- Length
- 304 pagesLuibheid and Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Paulist Press, 1987
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
The Mystical Theology
A thousand words that shaped a thousand years, by an author whose name was borrowed and whose identity is unknown. Its argument is that the highest thing we can say about God is nothing at all, and its authority came from a lie nobody caught until the Renaissance.
- Date
- c. 500
- Attributed to
- Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
- Region
- Syria
- Language
- Greek
- 867 Latin, John Scotus Eriugena Carried the corpus into the Latin West Consensus
- 1987 English, Luibheid and Rorem The standard modern version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 367 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 235 years
Read for a thousand years as the work of a man converted by Paul in Athens, and treated with near-scriptural authority on that basis.
What the book says
Five short chapters, perhaps a thousand words in all, arguing that the way to God runs through the systematic destruction of everything we say about him. The author distinguishes two routes. The affirmative one begins from what is nearest to God and works outward, calling him good, wise, powerful, one - and every term is true, because everything that exists comes from him and bears some trace of it. The negative route runs the other way and is the one this book takes: begin from the furthest and least likely descriptions and strip them off, then continue stripping until the words we were most confident of are gone too. So God is not a body, not a shape, not in a place; then not a soul, not mind, not reason; and finally, in the passage that has been quoted for fifteen centuries, not one, not unity, not divinity, not goodness, not spirit as we understand spirit - and not darkness and not light, since even those are ours. The point is not that God lacks these things. It is that he exceeds both the assertion and the denial, and the ascent ends not in a better description but in silence.
What it argues
That negation is not a poor substitute for description but a higher form of it, and that a mind which stops at any affirmation has stopped too soon. The order of the stripping carries the argument. Beginning at the bottom - God is not a stone, not a body - is easy and worthless; the work is in continuing past the point where the terms are ones we would defend, so that goodness, unity and being itself are removed in turn. The author is careful about what this does not mean. He is not saying God is nothing, and he is not saying the affirmations were false; both routes describe the same God, and the affirmative one has its place. What he denies is that any concept we possess is adequate, since every one of them is drawn from things that were made, and applying them to their source is running the relation backwards.
What it answered
Enneads 253-270Plotinus
Plotinus and Proclus on how the One is reached, and a Christian theology increasingly confident that it could specify the divine nature. The fifth and sixth centuries were an age of doctrinal definition, of councils settling exactly what could and could not be said about God and Christ; this book, written in the middle of it, argues that the whole enterprise touches only the outer edge of its subject.
What answered it
Periphyseon c. 867John Scotus Eriugena
Eriugena, by translating and systematising it. Aquinas took it seriously enough to write a full commentary on The Divine Names and to cite the corpus some seventeen hundred times across his works, on the assumption that he was reading a companion of Paul. Eckhart, Ruusbroec, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and Nicholas of Cusa all build on it directly. The attribution was doubted by Lorenzo Valla and then by Erasmus in the Renaissance, and demolished in the nineteenth century - by which time the influence was structural and could not be undone by knowing who had not written it.
How it argues
By performance rather than exposition. The book is extremely short and its structure enacts what it describes - each chapter removes more than the last, the sentences shorten as the terms fall away, and the final chapter is a rapid series of denials ending in silence. There is no argument in the ordinary sense and no attempt to persuade a sceptic; the reader is taken through an exercise. This is why it can be read in half an hour and why it has supported fifteen centuries of commentary.
The moment
Syria around 500, in a Greek-speaking Christian world under Byzantine rule and reading Neoplatonic philosophy in Athenian schools that would be closed within thirty years. The author gave himself the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, whom Acts records as converted by Paul's sermon in Athens - a claim to apostolic proximity, made by someone writing four hundred and fifty years later. Nothing else about him is known: not his name, his city, his office, or whether he expected the attribution to be believed.
How it travelled
On a false passport, and further than almost anything in this section. Because the author was taken for a disciple of Paul, the corpus carried an authority close to scripture, and a Neoplatonic account of God entered Christian theology at the highest possible level without ever having to argue for itself. The Latin West received it through Eriugena's translation in the ninth century; the Greek East had it from the start. Every subsequent mystical tradition in Europe runs through it. Its authority survived Valla and Erasmus by three centuries, and its influence survived the correction entirely.
The strongest objection
That the method eats itself. If every concept must be denied of God, then so must the concepts the book relies on to say so - transcendence, cause, source, beyond - and the author's move of denying the denials does not obviously rescue this so much as postpone it. What is left after the last negation cannot be described even as a something, so it is unclear what has been reached or how anyone would know they had reached it. The traditional answer is that this is the point: the difficulty is the subject rather than a defect in the account, and a method that produced a stateable result would have failed. That reply is coherent and it means the position cannot be assessed by argument, which is the price. The historical objection is separate and blunter: an argument that carried because its author was believed to be someone else was never assessed on its merits at all.
Why read it
Because it is a thousand words and among the most influential thousand words ever written, and because almost nobody who reads the fifth chapter forgets it. It needs no background. Read The Divine Names afterwards if the affirmative route interests you; the two are designed as a pair.
- First printed
- 1498
- First in English
- 1897
- Digitised
- Yes
One of four treatises plus ten letters forming a single corpus: The Divine Names, The Mystical Theology, The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. The Divine Names is much longer and sets out the affirmative route this book reverses.
Eriugena's ninth-century Latin, and Sarracenus' twelfth-century replacement, carried it through the Middle Ages. Luibheid and Rorem's 1987 English is the standard and is in copyright.
Where it stands
Live. Negative theology is an active position in philosophy of religion, the corpus is a substantial scholarly field in its own right, and the question of what can be said about a being who exceeds our concepts is not closer to resolution than it was in 500.
On quoting this book
The Greek is public domain but the accurate English translations are modern and in copyright, and the central passage turns entirely on the translator's handling of the negations. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Who wrote it is unknown and the candidates - a Syrian monk, a follower of Proclus, someone connected to Severus of Antioch - are all conjecture. Whether the pseudonym was a deliberate forgery, a recognised literary convention, or a claim to write in a tradition rather than as a person is argued seriously in all three directions. Whether the corpus is Christian Neoplatonism or Neoplatonism wearing Christian vocabulary has been disputed since the Renaissance. And what the negations finally leave - a God beyond being, or a method with no object - divides its readers now as it divided its medieval commentators.