The Mystical Theology

The Mystical Theology is the briefest treatise of the Corpus and its summit: five short chapters in which the mind is led to renounce every perception and concept, every affirmation and every denial, and to enter “the darkness of unknowing” where it is united to the God who is beyond all being and all knowledge. This file reads the treatise itself — the ascent of Moses into the cloud, the via negativa pressed past its own negations, and the union beyond knowing that founded the apophatic tradition of Christian mysticism.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (the Corpus Areopagiticum)

The Summit of the Corpus

If the Divine Names is the long cataphatic body of the Corpus, The Mystical Theology is its apophatic head — and though it occupies only a few pages, it is the single most influential thing the author wrote. Its five brief chapters compress the whole upward movement of the Corpus into a sustained act of negation, leading the mind beyond all that it can grasp into union with the unknowable God. The treatise opens not with argument but with prayer, invoking the “Trinity, higher than any being, any divinity, any goodness” to guide the seeker “up beyond unknowing and light, up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture, where the mysteries of God’s Word lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence” (Mystical Theology 1.1; trans. Luibheid–Rorem 1987). The paradox of that “brilliant darkness” is the treatise’s governing figure: the divine is dark not because it lacks light but because its light exceeds every capacity of the created mind.

The Ascent of Moses

The treatise’s controlling image is the ascent of Moses on Sinai. Dionysius reads the narrative of Exodus as a figure of the soul’s ascent to God. Moses first purifies himself and is separated from the impure; he hears the trumpets and sees the lights; then he leaves behind the multitude and, with the chosen priests, presses on to the summit. But — and this is the crux — even there he does not see God, “but rather the place where he dwells.” For “the most divine and the highest of the things perceived” are only “the rationale presupposed for all that lies below the Transcendent One,” through which God’s presence is shown “walking on those heights of his holy places” (Mystical Theology 1.3; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). Then Moses “breaks free … away from what sees and is seen, and plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing,” where, “renouncing all that the mind may conceive,” he is “supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing” (Mystical Theology 1.3; Luibheid–Rorem 1987).

This is the heart of the apophatic program. The ascent does not end in a vision of God as an object but in a union that is darkness to the intellect — not because God is less than mind, but because he is incomparably more. The cloud Moses enters is the “darkness of unknowing” (gnophos tēs agnōsias), and to enter it is to leave behind not only the senses but the very operations of reason and concept (Louth 1989; Rorem 1993).

The Two Theologies

The brevity of the treatise rests on a distinction it makes explicit: between affirmative (cataphatic) and negative (apophatic) theology, and the priority of the latter. Dionysius explains that when theology affirms things of God, it does so beginning from the highest realities and descending — God is good, God is wise, God is being. But when it negates, it begins from the lowest and ascends: God is not a body, not a shape, not number, not place, not soul, not mind, and so on up the scale of being (Mystical Theology 2–3; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). The negative way is the truer, because every affirmation, however exalted, says something less than God; only negation guards the divine transcendence. Yet — and this is what distinguishes Dionysius from a mere agnosticism — the affirmations are not false; they are the procession of God into nameable creation, valid in their place (see The Divine Names). The two theologies are the descending and ascending arcs of a single movement.

Beyond Affirmation and Negation

The treatise’s most radical step comes in its final chapters, and it is the step that lifts Dionysian apophaticism above ordinary negative theology. Having denied of God all sensible things (Mystical Theology 4) and then all intelligible things (Mystical Theology 5), Dionysius refuses to let even the negations stand as the last word. God, he writes, is beyond every assertion and beyond every denial: “It is not soul or mind … nor is it speech per se, understanding per se. … It cannot be spoken of and it cannot be grasped by understanding. … It is not … sonship or fatherhood. … There is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it. Darkness and light, error and truth — it is none of these. It is beyond assertion and denial. We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond every assertion … and … beyond every denial” (Mystical Theology 5; trans. Luibheid–Rorem 1987).

This double negation — denying both the affirmations and the denials — is the precise summit of the treatise. To say “God is not good” would be as false as “God is good,” if “not good” were taken to place God among the lacking. The negations must themselves be negated, until language fails entirely and the soul is left in silence before the One who is “beyond every assertion and denial.” The union that follows is not a higher concept but the cessation of concept: the mind “knowing nothing” is united to the Unknown (see Negation and Union). This is why the treatise can be so short — its argument is the dismantling of argument, and it ends, as it must, in the silence it has been clearing.

Union with the Unknown

The goal of the whole is union (henōsis), not information. The seeker does not climb in order to comprehend God but to be joined to him beyond comprehension. Dionysius counsels Timothy, to whom the treatise is addressed, to “leave behind … everything perceived and understood, everything perceptible and understandable, all that is not and all that is,” and “by an undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all,” to be “uplifted toward the union, as far as is attainable, with him who is beyond all being and knowledge” (Mystical Theology 1.1; trans. Luibheid–Rorem 1987). The instrument of this ascent is not reasoning but love and self-abandonment; the term is not vision but union in darkness.

It is essential to the Orthodox reading that this union is not absorption or the dissolution of the person into an impersonal Absolute. The God met in the darkness is the Holy Trinity, invoked at the treatise’s opening, and the union is the deifying communion of the creature with the personal God who infinitely transcends it — the same union that the later tradition would call theosis (see Theosis). The Areopagite’s darkness is the darkness of an excess of light, and the silence is full. How this apophatic ascent was held together with the doctrine of the divine energies — so that God remains genuinely unknowable in essence yet genuinely communicable in his energies — was the work of the later Byzantine tradition, above all of Gregory Palamas (see Palamas and the Essence–Energies).

The Fountainhead

From these five pages flows the entire apophatic stream of Christian mysticism. In the East, the Mystical Theology shaped Maximus, John of Damascus, Symeon the New Theologian, and the hesychast tradition (see The Corpus in Orthodox Theology). In the West, translated by Eriugena and read by the medieval schools, it stood behind the Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, the Rhineland mystics, and the via negativa of the scholastics (see The Influence on the West). Few texts of comparable brevity have done comparable work. That its author wrote under a borrowed name does nothing to diminish the treatise; that the Church received it so deeply is itself a judgment on its truth (see The Theological Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Pseudo-Dionysius. The Mystical Theology, in The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. (The five chapters; the “brilliant darkness of a hidden silence” at 1.1; the ascent of Moses at 1.3; the two theologies at 2–3; the double negation, “beyond every assertion and denial,” at 5.)
  • Exodus 19–20; 24:15–18; 33:18–23. (The Sinai narrative the treatise reads as the figure of the ascent.)
  • Rorem, Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (Chapter on the Mystical Theology; the structure of the negative ascent.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Denys the Areopagite. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989. (The “darkness of unknowing”; union beyond knowledge; the apophatic tradition.)