Denys - secondary reading Flashcards
Evans on the distinction between cataphatic and apophatic
o Mystical theology
♣ Distinction between cataphatic and apophatic
♣ ‘they do no more than to reflect the two sides of the life of the cosmos and the human individual, in the characteristic Neoplatonic motif of procession from God’s creative activity, and return to God in contemplation’ (188)
♣ sets out ‘the way of unknowing which leads beyond all created reality to this union with the divine itself’ (190)
♣ descent through assertion
• begins with God, moves along creation into ‘ever-greater multiplicity’ (190)
♣ ascent via negation
• begins with diversity of life
• denies that we can describe God
• moves up chain of being to God
• ‘in the last chapter, the great affirmations of Christian faith are dealt with – God is Life, Light, Love….and so on – and these too are all denied: they are not true. This rejection of all the precious truths of Scripture is a breathtaking demonstration of the stripping-off of all comforts to the self’ (190)
• we get to the point where we have run out of words – God is beyond description
• need to go beyond
• unknowing is not the same as ignorance
• mind is carried beyond itself
Evans - themes in denys
♣ beyondness of God ♣ anagogy (ascent) ♣ hierarchy ♣ divinisation ♣ apophasis ♣ unknowing
evans - how D shows God’s transcendence
♣ Utterly transcendent
♣ He ‘expresses this with the Neoplatonic philosophers’ trick of prefixing words with “hyper” – he thus modifies a huge number of terms to express the excessive divinity, its sheer bursting of the boundaries of all that we can think’ (188)
♣ God = above all knowledge.
♣ ‘all the things which we are able to think and say of God need ultimately to be unthought and unsaid’ (188)
♣ cannot know him through any names
♣ ‘Yet D’s language is of the “beyondness” of God, not of transcendence as opposed to immanence; and therefore, in a typical paradox, the divine which is beyond all duality transcends even the duality of transcendence and immanence, is known in all created works, and called by every name’ (188)
evans on anagogy (ascent)
♣ recalls Gregory of Nyssa’s notion of epectasis – constant yearning for God
♣ can happen through engagement with Scripture
♣ need to recognise that all divine images are inadequate
♣ sacraments, discipleship
♣ can only achieve union with God through self-renunciation
Evans on accusations made of D
o Accused of heresy/pantheism
o Also accused of ‘cloaking…an explicitly pagan philosophy in Christian robes’ (192)
Coakley and stang on key parts of D
o Marriage of neo-Platonism and Christianity
o Intertwining of divine and human eros
o Hierarchical cosmos
o ‘ecclesiastical anchoring in acts of liturgical praise’ (532)
o emphasis on union with God via contemplation
Louth on D and adopting Proclus terms
- ‘In introducing the terminology of apophatic and cataphatic theology Dionysius was simply introducing a terminology for an already well-established approach to theology. He did not invent this terminology, however, but borrowed (like much else) from the great fifth-century Neoplatonist, Proclus (410 or 412–85), diadochos (i.e., Plato’s successor) at the Academy at Athens.’ (139)
- ‘The Neoplatonists, led by Plotinus, found a good deal more apophatic theology in the Platonic dialogues than scholars do nowadays (or indeed, did their predecessors, the so-called Middle Platonists), notably in the latter section of the Parmenides concerned with the consequences of positing or denying the One. But it fell to Proclus to introduce the terminology of apophatic and cataphatic theology.’ (139)
louth on proclus
o The One can be revealed ‘through analogy’, likeness and negations
o Plato uses analogy of sun in Republic (506D-509C)
o Parmenides uses apophaticism
o ‘Proclus goes on to warn against interpreting the negations (apophaseis) as privations (stereseis), or the analogies as identities’ (140)
o ‘The analogies, he says, are hints or suggestions that point us toward the One, while the negations do not simply contradict affirmations (here Proclus uses the word kataphasis), rather, because they are closer to the first principle, they, as it were, underlie and generate affirmations.’ (140)
o need both apophatic and cataphatic
- ‘Dionysius also emphasizes, as Proclus does, that negations applied to God do not mean that God lacks some quality or another, but that he transcends it. He expresses this conviction by supplementing adjectives prefixed by the alpha-privative with adjectives prefixed by hyper- (“beyond”).’ (140)
turner on apophasis
o ‘apophasis is a Greek neologism for the breakdown of speech, which, in face of the unknowability of God, falls infinitely short of the mark’ (20)
turner on cataphasis
o ‘For in its cataphatic mode, theology is, we might say, a kind of verbal riot, an anarchy of discourse in which anything goes.’ (20)
turner on mystical theology and apophasis
We must both affirm and deny all things of God; and then we must negate the contradiction between the affirmed and the denied.’ (22)
turner on negation of negation
o the negation of the negation is ‘not a third utterance, additional to the affirmative and the negative, in good linguistic order; it is not some intelligible synthesis of affirmation and negation; it is rather the collapse of our affirmation and denials into disorder, which we can only express, a fortiori, in bits of collapsed, disordered language, like the babble of a Jeremiah.’ (22)
o for D, religious language = rightly paradoxical
turner on creation
- ‘Consequently, from the fact that we name God from his effects - and are justified in doing so because he is their cause - it does not follow that the names of God signify only that causality.’ (24)
‘to name God adequately, we not only may, but must, name God by all the names of creatures: only the ‘sum total of creation’
turner on linguistic inadequacy - patriarchal language
o contemp example = patriarchal language used to describe God
♣ why this is wrong for D
• ‘An exclusive use of male descriptions is…a misdescription of God by exclusion, since it rules out the ascription to God of the names distinctive of half her human creation.’ (25)
• God is not the type of being to have a gender
♣ H, cannot be both male and female
• ‘Hence, if God has to be described in both ways, then he cannot possibly be either male or female; and if God is neither, then also she cannot possibly be a ‘person* in any sense we know of, for every person we know of is one or the other. It is in the collapse of ordinary language, brought to our attention by the necessity of ascribing incompatible attributes, that the transcendence of God above all language is best approached.’ (26)
turner on hierarchy
o ontological distance/proximity – existence = a scale of reality
♣ no longer think of existence hierarchically
♣ more dichotomous now – you exist or you don’t
• hierarchy determined degrees of reality
• this can be seen in degrees of distance from creator, which ultimately determines degrees of reality
o ‘creation is the erotic outpouring of the divine goodness into all things’ (29)
o ‘Corresponding with this picture of the outflow of all beings in creation, in their multiplicity and differentiation, is Denys’ picture of the tendency and flow of affirmative language about God.’ (29)
- ♣ God is the top of the hierarchy of existence/beings, but all creatures have same immediacy with God
♣ ‘So we are now presented with an aporia. The tendency of the hierarchical scale of ontological degrees, and the ‘anti-hierarchical’ tendency of the doctrine of creative immediacy, certainly appear to pull Denys’ thought in opposed directions. Moreover, the tension between them may seem to be heightened by the fact that both seem to Denys to be necessary within an adequate theology.’ (31)
• conflict between creation ex nihilo and our ‘hierarchically ordered theological language, constructed on a scale of degrees of descriptive adequacy’ (31)
aka: God is at top of hierarchy but no ontological distinction (discuss in relation to creatio ex nihilo. idea of emanation seems in tension with this)
