Symbolic Theology

Other names directly refer to visible things, whose multiplicity and accessibility to sensation make them easy for us to understand. The difficulty with these names, referred to by Dionysius and the Neoplatonic tradition generally as “symbols,” is that they have no inherent relation to the godhead at all. Their literal signification is restricted to the realm of the sensuous, and so they must be turned into metaphors if they are to become useful for theology. This is the task of Dionysius' Symbolic Theology. Though the work itself is not extant, we find him undertaking the same project in each of his extant works.
One of Dionysius' favorite sources of symbols is a verse from the 78th psalm: “the Lord awoke, like a strong man, powerful but reeling with wine.” Taken literally, the verse indicates that God sleeps and gets drunk on wine, two activities that properly apply only to embodied, visible beings. Only an embodied being can manifest the activities to which the names “sleep” and “drunkenness” literally refer. If we are to apply such terms to God, they must be attached to a foreign, intelligible content that will be able to lead the interpreter of the symbolic name to the contemplation of an intelligible name. In “sleep,” for example, Dionysius finds a meaning common to both intelligible and visible things: withdrawal from the world. He concludes that God's sleep is his “removal from and lack of communication with the objects of his providence.” In drunkenness, Dionysius sees a kind of over-filling, and so he explains that God's drunkenness is “the overloaded measurelessness of all goods in the one who is their cause.” From the easily comprehended literal meaning of the term, the reader rises to the more difficult intelligible terrain of imparticipability and measurelessness.
Drunkenness and sleep are what Dionysius calls “dissimilar similarities.” They strike us as exceptionally unworthy of God, and so are “dissimilar,” yet they reveal an intelligible truth capable of leading us to him, and so are “similar.” Dionysius privileges such names over more appropriate names like “golden” and “luminous.” The more that the name seems appropriate, the more we are likely to be lulled into thinking that we have adequately comprehended the godhead in our use of the name. The very materiality and ignobility of the dissimilar similarities cry out that the names do not literally describe the godhead, and compel the reader to seek the intelligible truth behind the name.
We may wonder whether the symbolic names are a necessary part of theology at all, since their content belongs to the intelligible theology and not to a “symbolic” theology. Dionysius repeatedly affirms their necessity, not because of the character of their content, but because of the nature of the human soul. The soul may be divided into two parts: one passionate and the other passionless. Passionate here means set in motion by things exterior to the soul. The senses, for example, are passionate because they can only function when an outside object gives them something to sense. Dionysius follows a longstanding Neoplatonic tradition when he says that most of us are unable to engage our passionless part directly. Instead, our passionless part comes into play only indirectly, through the activity of the passionate part. By sensing the world around us, we are led to contemplate its intelligible structures through the sensations we receive. Even those few human beings who can engage their passionless part directly find it helpful to shore up their contemplation with examples drawn from the senses. Dionysius may understand the causality of God directly, and yet still find it helpful to compare God's causality to the emanation of light from the sun.
Such examples do not require the presence of a revealed scripture. Skilled teachers in any subject are characterized by their ability to come up with helpful examples drawn from ordinary experience when explaining a difficult intelligible truth. Dionysius himself frequently resorts to examples “at our level” in order to explain something intelligible. The scriptural symbol goes further, attempting to reveal the God who is before and beyond even the intelligible truth. The highest human intellect has little ability to attain this truth directly, and so we cannot rely on intellectual teachers as guides to that truth. We require the gift of symbols, which tie our ordinary comprehension to the godhead beyond being. And so Dionysius does not describe the symbolic names as pedagogical tools developed by theologians. The names appear instead in the ecstatic visions of the prophets. Though Dionysius explicitly asserts our dependence on the Hebrew and Christian scriptures as the source of these symbols, he has no qualms about embellishing the list of names with symbols drawn from other traditions. For instance, he discusses at length the name of “mixing bowl,” which has no real source in the Christian or Hebrew scriptures, but occurs centrally in the Platonic philosophy deriving from Plato's Timaeus.

3.4 Mystical Theology

When Dionysius praises “dissimilar similarities” over seemingly more appropriate symbolic names for God, he explains that at least some dissimilar names are negations, and negations are more proper to God than affirmations. The Mystical Theology has this last, most arcane form of theology as its subject. Negations are properly applied not only to the names of the symbolic theology. Any and all of the divine names must be negated, beginning with those of the symbolic theology, continuing with the intelligible names and concluding with the theological representations. The godhead is no more “spirit,” “sonship,” and “fatherhood” than it is “intellect” or “asleep.” These negations must be distinguished from privations. A privation is simply the absence of a given predicate that could just as easily be present. The absence of the predicate is opposed to its presence: “lifeless” is opposed to “living.” But when we say that the godhead is not “living,” we do not mean that it is “lifeless.” The godhead is beyond the lifeless as well as beyond the living. For this reason, Dionysius says that our affirmations of the godhead are not opposed to our negations, but that both must be transcended: even the negations must be negated.
The most controversial and arcane passages of the Mystical Theology revolve around the mystical as taken in itself and not as the act of negating the other forms of theology. Dionysius says that after all speaking, reading, and comprehending of the names ceases, there follows a divine silence, darkness, and unknowing. All three of these characteristics seem privative, as though they were simply being the absence of speech, sight, and knowledge respectively. But Dionysius does not treat them as privative. Instead, he uses temporal and spatial language to mark off a special place and time for them. Using as his example the account of Moses' ascent up Mount Sinai in the Hebrew scriptures, Dionysius says that after Moses ascends through the sensible and intelligible contemplation of God, he then enters the darkness above the mountain's peak. The darkness is located above the mountain, and Moses enters it after his contemplation of God in the various forms of theology. Dionysius leaves the relation between Moses and the darkness highly obscure. Some commentators reduce it to a form of knowing, albeit an extraordinary form of knowing. Others reduce it to a form of affective experience, in which Moses feels something that he can never know or explain in words. Dionysius himself does not give decisive evidence in favor of either interpretive move. He speaks only of Moses' “union” with the ineffable, invisible, unknowable godhead.

Symbolic Theology

3.4 Mystical Theology

Symbolic Theology :: تعاليق

Symbolic Theology