Character of Writing

What is the general character of Dionysius' writing and is there anything philosophical in it? Dionysius presents us with complex affirmative (kataphatic) and negative (apophatic) forms of theology, exploring what we can say about God, what we mean by our statements, discovering the necessity for us to talk too much about God and to push language forms to their breaking points, and then to see what we cannot say about God. Negation is important here at both levels, inkataphatic theology as well as in apophatic theology. This complex theory of signification and its subversion is often referred to as negative theology: affirming our affirmations, then negating them, and then negating the negations to ensure that we do not make an idol out of a God about whom we know nothing. But it is also much more than this.
Dionysius is practising forms of theological meditation in the sense that the earlier Church Fathers had understood this, not as a type of objectified, academic knowledge, but rather as a more complex, intersubjective form of address, communion and contemplation. Dionysius adopts the word theurgy, “god-work”, together with theology, “god-word”, to describe the inmost reality of this practice, adopting it from the later Neoplatonist understanding of a hidden sympathy or interconnectedness between material things and the sacred, divine significances resident in them by virtue of divine power. Iamblichus, for instance, had denied that pure thought or contemplation could bring about union with the divine. What was crucial was the performance of certain ritual actions or theurgy, “god-work”, in the belief that one could attain to the divine by the incarnation of divine forces in material objects, statues, or human beings through the divine power mirrored everywhere in the universe and in the natural sympathy of all parts, and not just by talking about the gods (theo-logy) or by looking at them (theoria). For some modern critics, Dionysius' adaptation of pagan theurgy is analogous to calling the Christian sacraments “magical”, which also results in the subsumption of everything (morality as well as contemplation) to a form of magical correspondence. But Dionysius does not understand theurgy in this way. For him, “theurgy is the consummation (sygkephalaiosis) of theology” (EH 432B), which is to say that God's activity within all the orders of nature does not abolish nature, morality, contemplation, or science but rather completes them and makes possible the divinization of human nature.
God's work in all things, therefore, turns the world into a reservoir of possibilities: at its lowest and most fragmented, it is apparently a world of only individual, discrete things without significance, but in reality it is a world vested with signs, symbols, and hidden meanings as the multidimensional creation of a Triadic God. Even the lowest things cannot simply be despised, for even in their dissimilarity from the divine, they bear the capacity to signify the divine more appropriately than supposedly worthier images. If we say God is good, we run the risk of thinking we know entirely what we mean and consequently of closing off a thought that has to be radically open-ended, if not altogether subverted. If we liken God to a “worm”, we subvert our own comfortable tendencies by being shocked into filling the image with enquiry. So the Psalmist who uses the worm image hides the sacred from those who would defile it with a lack of understanding and yet points to the sacred in a new way. This constant tension or dialectic between hiddenness and openness pervades the whole of Dionysius' meditative practice of theology; and from this perspective Dionysius' practice of writing is a complex and necessarily deceptive or subversive process of reading the encoded insight (or contemplation) in created things in such a way that neither the perceptual beauty of the material thing nor the deeper hidden beauty of the sign becomes a trap, an idol, or a vanishing point but, instead, an activity that opens up an irresistibly beautiful world in and to God.
There are several consequences of this. First, Dionysius' writing is a response, a preparing of the organs of reception for the love of God in praise and worship. In theology, we are learning how to praise, to hymn—not to catalogue—God. Second, such writing is dialogic and intersubjective to its core in three ways: a) As “in between” teacher and pupil, dialogical receptivity and transmission, open-ended in both directions, characterize its essential form; b) Even in thecontent of Dionysius' various works, replete as they are with triads (which can so easily be relegated to a Neoplatonic obscure penchant for providing intermediate links), this open-ended in-betweenness, characteristic of conversation and cooperation, is fundamental to the ranks of the various hierarchies. In the EH, for instance, in the triad catechumen (the one undergoing purification), sponsor or confirmed Christian (the one being illumined), and hierarch (the one being perfected and enlightening) (according to the traditional triadic form: purification—illumination—perfection), the sponsor first introduces the catechumen and both sponsor and catechumen are then mediated by the work of the hierarch. For Dionysius at least (if not in the actual operation of a “church”), hierarchy is here not a question of domination, but rather of a genuine open-endedness, testability through interlocutor and mediator, community and responsibility. c) Finally, what completes both the form and the content above all is prayer, since, for Dionysius (as for Anselm much later), prayer is the primary form of reverential philosophical thought and receptivity, “stretching ourselves out”, as in Gregory of Nyssa, so as to be “lifted up” (cf. DN 3). The most famous example of such prayer is the very beginning of theMT, where in the address/request “Triad, above substance, above god, above good” to “make our way straight to the topmost peak, beyond knowing and light, of the mystical scriptures—there where the simple, absolute and unchangeable, mysteries of God's speaking lie wrapped in the darkness beyond light of secret—hidden silence”, Timotheus, the disciple is also included, together with us the readers.

Character of Writing

Character of Writing :: تعاليق

Character of Writing