The symbolic theology that attempts to make the nature of God comprehensible through similes or “aistheta symbola” (“perceptible symbols”) (Letter Nine, trans. Luibheid, p. 281) swings between these two extremes. Still, it must be clear that these symbolic references are always inadequate. Hence the need for these representations to display their feebly hyperbolic nature (if I too may be permitted an oxymoron):
Furthermore, I doubt that anyone would refuse to acknowledge that incongruities are more suitable for lifting our minds up into the domain of the spiritual than similarities are. High-flown shapes could well mislead someone into thinking that the heavenly beings are golden or gleaming men, glamorous, wearing lustrous clothing, giving off flames which cause no harm, or that they have other similar beauties with which the word of God has fashioned the heavenly minds. It was to avoid this kind of misunderstanding among those incapable of rising above visible beauty that the pious theologians so wisely and upliftingly stooped to incongruous dissimilarities, for by doing this they took account of our inherent tendency toward the material and our willingness to be lazily satisfied by base images. At the same time they enabled that part of the soul which longs for the things above actually to rise up. Indeed the sheer crassness of the signs is a goad so that even the materially inclined cannot accept that it could be permitted or true that the celestial and divine sights could be conveyed by such shameful things. (The Celestial Hierarchy, trans. Luibheid, p. 150)
At the very end of this citation Dionysius continues with an apparent contradiction: he observes that “there is nothing which lacks its own share of beauty” (ibid., p. 150), given that Scripture states that God saw everything He had made, “and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). But what we have here is a bow in the direction of that pancalistic sensibility that will pervade the entire Middle Ages. The problem is rather that at this point Dionysius introduces the idea, which will return with some frequency throughout his corpus, of naming through dissimilar similarity or inappropriate dissimilarity (see, for example, chapter 2 of The Celestial Hierarchy, trans. Luibheid, p. 138), whereby the divinity is sometimes given a lowly name: “Sometimes the images are of the lowliest kind, such as sweet-smelling ointment and corner stone, Sometimes the imagery is even derived from animals so that God is described as a lion or a panther, a leopard or a charging bear. Add to this what seems the lowliest and most incongruous of all, for the experts in things divine gave him the form of a worm” (The Celestial Hierarchy, trans. Luibheid, p. 152).31
Concerning this point, it has frequently been understood that for Dionysius the name that best expresses the inexpressibility of the divine nature is based on an inverse analogy, according to which what is emphasized are not the similar but the opposed properties. Some occultist interpretations of these passages speak of an image of God reflected as it were on the surface of the terrestrial sea in inverted symmetry (and this would be the sense in the famous passage from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians 13:12, where he says that we see now “through a glass darkly”). If this were indeed the case we might expect a theory of inverse analogy, which would go a long way toward confirming the idea of a symbolic naming that obscures in order to spur the intelligence to seek further—and we would therefore be quite close to the idea of metaphor as cognitive process. And this could be tied in with a strong suggestion from Aristotle (see Rhetoric 1405a): “since opposites are in the same class, you do what I have suggested if you say that a man who begs ‘prays,’ and a man who prays ‘begs’; for praying and begging are both varieties of asking.” And it would be quite a challenge to require a semiotics of metaphor to account for a process by which two things are substituted for each other based, not on the properties they have in common, but on the maximum tension between opposite properties (like calling the sea solid, God malevolent, the gaze of the Medusa benevolent, and so on). To tell the truth, none of the examples given by Dionysius constitutes a case of dissimilar similarity (in the above sense), but at most of audacious similarity, linking the divine and the human on the basis of “unseemly” resemblances, but resemblances nonetheless.
The most extreme case of dissimilarity is cited in Letter Nine, which examines a passage from Psalm 78 in which God appears to get drunk. Since the image of a divinity shamelessly intoxicated is unacceptable, Dionysius engages in a prodigious example of exegetic subtlety only to conclude as follows:
In our terminology, inebriation has the pejorative meaning of an immoderate fullness, being out of one’s mind and wits. It has a better meaning when applied to God, and this inebriation must be understood as nothing other than the measureless superabundance of good things which are in him as Cause. As for being out of one’s mind and wits, which follows drunkenness, in God’s case it must be taken to mean that incomprehensible superabundance of God by virtue of which his capacity to understand transcends any understanding or any state of being understood. He is beyond being itself. Quite simply, as “drunk,” God stands outside of all good things, being the superfullness of all these things. He surpasses all that is measureless and his abode is above and beyond all that exists (Letter Nine, trans. Luibheid, p. 287).
A memorable example of an author clutching at allegorical straws, whereas all the Psalmist is doing is describing the wrath of God: “Then the Lord awaked as one out of sleep, and like a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine” (Ps. 78:65). Describing God as wrathful is in keeping with the Bible’s normal process of anthropomorphization; and what we have here is actually a simile: God awakens so full of wrath as to appear to be drunk. A powerful image, that truly puts before our eyes, as Aristotle has it, the wrath of God, but which Dionysius, with his lack of interest in the mechanism of metaphor, does not see, his attention being concentrated on the subtler exercises of allegory. So that, as Augustine points out, seeing that the literal sense appears repugnant, we look in factis for a spiritual sense.
The real problem is that Dionysius does not make a clear distinction between metaphor and allegory and tends to lump both together in the category of the symbolic. The difference between metaphor and allegory has already been made abundantly clear. What constitutes a symbol, compared with these two rhetorical techniques, is still an open question at this point in time and will remain so for centuries (see Eco 1984a: ch. 4): an image in the form of a luminous glowing mandala may be thought of as a symbol in a number of cultures, without its being either an allegory or a metaphor. After all, maybe the best way to grasp Dionysius’s hallucinated semiotics is to reconsider Goethe’s famous distinction:
There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it. Allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept, the concept into an image, but in such a way that the concept always remains bounded in the image, and is entirely to be kept and held in it, and to be expressed by it.
Symbolism … transforms the phenomenon into idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea remains always infinitely active and unapproachable in the image, and even if expressed in all languages, still would remain inexpressible. (Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, Nos. 279, 1112, 1113)