St. Paul, while preaching in Athens, converted to the faith a certain Dionysius, a member of the once potent but still prestigious body that sat at the Areogapus (Ares’ Hill). Centuries later (circa 500AD), an anonymous scholar of notable abilities seemingly wished to provide his considerations with greater cachet and adopted the name. It took a millennium to recognize an allonym had been employed, but the desired celebrity had been won.
Pseudo-Dionysius offers a Neo-Platonic elucidation of orthodox Christianity. His most important contribution to the topic is his analysis of how we can know God, or more exactly said, the attributes or defining characteristics of divine nature. He posits two methodologies: the first dubbed the positive approach, the second the negative. In the positive schema, the mind begins with a universal idea or concept, such as goodness, beauty, power. Each of these is understood as applicable to divine nature in a transcendent manner and to creatures in a derivative manner. This is the way of analogy or reasonable comparison wherein the divine nature is seen as the archetype of each of these qualities or names, with creatures possessing them in degree by comparison to the archetype. The divine nature may be radically different from the human nature, but by looking to the cause from the effect, to the creator from the creature, some degree of likeness, some proportionality, some basis or groundwork of relatedness may be inferred. Thus, if personhood is considered the highest aspect of our being, it may be inferred personhood is in some manner reflective of, proper to, rooted in the divine. In the negative method, the mind simply denies to divine nature all the imperfections common to creatures. Thus, the divine nature is said to be simple (non-complex), infinite (non-finite), eternal (non-temporal), ubiquitous (non-spatial), immutable (non-changeable), abiogenic (non-contingent, un-caused), omniscient and omnipotent (un-limited in powers of intellect and will).
Pseudo-Dionysius notes neither of these methodologies is definitive, neither provides a clear view or an understanding of God, for the divine nature is beyond anything the human mind can envision. God is always and in all ways the infinitely more, the unknowable. Thus, talk of God yields not enlightenment, but darkness. In that darkness man becomes opened to the mystical experience of God. This is the darkness wherein reason meets its bounds and man must face the unanswerable questions with some other tool in hand. For Pseudo-Dionysius this other instrument is divine gift of faith. Such a portal beyond reason presents itself in plurality of forms throughout the centuries: in the heart having reasons reason cannot comprehend (Pascal), in the experience of being seized and infolded (John of the Cross), in the sense of the luminous and ominous (Otto), in the call to moral living (Kant), in the depths of feeling (Schleiermacher), or in the angst of living (Kierkegaard). Fundamentally, it is the awareness that reason, the faculty whereby things are taken into our field of being, is not the full compass or sole power wherein and whereby we “know”, under-stand, com-prehend, that some things are not things, are not available to be inwardly assimilated into usability, but simply open to encountering and being inwardly related to and with our vitality.
Two fault lines are evident in Pseudo-Dionysius’ reflections. First, the need to maintain the simplicity of God has him embrace the Platonic rule that a principle, being non-material, is not exhausted in its application. God can, as such, bring forth from himself without any depletion or differentiation in himself, can actively create and engage the world without loss of unicity. In this envisioning, despite analogies positive and negative, God is more metaphysical principle than “person” as Christianity would have it. Second, Pseudo-Dionysius’ musings extend the potency of evil. As in Plotinus’ analysis, evil is not a thing, but a lacking. Pseudo-Dionysius, however, extracts a nuance from this sense of non-being, a sense of a privation of a good that ought to be there–a lack of virtue, a deficiency of some quality, balance, capacity, or right judgment. This reiteration of the Neo-Platonic/Augustinian position further cements the ideas of evil and matter together, for matter is always, from one perspective, a state of lacking as a consequence of its being ever a state of becoming, of potentiality. It is a nuance that intensifies in the occidental attitude a growing and ungrateful distrust of the “world”, of anything sufficiently vibrant to deflect from reason’s ordered glare, of any fuglemen of loss of focus, and therein loss of being.
It is most importantly, however, the naming of a darkness beyond reason, the inability of mind, of our thinking, to define or confine God that brings us to a new threshold in the occidental understanding of the divine–a speechlessness, and therein a mode of relationship with that which cannot be spoken. God is not the abstracted pure transcendent so much as that which can be gazed toward but cannot be named. There is here an affront to transcendence, there is an approach to touching, and it is affected by and in the failure of human reason. It is not Augustinian illumination which moves from God to man, but an incremental step toward something that moves from man to God, something neither purely Platonic nor resoundingly scriptural.