03 — Apophatic and Cataphatic Theology
The two ways of speaking about God that the Corpus holds together, and the engine of its whole theology: the cataphatic (affirmative) way that names God from his creatures, and the apophatic (negative) way that strips the names away to ascend, beyond affirmation and negation alike, into union with the Unknown. This section reads the Divine Names as the great cataphatic treatise and then follows the negative ascent through to its summit — the union beyond knowing that grounds the Orthodox theology of God’s unknowable essence and knowable energies.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (the Corpus Areopagiticum)
For Dionysius the two theologies are not rivals but the two arcs of a single movement. God, utterly transcendent, pours himself out into creation, and that procession is reflected back in the names Scripture gives him: he may therefore be praised from his effects (the cataphatic way). Yet because every such name says less than God, the same names must then be denied, and the denials themselves transcended, until the mind passes into the silence of union (the apophatic way). The cataphatic descends from God into the world; the apophatic ascends from the world back into God. This section treats each in turn, and insists, with the tradition, that the second is the deeper and the goal.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Divine Names | The cataphatic treatise: how the unknowable God is named from creation; the procession of the divine names — Good, Being, Life, Wisdom, Beauty, Love; the scriptural discipline of affirmative theology and its built-in limits. |
| Negation and Union | The apophatic ascent: the via negativa pressed past its own negations; the threefold way of affirmation, negation, and eminence; union beyond knowing; and the link to the Orthodox doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the unknowable essence. |
See Also
- The Mystical Theology — the apophatic ascent enacted in five chapters
- The Treatises and Letters — procession and return, the frame of both theologies
- Palamas and the Essence–Energies — the later synthesis that secures the apophatic God as also communicable
- The Holy Trinity — the Triadic God the two theologies unfold
References
- Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.
- Rorem, Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
- Louth, Andrew. Denys the Areopagite. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989.