How then can we speak of the divine names?  

How can we do this if the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge,

if it abides beyond the reach of mind and of being, if it encompasses and circumscribes,

embraces and anticipates all things while itself eluding their grasp and escaping

from any perception, imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding?  

How can we enter upon this undertaking if the Godhead is superior to being and is unspeakable and unnameable?

—Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, 593A-B.

On Pseudo-Dionysius   (471/485 – 518/528 c.e.):

Pseudo-Dionysius wrote unremittingly about the power of names, even as he refused us his own. 

Scholarship identifies him as a Neoplatonist Christian writing in Syria sometime between 471 or 485 to 518 or 528 c.e. who adopted the name of Denys, Dion, and Dionysius, where each occasionally was accompanied by the title “the Areopagite.” 

“Dionysius” represents him as a distinguished convert of St. Paul from Acts 17; “the Areopagite” represents him as an Athenian member of the Areopagus, the juridical council—this self-identification as the Areopagite interestingly links to Lyotard’s frequent culling of legal terminology and theory; both step into law in order to speak of and for the witness and testimony . 

All of these names tie him to the philosophical center of Athens even while he truly has “neither birthday nor native land,” as Paul Rorem notes, sprightly translating a comment about mystical obscurity into one about the literal obscurity of his biography.

The Dionysian Corpus:

Existing: ten letters and four treatises 

        —although, the division between letters and treatises is questionable!  Two of the letters are actually longer than several of the treatises and, technically, the treatises, themselves, are composed as letters addressed to one bishop Timothy, presumably the same gentleman who was in conversation with Saint Paul.

        —the letters are predominately exegeses of his thought and moral advice.

       —the treatises: The Celestial Hierarchy, which delineates the ranks of angels.  The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which delineates the ranks of religious figures.  The Divine Names, which undertakes a study of the intelligible names applied to God (i.e., Goodness, Wisdom, Yearning, etc.).  Finally, the Mystical Theology, which philosophically prompts one to abandon the sensible and intelligible in order to experience a union with God.

But, Pseudo-Dionysius cites two further treatises:

The Theological Representations (Outlines of Divinity), which was said to be on the trinity and incarnation, and the Symbolic Theology, which reputedly analyzed the sensible names representing God (i.e. Rock, Right Hand, etc.). 

On his Project in The Divine Names:

The Divine Names is preeminently concerned with the problem of naming the divine.  The essence of the difficulty resides in God’s unknowability due to his super-essentiality: all that He is surpasses humanity’s capacity to know Him.  Nonetheless, by His grace, through the divinely inspired words of the Scripture writers, and with the aid of philosophy we may know some things of Him.  Pseudo-Dionysius’ aim, then, throughout his oeuvre, is to achieve this knowledge, however deficient, that is permitted humanity so as to achieve union with the One.  

This mission reveals that Pseudo-Dionysius is a mystic.  

Mysticism:

Etymology:

Greek mysterion, meaning a “secret rite or doctrine,”

mýstēs, meaning “one who has been initiated,”

mýein, verb, meaning “to close” or “to shut,” likely referring to the closing of the lips so as to keep a secret and the shutting of the eyes wherein only the initiated were permitted to see the sacred rites.

Mysticism, according to this etymology, is the enigmatic knowledge that is neither acquired through the eyes nor is communicable through the lips. 

More commonly, mysticism is an immediate, direct, intuitive knowledge of God, or of some type of ultimate reality, attained through personal religious experience.

This experience may be understood as achieving a final mystical union or return to God or a single or series of brief encounters with Him through dreams or visions to create a continuum of contact directly in proportion to received knowledge.  The union presumably could provide intuitive and indubitable knowledge of God while the episodic experiences provide scant, partial or veiled knowledge. 

So!  Pseudo-Dionysius’ focus of The Divine Names is how to name the divine, to name, and thus to know, that which exceeds all that we can possibly know. 

He writes:  God “surpasses all discourse and all knowledge,” so, “How then can we speak of the divine names” (593A-B)?  How do we know He who exceeds knowing?  He writes:

Many scripture writers will tell you that the divinity is not only invisible and incomprehensible, but also ‘unsearchable and inscrutable,’ since there is not a trace for anyone who would reach through into the hidden depths of this infinity.  And yet, on the other hand, the Good is not absolutely incommunicable to everything (588C).

A marked aspect that contributes to making Pseudo-Dionysius a radical thinker is his emphasis of the erotic relation between humanity and God.  Like the desperate lover, we seek to know our beloved.  We are driven to seek His names because God is the “object” of our desire.  Seeking knowledge is an act of faith, driven by love, that motivates our desire to name Him.  By knowing His names, speaking them, we can be faithful to Him and perhaps receive the divine gift of union with Him. 

So, when our soul is enlightened by the love of God, Pseudo-Dionysius says, we can concentrate through yearning alone on achieving a perfect divine union with Him, but until this union, we cannot positively know God.  Until then, since God exceeds human imagination and comprehension, we are only permitted scraps of knowledge.

We begin with knowledge born from scraps of Scripture:

… we must not dare to resort to words or conceptions concerning the hidden divinity which transcends being, apart from what the sacred scriptures have divinely revealed.  Since the unknowing of what is beyond being is something above and beyond speech, mind, or being itself, one should ascribe to it an understanding beyond being (588A).

But, further, the “scrappy” nature of knowledge, then, means that every scrap must be taken for what it is and what it cannot be: certain.  We can only name Him by admitting that any name truthfully given to God must embrace its own inherent paradox as an untruthfulness.

Just as senses cannot grasp ideas and form cannot adequately represent the formless, we cannot know what is beyond knowing in any other way than by troublesome indirection, analogy, suspicion, and these scraps of knowing collected here and there.  We cling to these scraps in order to come closer to grasping the divine.  We set our heart and minds to work assembling a collage of these fragments to make a picture, to give us a name by which we can know something about God. 

We strive to know by naming that which we desire.  “We now grasp these things in the best way we can, and as they come to us, wrapped in the sacred veils …” (592B).  This intense desire and command to know God, to know that which exceeds our rational capacities, is well documented; the Scriptures tell us to speak the truth “not in the plausible words of human wisdom but in demonstration of the power granted by the Spirit” (585B).

On his Method:

What we know of Him is that we know only mere fragments of the whole of what is. 

So… specifically, how we are going to know/name him is by embodying a hyper-amplified desire directed to the creation of a method of affirming and denying these scraps of knowledge.  This meager knowledge translates our testimony into a stutter. 

Using Scripture as a guide, he collects attributes of God, in themselves insufficient to name that which is above all names, and pastes them together as a picture, once drawn then erased. 

This method is a ceaselessly active conjunction of cataphatic (affirmative) and apophatic (negative) theologies.

Cataphatic Theology: in regards to the question of naming God, is the method employed by theologians to ascribe confirmatory names to God without equivocating them.  God is Light.

Apophatic Theology:  the method employed to apply negative names to God or negate the possibility of affirmative names.  God is not Light.

Pseudo-Dionysius radically appends one theological method to the other in a hybrid but organic stutter: God is and God is not (817C-D).  “Since the unknowing of what is beyond being is something above and beyond speech, mind, or being itself, one should ascribe to it an understanding beyond being” (588A).  The result is a stutter that repeats and differentiates, that calls God “nameless and yet has the names of everything that is” (596C), “He is power insofar as he exceeds all power” (889D), He is greatness and smallness, immovable and moved (909B).  This appendage of the negative to the affirmative is necessary in the attempt to describe the indescribable.

The philosophical justification behind this method of knowing begins with the Theory of Emanation.  This states that God, as Creator, is All that is before He creates what is… that is, everything is in Him, first, and He creates from an overflowing from Himself to all of creation, which, in turn, then desire to, seeks to, and ultimately does, in death, return to Him.  The image most often applied to emanation is the bubbling over of water—most accurately, think about the cyclical biological process of clouds producing rain, rain falling, evaporation happening, clouds reforming, and raining forth, again. 

“From him and to him are all things”

—Romans 11:36.

“Every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it, and returns to it”

—Proclus, The Elements of Theology.

Every name, then, of creation can properly be applied to God because He is and was all things before they came to be distinct.  But, at the same time, no thing in creation is accurately God.  Thus, we call God by the names of all things as we also negate the assignment of all names to Him. 

On Pseudo-Dionysius’ connection to Jean-François Lyotard:

Pseudo-Dionysius and Lyotard’s interlocutors, the historical revisionists and religious skeptics, are similar in that both only permit knowledge to be that which is independently verifiably, logically based, and rational (versus a knowledge that works up to, through, and beyond reason alone).

So, Pseudo-Dionysius’ stuttering method will sound illogical to the court.  It, alone, cannot be a solution for Lyotard’s differend.  It can be, however, a productive possibility to explore because it can evade the fictionalizing tendencies of linear narrative, to which many of the other explored methods fall prey, and open up two radically non-narrative models of testimony.  Also, it lets ostension point to and beyond any and everything. 

Pseudo-Dionysius’ method of affirmation and negation lifts his testimony of God’s names beyond reason to silence, to the step beyond the speaking of both sensible and intelligible names, even while it reveals the moment when negation will falter, that is, when it concerns the name for God, Eros.  And yet, this relation motivates us to know God and motivates God to us, too; thus, faltering before the name of Eros is a mode of placing the self and the most radical Other in a phenomenological relation. 

Pseudo-Dionysius’ method may be the only way to name the unnamable, to give testimony to the empirically impossible; be the only way for a being to endeavor to understand what is beyond being. 

What, then, is this other type of knowledge by which his method functions?  

The Passions:

The “passions” is not a strictly, rigidly defined faculty or group of powers. 

Modern and contemporary epistemologies, not to mention the historical revisionist and religious skeptic, have tended towards models that exclude the diversity of human powers from truth determination along battle calls similar to the Cartesian “by the mind alone.” 

Instead, I intend the “passions” to designate a knowing that is inclusive of what is typically excluded from intellectual activity, non-exhaustively including: sensory apprehension, whether by exterior or interior senses, drives, will, common sense or sensus communis, imagination or phantasia, memory, intuition or vis aestimativa, and the synthetic powers of mind that blur the distinctions of intelligible activity. 

The “passions” designates what is other than pure reason alone.  Its etymology reveals that the passions is what we suffer. 

For the Neoplatonism that inspired Pseudo-Dionysius, “in every external object there is an inexpressible element not assimilable in the cognitive process;” it is this element the passions seek.

On the Text of the Divine Names:

Chapter One:

Subtitle/Dedication: “Dionysius the Elder to Timothy the Fellow-Elder: What the goal of this discourse is, and the tradition regarding the divine names” (585A).

As the footnote notes, the titles and dedications may be later editorial additions. 

Regardless of this possibility and/or probability, I think its consideration is useful to reinforce to us the levels of addressor-addressee relations at work here.  Recall that Dionysius was the first Greek convert to Saint Paul (Acts 17), thus, Saint Paul was the teacher to Dionysius.  Pseudo-Dionysius posits his teacher as Hierotheus (author of the supposed Elements of Theology) (cf. 648A-C, etc.).  Also, P-D does not claim to be the direct source of the text’s divine knowledge, instead ascribing it to the Scriptures.  And, in this dedication, we get the teacher-pupil relation of Dionysius and Timothy; while he identifies both as fellow-elders, the tone of the text suggests the former schooling the latter.  Finally, we must consider our role, as readers, thus pupils, in a relation to Pseudo-Dionysius and/or his text as our teachers.  If we grant the consideration that the text is a spiritual exercise we are to take up, we could even posit a further relation of pupil-teacher between ourselves as we take it up and the divine truth.   

Section One (585B-588B):

He begins by stating he will begin after The Theological Representations, the lost or fictional treatise supposedly on the trinity and the incarnation, to the work of the current treatise, The Divine Names, and their explication “as far as possible” (585B).  This conditional is needed for, as he says, one cannot speak of God in the words of human wisdom, but only in demonstration of the power granted by the Spirit.  This power surpasses speech and knowledge and our demonstration grants a degree of union beyond our conception.  “This is why we must not dare to resort to words or conceptions concerning that hidden divinity which transcends being, apart from what the sacred scriptures have divinely revealed” (588A).

Thus, granting this, “Since the unknowing of what is beyond being is something above and beyond speech, mind, or being itself, one should ascribe to it an understanding beyond being” (588A).  We gather the pieces of knowledge for our reflection from Scripture.  These pieces are “… revealed to each mind in proportion to its capacities” (588A).  This is a Platonic thesis, the proportionate distribution of knowledge according to capacity—it is most seen in explanations in Plato’s dialogues of the degree of exposure one is permitted to the forms dependent upon one’s capacity and the next transmigration of souls determined by degree of knowledge of the forms attained by the deceased in the previous life (e.g., the philosopher has a greater degree than the tyrant, and these determine next incarnation of soul). 

P-D describes this proportionate revelation as an instance of God’s goodness; presumably, God knows best what we are capable of handling and doing the most with in our individual fulfillment of our function.  He also uses this hierarchy thus created to posit God as the highest, to the degree beyond comprehension, in the spectrum of all created things.  God, as “The Inscrutable One” is beyond the grasp of every rational process, thus, of course, beyond all our human words.  Note that this paragraph is full of divine names—thus, his treatise begins its mission of delineating the names of God before it even formally appears to do so.  He is, already, named as the Inscrutable One, the Inexpressible Good, the One, the Source of all Unity, the Supra-existent Being, Mind beyond Mind, Word beyond Speech, and the Cause of all existence (588b).

Section Two (588C-589A):

God exceeds our comprehension, thus we can only use names that the Scriptures reveal (as the Scriptures are divine revelations, i.e., God telling us of Himself, the Truth).  “Many scripture writers will tell you that the divinity is not only invisible and incomprehensible, but also ‘unsearchable and inscrutable,’ since there is not a trace for anyone who would reach through into the hidden depths of this infinity.  And yet, on the other hand, the Good is not absolutely incommunicable to everything” (588C).  This, then, presents P-D his paradox to work through: He is unknowable, yet not completely incommunicable. 

Why he is not entirely incommunicable, again, is because of the proportionate revelation of truth granted to some minds.  This truth draws these concerned minds up to His contemplation … but to more, in addition: it draws them up to participation within Him and (to) the state of becoming like Him.  P-D is a mystic.  Intellectual activity is a spiritual exercise so as to make it possible for us to be granted divine union with our source, wherein we would become unified with Him (thus, granted true, intuitive, indubitable knowledge). 

The other important note here is that in this emanation as creation, the cause remains undiminished when it reveals its effects.

When we so concentrate on our activity of the seeking of divine knowledge, we are firmly drawn up to the ray of light (light being a crucial image and metaphor for P-D drawn from Plato and the Neoplatonists) “with a love matching the illuminations granted them,” thus, in proportion to our capacity (589A). 

Section Three (589A-589C):

With minds made “prudent and holy” by this concentration on divine knowledge, “we offer worship to that which lies hidden beyond thought and beyond being” (589B).  This is striking support for the intellectual activity as an activity of faith, a spiritual exercise …

Most curiously, he then adds: “With a wise silence we do honor to the inexpressible” (589B).  For most apopthatic (negative) theology and most mysticism, this is not curious at all …  Silence is the most common means of honoring that which cannot be known/said; it is the most reverent and most logical consequent action to the recognition of the inexpressible.  It is curious, however, to a project that is full of words, full of names, that hierarchializes knowledge, that has set out to delineate the names of God. 

This has been explained variously.  The most common explanation is cast the project as a process, conceived of in two ways: (1) we begin by striving to know the names of God, we concentration our attention on this knowledge, and then rest therein in silence to be gifted with divine union; or, (2) we begin by building up all the knowledge/names of God, and then un-build them as knowledge had by the act of negation or the silence that erases them, implicitly negating them, as our act of spiritual exercise/devotion.  There is textual support for both of these conceptions of silence in the process of the project.  But, there are other ways that this upholding of silence has been interpreted.  Predominately, it is cited as a clue that his method is going to radically conjoin cataphatic and apopthatic theologies together, silence being the negation, the undoing of the affirmations of knowledge.  It can also be interpreted as saying that the treatise is of esoteric knowledge, thus, of things that one must remain silent (cf. 587C); or that the ultimate knowledge of the divinity is such that about it we must remain silent.  I think that there is an additional way to read this, however; this would be a way that would be highly interpretative from reflections upon the whole project and suggestive that there is an unique type of silence that is methodologically key to the engagement of the project as a spiritual exercise.  (I will try to explain this more after notes on chapter four.)

We learn, in accord with our proportionate capacity, about “a Source which has told us about itself in the holy words of scripture” (589B); in particular, we learn: it is the cause of all, it is origin, being, and life; it calls to those who fall away; restores corruption; it is safety; it is guide; source of all things …

Section Four (589D-593B):

What the scriptures say about the divinity refers “to the beneficent processions of God” (589D).  Here, again, we see his affirmation of the theory of emanation—previously, he established that God is the source and cause of all that is, thus all that is comes from and is created by God; here, we see that all that is from and created by God are processions of Him.  Being His processions, all that is, is a reference to its source.  This is the justification why we can use the names of created things as names of God. 

He goes on to explain what the scriptures thus describe Him as, although, really, this is how the Neoplatonists describe the One …

Monad and Henad (Greek root: “one”)—it is One because of its natural simplicity and indivisible unity (He is all things, but not a composite, which is subject to corruption, but a whole, an unity).

Trinity—its “transcendent fecundity” manifests itself as three persons.

Cause of Beings—“since in its goodness it employed its creative power to summon all things into being.

Wise and Beautiful—“because beings which keep their nature uncorrupted are filled with divine harmony and sacred beauty”

Loving (toward humanity)—“because in one of its persons it accepted a true share of what it is we are, and thereby issued a call to man’s lowly state to rise up to it” … The interesting explanation of this comes immediately after, “In a fashion beyond words, the simplicity of Jesus became something complex …” (592A).  From the Neoplatonists, the One is the source of the Many, the unity is the source of the plural, the simple is the source of the complex.  Thus, here, Jesus’ separation from the trinity through incarnation is a movement from simplicity, from the unity, from the (three that are) One, to the complexity of the many.  Of course, in this movement, there is not a diminishing of his original unity or divinity; he returns to the source.  This hints towards the final aspect of the theory of emanation that we have yet to see: the return or regression to the source.  (Recall the image associated most often with emanation: water overflowing its source, trickling out into a founding of all that is, and then all that is, returning back up to the source.)

We then get the best description of mysticism in the following paragraph (592B-C): we grasp this knowledge in “the best way we can, and as they come to us, wrapped in the sacred veils of that love toward humanity with which scripture and hierarchical traditions cover the truths of the mind with things derived from the realm of the senses” (592B).  With these veiled truths that we gather, we contemplate them until the time comes (if and) when we are purified by them, that we return to our source in divine union, “And there we shall be, our minds away from passion and from earth, and we shall have a conceptual gift of light from him and, somehow, in a way we cannot know, we shall be united with him and, our understanding carried away, blessedly happy, we shall be struck by his blazing light” (592C). 

“But as for now, what happens is this” (592C)…  In other words, until divine union—and, we may proffer, that in order to make ourselves worthy of union—“We use whatever appropriate symbols we can for the things of God” (592C).  We take these symbols as analogies to direct us beyond them to His truth.  In this movement beyond, we leave behind all of our notions, halt the mind, and (in appropriate degree), approach the Ray.  A question that we will ask ourselves throughout, however, is the status of these “symbols as analogies”—in abidance with affirmative theology, we will equivocate the name and the thing, but … being most truthful to the theory of emanation and the justification of negative theology, we do, indeed, in a way, make this equation between names and being.  Otherwise, we would have no need to actively erase or negate the names. 

This paragraph also lays out the process: strive to acquire knowledge by proceeding through perceptible symbols to their conceptual symbolization and then move beyond this knowing, beyond all conceptualization, the ceasing of thought and speech.  Thus, we see two ways in which he will conjoin affirmative and negative theology—on the one hand, with each name (with the exception of eros), he will affirm and negate it; on the other, with all the names as a whole, he will present them as a full-as-possible picture of God, and then negate the picture by leaving it behind. 

Section Five (593A-593D):

Now… having established how we move beyond all concepts because we cannot comprehend divinity, P-D must return to the question “How then can we speak of the divine names?” (593A).  Here, he better lays out all of the ways in which God exceeds our comprehension; the transcendent surpasses: discourse, knowledge, beyond reach of mind, beyond reach of being, beyond perception, imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, and understanding. 

So, how can we speak of the inexpressible?

“Since the union of divinized minds with the Light beyond all deity occurs in the cessation of all intelligent activity, the godlike unified minds who imitate these angels as far as possible praise it most appropriately through the denial of all beings” (593B-C). 

Because some people can talk about the divine names; those people who are granted the greatest degree of knowledge and have the greatest purity so as to most closely imitate the angels, those beings who commune with the divine.  Note that “imitation” (mimesis) is also a Platonic inheritance.  Thus, we take the scraps of knowledge from the scriptures, but then we must follow the model of those who know the best and deny all of this knowledge—this is his admittance of employing negative theology—we must negate all that we know of God, for all that we know is not actually knowledge of God.  He is at a remove from everything, and yet the source under all things.  Thus, what we do is turn to the things and use the names of creation to speak towards what cannot be spoken of—the cause precontains all the effects, thus name the cause through its effects, and then negate all of these names thus given. 

The end of this section offers us the second element of the theory of emanation—the return.  “Because it is there the world has come to be and exists.  All things long for it.  The intelligent and rational long for it by way of knowledge, the lower strata by way of perception, the remainder by way of the stirrings of being alive and in whatever fashion befits their condition” (593D).  This passage is rich.  It summarizes the theory of emanation: the source creates from itself, and all that is created longs to return to the source.  It emphasizes, for the first most direct time, the key of longing in procession/creation and reversion.  And it utilizes the Platonic/Aristotelian conceptions of the soul (Aristotle’s, especially, the rational animals, brute animals, and plants, but also Platonic, as the role of desire works with the rational and spirited parts) so explicate the proportionality of capacity as directive of the how of achieving return.  

Section Six (596A-596D):

Thus, granting emanation, the “theologians praise it by every name—and as the Nameless One” (596A).  P-D proceeds to a long list of scriptural citations of its namelessness and its many names.

Section Seven (696C-597B):

Repeating, in summary, “And so it is that as Cause of all and as transcending all, he is rightly nameless and yet has the names of everything that is” (596C). 

This section nicely summarizes and more precisely delineates the theory of emanation.  This provides the justification for the treatise. 

Section Eight (597A-597C):

P-D continues with a listing of other names not previously mentioned.  Many of these are symbolic names (which, he says, he addressed in his treatise The Symbolic Theology, which is no longer or perhaps never was existent).  He then moves to the more conceptual names—that is, the rest of his treatise.  He concludes with an insistence of the sacred nature of this knowledge, and its nature as esoteric wisdom—thus, he cautions Timothy to guard this knowledge and not share it with the uninitiated.  Adding the final sentence that he prays that God will not take the words from his mouth for punishment of any misuse of the knowledge. 

Chapter Two:

Subtitle: “Concerning the unified and differentiated Word of God, and what the divine unity and differentiation is” (636B-652A)

Section 1:

God is all that He is; “It is the entire divine subsistence …” (636C). 

Subsistence is hypostasis—the divine underpinning or that unity of diversity.  (Often used in terms of the trinity being three and one at the same time.  Neoplatonism uses it for the objective reality, which is an inner reality of something—not objective in sense of empirical—a better description is substantive reality, the being-reality of something.  This debate is thoroughly Neoplatonic merelogy on the One and the Many.)

Contrast/compare this with Haecceity: Latin for the ‘thisness’ of something, which makes it particular (discrete qualities); can be what makes it essentially what it is, but this is in terms of particularity as opposed to unity… (Quiddity, the ‘whatness’ is more the essence of something that is in terms of genre, not species.)   The debate is critical in the Abrahamic tradition, too, as its monotheism is principle, yet philosophy inherited from polytheistic sources.  There was a raging debate between Monophysitism / Monophysiticism (monos = one, alone; physis = nature), a Christological argument that Jesus has only one nature (his humanity is a part of his divinity, and not distinct from it), and Chalcedonian argument that Jesus has two natures (his humanity is distinct from his divinity).  The former view was considered heretical; the latter was deemed orthodox by the Western and Eastern Churches (for the most part, although there were numerous stages of Church development wherein either/or/both/and views were in and out of favor in various forms, e.g. Nestorianism (opposite of Monophysitism), Eutychianism and Apollonarianism (variants of Monophysitism), monothelitism (synthesis of the opposing positions), Miaphysitism, etc.).  It is apparent how easily P-D’s writings could be guilty of either position, as his is a synthesis that maintains unity and distinction at once.  

All the names of God are praised as regarding the whole that He is; using one name as praise (knowing) does not mean that it is a mere part that we are discerning, but in its piece, it is reference to the whole.  His most frequent support for this claim is the quotation of Col.1:16a and 17b: “in him all things hold together” (637B; see ch. 1, section 5).

Section 2:

This is not a confusion of the distinctions within God.  In their unity, they are also differentiated.  God operates sometimes with distinctions and sometimes without any at all; it is not our right to make them where there are none, nor is it our right to jumble together what is differentiated (640A).

Section 3:

“The unified names apply to the entire Godhead …” (640B).

But, there are distinctions in the names; P-D gives us two here: those that are a denial that recognize the superabundance of God (e.g., transcendently good, transcendently divine, etc.), and those that are causal, that imply the power of causation or the effect of causation, which are ascribed to God as the Cause of all (e.g., good, beautiful, existent, etc.). 

Section 4:

More on divine unity and differentiation:

Unity / Subsistence / Hypostasis: “… divine unities are the hidden and permanent, supreme foundations of a steadfastness which is more than ineffable and more than unknowable” (640D).

Differentiation: “… the differentiations within the Godhead have to do with the benign processions and revelations of God” (640D). 

Unity is beyond our capacity to experience or conceive; it is the totality of God.  Differentiation is that by which we can experience and know some of God; it is that by which he creates and lets us know.

Lamps Example:

Many lamps with their own light, but they, together, enlighten the whole room.  “… there is nevertheless a single undifferentiated light and from all of them comes the one undivided brightness” (641B).

Carry out one lamp and its light will be carried out without diminishing the lit-up-ness of the house or increasing the light of the remaining lamps. 

“But turn now to that unity above being” (641C):

“I say that it surpasses not only the union of things corporeal, but also the union of souls, and even that of minds themselves.  These minds purely, supernaturally, and thoroughly possess the godlike and celestial lights, but they do so in a participation proportionate to their participation in the unity which transcends all things” (641C).

The unity above being so far surpasses our reach; we participate in this being, as processions from it, and our participation is proportionate to each, and yet that in which we participate so far exceeds us, even our participation cannot let us approach its grasp. 

Section 5:

Our knowledge works through the differentiations of this unity.  It is through this differentiation that God has created all things (processions). 

Circle and Seal Examples (644A):

The whole is participated in by all; none participates in only a part, but in this wholeness.

“It is rather like the case of a circle.  The center point of the circle is shared by the surrounding radii” (644A).

“Or take the example of a seal.  There are numerous impressions of the seal and these all have a share in the original prototype; it is the same whole seal in each of the impressions and none participates in only a part” (644A). 

Section 6:

“Maybe some will say that the seal is not totally identical in all the reproductions of it.  My answer is that this is not because of the seal itself, which gives itself completely and identically to each.  The substances which receive a share of the seal are different.  Hence the impressions of the one entire identical archetype are different” (644B).

Thus, it is the “material” that has inherent differences accounting for the possible differences discerned between impressions; it is not the seal that differs, and it is not the sealing/imprinting that differs.  This example helps illustrate his point, but can also be confusing.  We must say that the unity is the same in its differentiations, but must also say that the differentiations are different.  The creations are obviously different, receiving themselves proportionately.  But, that cannot mean that the creating of the seal differs, for then it would violate the unity.  Another confusion is that in the seal example, it is pressed into wax, etc., material that is already; analogically, this discords with the fact that the Creator creates the whole, the material and the form given it.  But, this is not a problem if we consider the “material” being the different beings being created; it is not preexistent, but created as different things by the identical and subsistent creator.   

Section 7:

“For the truth is that everything divine and even everything revealed to us is known only by way of whatever share of them is granted.  Their actual nature, what they are ultimately in their own source and ground, is beyond all intellect and all being and all knowledge” (645A).

We know the truth by what it reveals to us; we know it in its differentiations: for example, P-D tells us, when we give the name “God” to that transcendent hiddenness, or any other name, “what our minds lay hold of is in fact nothing other than certain activities apparent to us, activities which deify, cause being, bear life, and give wisdom” (645A). 

And, composing the negative aspect that he compounds to the affirmative: “For our part, as we consider that hiddenness and struggle to break free of all the workings of our minds, we find ourselves witnessing no divination, no life, no being which bears any likeness to the absolutely transcendent Cause of all things” (645A-B). 

We grasp differentiations that point us to their source, that unity that is not any differentiation or its collaged differentiations together, but no-thing at all, no thing that bears any resemblance to a part or accumulation of parts; that unity is beyond our experience and conception.  But… this passage also shows process—we “consider that hiddenness” and “struggle to break free of all the workings of our minds” … We struggle to know and then we struggle to un-know to work towards the true ‘knowing’ that is no knowing (in our human understanding of knowing).  Our struggle is a witnessing; it is not something born witness to, for we see no-thing, we see only that we do not know.  Our struggle is also our testimony, our saying the pieces, and that testimony that is reduced to stuttering and silence.  We are and are not a witness in the etymological and everyday, intentional sense of one who knows, has knowledge of something—the knowledge had is that there is something that is no-thing; it is knowledge of our lack of knowledge.  

We know something because we know that there is something that we cannot know.  “But we can neither say nor understand how this may be so” (645B).

Section 8:

A qualification of procession.  We are of God, and our intellectual knowledge can go that far back to knowing God.  But … “In reality there is no exact likeness between caused and cause, for the caused carry within themselves only such images of their originating sources as are possible for them, whereas the causes themselves are located in a realm transcending the caused, according to the argument regarding their source” (645C). 

This is in accordance with what P-D has argued before this section; even as its addition does blur the strength of his justification for the differentiations being true knowledge, even as they are only partial knowledge.  As Luibheid, the translator, adds, this restatement with its slight weakening may be to protect himself from the charge of pantheism.  (Pantheism has divinity throughout all creation, not transcendent and in creation, thus, his re-insistence on transcendence saves him from the charge). 

Section 9:

The incarnation of Jesus is “entirely mysterious” for us; we cannot enclose it in words or grasp it by the mind (not even the angels can ‘understand’ this). 

Reference to Hierotheus, his “teacher” (648A)—he learned these sacred things and experienced them, which is something P-D does not claim for himself.  This “experience” he describes as a “sympathy”—this is a Neoplatonic term for the mystical experience (or for attaining it, theurgy), for this is an experience that is not on the rational, but the passionate level (pathos), one of feelings, that one ‘suffers’: “Each god has his ‘sympathetic’ representative in the animal, vegetable, and mineral world” (Proclus, ET, see footnote 121 in text).

He announces he is then going to share with us what Hierotheus taught him about Jesus.

Section 10:

The teachings of Hierotheus on Jesus:  parts unified with whole; “… neither whole nor part while being at the same time both whole and part” (648C).  Whole is all its parts and is before and beyond parts.  The “Transcendent possessor of transcendence” (648D).

Section 11:

Moves to the “object of our discussion … the common and united names that are applied to the differentiated being of God” (649A).

Provides another good description of processions: “This Godhead is granted as a gift to all things.  It flows over in shares of goodness to all.  And it becomes differentiated in a unified way” (649B).  “Flows” is the common use (by the Neoplatonists) of the water metaphor to describe this procession as creation.

He then proceeds through a lovely paragraph of the paradoxes we must think in thinking God—multiplied and singular, being beyond being, one amid plurality, etc.

This knowledge, he says, comes to him through the genealogy of his teacher and Saint Paul, who received the knowledge divinely.  Interesting is his further explication by quoting Paul about there being many gods while there is one God. 

Chapter Three: 

Subtitle: The Power of Prayer; concerning the blessed Hierotheus, piety, and our writings on theology

Section One:

This section indicates a bit of a false start to the actual work of The Divine Names—“For a start, then, let us look, if you will, at the most important name, ‘Good,’ which shows forth all the processions of God.  But we should really begin with an invocation of the Trinity, the source and, indeed, the superior of what is good” (680B). 

Thus, before we start at the beginning, we must start before the beginning, with a consideration of the trinity.  Why?  Because it “shows forth every one of its most excellent processions and we should be uplifted to it and be shaped by t o as to learn of those good gifts which are gathered together around it” (680B).  P-D is not saying that there is something higher than God, but that God is the trinity, and, of course, more than this, thus also not just this (as usual, his formula forbids any simple sentences).  He also seems to be demonstrating another hesitation before presenting his treatise’s main point—the delineation and explication of the names of God—by adding this additional, brief chapter to re-state the importance of preparing ourselves to receive this knowledge.  This additional emphasis on one’s state of being again reinforces that the treatise has an aim to be a spiritual exercise as much as, if not more, than being a mere treatise cataloging divine names. 

This chapter is also rich in references to and inheritances from the Neoplatonists, from Iamblichus to Proclus to Origen, etc. 

Proclus (412-485 ce): born in Constantinople, child to Patricius, a legal official in the Byzantine Empire courts and studied in Alexandria, returned to Constantinople to practice law, but is considered a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher because he left Constantinople (and law), dissatisfied with the study there, and went to Athens to study at the Academy in 431.  He was said to have studied under Plutarch, Syrianus, and Asclepigenia, eventually succeeding the middle teacher as the head of the Academy.  He spent the rest of his life there, minus one year of exile (his philosophy unfavorable to the Christian rule), in which he was said to have travelled widely and have been initiated into many different “mystery cults.”  Most of his works are commentaries on Platonic dialogues, which are faithful to them, yet also presenting his own philosophical theories.  Another influential work was his commentary on Euclid’s Elements of Geometry.  His own philosophical system was worked out in two treatises, the Elements of Theology and the Platonic Theology (additional essays, minor works, and fragments exist).  Elements of Theology was the work inescapably influential on P-D, who ascribed the title to his teacher, Hierotheus (cf., 681A, etc.).  This work, 211 propositions followed by proofs, traces the origin in the One (to Hen) to the instantiation of the Many individual souls in the world (through a chain of henads, individuated ones that overflow from the one and carry multiplicity, eventually, to the many through principles of apeiron and peras, the infinite and the limit, which proceed to the Nous, intellect, and then to the Psuche, soul, and finally to the material world—in P-D, this chain is altered so that these are Mind and Soul, designating angels and humans and then non-rational souls and things).  This text was condensed into a summary and attributed to Aristotle as, first, Discourse on the Pure Good (predominately in Arabic), and then as Book of Causes (Liber de Causis) (the attribution to Aristotle expanded the book’s influence, as Neoplatonic thought was undergoing harsh critique, especially in medieval Islamic philosophy; it was Thomas Aquinas who first notably realized that the Liber de Causis was a summation of Elements of Theology).

The first direct reference we get in this chapter to Proclus is the last sentence of the first paragraph: “For the Trinity is present to all things, though all things are nor present to it” (680B).  P-D is referencing Proclus’ proposition 142 in his Elements of Theology:

PROPOSITION CXLII.

The Gods are present to all things in the same manner, but all things are not in the same manner present to the Gods. But every thing participates of their presence according to its own order and power. And this is accomplished by some things uniformly, but by others manifoldly; by some eternally, but by others according to time; and by some incorporeally, but by others corporeally.

[Proof:]

For it is necessary that the different participation of the same things should become different either from the participant, or from that which is participated.  But every divine nature always has the same order, and is free from any relation to all things, and is unmixed.  It follows therefore that the mutation must arise and sub­sist from the participants, and that in these there is that which is not invariably the same, and that at different times they are differently present to the Gods.  Hence though the Gods are present to all things with invariable sameness, all things are not in the same manner present to them.  But other things are present to them to the extent of their capacity, and according to the manner in which they are present they enjoy their illuminations.  For the participation of the Gods is according to the measure of their presence.

—Proclus, Elements of Theology, CXLII (proposition 142),

trans. Joseph H. Peterson, 2005,

cf., http://www.esotericarchives.com/proclus/metaele2.htm#section17

for an e-text of the work.

The point of the statement being that if we invoke the divine with holy prayers, in the right state of being (that is, pure, untroubled minds suitable for union), “… then we are surely present to it” (680B).  “Presence,” however, is a troubling word for our dear Areopagite, as it implies thingliness that can be somewhere, bound by space and in time; obviously, God is that which transcends space, place, being, and time, being as he is, the creator of all these and more than them. 

The next two paragraphs proffer several images troubling with directionality and movement:  We stretch ourselves upward, God is a shining ray shining outward, a shining chain hangs downward, we reach up and grab it, we pull it down to us, we are pulled up to it, we are on a boat pulling a rock to us and ourselves to a rock, the rock both retreats as we push from it and is immobile as we move from it, we won’t pull down God’s power, but be uplifted by it, etc. 

However, compare this last affirmation that we are pulled to Him, even as it seems we are pulling him to us to 712A-B, wherein it is clear that God (from his own desire) leaves His transcendent dwelling to come to us. 

Does prayer affect the gods / God?  Iamblichus and Origen, etc., argue that prayer does not affect the gods/God, but the one who is praying.  P-D seems to go back and forth on this point (re: 680C-D versus 712A-B), although he is obviously not saying that somehow we, in ourselves, have power over God, because all of our power is his power granted us in an appropriate share.  But, as we will see in the next chapter, the force of this desired communion is most intense; it may not be entirely improper to denote this force as so great as to be capable of moving God (just so long as we respect his affirmation and negation of all claims).

Section Two:

P-D again acknowledges his lineage from Hierotheus (as his teacher and the author of a treatise by the same name as that of Proclus), and theirs from Saint Paul.  He mentions that he (presumably the Timothy to whom the treatise is addressed) had returned Hierotheus’ work to P-D, saying it was too complex for his understanding.  This, then, is reason for P-D to try to re-explain and make clear some of these points.  (“If solid food may be given only to the perfect, how much perfection is required when this food is given to others?” (681C); indicating our infancy in the light of the superior knowledge of the divinely inspired and God.)

He inserts a telling of an anecdote as to when he acquired these ideas first from Hierotheus: at the “… vision of that mortal body, that source of life, which bore God” (681D), which is presumably the Dormition of the Virgin Mary—i.e., the “falling asleep” or death of Mary, at which all of the Apostles were said to be present; it is similar to the Assumption of Mary, both meaning her material death and spiritual ascendance to heaven, but the Orthodox (Dormition) and the Catholic (Assumption) Churches have differing details as to its event and recognition. 

His teacher was said to have had a mystical experience there, an ecstatic one (“… so taken outside of himself …” (681D-684A), in which the divine spoke through him.  [More on Ecstasy here]  While P-D goes on to say “I say nothing of those mysterious experiences.  You know them well, and they cannot be explained to the multitude” (684A-B), he may very well have inserted this anecdote here to further explicate precisely the experience of ecstasy in the mystical experience and tie it to a holy, liturgical history. 

Section Three:

P-D debases his own knowledge, making himself humble and inferior to his lineage of teachers, “I know I lack the words to articulate such knowledge of God” (684B).  And to argue why, nevertheless, he is writing a treatise: “… I would not even … speak of, the divine philosophy were it not that I am convinced in my mind that one may not disregard the received knowledge of divine things.  I believe this not merely because one’s spirit naturally yearns for and seeks whatever contemplation of the supernatural may be attainable but also because the splendid arrangement of divine laws commands it” (684B-C). 

“We are told not to busy ourselves with what is beyond us, since they are beyond what we deserve and are unattainable.  But the law tells us to learn everything granted to us and to share these treasures generously with others” (684C). 

Thus, it is obedience that makes him speak, as much as it is his desire to know. 

Chapter Four:

Subtitle: “Concerning ‘good,’ ‘light,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘love,’ ‘ecstasy,’ and ‘zeal;’ and that evil is neither a being, nor from a being, nor in beings.”

Good – a preeminent name for God; borrowed from ancient Greek philosophy (Forms); note that all that is good gets its being and goodness from God in proportion.

Light – also borrowed from Greek thought (allegory of the cave); pedagogic image.

Beautiful – also borrowed from Greek thought, compare Plato’s good=desired versus Aristotle’s akrasia and beauty-harmony as music and celestial movement; beauty bids – this helps explain both the reversion of P&R and our command to try and stutter this fragmentary knowledge and shows his mysticism

Yearning – here P-D goes out onto a limb, and his faltering voice shows it; he uses Eros, rather than Agape or Phileîn as a name for God; why?  Is it blasphemous?  How relate to the passions versus reason division?  Eros is a lack, what effect might this have?  (Procession)

Evil – this reading is also very tricky; the first four names revealed that God is so superlative that even nonbeing yearns for Him, but how?  Evil, at least more clearly as embodied in nonbeing and in demons, is as a privation, but proportionate.  So, what is not is, still, in someway so as to yearn to be…

Section 1:

693B

Good: preeminent name for God; this goodness of God is responsible for all goodness in the world just as the sun is responsible, by its very act of being, for the light in the world. 

693C-696A

“such beings” – he is speaking here of the Angels: they are shaped by their longing for the good; they are immortal and nonmaterial, purified from corruption and death, thanks to God’s goodness, they are minds who understand in a “supra-mundane way,” they enlighten others.

Section 2:

696B

Angles are constant in their desire for the Good (as P-D says he has elaborated in his work, The Properties and Ranks of the Angels, a lost or fictional treatise).  Everything good comes from “the Universal Cause and Source of goodness” – this source gave goodness to all below it “to exemplify the good, to manifest that hidden goodness in themselves, to be, so to speak, the angelic messengers of the divine source, to reflect the light glowing in the inner sanctuary” (696B).

696C

Below the ANGELS are the SOULS (human souls).  They, too, get their existence and goodness from the Good.  They, too, have intelligence, immortality, and existence and can strive towards angelic life.  The angels are their leaders and can guide them to the best life (as P-D claims to have elaborated in his lost or fictional treatise The Soul). 

696C-696D

En-mattered things, i.e., Irrational souls: creatures, plants, and objects:

All sentient and living things “have soul and life because of the existence of the Good,” as do all plants have “nourishment and life and motion,” as do all soulless and lifeless matter (969D).

Section 3:

697A

The Good transcends all things and therefore is the creator of all form.  “In it is nonbeing really an excess of being.  It is not a life, but is, rather, superabundant Life.  It is not a mind, but is superabundant Wisdom” (697A).

Note the most provocative addition: “And one might even say that nonbeing itself longs for the Good which is above all being” (697A).  Nonbeing is how P-D will speak of evil.  All things, then, even evil, long for the Good.

Section 4:                697B-C-D – 700A-B-C

Good is the Cause and source of all else, too… the heavens, universe, time, light, measure, eternity, number, and order. 

God, being the source for all these things is also called by the names of these things, especially by the name Light (697C).

“The Good returns all things to itself and gathers together whatever may be scattered, for it is the divine Source and unifier of the sum total of all things” (700A).  This denotes the return in the theory of procession and reversion from and to the source.  The Good creates all things and calls all things back into itself. 

The Good is source, cohesion, and goal of life.  He moves immediately to a remark on desire showing, although not yet explicating, how it is love and desire that drives this cycle of procession and reversion.  “All things desire it: Everything with mind and reason seeks to know it, everything sentient yearns to perceive it, everything lacking perception has a living and instinctive longing for it, and everything lifeless and merely existence turns, in its own fashion, for a share of it” (700B).

Further relation of God to the image of the sun or Light, whose rays show (make things visible) and gather (collect within the light)—this relates to the frequent image of Light for the Good in Platonic philosophy (700B-C).

Section 5:               700C-D – 701A

P-D refers to his lost or fictitious treatise The Symbolic Theology, which he said would address the perceptible symbols as names for God, including more on Light.  Instead of the specifically perceptible traits, he wants instead to address the conceptual nature of the name of Light (and others) for God. 

Thus, Light is a proper name for God because, as the “light of the mind” is universal amongst all things of mind, the Good illuminates all things with goodness.  Note, again, the use of a strong ancient Greek philosophical image, thinking, for only one of many examples, the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic, wherein the ignorant and fooled mind is blinded by the painful rays of sunlight when dragged up from captivity in the cave through education.  Light drives ignorance from souls as light drives away darkness.  Despite the image of the painful light in The Republic, a common Greek premise was proportional learning; each mind is given what it can well handle.  This is repeated in P-D’s frequent assertion about how each mind is illuminated slowly (by God) in accordance with its nature and capacity.  The first such statement in this chapter reads: “At first it deals out the light in small amounts and then, as the wish and longing for light begin to grow, it gives more and more of itself, shining ever more abundantly on them because they ‘loved much,’ and always it keeps urging them onward and upward as their capacity permits” (701A). 

Light, then, a proper name for God, reveals a moment of his Greek intellectual inheritance but also provides us with an image of how we interrelate with God, it is pedagogic…

Section 6:                   701A-B

So, we see how the name Light multiplies itself in that its sensible qualities can also be rightfully applied to the Good: e.g., “Light of the Mind,” “Beam and Spring,” and “overflowing radiance” (701A).

The Good gives everything its light, precedes and transcends everything, and gathers and anticipates all things, it is the source of everything and unifies everything, renews and perfects everything, and redirects all things to the really real.  

Section 7:            701C-D – 704 A-B-CBEAUTY

Now we turn to new names: “The sacred writers lift up a hymn of praise to this Good.  They call it beautiful, beauty, love, and beloved.  They give it the names which convey that it is the source of loveliness and is the flowering of grace” (701C). 

Thus, another proper name for God: Beauty.  (Making no distinction between Beauty and the Beautiful… wherein beauty might be some the ingredient that many beautiful things share—God is the beauty and beautiful beyond and responsible for both and all things that have a share in it.)

Playing, like Plato, on the etymology, P-D says that Beauty [Kallos] “bids [kaleo]” to us, “calls” to us, and gathers all things in it… the play is important, though, because are we not drawn to things we find beautiful?  Is not what we like what we consider to be lovely? 

The sharp distinction that P-D makes from the way we may think of beauty, though, is to eliminate its relativity… it is not that that which is beautiful is so in relation to something less beautiful, no, for the Good is the “beautiful beyond all.  It is forever so, unvaryingly, unchangeably so…” but beauty in and of itself, eternally, completely (701D).

All beauty comes from the Beauty that is God; all harmony, sympathy, community come from beauty (704A; later, he includes all rest and all stirring, too, at 704C).  It creates all things and calls all things back to it (“Beauty unites all things and is the source of all things” 704A). 

“The Beautiful is therefore the same as the Good…” (704B) and even “nonbeing also shares in the Beautiful and the Good, because nonbeing, when applied transcendently to God in the sense of a denial of all things, is itself beautiful and good” (704B). 

Section 8:                704D – 705A

How, then, if the beauty creates and causes a return, do things rest and find motion?

The divine intelligences move: a circle, a straight line, and a spiral.  What does this mean?  When the Divine Intelligences are conceived, they dwell, actively, and rest and reside in the Good, thus, they move in a circle, from and to God.  But, then, they share with all things below them the goodness of the Good, thus, they move in a straight line down to created things, but then, even in their movement outward, they always are in and remain at one with the Good, thus moving in a spiral.

Section 9:                    705A-B

The soul, like the Angels, has movements of circularity, spirals, and straight lines insofar as it dwells on God, reaches out to things beyond it, draws those things up, and seeks the simple unity in their diversity (or, return back straight to a more circular contemplation).

Section 10 ff:                705B-C-D – 708A-B

The Good and Beautiful cause these movements.  Existence is movement, “all being drives from, exists in, and is returned toward the Beautiful and the Good” (705D).

“…every source, all preservation and ending, everything in fact, derives from the Beautiful and the Good.  Here is the source of all which transcends every sources, here is an ending which transcends completion.  ‘For from Him and through Him and in Him and to Him are all thins’ says holy scripture” (708A).

“And so it is that all things must desire, must yearn for, must love, the Beautiful and the Good” (708A).  If we love the Beautiful, we are drawn to the Beautiful and thus desire it.  And, also, here we learn a new name (or set of names) for the Good: YEARNING (and Desire and Love, i.e., Eros).

“The divine longing is Good seeking good for the sake of the Good” (708B).

Thus, what we have seen so far is that the name Beauty is a revealing name for God because beauty (kallos) is that which bids to us (kaleo); it attracts our attention and births our desire to pursue it; it inspires us to see beauty in all things and thus being the cause of all things; it inspires harmony, the innate togetherness of all things, and love between all things; thus it “gathers everything into itself” (701D). 

Beauty inspires our love, “… each bestirs itself and all are stirred to do and to will whatever it is they do and will because of the yearning for the Beautiful and the Good” (708A).  Thus, the next divine name is Yearning.  Yearning is a translation of eros, not the more common religious term for love, agape. 

This explains why P-D may say that we “may be so bold” (708A) to call God Eros, and defensively cautions “Let no one imagine that in giving status to the term ‘yearning’ I am running counter to scripture,” citing scriptural passages that only very weakly support his case, but that “it would be unreasonable and silly to look at words rather than at the power of the meanings” (708B), and then apologizes for language, “The truth we have to understand is that we use letters, syllables, phrases, written terms and words because of the senses” (708D).

Why is he defensive about the name Eros?

There are four associations to eros that can cause offense:

1)Sexuality:

2)Physicality/Materiality:

3)Lack:

4)Deviancy from the Good:

His (implicit) rebuttal:

1)The implication of sexuality is misleading, but okay, as this love is not merely chaste; it is the sort of love that must fully awaken one and drive one to union.  He supports this claim citing Samuel 1:26, “Love for you came on me like love for women” (709C).

2)The implication of materiality is misleading, but okay, because it must follow the affirmation and denial method of all names, thus better point beyond itself.  This can be supported with the Song of Songs reveling in physical descriptions to point to the love that cannot be otherwise captured in language.

3)The definition of lack is equally okay because of our method of affirmation and denial to recognize that what is, is also not what is.  This precarious, contradictory nature of eros as something which is nothing makes one feels “a ‘presence’ that is certainly not present” (Lyotard), which captures its absurdity of one bumping up against the limit of thought and expression.  Lack better captures this name of the divine because if the object could be had, the desire would be satisfied and cease to exist; having it as lack permits an argument for the sustaining of desire.

4)If eros is our impetus to strive in absurdity to name the unnamable and its end is to reunite with our source, this is not deviancy, but the only possible pursuit of God.

Eros is also the best name for God because it resonates with the idea of the transgression of limits; we “must be so bold” so as to strive for the logically impossible.  If it invokes the transgression of limits, it also confirms that there are limits, there is an impossibility that is our end.  Agape is conceived of as unconditional love; this implies no limits, thus lacks the recognition of the impossibility (which inspires and maintains actions) and an end, God, that which is not within our limits. 

The attainment of the object of yearning is its own destruction (destruction of eros as a drive and the identification of the lover and beloved through its relation).  If eros is a lack, this implies it will evade this conclusion, but we yearn with the wholehearted commitment and thought that we can achieve this end.  Thus, we act by risking self-annihilation and annihilation of that which we love; we risk everything for it. 

Finally, Eros is a superior name for God because of its being an inexpressible excess—existanai phrenon, that which drives us out of our minds.  We must get beyond mind and material so as to reunite with God in divine union.  Thus …

What further compounds the importance and potential offense of the name Eros?

Ecstasy:  “This divine yearning brings ecstasy so that the lover belongs not to self but to the beloved” (712A), and, since everything that is, is in God first, then God yearns in a superior way to our own yearning, “And, in truth, it must be said that the very cause of the universe in the beautiful, good superabundance of his benign yearning for all is also carried outside of himself in the loving care he has for everything” (712A).  God yearns, too, and achieves ecstasy; carried outside of himself, “He is, as it were, beguiled by goodness, by love, and by yearning and is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things” (712B). 

Ecstasy describes procession, how God creates, and describes reversion, how we must return to the Source.  [More on Ecstasy here] 

Sections 18 ff.:

Yet… as all too common, from the investigation of yearning, P-D turns to a consideration of evil.

Evil is not a name of God here.  The topic is raised by someone asking what accounts for the demons, those who turn away from the good and beautiful, if it is said that everything yearns for such.  This launches P-D into a wildly perplexing explication of demons, nonbeing, and evil which runs nearly 13 pages to the end of the chapter.  He frequently contradicts himself and ends with no terribly clear definitions and explanations.

The clearest conception that we can struggle with is that demons, nonbeing, and evil exist, but how (what they are and from what they come) is ambiguous.  Insofar as evil, as something in things (although even this statement is tentative), people or acts, it seems that this is a degree of nonbeing within being, thus, we must conceive of something like a proportionate privation of being and goodness (an inverse of the proportionate capacities given in procession).  

To see some of what is contained in this complex and logic-frustrating section, consider the following, a brief delineation of the “argument” on evil in Section 19 alone:

Evil does not come from the Good (or else it would be good) (716B);

Everything comes from the Good (thus nothing comes from evil) (716C);

Evil cannot act as evil to itself, or else it cannot exist (716C);

Thus evil cannot be wholly evil, or it would not be (thus, it must have some good in it) (716C);

Everything that is, is from the Good, or else it is nonbeing (716C);

But everything not in being is also in the Good (716C);

Thus, evil is not a being (or else it would not be totally evil), nor is it nonbeing (for it would still have to be in the Good) (716D);

Yet, evil has “a greater nonexistence and otherness from the Good than nonbeing has” (but, of course it cannot be greater than the superabundance of Being) (716D);

And, if it does not have being, this will collapse virtue and vice by removing virtue’s opposite of evil (717A);

Thus, there is something contrary to goodness, and this is evil (717A);

“Therefore evil is a being” (717A);

Evil is in things that have being (717A);

Evil contributes to the fulfillment of the world and by its existence saves the world from imperfection (717B).

Just within this section (and the rest of the chapter only makes the argument more twistingly complex), we see the numerous contradictory claims.  For example, evil is, yet it is not in being nor is it nonbeing; it is, yet has no clear cause; it is, yet it has no existence, and this nonexistence is greater than nonbeing’s difference from being, etc.  A further complexity is that the accounts of evil itself, the evil that is demons, the evil that is nonbeing, and the evil that is said to be in things, like in the soul and in bodies, all run together.  The following offers most of the claims extracted from this latter half of the chapter about these different modes of evil:

Demons: beings; exist; not evil by nature; not permanently evil; have a share of the good (proportionate privation); long for the good; but evil is not really ‘in’ demons; evil in demons is in the opposition of a mind shaped by goodness; their evil is a lack of angelic virtues; their evil is a deviation from the good; their evil qualities are not innately evil; there are complete, but a failure of their powers to perceive to good makes them evil;

Nonbeing: longs for the good; is what it is on account of what it lacks; exists; evil to the extent of its lack;

Evil in soul: evil not in souls; evil in souls lies in activity contrary to reason;

Evil in bodies: evil not in bodies; evil in bodies lies in renunciation of what is natural;

Evil: not being nor nonbeing; exists; contributes to perfection of the world; is only in contrast to good; not inhere in beings; not in God; not from the Good; not in angels; not in animals; not in nature; not in bodies; not in matter qua matter; demons are called evil by what they lack; demons are not evil by nature; evil is not in demons; impermanent; a destructive force that is productive through the Good; does not confer being; does not maintain being; is not a lack of Good; has no substance; exists as an accident; origin is due to a defect, not a capacity; origin is numerous, partial deficiencies; God knows evil under the form of the good; causes of evil are capacities for God for Good.

Another complexity at work is the number of different theories of evil that he is presuming or addressing without referencing them, for example:

--Augustine’s definition of sin/libido as a turning away from the Good;

--Evil as a lack because it cannot be substantial, or else it is something that has being;

--the argument that evil cannot have being for if all things come from the Good, all things must be of the Good before being created, and the Good cannot be Good if it precontains evil;

--the argument that we cannot say that God did not create evil, yet evil is, for this violates his position as being the creator or all;

--further, we cannot say that God cannot have created evil, for that would violate his omnipotence;

--the “God’s Eye View” argument that even all that seems to be evil to us, if it is, it must be good and right, because God does not make mistakes in creation, thus, all that seems evil must be fulfilling a part of perfection if only we had God’s widest vantage point.

Thus, while we can walk away with the unique and fascinating conception of the evil in demons and nonbeing being granted as proportionate privation, we can logically determine little else that resembles clear conclusions from his analysis of evil.  Nevertheless, to do honor to the text, we do not want to simply dismiss this as a crummy failure of an investigation.  Thus, is there an argument that may suggest a value to an investigation that is so confused?  Is the lack of answers and the contradicting claims demonstrative of something that abides by his overall philosophy about incomprehensibility?

Chapter Five:

Subtitle: Concerning “Being,” and also concerning paradigms

Section One:

Consideration of the name “Being:” “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14).  (But, he does not limit his consideration  to this name alone.)  By this consideration of the name Being, P-D is not seeking to reveal what is the Being of the Transcendent, but to explore that which is beyond words, or, as he phrases it: “What I wish to do is to sing a hymn of praise for the being-making procession of the absolute divine Source of being into the total domain of being” (816B). 

Good names all the processions of the Universal Cause and what is beyond all these.

Being names all that is and all that is beyond what is.

Life names all that extends to all things and what is beyond life.

Wisdom names all that is wise in all things and has to do with understanding, reason, and sense perception, and all that is beyond these things, too.

Section Two:

He now moves to the names that tell of the Providence of God; “What I have to say is concerned with the benevolent Providence made known to us, and my speech of praise is for the transcendentally good Cause of all good things …” (816C).

He is not intending to separate that which is good from that which is wise or in being; nor does he imply that there are separate causes for all of these attributes.  There is one God, the cause of all these effects, “… and that he is the possessor of the divine names of which I speak and that the first name tells of the universal Providence of the one God, while the other names reveal general or specific ways in which he acts providentially” (816D-817A).

Section Three:

He raises an interlocutor’s possible objections/questions: (a) since being is greater (ranges farther beyond) than life, and life is greater than wisdom, how do we rank living beings higher or better than things which merely are, or sentient things better than merely living things, or reasoning beings better than only feeling beings?  (b) What justifies this hierarchy of things in the approach to and establishment of a relationship to God?  (c) And, “One would have expected that the greater one’s share in the gifts of God, the higher one would be and the more one would be superior to others?” (817A-B).

These questions seem to raise three distinct points, although, together they reveal that P-D’s position is assumed to be that there is a hierarchy of all things (mostly determined by allotment granted in accordance with receiver’s capacity), but that this hierarchy permits all things to approach God and establish a relation therewith.  In other words, there is a hierarchy of difference, but an equality in permission to approach God.  The objection (c) seems to argue that the hierarchy of capacity should also determine a hierarchy of worthiness to approach God.  For example, one may say a human is more worthy than a rock to enter into relation with God.

P-D responds, “A good point …” (817B).  But, his initial remark is about how intelligent beings have neither being nor life (in the sense in which we do); thus, it seems his take from the objection is that do not the intelligent beings have the greatest worth, although lacking in those attributes by which we hierarchialize all that is here on Earth. 

“The reality is this” (817B), P-D proclaims: divine intelligences exist in a manner superior to all other beings and live in a manner superior to all other life.  Their understanding and knowledge exceeds perception and reason.  They desire and participate in God in a way far superior to the ways in which we and all other things are capable.  They are closer to God because they have received more gifts from God.  “And in a similar manner, creatures endowed with reason surpass those having perception simply because of the greater powers of reason” (816B), and likewise down the hierarchy.  “The more a thing participates in the one infinitely generous God, the closer one is to him and the more divine one is with respect to others” (817B-C).  Thus, P-D does not hold out a hierarchy of capacity with a pure equality of access to God; instead, he seems to accede that greater participation, which means having a greater share of the “gifts” of God, more and greater faculties, makes one closer to God, thus, more worthy of receipt within Him.  He does not completely affirm that animals or plants have lesser chance to return to their source, but he does shut off a fascinating argument for equality that accepts difference. 

Section Four:

Begins with the absolutist: “So much for that problem,” to which we may well want to add an exclamation mark to highlight our potential dissatisfaction with an interesting argument unpursued (817C). 

Now, he turns back to speaking of the Good, “… about that which truly is and which gives being to everything else” (817C).  Thus, he is speaking about Being, but, of course, in this discussion, he speaks of creating, time, etc..  He reasserts premises that he has already proffered:

The God who is (Ex. 3:14) transcends everything by virtue of His power;

He is the substantive Cause of all;

He is the Source and the measure of the ages;

He is reality beneath time and eternity behind being;

He is time in which all happens;

He is being for all that is;

He is becoming (coming-to-be) amid whatever happens;

He is being immanent in and underlying all things;

But … “God is not some kind of being.  No” (817D).

Thus, starts his listing of negatives, or negations of the above affirmations:

He was not;

He will not be;

He did not come to be;

He is not in the midst of becoming;

He will not come to be;

He is not (817D).

God’s being is a critical affirmation, most obviously, for philosophy and theology; it is an assertion of existence, arguments and proofs for which fill extensive volumes and libraries.  P-D is true to his philosophy, however, that knowledge of God exceeds what we are capable of comprehending, thus, to be most truthful to this truth, we must affirm and negate each attribute, each name, that we assign to God.

Section Five:

He begins with a summation of the above, that is, itself, summed up in his line: “In short, the existence of anything whatsoever is there in the Preexistent, and is perceived and preserved” (820A). 

He then establishes (already has this fairly clearly in sections two and three, but bluntly here) that being is primary; whatever participates in the other attributes, e.g., life, wisdom, etc., do so because they participate in being, that is, in Being.  (Their being is because of their participation in Being.)  “It is only because of their participation in Being that they exist themselves and that things participate in them” (820C).  God’s Being, then, is praised as primary in the praise of all attributes. 

Section Six:

“The first gift therefore of the absolutely transcendent Goodness is the gift of being, and that Goodness is praised from those that first and principally have a share of being.  From it and in it are Being itself, the source of beings, all beings and whatever else has a portion of existence.  This characteristic is in it as an irrepressible, comprehensive, and singular feature” (820D). 

The first sentence, above, affirms the last section’s affirmation, that being is primary and presupposed in all other attributes.  The second sentence is a classic phrasing herein, “from it and in it …” expressing the maintenance within the One all that has proceeded from it: God creates and God is all that is created.  The third sentence reaffirms his commitment that the diversity of attributes does not compromise the unity of God (the second chapter explored this most extensively).

He continues the discussion of multiplicity and unity in the following discussion of number.  Here, he uses the Neoplatonic language of the One being the monad.  Every number exists as distinct in the monad, which preserves their unity as number, and then each number receives its differentiation made manifest when it proceeds forth from this One. 

He then repeats his example of the radii of the circle being brought together in the unity of the circle itself, its center or hub, which gathers together all the distinction and makes them a whole.  The unity links all the distinctions together, even as each line radiating outward differentiates more and more from the source and from one another. 

Section Seven:

Like number, and all diversity, all of the many laws of nature, too, are gathered together in unity; this prevents any confusion.  All of the powers in the soul, too, are gathered together in unity.  “So there is nothing absurd in rising up, as we do, from obscure images to the single Cause of everything, rising with eyes that see beyond the cosmos to contemplate all things, even the things that are opposites, in a simple unity within the universal Cause” (821B).  Here, we see how the unity of the diversity is again being used as justification for the legitimacy of naming God by the names of His creation.

Section Eight:

The hierarchy of all things:

From the single Source and Cause of all things, comes, too, the angels, the nature of the soul, the nature of everything in the cosmos, along with all other qualities said to reside therein each of these, all objects, and our thinking processes, as well as all the powers.  Thus, not only do all things come from God, but so do the natures and qualities and powers of all things. 

After all these, come next the subordinate beings; these receive their being and all that they are, as well as their subordinate status from God.  Below these, come another level of the lowliest beings.  They are lowliest in relation to the heights of the angels.

Next, come all souls and all other creatures.  These, too, all have being and well-being.  Thus, their being is not a derogated state of being, but the best state of being that their status of being is fit for or for which they have capacity.  These things too, revert to their Source.

Thus, “He grants the highest measure of existence to those more exalted beings described in scripture as eternal.  But beings are never without being which, in turn, comes from the Preexistent” (821D-824A).

To speak of God being “in” all things as by being their cause, this does not mean to imply that He is a “facet of being.  Rather, being is a facet of him.  He is not contained in being, but being is contained in him.  He does not possess being, but being possess him” (824A). 

This leads into a rehashing of God and time, being that he is the beginning, middle (maintenance), and end of beings.  This signifies the complete transcendence of God.  He does not possess this or that, but is all because he is the cause of all. 

Then, another restatement of how this justifies the affirmation and negation of all names being applied to Him:

“Therefore every attribute may be predicated of him and yet he is not any one thing.  He has every shape and structure, and yet is formless and beautyless, for in his incomprehensible priority and transcendence he contains the sources, mean terms, and ends of all things and he undefiledly enlightens Being for them in one undifferentiated cause” (824B). 

The Sun:

The sun is one, “… a single illuminating light,” that acts upon the essences and qualities of the many things, renewing them, protecting them, and perfecting them; it establishes them as distinct and unifies them.  All of these things share in the sun light and the sun is one as their unity and cause.  “All this holds all the more truly with respect to the Cause which produced the sun and which produced everything else” (824C).

The preexisting principles in God, called “exemplars” or “predefining” acts of will

Section Nine:

Clement the philosopher uses the term “exemplar” for the more important things among beings, but P-D disagrees; he emphasizes how God is the Cause of all things, and all these things are united in God. 

The pure simplicity of God “shakes off all duplication and it embraces everything,” and is “therefore shared indivisibly by all in the same way that one and the same sound is perceived by numerous ears” (825A).

Section Ten:

The Preexistent is the Source of all, their Cause, End, and Final Cause (the “for the sake of whom” (825B)).  Present to all and everywhere.

The affirmations are then followed with negations: “He is at rest and astir, is neither resting nor stirring and has neither source, nor middle nor end.  He is nothing.  He is no thing” (825B). 

Chapter Six:

Chapter Ten:

Subtitle: Concerning “Omnipotent,” “Ancient of Days,” and also concerning eternity and time

Section One:

Omnipotent: “… as the omnipotent foundation of everything he preserves and embraces all the world” (936D).

Founds world; makes it secure; holds it together; binds all to himself; generates everything from out of self and returns all back to himself; a root and storehouse;

Has power over all; is in control of whole world; goal of all yearning; lays a “happy yoke on all who wish it,” is sweet toil of all yearning for his goodness.

Section Two:

Ancient of Days: “… he is the eternity and time of everything, and because he precedes days and eternity and time” (937B).

Also has names: Time, Day, Season, Eternity –all refer to someone completely free of change or movement; his movement remains in himself; causes movement, time, eternity, days, seasons, etc. 

Mystical visions depict him as ancient and new; primal and ageless;

Also has names: Ancient, New –reveal he goes forth from beginning to end;

All names signify his being. 

Ancient: signifies he is first in view of time;

Young: signifies he is primary in context of number;

Section Three:

Time and Eternity:

Scripture describes things as “eternal” but does not always mean to imply that things are unchanging or immutable; often, it describes the very ancient or the whole course of earthly time

Scripture describes things as “time” meaning the process of change manifested in birth, life, and death, and variety; those bound in time have a share of eternity when we return to the source; sometimes scripture also refers to temporal eternity and eternal time; not all eternal things are co-eternal with God (for God precedes eternity).

Eternity is the house of our being; time is the home of things that come to be (940A).

Things that share partly in eternity and partly in time (i.e., the soul) are midway between things which are and things which are coming-to-be (940A).

Notice, the addition of the ending “Amen.”

Chapter Eleven:

Subtitle: Concerning “peace,” and what is intended by “being-it-self,” “life-itself,” “power-itself,” and things said in this vein

Section One:

“With reverent hymns of peace we should now sing the praises of God’s peace, for it is this which brings all things together” (948D).

Peace unites, begets harmony and agreement; all things therefore long for it.  Peace unites the multiplicity, the divisions, giving these “severed parts” their definition, limits, and guarantee; keeps the many from chaos.

Divine peace called Ineffable and Unmoving; he goes forth to all things, but remains within himself peacefully.

Section Two:

God is subsistence of absolute peace, peace in general, and instances of peace (949A).  Brings all into unity without chaos; each is its own thing without its confusion merging into its otherness.

Peaceful unity links all things, letting all things rise up to meet what is beyond knowing.  It grants the enjoyment of its presence, unity, identity, communion, mutual attraction, and ensures kinship.

Peace reaches out to all, yet remains wholly unified as one.

Section Three:

Wish for peace: things take pleasure in difference, so how do we all wish for peace?  This situation is due to the desire for peace.

Section Four:

Moving things aim for their movement, so how do we wish for the rest of peace?  This, too, is a wish for peace, that which keeps all things in their own place and ensures them individuality and ensures the stirring of life to be kept safe from destruction.

Section Five:

Since it seems things have fallen away from peace, how do we say all things yearn for peace?  P-D replies there is nothing that has completely fallen away from unity.  The completely unbounded or unstable or undefined is not a being nor has a place among things with being (953A).

We must aim to cease strife and work towards peace.

Section Six:

Says that Timothy once wrote him a letter asking about being-itself, life-itself, and wisdom-itself; these are names that we can call God.

They do not invoke contradiction; the former names (life, power) are names derived from beings and given to God as being their cause.  The latter names (subsistence of life itself, subsistence of power itself, subsistence of peace itself) are names of God because he is transcendently superior to all things, including the primary beings.

What is meant by these names?  The “-itself” invokes the absolute being underlying the manifestations as particulars; this is the cause of these particulars (953B-D).  These names signify source, divinity, and cause and are applied to the transcendent source and cause beyond all beings (953D).

This also justifies why we give Him names like Existing, Life, Possessed by Divinity; the good is the source of the first beings, the whole, the parts, those with a complete share, those with a partial share in the whole (956A).