Now, we might expect Dionysius to consider allegories as didactic procedures (or procedures calculated to conceal the truth from the eyes of the profane) and symbols as epiphanies that make secret knowledge evident. The truth is that all the examples of symbolic theology provided by Dionysius have nothing whatsoever to do with a modern theory of symbols, nor do they propose an alternative. Let us consider a few examples.
In chapter 2 of The Celestial Hierarchy (trans. Luibheid, p. 148), Dionysius affirms that the Scriptures use poetic forms to represent formless celestial intelligences. It is unclear whether by poetic forms he means allegories (in verbis) or metaphors. And in the passage previously cited in which he speaks of God being named through the lowliest creatures, such as the bear and the lion, the example Dionysius has in mind is clearly Hosea 5:12–14, where God, still angry with Israel, says that he will be unto Ephraim as a moth, and to the house of Judah as rottenness, and unto Ephraim as a lion, and as a young lion to the house of Judah. The moth and the young lion are not “symbols” of the divinity. The Bible does not say that God is a moth or a lion, but that in a certain circumstance He will behave as His children are used to seeing the moth and the lion behave. These are perfectly comprehensible similes or metaphors (in verbis naturally) to which the prophets have accustomed us. Thomas Aquinas would have said that what the biblical author intended to say literally was that God, at the height of his wrath, was not about to give his erring children any respite.
Similarly, when in Letter Nine (trans. Luibheid, pp. 286–287) Dionysius speaks of those “occult and audacious enigmas” in which the Scriptures compare divine things to dew or honey, he is still thinking of Hosea 14:5, where the Psalmist says, “I will be as the dew unto Israel,” or Psalm 19:9–10, where he affirms that “the judgments of the Lord are … sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.” This time God is not angry but most loving, and the metaphor makes this clear. In no sense, however, is honey a symbol of God.
It should be obvious that these metaphors are comprehensible, because the traditional attributes of honey are its pleasant taste and sweetness, of the moth its annoying persistence, of dew its beneficial fertilizing qualities. When Dionysius is afraid that his audience may not be familiar with all the properties of the metaphorical vehicle, he lists them, as any self-respecting encyclopedist of the early centuries A.D. would have done. In The Celestial Hierarchy, for example, speaking of the symbolic presentation of fire, he points out that the Scriptures give us examples of flaming chariot wheels, fiery animals, men radiating fire, braziers of red-hot coals, rivers of flame, and he observes: “And indeed it seems to me that this imagery of fire best expresses the way in which the intelligent beings of heaven are like the Deity” (p. 183), and he proceeds to list a series of properties traditionally associated with fire. Fire passes through all things without mixing with them, it cannot be grasped but it seizes everything, it lies hidden until it finds the proper kindling, it transforms things, it vivifies them with its heat, it shuns adulteration, it tends upward, it penetrates, it moves by itself and makes other things move, it embraces everything but nothing can contain it, it is efficient, powerful, and when ignored it appears to be dead, but it springs unexpectedly to life when stirred, it flings itself upward and cannot be checked, and so on. With such an encyclopedia it is easy to produce not just metaphors but whole allegories based upon fire. Fire is not an obscure symbol that names without naming, that alludes without revealing: when intimately known in its very nature, as Dionysius shows that he knows it, it puts before our eyes the supernatural realities of which it is a metaphor or an allegory, and it does so effortlessly.
The same can be said of light, and of the sun as the source of light, to which Dionysius devotes a number of fine pages in the Divine Names (trans. Luibheid, p. 74), pages that will inspire many medieval theorists of the aesthetics of light (see Eco 1956, 1987).
The pages of the Divine Names in which Dionysius says that God can be called Good, Beauty, or Being belong to a different register. In this case he is not talking about earthly entities, animals, objects, natural phenomena capable of becoming images, or metaphors of divine things. Here he is talking about what the Scholastics will call the transcendental properties of Being. The problem is that we, knowing the moth from experience, can compare it to God, but we are able to say that something is good or beautiful only insofar as we are able to see that certain things in our experience participate in a reflected fashion in the properties of the divinity. “For we recognize the difference in intelligible beings between qualities that are shared and the objects which share them. We call ‘beautiful’ that which has a share in beauty, and we give the name of ‘beauty’ to that ingredient which is the cause of beauty in everything. But the ‘beautiful’ which is beyond individual being is called ‘beauty’ because of that beauty bestowed by it on all things, each in accordance with what it is” (The Divine Names, trans. Luibheid, p. 76).32
Likewise, what is suprasubstantially Good and Beauty is “that which truly is and which gives being to everything else” (The Divine Names, trans. Luibheid, p. 98). “Every being and all the ages derive their existence from the Preexistent. All eternity and time are from Him. The Preexistent is the source and is the cause of all eternity, of time and of every kind of being” (The Divine Names, V, 5, trans. Luibheid, pp. 98–99).
What we have here is a leap. Here the trajectory is no longer upward (from the moth to God) but downward, from God to whatever is good and beautiful. The divine names belong strictly speaking to the divinity, and only at a subordinate level to things. This subordination, however, is not of a metaphorical order, but of a metaphysical one. If the properties of the moth are similar to those of God, it is because of a defect of our imagination. This is the only way can imagine the implacability of God’s wrath (which is obviously something quite different). The simile is couched in verbis, and the verba are clearly inadequate to express an object so sublime. Therefore the metaphor from low to high appears capable of making us know, by putting the thing before our eyes; but it makes us know in an extremely pallid fashion what is by definition unknowable. The properties of beautiful things on the other hand are what they are because they participate in the beauty of the divinity. The similitude is not in verbis but in re. The sharing of transcendental properties by creatures is always a pallid sharing, but it is not a pallor of the imagination (or of language); instead the pallor is ontological.
This is tantamount to saying that in the symbolic theology of Dionysius there is no room for a coherent theory of metaphor, and so be it. But this position implies a fine cognitive dilemma. In fact we have it on faith that God is Goodness and Beauty, but in what precise way He suprasubstantially possesses these properties we do not know. Or rather, either we know it by illumination or arcane knowledge, or we must imagine it in a pallid fashion taking the properties of things as our point of departure. A problem of which Thomas Aquinas (who is not a cultivator of any hidden or mysteriosophic science of the divinity) is fully aware when, from these very same pages of Dionysius, he derives the idea of knowledge by analogy: somehow or other, “prout possumus,” to the best of our abilities, we must elevate ourselves from earthly things to knowledge of the First Cause (Expositio Sancti Thomae V, 3, n. 668). Are we justified in saying, then, that such knowledge is merely metaphorical?