On the Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies

Perhaps even more vexing than the nature of union in Dionysius is the question of how the theological treatises relate to Dionysius' two treatises on hierarchy. The Mystical Theologysuggests an ascent from the lower sensuous realm of reality through the intelligible intermediate realm to the darkness of the godhead itself, all accomplished by a single person. The hierarchic treatises, on the other hand, suggest that the sensible and intelligible realms are not places reached by a single being, but different kinds of beings, and that the vision of God is handed from being to being downward through the levels of the hierarchy. On the Celestial Hierarchydescribes the intelligible realm as divided into nine ranks of beings: the seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, powers, authorities, principalities, archangels, and angels. On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy describes the human beings within the church as divided into eight ranks: the hierarchs or bishops, priests, deacons, monks, laity, catechumens, penitents, and the demon-possessed. Dionysius does not address human life outside the church, except for a few scattered references to the angels presiding over other religious traditions and the earlier “legal hierarchy” of the Jewish rite, which precedes the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Christian rite.
The hierarchs, highest within the human hierarchy, contemplate the intelligible realm directly, though presumably they contemplate only its lowest level: the angels. The visible result of the hierarchs' contemplation of the angels is the series of rites belonging to the Christian church. Since the hierarchs are able to contemplate the intelligible directly, they do not perform the rites for their own sake, but for the sake of the monks and laity, who have no capacity for direct intelligible contemplation. The monks and laity are able to engage the passionless part of their souls only through the passionate part, and so they require a visible trigger—the symbol—to stimulate their intelligible contemplation. The ranks of hierarch, priest, and deacon are in charge of administering the rites, with a specific set of initiates in their care and a specific action to perform. The deacons purify the catechumens, penitents, and possessed, primarily by giving them ethical instruction. The priests illuminate the laity, who are able to receive the intelligible truth. The hierarchs perfect, a task whose initiate seems ideally to be the monk, since Dionysius identifies the monks as leading the more perfect life of those who are not explicitly consecrated as clergy.
The very structure of the church reflects the different roles of the clergy and the laity. The hierarch stands still at the altar, facing away from the multiplicity of the church's interior. He enters the nave of the church only to bring sacred objects like incense, bread and wine, and holy oil into the realm of multiplicity, the spatially extended nave. When he brings the censer into the nave, for example, its fragrance is distributed to the laity there, just as the bread and wine are later distributed in the eucharistic rite. The hierarch then returns to the altar, and takes up again his own proper object of contemplation, the intelligible source of the rites. The laity, on the other hand, remain within the spatially extended nave, but orient themselves toward the altar, where the sacred objects are raised for their contemplation. Before this contemplation can occur, the catechumens, penitents, and the demon-possessed must be removed from the church. Their orientation toward the material prevents them from adequately contemplating the intelligible truth through its visible manifestation in the sacred objects.
Although the rites have intelligible contemplation as their goal, it does not appear that non-ritual forms of contemplation, like reading, can substitute for participation in the rites. Dionysian contemplation is public, so that it may unite us to each other; it involves prayer, so that it may unite us explicitly with the godhead; it also requires bodies, since only the interaction of bodies allows the contemplative act to include both components of our nature: body and soul. The names used in Dionysius' theological treatises acquire their salvific power in this liturgical context. Although the rites involve the performance of bodily actions, they clothe themselves in words: the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, and the oral tradition of the liturgical prayers. Only the silence and unknowing of the Mystical Theology finds no clear place within the liturgical rites of the hierarchy, since it transcends both the visible rites of the laity and the intelligible contemplation of the clergy. It may be that, just as some points of the liturgy call for a literal silence, the intelligible contemplation of the hierarch at the altar must engage in its own form of silence, so as to allow the appearance of the godhead beyond naming. On this question, however, Dionysius is as silent as the mystical theology which crowns his vision of the human ascent to God.

4. Sources, Ideas, Character of Writing, Terms: Christianity and Neoplatonism

Having examined the plan and content of these works let us now take a brief look at some of the sources of Dionysius' ideas (and associated problems), and at the character of Dionysius' writing in order to determine what in practice he is actually doing and to see if there is anything genuinely philosophical in his writing.

4.1 Sources, Ideas, and Terms

There is a major tension between Platonism and Christianity in Dionysius' writing. Luther expressed the negative side of this tension: “Dionysius is most pernicious; he platonizes more than he Christianizes” (Babylonian Captivity of the Church (Weimarer Ausgabe 6, 562)). Von Balthasar has been more positive, seeing Dionysius' Christianization of Neoplatonism “as a side-effect of his own properly theological endeavor”, namely, “the clear realized synthesis of truth and beauty, of theology and aesthetics” (The Glory of the Lord, vol. 2, 148–9). Perhaps one may suggest that neither Christianity nor Platonism are side shows in Dionysius' thought; They are rather mutually important whole perspectives that do not get lost in the mix, no matter how subordinate Neoplatonism nonetheless may be to Christianity for Dionysius himself. Dionysius' central concern is how a triune God, that he calls—among other things—the thearchy (god-rule; god-beginning), who is utterly unknowable, unrestricted being, beyond individual substances, beyond even goodness, can become manifest to, in, and through the whole of creation in order to bring back all things to the hidden darkness of their source. To this end Dionysius employs some major Neoplatonic insights: (1) The abiding—procession—return or conversion of all things as the creative and receptive expression of what it means for anything created to be. In Proclus' terms in the Elements of Theology, prop. 35: “Every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it, and converts to it”. This is a way of expressing the vertical connectedness of everything by identity, difference, and the overcoming of difference by a return to identity that constitutes the nature of anything that is caused. (2) The hierarchical ordering of beings as an expression of both their natural placements and their freedoms as well as the simultaneous immediacy, without intermediary, of the unknown God's presence (on hierarchy see CH 3). Each thing and order bears relation to the whole or manifests the whole, but “according to its own capacity”, as the famous Neoplatonic saying puts it. A rock or a worm, for instance, is a window upon the entire universe if you only know how to look.
In the case of (1), the contrast between Dionysius and Neoplatonism should not be taken to be a contrast between free divine creation, on the one hand, and supposed emanation or illumination by necessity, on the other, for divine/ human freedom and creation out of “nothing” are conspicuous facets of Neoplatonic thought as well. What we see in Dionysius is rather a new way of understanding the abiding, outpouring, and return, not only concretely in relation to the various hierarchies, and structurally in relation to the various works (DN is more concerned with procession, for instance, while EH, CH, and MT deal with different levels of return), but also in relation to God's providential love that, while remaining supereminently identical to itself, and precontaining everything within itself, nonetheless is the creative power overflowing into its effects (procession) in order to bring them back into identity (return): “[The Cause of All] is ‘all in all‘, as scripture affirms, and certainly he is to be praised as being for all things the creator and originator, the One who brings them to completion, their preserver, their protector, and their home, the power which returns them to itself, and all this in the one single, irrepressible, and supreme act” (DN 1, 7, 596c-597a).
In the case of (2) (hierarchy and divine presence), Dionysius emphasizes, much more so than the impression often suggested by Neoplatonism, the directness of creation. Every being, no matter where it is placed in the scale of beings and no matter how dependent it might be on beings ontologically higher than it (e.g., for human beings, angels) is directly and immediately dependent upon God in and for its existence. Again, the contrasts often drawn between Neoplatonism's “flight of the alone to the alone” and Dionysius' community of hierarchy or between the supposed Neoplatonic view that the One causes the existence of lower beings only through the mediation of the higher, while Christianity sees creation as immediate are simply false or too simplistic. Plotinus' mysticism is not “solitary” in the sense often supposed and, for Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus, the One causes existence immediately and most profoundly, whatever other influences enter into the complexity of existence. What we see in Dionysius, by contrast, is a retention of one's place in hierarchy and a very concrete return to identity—in the case of human beings, for instance, through scripture, ritual, and practical performance to a deeper union with God rather than a simple, spatially conceived movement “up” the hierarchy. More broadly still, we see in Dionysius' thought new possibilities for thinking about divine love, a love that combines beyond beingness and unrestricted being, transcendence and yet even a kind of hyperessential vulnerability in rather startling ways, new ways consequently of thinking about both divine and human eros, about affectivity (cf. Dionysius' famous dictum about learning from sacred writers, or discovering the truth oneself, or not only learning but “experiencing the divine things” (pathein ta theia) (DN 2, 9); and compare Aristotle, fr. 15 (Rose) and Hebrews 5:8), about the nature of signification and the limits of language (see section 4 below), about the theory of evil as privation and non-being, however dependent this is upon one of Proclus' opuscula (cf. DN 4, 18–35), about the aesthetic richness of this world in the light of theology and the life of the Church, and even about the soul–body relation, though anthropology is not a part of Dionysius' primary concern (but see his comments at EH 404B, 433c, 437a–440a, 441b, 553a ff, 565b–c).
Two examples will have to suffice here: a) Dionysius' remarkable description of the ecstatic love of God and b) his radical transformation of the Neoplatonic intelligible and sensible worlds.
a) First, Dionysius evidently cannot accept in any single straightforward sense the Neoplatonic notion of a One that excludes the possibility of expressing trinity. He therefore links in a new way God as unrestricted being with God as utterly beyond being or any determinate predications. At the same time in the DN he argues that the ecstasy of love, which moves as a unifying force through creation without departing from itself, is the divine nature. Dionysius admits, in a note from Plato's Phaedrus, that it is characteristic of yearning not to allow “lovers to belong to themselves but only to their loved ones” (DN 4, 13). This is shown, he goes on to argue, by the providential care of the greater for the lesser (a reference to Proclus' divine providential love (eros pronoetikos) from the Commentary on the First Alcibiades, #56), by the love of equals, and by that of the lesser for those better than them (a reference both to Aristotle's seminal treatment of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics and to Proclus' returning or converting love (eros epistreptikos) in the same Commentary above), as also in the case of St. Paul's famous dictum “I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Might then such a belonging to one's beloved be characteristic of God, if perhaps in a different sense?
Dionysius continues as follows:

اقتباس :: We must dare to say even this on behalf of the truth that the cause of all things himself, by his beautiful and good love for all things, through an overflowing of loving goodness, becomes outside of himself (exo heautou ginetai) by his providential care for all beings and is as it were, charmed (thelgetai) by goodness, affection (agapesis), and love (eros), and isled down (katagetai) from his place above all and transcendent of all to dwell in all things in accordance with his ecstatic superessential power which does not depart from itself (DN 4, 13).

The very notion is, of course, remarkable, the notion, that is, of a kind of conjunction of opposites that strives to express the inexpressible magnitude of divine love and even to suggest power and vulnerability (or “almost” vulnerability: “as it were, charmed (beguiled, enchanted)”), as well as the possibility of a genuine two-way relation between Creator and creatures more in tune with Biblical thought. Yet the expression remains Greek, for the word thelgetai that Dionysius chooses is one that echoes the conclusion of Agathon's speech in the Symposiumwhere Agathon praises a Love that everyone “should hymn fairly, sharing in the song he sings that enchants/charms/beguiles (thelgon) the thought (phronema) of all gods and human beings” (197c). Dionysius changes the context but does not really reverse the polarity: it is God who still—like human beings—is beguiled by love and affection for beings and “led down” to dwell in them. Is this small detail and transposition merely accidental? It may well be, but in this context, the use of such a verb and thought is not accidental. Dionysius does not write as a Christian walled off from pagan thought or as if he were a Neoplatonic thinker in Christian disguise. Instead he provokes and delights in intertextuality at every point.
b) A second example is the precise nature of Dionysius' transposition of Neoplatonic structure. Dionysius makes concrete and accessible the whole world of Neoplatonism in the human, but sacramental life of the Church, a world of ordinary people and things whose significance can only be fully realized and perfected in the celestial and supercelestial world.
For Classical Neoplatonism, especially in its Plotinian form, the real truths that undergird or form the origins, beginnings (archai) of the world of ordinary experience are the three hypostases or realities of soul, intellect, and the One. The hypostases are necessary, above all, to account for our experience of degrees of unity and organization. The life-world accessible to our senses is an organized, animated world, and this needs a more intensive degree of unity to account for it, namely, the principle of life, that is, soul and all souls. But even the world of soul is a “one and many”, organized from within yet also requiring a principle of unity and organization beyond itself. And the same is true even to a higher degree of intellect. Intellect is a “one-many”, an organized world of intellects, in each of which the whole of intellect is present. Each is a sort of holographic reality. And because intellect is still a world despite its more intensive unity than soul, it requires a unity beyond intellect and beyond being to organize it and to form the groundless ground of its own being from which it has emerged.
So (1) in Neoplatonism, there are 3 hypostases, on the one hand, namely, soul, intellect, and the One, and four cosmic or hypercosmic dimensions, on the other: (i) the sensible world as a world of things; (ii) the sensible world linked by the soul to the intelligible world; (iii) the intelligible world itself composed of all intellects; and finally (iv) the One or the Good, from which everything has come. And (2) while everything has its appropriate “place” in this hypostatic hierarchy, the presence of the Good is so immediate and so accessible, that the presence is closer to each thing even than intellect or soul. This is equally true in both Plotinus and Proclus. Furthermore, (3) in order to explicate the derivation of each entity from what comes before it, it is not sufficient as some scholars have supposed that Neoplatonism should just have multiplied intermediaries and indulged in an absurd proclivity for triads, such as Life, Wisdom, Mind; Neoplatonism should rather be seen as a form of thought that attempts to meditate upon, read the signs in, and represent how, as precisely as possible, all beings are derived from and relate to the One, to examine and explicate their dependence, open-endedness, and radical interconnectedness without losing sight of the multidimensional ordering of the universe (sensible/intelligible) and of the fact that even the simplicity of things that have no intellect or life, but only bare existence, springs from the power of the One.
What Dionysius manages to do is both to capture this spirit profoundly, and, therefore, transform it, as well as to make it concrete and accessible in the scriptural, sacramental, and ordinary experiences of Christian practitioners. Instead of the 4 dimensions of the Neoplatonic universe, Dionysius has the following: (1) the sensible world or Legal hierarchy, i.e., the world considered under the aspect either of objective “thinginess” or of law, namely, in the case of law, a world in which we are dependent upon prescriptions rather than upon any deeper understanding, a world in which the “mysteries” or hidden things (such as Baptism and the Eucharist) are mere mechanical ceremonies and the Scriptures are given only a literal meaning. For Dionysius (as for Plato), law is necessary, but still deficient. The law of Moses, for instance, “gave only a veiled contemplation as to enlighten without harm weak capacities for sight” (EH 501c). Then (2) there follows the ecclesiastical hierarchy, namely, the sensible world as the limbs of the mystical body of Christ led by soul into the significance of the intelligible or celestial hierarchy, where the symbols can begin to be read. Its mysteries, both sensible and intelligible, are the Scriptures and the Sacraments, its initiators the priests, and its initiated the ones who receive them. From this perspective, Dionysius transforms Neoplatonism radically but at the same time provokes entirely new possibilities in the structures he transforms.

On the Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies

4. Sources, Ideas, Character of Writing, Terms: Christianity and Neoplatonism

4.1 Sources, Ideas, and Terms

On the Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies :: تعاليق

On the Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies