itself. Thus,
we begin by saying that:
"of him there is understanding, reason, knowledge, touch,
perception, imagination, name and many other things. But he is not understood, nothing can be said of him, he cannot
be named. He is not one of the things that are."
Reading the Scriptures is not a process of discovering facts about God, therefore,
but should be a paradoxical discipline that turns the kerygma into dogma. This
method is theurgy, a tapping of the divine
power that enables us to ascend to God himself and , as Platonists had always taught, become ourselves divine.
It is a method to stop us thinking! "We have to leave behind us all our conceptions of the divine. We call
a halt to the activities of our minds." We even have to leave our denials of God's attributes behind. Then
and only then shall we achieve an ecstatic union with God.
When Denys talks about ecstasy, he is not referring to a peculiar state of mind or
an alternative form of consciousness achieved by an obscure yogic discipline. This is something that every Christian
can manage in this paradoxical method of prayer and theoria. It will stop us talking and bring us to the place of silence. "As we plunge into that
darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless
and unknowing." Like Gregory of Nyssa, he found the story of Moses' ascent of Mount Sinai instructive. When
Moses had climbed the mountain, he did not see God himself on the summit but had only been brought to the place
where God was. He had been enveloped by a thick cloud of obscurity and could see nothing: thus everything that
we can see or understand is only a symbol
(the word Denys uses is "paradigm") which reveals the presence of a reality beyond all thought. Moses
had passed into the darkness of ignorance and thus achieved union with that which surpasses all understanding;
we will achieve a similar ecstasy that will "take us out of ourselves" and unite us to God.
This is only possible because, as it were, God comes to meet us on the mountain. Here,
Denys departs from Neoplatonism, which perceived God, as static and remote, entirely unresponsive to human endeavor.
The God of the Greek philosophers was unaware of the mystics who occasionally managed to achieve an ecstatic union
with him, whereas the God of the Bible turns toward humanity. God also achieves an "ecstasy" which takes
him beyond himself to the fragile realm of created being.
"And we must dare to affirm (for it is truth) that the Creator of the
universe himself, in his beautiful and good yearning towards the universe . . . is transported outside himself
in his providential activities towards all things that have being . . . and so is drawn from his transcendent throne
above all things to dwell within the heart of all things, through an ecstatic power that is above being and whereby
he yet stays within himself."
Emanation had become a passionate and voluntary outpouring of love, rather than an
automatic process. Denys's way of negation and paradox was not just something that we do but something that happens
to us.
For Plotinus, ecstasy had been a very occasional rapture; it had been achieved by
him only tow or three times in his life. Denys saw ecstasy as the constant state of every Christian. this was the
hidden or esoteric message of Scripture and liturgy, revealed in the smallest gestures. Thus when the celebrant
leaves the altar at the beginning of the Mass to walk through the congregation, sprinkling it with holy water before
returning to the sanctuary, this is not just a rite of purification - though it is that too. It imitates the divine
ecstasy, whereby God leaves his solitude and merges himself with his creatures. Perhaps the best way of viewing
Denys's theology is as that spiritual dance between what we can affirm about God and the appreciation that everything
we can say about him can only be symbolic. As in Judaism, Denys's God has two aspects, one is turned toward us
and manifests himself in the world, the other is the far side of God as he is in himself, which remains entirely
incomprehensible. He "stays within himself" in his eternal mystery, at the same time as he is totally
immersed in creation. He is not another being, additional to the world, Denys's method became normative in Greek
theology. In the West, however, theologians would continue to take and explain. Some imagined that when they said
"God," the divine reality actually coincided with the idea in their minds. Some would attribute their
own thoughts and ideas to God - saying that God wanted this, forbade that and had planned the other - in a way
that was dangerously idolatrous. the God of Greek Orthodoxy, however, would remain mysterious, and the Trinity
would continue to remind Eastern Christians of the provisional nature of their doctrines. Eventually the Greeks
decided that an authentic theology must meet Denys's two criteria: it must be silent and paradoxical."
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