Dionysius

Can We Know God or Speak of Him?

One of the problems that we have with understanding and knowing God is the language that we use to describe him.  When we assign predicates to him, we are bound to loose something of the true reality of God in our words.  When we say that God is good, we are saying something that is indeed true of God.  But do we loose something of the true nature of God’s goodness in even saying that he is good?  The pizza I had for lunch was good.  The Boston Red Sox are good.  My children are good.  We can certainly qualify and perhaps even quantify the goodness of each of these.  We could compare the Red Sox to other baseball teams this year, as well as to some of the greatest teams of all time.  I could develop a goodness scale which describes my pizza, with quantifiers for taste, crust, cheese/toppings ratios.  I may never be convinced that there is a scale on which I can test or quantify the goodness (or badness) of my children.  How do I come to the issue of goodness when it comes to describing God?  Can I develop a quantifiable scale that would describe him in the pantheon of religious deities – God is a 10, Zeus is a 3 and Vishnu a 5?  Perhaps rather, I should think of God as simply the highest of all possible goodness; he is the nth degree of goodness. 

At first this does not seem like it is not a problem, since God is revealed in Scripture as good.  However, after considering it, it appears perhaps to be a problem that is not solvable.  Since language is colored by our cultural setting, can I ever get beyond that coloring to really say anything meaningful about God?  Perhaps I need to only say that God is (reminiscent of “I AM” of the Exodus story) and leave all other statements off.  Many have thought the only way that we can properly speak of God at all is through negation, saying what God is not. 

Theologians have for many years been struggling with this issue.  Many have given up the task altogether.  Increasingly, modern theologians are returning to the writings of the early teachers of the church to see how they solved the same problem.  Dionysius the Aeropagite, often called Pseudo-Dionysius, is one such person.  We return to his writings because he took up the task of how we talk about God.  We are going to begin looking at the little book Mystical Theology (MT), which is a book that is about negative theology and then move into The Divine Names (DN) to see how he builds a positive theology.  We will briefly look at how he builds a framework to talk about God.  Our goal is help us be able to do the same; construct our own frameworks to properly speak about God.

            To begin, we must understand that knowledge of God has to be mediated, because on our own, we are unable to gain knowledge of God because we must remember who and what He is and isn’t – specifically, he is not like us.  So knowledge of God does not come to us “who think that by their own intellectual resources they can have a direct knowledge of him who has made the shadows his hiding place” (MT, 1000A).  This is an important for Dionysius because the path to knowledge is closed to those who are not worthy of walking that path.  “It is not for nothing that the blessed Moses is commanded to submit first to purification and then to depart from those who have not undergone this.  When every purification is complete, he hears the many-voiced trumpets” (MT, 1000C+D).    

            Since He is “the transcendent cause of all things” we must be careful in our descriptions of God.  It is not enough to simply ascribe to God those things that we see around us to the highest degree – God is not simply the best or highest good.  Dionysius says that we should not only ascribe to God all of the affirmations of being that we can think of, but we should negate these affirmations because they are not sufficient to describe the God who is being itself.  “Now we should not conclude that the negations are opposites of the affirmations, but rather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this, beyond privations, beyond every denial, beyond every assertion” (MT, 1000B).  In this space between the affirmation and the denials; between ‘the vast and the miniscule’ is where true speech about God lies.  It begins without speech.  For Dionysius, theology begins, not with affirmations or denials, but above, under, beneath, through and around that space.  It is only in this space that is not space, where we “leave behind … every divine light, every voice, every word from heaven, and who plunge into the darkness where, as Scripture proclaims, there dwells the One who is beyond all things” (MT 1000C).  Theology begins not as knowledge content conveyed in words and propositions, but in mystical experience.  It is experiencing God beyond knowing, into the darkness of unknowning.  To speak about God, we must unknown, renouncing all that the mind can conceive, to know the One beyond everything.  If our minds are bound to the predication of things – pizza is good and God is good – then there must be sense in which Dionysius is right.  To know God, we must unknow good as it is tangled in our cultural expressions.

            The picture of the process of unlearning that Dionysius gives is that of a sculptor who removes all the ‘obstacles’ to the pure view of the image hidden inside the stone.  By clearing away these obstacles, beauty can be ‘unhidden.’  This stripping away of the obstacles of beauty is also a journey that becomes increasingly more difficult as we progress.  Language increasingly fails us.  Even if I re-envision ‘good’ in my understanding, can I use that word to properly signify what I now know?  If not, can I create a new word to describe that which I now know?  But that new word will be devoid of meaning because it will not signify anything.  Signifiers only work when there is agreement on what is being signified, and if I cannot express what I mean, language will ultimately fail me.  The higher I move away from the stone toward the beauty hid beneath the surface, the less I can speak about it.  Eventually, language will completely fail us; silence is then a friend to beauty and knowledge because we will “finally be at one with him who is indescribable” (MT, 1033C). 

            This is not to say that language is of no value in the journey of knowing.  Rather, it is helpful for us in our journey because it helps us peel away these lesser things to find the beauty.  It is better to say that God is good, than to say that he is a rock, even though both are used properly in Scripture.  The higher one goes on this journey to the Cause, the more we are left with only negations.  It (the Cause) is not touchable, perceivable, etc., until we get to the point where we even must deny the highest and best of our words.  Words will and must fail us if we are to truly know God.  “There is no speaking of it, for it is beyond any assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and, by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free from every limitation, beyond every limitation; it is also beyond every denial” (MT 1048B). 

            Does this mean that we should abandon all attempts at naming God?  Dionysius reminds us in the Divine Names that this is proper to name God because Revelation gives us names for the divine (DN 592C).  But we must understand the place that these names have as analogies, not actual representations of what God is.  “We must use what ever appropriate symbols we can for the things of God.  With these analogies we are raised up toward the truth of the mind’s vision, a truth which is simple and one” (DN 592D).  So do we not ascribe any names?  Dionysius reminds us that Scripture assigns every name to the Cause; everything from ‘I am being’ to ‘the rock.’  This is because “as the Cause of all and as transcending all, he is rightly nameless and yet has the names of everything that is” (DN 596 C). 

            For Dionysius, the key to our ability to understand is the Incarnation.  In the act of the Incarnation, becoming completely our human substance, we have a path to walk in the naming of God.  This is the path where the impassible suffers, where the just owns mercy.  In the Incarnation, we have a way to begin properly to know God, a way that was first walked by Christ.  And yet, we must still remember that a barrier does exist, because even in his humility, the Son surpassed our humanity (DN 649 A). 

            How do we overcome this gap?  On our own, we cannot, but God has given the angels to help us in this intervening space.  So, although language, knowledge, thought all fail us in knowing God, a way has been provided for us to know.  This knowing is increasingly accommodated to us as we move away from the One, the Cause of all things.  As we move away from essence of the One, we can assign more and more names.  The less mediation is needed, the less we truly know of the essence of the One.  The more we know, the more the use of language for naming fails us.  This is the paradoxical path of knowledge of the Divine Cause. 

            This path would seem to cause multiple problems for not only my knowledge of the Divine, but for our life in community.  If I am the only living person, my knowledge and progress in knowing is sufficiently contained in my own life.  But we live and know in a community.  Into this void, Dionysius brings the concept of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (EH).  We must understand our place in this hierarchy because the hierarchy itself is both a means of knowledge and a path to the Cause itself.

            The EH are not simply the constructions of authority, but rather a recognition of the path of discipleship, based again on the Incarnation.  “Jesus enlightens our blessed superiors, Jesus who is transcendent mind, utterly divine mind, who is the source and the being underlying all hierarchy, all sanctification, all the workings of God, who is the ultimate power.  He assimilates them, as much as they are able, to his own light” (EH 372A).  The incarnation is the means – the path – between the ultimate, the Cause itself and this world of causation, mediated through the heirarchies. 

            As each person enters the path of incarnational living, there is a movement back toward the Cause, the Good.  The hierarch – the one who receives sacred deification directly from God – mediates between subordinates and God.  In this harmony, each one is able “to have as great as possible a share in him who is truly beautiful, wise and, good” (EH 373A).  Each person is on this path in a different place, each in process of knowing God.   The hierarchy is simply a reflection of place on this path, the path of knowledge that he has previously discussed in the Mystical Theology. 

            We began with the problem of speaking about the knowledge of God.  How can we know, though language, about the God who transcends language?  Dionysius reminds us that it is through the incarnation of the Son that we have a way.  The incarnation of the Son is also the basis for our own journey of knowledge on the path represented in the hierarchies.  How can we know God – by following Jesus and by following those who follow Jesus.  The closer we are to them, the closer we are to Jesus, and therefore the closer we are to God and to real knowledge which is eclipsed by mere words. 

                                                                                   

Bibliography

Pseudo-Dionysius.  Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works.  Translated by Colm Luibheid.  New York, Paulist Press, 1987.