This classical vision of the cosmos was then translated in the medieval world into emphatically Christian terms. Relying on Plato’s distinction between physical and (unknowable) ultimate reality, Pseudo-Dionysius treated material reality as an emanation from Absolute Being, or Absolute Beauty, which transcends the whole of sensible nature but remains continuous with it in terms of “emanations” from it. The nature of the world is divine, based on eternal principles, and we—humans—can directly perceive these principles, this divinity, from reality. All created things on this view are theophanies or manifestations of God; the created world, then, presents itself to us as having order and coherence. Thus, the Good and the Beautiful are taken to be one and the same and both have their identity in God. So, in experiencing that which is beautiful in this world, we are experiencing the anagogical or “moving upward” of the mind from this world of appearances and imperfection to a contemplation of divine love. In Mystical Theology, Dionysius makes this even more explicit:
The fact is that the more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming; so that now as we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing . . . [M]y argument now rises from what is below up to the transcendent, and the more it climbs, the more language falters, and when it has passed up and beyond the ascent, it will turn silent completely, since it will finally be at one with him who is indescribable.58
It is important here to recall Plato and the Platonic view of reality as a ladder or scale of being, and the ascent from the sensible world to the ineffable One. Recalling also Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the mystical ascent may be further characterized allegorically as a glorious ascent from darkness (illusion) to light (revelation). The Pseudo-Dionysius writes:
. . . the Superessential Beauty is called “Beauty” because of that quality which It imparts to all things severally according to their nature, and because It is the Cause of the harmony and splendour in all things, flashing forth upon them all, like light, the beautifying communications of Its originating ray.59
This centrally defining metaphor of light for early Christians is thus freighted with figural implications—“seeing,” “perceiving”—each with aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual dimensions. Such systematic analogy-making was a way of knowing the world; it involved both the philosophical habit of seeing the hand of God in the beauty of this world—a symbolism for the mind which perceived relations obtaining between the phenomenologies of the physical and the metaphysical—and the more conventional perception of the world as a divine work of art, such that everything in it possessed allegorical (and thus moral), in addition to literal, meanings, as if the world were designed to be interpreted for those meanings.
Yet, for Pseudo-Dionysius, divine “names” such as Beauty, Goodness, Love, Wisdom, Light, or even Being, while necessary, can be applied to God only analogically and therefore, in the end, inadequately; these names are both like and unlike human goodness, beauty, wisdom or being. For Dionysius—and this is the paradox of aphophatic discourse—these names are first applied to God affirmatively (that is, cataphatically)—God is of course a good, wise, beautiful and loving being—but the inadequacy of these names is also realized in their very utterance, and it is the recognition of this deficiency that leads to apophaticism, or the erasure, crossing out, or reversing the direction of affirmative theology. God is not good or wise or beautiful or loving or powerful in the way we, as humans, understand these attributes, predicated of a presumed subject they qualify. The closer we come to naming the reality that is God, the more the impotence of our ordinary language to speak of God is in evidence. That which is said, then, must always and immediately be unsaid. He shows this in The Divine Names:
The indefiniteness beyond being
lies beyond beings.
The unity beyond intellect
lies beyond intellect.
The one beyond thought is
unintelligible to all thinking.
The good beyond logos:
ineffable to all logos
unity unifying every unity
being beyond being
non-intelligible intellect
ineffable logos
non-rationality
non-intelligibility
non-nameability
be-ing according to no being
cause of being to all; but itself: non-be-ing,
as it is beyond every being, and
So that it would properly and knowingly
manifest itself about itself.60
Dionysius’s writing is frustratingly provocative in its reversals, denials, contradictions, paradoxes and oxymorons; it is a model itself of apophatic rhetoric. In chapter VII of The Divine Names he tells the reader that “it is necessary for us to investigate how we know God, which is neither intelligible, sensible, nor in general some being among beings.” And then he offers this apophatic performance:
God is known
through knowledge, and
through unknowing.
Of God there is
intellect, reason, knowledge,
contact, sensation, opinion, imagination, name, and
everything else.
God is
not known, not spoken, not named,
not something among beings, and
not known in something among beings.
God is
all in all,
nothing in none,
known to all in reference to all,
known to no one in reference to nothing.
For we say all of this correctly about God
who is celebrated according
to the analogy of all,
of which it is the cause.61
St. Augustine, too, had puzzled: “Have I spoken or announced anything worthy of God? Rather I feel that I have done nothing but wish to speak: if I have spoken, I have not said what I wished to say. Whence do I know this, except because God is ineffable? If what I said were ineffable, it would not be said. And for this reason God should not be said to be ineffable, for when this is said something is said. And a contradiction in terms is created, since if that is ineffable which cannot be spoken, then that is not ineffable which can be called ineffable. This contradiction is to be passed over in silence rather than resolved verbally.”62
Apophasis, explains William Franke, “can actually be apprehended only in discourse—in language insofar as it negates itself and tends to disappear as language . . . [A]pophatic discourses consist in words that negate themselves in order to evoke what is beyond words—and indeed beyond the limits of language altogether.”63 And Dionysius confirms this in Divine Names: “We leave behind us all our own notions of the divine. We call a halt to the activities of our minds and, to the extent that is proper, we approach the ray which transcends being. Here, in a manner no words can describe, preexisted all the goals of all knowledge and it is of a kind that neither intelligence nor speech can lay hold of it . . .”64
In the fourth and fifth chapters of his Mystical Theology, the author traces an ascending hierarchy of denials, denials of all the names of God—from the lowest “perceptual” names (“rock, “light”), derived as metaphors from material objects, to the highest “conceptual” names (“wisdom,” “goodness,” “beauty,” “existence”)—all negated one by one as he progresses up the scale, or ladder, of language until, ultimately, silence.
Ascending higher we say:
It is
not soul, not intellect
not imagination, opinion, reason and not understanding,
not logos, not intellection,
not spoken, not thought,
not number, not order,
not greatness, not smallness,