The Divine Names

The Divine Names is the longest treatise of the Corpus and its great work of cataphatic (affirmative) theology: an inquiry into how the God who is beyond all names may nonetheless be praised by the many names Scripture gives him. This file follows the treatise’s argument — that the names of God are “processions,” rays of the divine goodness streaming into creation; that they must be drawn from Scripture and not invented; and that even the highest of them, affirmed, already point beyond themselves to the Unknown the Mystical Theology will pursue.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (the Corpus Areopagiticum)

The Question of the Treatise

The Divine Names (Peri theiōn onomatōn) sets out from a problem the whole Corpus presupposes: God in himself is utterly unknowable, beyond every name and concept — and yet Scripture is full of names for him. How can the nameless be named? Dionysius’s answer organizes the thirteen chapters of the treatise: God is named not as he is in himself but from his effects, from the perfections that proceed from him into the created order and reveal, each in its measure, the Source from which they flow (Divine Names 1.1–7; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). The names are true, because the procession is real; the names are inadequate, because the Source infinitely exceeds them. Affirmative theology is thus both valid and provisional — the necessary first movement, which the negative theology of the Mystical Theology will complete (see The Mystical Theology).

The Discipline of Scripture

The treatise opens with a strict limit. The theologian may not name God from his own speculation; he is bound to “the things laid down in the sacred Scriptures.” Dionysius insists at the outset that “we must not dare to apply words or conceptions to this hidden transcendent God” beyond “what the sacred Scriptures have divinely revealed,” for the names of God are given by revelation, not constructed by the mind (Divine Names 1.1–2; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). This scriptural discipline is decisive for the Orthodox reception of the Corpus: however thoroughly Dionysius draws on the philosophical vocabulary of Neoplatonism, the content of his divine names is governed by the Bible — Good, Light, Beauty, Being, Life, Wisdom, Power, Righteousness, Salvation, and the rest are names Scripture supplies (Louth 1989; Rorem 1993). The philosophy provides the grammar; Scripture provides the names. (The grammar’s dependence on Proclus is the chief evidence for the late dating; see The Pseudo-Dionysius Problem.)

The Good as the First Name

Pride of place among the names goes to the Good (to agathon). Dionysius treats it first and most fully, because goodness is the name most proper to God as the source of the procession itself: the Good, like the sun, pours itself out by its very nature, communicating being and life and order to all things without diminishment (Divine Names 4.1–4; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). From the Good flows the second great theme of the chapter, Beauty and Love (kalon and erōs/agapē): God is named the Beautiful because he calls all things to himself and gathers them in harmony, and he is named Love because the divine goodness is an ecstatic, outgoing yearning that goes forth from itself to dwell in all and draw all back. Dionysius dares to call God himself erōs — a “yearning” that is “ecstatic,” carrying the lover out toward the beloved — citing in support the words of his predecessors and even daring the boldness of the term (Divine Names 4.10–17; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). This treatment of the divine erōs would be among the treatise’s most fruitful legacies, taken up by Maximus and the whole later mystical tradition.

The Problem of Evil

Chapter 4 turns, at length, to a question the doctrine of the Good forces: if all that proceeds from the Good is good, whence evil? Dionysius answers with the classic teaching, sharpened in Neoplatonic terms, that evil has no substance and no positive being of its own. Evil is not a nature, not a thing made, not from God; it is a privation, a falling-short, a “parasite” on the good it corrupts. Nothing is evil insofar as it exists, for to exist is to participate in the Good; evil is the defect of being, the failure of a good thing to be fully what it is (Divine Names 4.18–35; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). This privative account of evil — evil as steresis, deprivation, not a rival principle — passed through the Corpus into the common stock of Christian theology East and West, and stands among the treatise’s most influential single arguments (Rorem 1993; Louth 1989).

Being, Life, Wisdom, and the Rest

The remaining chapters take up the further names in a descending order of universality. God is named Being (to on), because he is the source of all that is, the “Being of beings,” himself beyond being as their cause (Divine Names 5; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). He is named Life and Wisdom, Mind, Word, and Truth, as the source of life, knowledge, and intelligibility in all that lives and knows (Divine Names 6–7). He is named Power, Righteousness, Salvation, and Redemption, as the one who sustains, orders, and saves (Divine Names 8). Later chapters treat the names that come in pairs and seeming opposites — Great and Small, Same and Different, Like and Unlike, At Rest and in Motion (Divine Names 9) — and the names “Ancient of Days” and “Young,” “Omnipotent,” “King of Kings,” “Holy of Holies,” and finally the names of the divine unity and distinction (Divine Names 10–13). The treatise closes with the One and the Perfect, returning the whole multiplicity of names to the simple unity from which they proceeded (Divine Names 13; Luibheid–Rorem 1987).

The Names as Procession

The unifying idea throughout is that each name marks a procession (proodos) of the one God into the manifold of creation. God is in himself the simple, unnameable Source; but as he goes forth into the world, communicating goodness, being, life, and wisdom, he becomes nameable from these his gifts. The names are not arbitrary labels but real participations: to call God “Life” is to name the source of the life that is genuinely shared by all the living (Divine Names 5.1–2; 11.6; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). This is why the cataphatic theology is true and not mere projection — the names answer to a real procession of the divine into the nameable order. And it is why the cataphatic theology is also incomplete: the procession reveals God as cause, but God in his own super-essential simplicity remains beyond every name that the procession yields (Louth 1989). The treatise thus carries its own transcendence written into it.

The Turn Toward Negation

For this reason The Divine Names, for all its affirmations, repeatedly gestures beyond itself. Dionysius reminds the reader at every turn that the God so richly named is in himself “beyond every name,” “the Cause of all” who is “none of the things that are,” knowable from his effects but never comprehended in his essence (Divine Names 1.5–7; 13.3; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). The affirmations are praises offered to a God who exceeds them all, and the right response to the fullness of the names is finally to fall silent before the One who is beyond them. The treatise’s last word points up toward the Mystical Theology, where the names just affirmed will be denied, and the denials transcended, in the ascent to union (see Negation and Union). Cataphatic and apophatic theology are the two arcs of one movement, and The Divine Names is the down-stroke that the up-stroke of the Mystical Theology completes.

See Also

References

  • Pseudo-Dionysius. The Divine Names, in The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. (The thirteen chapters; the scriptural discipline at 1.1–2; the Good, Beauty, and divine erōs at 4.1–17; the privative account of evil at 4.18–35; Being at 5; Life and Wisdom at 6–7; Power and Righteousness at 8; the paired names at 9; the One and the Perfect at 13.)
  • Rorem, Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (Chapters on the Divine Names; the procession of the names; the doctrine of evil as privation.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Denys the Areopagite. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989. (Cataphatic theology and its scriptural grounding; the names as procession; divine erōs.)