Dionysius on Bartholomew

In The Mystical Theology, the influential author writing under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite invokes “the divine Bartholomew” for the paradox that theology is at once ample and minute — vast and yet concise — and that the Word of God is both copious and brief, and even wordless. This file sets out that celebrated passage (Mystical Theology 1.3), its apophatic setting, the disputed identity and date of “Dionysius,” and its long influence on Eastern and Western mystical theology.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Passage

The single most famous patristic mention of the Apostle Bartholomew occurs in the opening chapter of The Mystical Theology, the brief but immensely influential treatise of the author known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Setting out the apophatic way — the knowledge of God by negation, by stripping away all that God is not — the author appeals to the apostle. He writes that “the divine Bartholomew says that theology is at once vast and minute, and that the Gospel is broad and great, and yet concise” — that the Word of God is both abundant and brief, indeed that it surpasses speech altogether (Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology 1.3; trans. Luibheid and Rorem 1987; trans. Parker 1897).

The saying, as Dionysius reports it, holds together two apparent opposites. Theology — the speaking of God, and God’s own self-disclosure — is vast: it is “broad and great,” for God is infinite and inexhaustible, and the Scriptures are an immeasurable deep. And it is at the same time minute and concise: contracted to a point, sayable in few words, and finally passing beyond words into silence. The “divine Bartholomew,” in Dionysius’s appeal, is the witness to this paradox — that the fullness of God can be both spoken at length and gathered into the briefest utterance, and that the highest theology ends in the wordlessness of contemplation.

The Apophatic Setting

The appeal to Bartholomew is not incidental but serves the argument of The Mystical Theology. Dionysius is opening his exposition of the apophatic or negative way to God — the ascent in which the soul, leaving behind all images, concepts, and affirmations, enters “the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing” where God dwells beyond all that can be said or thought (Mystical Theology 1; Luibheid and Rorem 1987). The Bartholomew saying captures, for Dionysius, exactly the movement of this ascent: theology is vast (the cataphatic, affirmative, abundant speech about God drawn from creation and Scripture) and yet minute and finally silent (the apophatic, negative, brief, and at last wordless approach to the God who exceeds all speech). To invoke “the divine Bartholomew” at this point is to claim apostolic warrant for the apophatic principle that stands at the foundation of the whole Dionysian — and through it, of much Eastern Orthodox — mystical theology (on the apophatic dimension of Orthodox theology, see Orthodoxy: Christology, where the limits of theological language are treated).

It should be noted that no such saying of Bartholomew survives independently; Dionysius’s report is the source of it. Whether the author drew on a now-lost tradition, an apocryphal text, or his own theological insight attributed honorifically to the apostle, cannot be determined. The saying lives in and through the Dionysian passage.

The Disputed Identity and Date of “Dionysius”

The authority of the passage is bound up with the long-debated question of who its author was. The treatise presents itself as the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian converted by St. Paul’s preaching on the Areopagus (Acts 17:34) — and so as a first-century, sub-apostolic witness. From late antiquity through the Middle Ages the Corpus Dionysiacum was received under this venerable name and carried immense authority accordingly.

[Disputed: the authorship and date of the Dionysian corpus. The traditional attribution is to Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of Acts 17:34 (so the corpus presents itself, and so it was universally received in the medieval East and West). Modern scholarship, however, dates the corpus to the late fifth or early sixth century — on the grounds of its dependence on the Neoplatonism of Proclus (d. 485), its developed liturgy, and its first attestation in the early sixth century (at the Council of Constantinople of 533) — and therefore designates its author "Pseudo-Dionysius." This scholarly consensus (Stiglmayr and Koch, c. 1895, and the subsequent literature) is now standard. The author's true identity remains unknown. The Eastern Orthodox tradition continues to venerate the corpus for its theological depth while the historical-critical dating to c. 500 is generally accepted; the attribution of the Bartholomew saying is thus the work of a late-fifth- or early-sixth-century author writing under the apostolic name, not a first-hand apostolic report.]

Whatever its date, the corpus exercised an authority second to few in the history of Christian thought, precisely because it was long believed to come from the apostolic age — and the Bartholomew saying shared in that authority.

The Influence of the Passage

The Dionysian tribute gave Bartholomew a permanent and distinguished place in the history of mystical theology, East and West. In the Christian East, the apophatic theology of which this passage is a charter ran through St. Maximus the Confessor (who commented on the Dionysian corpus), St. John of Damascus, and the whole hesychast tradition that flowered in St. Gregory Palamas — the tradition of the knowledge of God beyond knowing, of the divine darkness and the uncreated light. In the Christian West, the Mystical Theology — translated and expounded by figures from John Scotus Eriugena to the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and the Rhineland and Spanish mystics — became a foundational text of negative theology. Wherever that tradition was studied, “the divine Bartholomew” of Mystical Theology 1.3 was read as having spoken the paradox at its heart.

For the veneration of the apostle, the passage is precious out of all proportion to its length. It is the one place where Bartholomew is remembered not for a deed but for a thought — and that thought, the vastness and concision of theology and its passage into silence, became one of the governing intuitions of Christian contemplation. The guileless Israelite who confessed the Son of God on a single sign (John 1:49) is thus also, in the Church’s memory, the apostle who witnessed to the truth that the deepest theology is briefest, and ends in wonder.

References

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Mystical Theology 1.3. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1987; and trans. John Parker, The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, 1897.
Rorem, Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (On the date, authorship, and influence of the corpus.)
Louth, Andrew. Denys the Areopagite. London: Continuum, 1989. (On the Dionysian apophatic theology and its reception.)
The Holy Bible, King James Version. (Acts 17:34; John 1:49.)