"The Way Up Is the Way Down": Whose Mystical Journey Does Dionysius Describe?

A Speculative Reversal on the Mountain of Dazzling Darkness

In the corpus of Dionysius the Areopagite, as is well known, the descending affirmations about God come first, followed by the ascending negations.

Dionysius goes through the way of affirmation in “The Divine Names” (and alleged also the “Theological Outlines” and “Symbolic Theology,” if they ever actually existed) and offers a recap in “The Mystical Theology.” As for the way of negation, he turns his focus to it properly in “The Mystical Theology” (although in some sense both ways are always present in his work and cannot be neatly separated).

The Way of Affirmation (The Descent)

In the way of affirmation, at least as it is typically explained - Dionysius's actual procedure is considerably more complex)¹ - we start with

a. applying to God the highest (but abstract and so relatively empty and contentless) superlatives possible

and then move towards

b. more low-ranking and dissimilar (but more rich and concrete) names.

This proceeds to the point of saying things that seem very obviously inappropriate to apply to God.

The way of affirmation unfolds, on this model, roughly like so:

1. God is one

2. God is good

3. God is being

4. God forgives (and other metaphorical actions)

5. God has a mighty arm (and other anthropomorphic descriptions)

6. God is like a rock (and other symbolic objects)

7. God is like a worm (and other monstrous comparisons)

The Way of Negation (The Ascent)

In the way of negation, we reverse all this. We

a. start by denying that God is aptly captured or described by the obviously inappropriate names

before finally

b. climbing to those names that seem more accurate but still don’t do justice to God’s transcendence.

So roughly:

1. God is not a worm (for obvious reasons)

2. God is not like a rock (God’s not spatial and unmoving)

3. God does not have an arm (God’s not a divided body)

4. God does not forgive (God doesn’t change God’s mind/state or get affected by external things)

5. God is not [a] being (God’s not among the caused hierarchy and manifold)

6. God isn’t good (God’s got no external standard of value)

7. God isn’t unified (God’s not divided enough to need to be unified, and is not unified by unity as if it were something other than Godself).

Emptiness or Plenitude?

A fairly common worry which is raised in response to this Dionysian scheme is whether the final state reached following negation is silence and emptiness in a privative sense.

In other words, how can we distinguish the “dazzling darkness” from darkness simply speaking, the “beyond being” from absolute non-being?

Is the end of the journey emptiness or plenitude? The references to “dazzlement” and “eloquence,” as most readers have seen, indicate that this is supposed to be a darkness and silence by excess rather than privation.

In order to communicate this (and following Dionysius fondness for hyper- statements like God is “hyper-good”), the scholar Bernard McGinn has coined the phrase "hyperphatic” to describe a third form of discourse which is neither simply kataphatic affirmation nor apophatic negation. God is not good not because he is evil or non-good but because he is more good than goodness as we can conceive it.

However, this terminological distinction alone is not decisive. Simply claiming that something without determinacy is plenitude rather than lack doesn’t guarantee that it actually is. One still struggles to see how saying, and then unsaying, a list of attributes produces anything other than a purely negative result, regardless of intent or stipulation. Are we any closer to God through our descent through affirmation and ascent through negation? How is any of this more than spinning our wheels? An alleged goodness which is by admission entirely beyond our conception is, for us, no more positive or rich in content than sheer nothingness.

“Exactly,” a critic might respond. “God is not a being and therefore there can be no positive knowledge about him. There is no content to be had, ‘rich’ or otherwise.”

Yet presumably even such a critic would not wish to say that God is equivalent to non-being or a void, or that the “knowing in unknowing” one gains mystically is the same as ordinary ignorance. Nor would they wish to equate the emptiness one achieves in enlightenment with the lack of awareness one finds in sleep, death, or inebriation. And so the troubling question recurs. Why—and here I refuse to accept mere stipulation—is the One Beyond Being plenitude rather privation, and how does my process of saying and unsaying the entire linguistic ladder of beings get me any closer to the goal of my journey than the person who proceeds immediately—or via a single koan—to silence?

But Whose Journey is This? A Reversal

The key, I contend, to interpreting Dionysius lies in recognizing who the "subject" of his mystical journey is—a recognition that involves a speculative reversal.

We tend to think of ourselves as climbing up a mountain to the "dazzling darkness" and then descending again, akin to Moses in the biblical story which forms the partial basis for the Dionysian treatise.

But if the descending affirmations precede the ascending negations, this means, in terms of the image of the mountain, that we actually start at the top rather than the bottom. What is the meaning of this crucial clue?

It is widely acknowledged that Dionysius follows the Neoplatonic scheme of procession and return, and that in some way the affirmations correspond to procession and the negations to return.

But the conclusions of this insight are not always drawn. If this is truly the case, then the affirmations come before the negations not for epistemological reasons, as if this double process were happening solely or even primarily within the thinking subject.

The affirmations and negations do not, that is, reflect merely our attempt to use creatures as a ladder to God. If that were the case, then no amount of saying or unsaying could bring us a closer to the inaccessible thing-in-itself.

Creatures are, ontologically and in themselves, this ladder, as God’s self-symbolization. The procession of creatures and their return to God (which the affirmative and negative ways consummate) is God’s own act of simultaneously, and dialectically, concealing and revealing himself. Creatures are both veils and rays of light, organ and obstacle, concealment and theophany. Which is to say, most radically, that the linguistic and epistemic acts we perform in traversing (and thus intellectually actualizing them) are most properly God’s self-affirmations and self-negations.

Whose mystical journey is being described? It is not merely that of the creaturely manifold, or ourselves as rational beings.

It is God’s own procession and return to Himself—with both our consciousness and the natural world moments within this process. This is why Dionysius makes the top of the mountain the origin point—to initiate the speculative reversal which is the key to every spiritual itinerary.

Why is God plenitude rather than the nihilistic void which haunts negative theology in its epistemic (which is to say modern) form?

Because God is not merely the indeterminate Goal to be reached (in whom the Way would be lost, as Augustine saw with the Platonists), but the One who determines himself and sublates these determinations, who returns to himself as Goal only in becoming himself the Way.

The “hyperphatic” is the trace of this passage, which it alone cannot explain. We must learn to see our difference and that of creatures, which we celebrate in the systole and diastole of speech, as God’s own difference from Himself.

Our acts of knowing and loving (and paradigmatically those of the God-man, whose members we are) are the interior accomplishment of the ontological project of God's self-affirmation and self-negation; God’s procession and self-return.²

1. In the Divine Names (and in the summary of the Theological Outlines contained in the Mystical Theology) there are at least two major deviations from a simple scheme, along the way of affirmation, of increasing concretion and decreasing rank. First, the Theological Outlines (ostensibly) treat of the Trinity and Incarnation, which are more concrete than many of the subsequent Divine Names. Second, the One occurs at the end of the Divine Names rather than the beginning. Both of these deviations, I would argue, can be read as supporting the thesis of this post, and further establish that Dionysius’ standpoint is (or can be interpreted through) the concrete one of a self-determining unity.

2. Or so, at least, Dionysius may be read through Hegel, at least as plausibly as he is (and he nearly always is) read through Kant.

For in Dionysius’ pre-modern standpoint, the epistemological problem of the subject-object split, in its skeptical form, had not yet been posed. Thus while it might be anachronistic to make him a forerunner of idealism, it is equally anachronistic to make him the champion of our unhappy consciousness.

We cannot help but bring to him questions which he did not pose; we are moderns. Our appropriation of a text is necessarily nested within our self-appropriation, which requires an appropriation of the culture which mediates that text to us and mediates us to ourselves.