Christian Mysticism · 5th–6th century
Dionysius the Areopagite
Christian Neoplatonism · apophatic theology · On Mystical Theology · the Corpus Areopagiticum
The one who gave the West a language for the unsayable. God is not light, but a radiance so full that to the mind it is darkness.
The essence of the teaching: One ascends to God not by affirmation but by negation: stripping from Him, one by one, all images and names. At the summit all knowing falls silent, and there remains the luminous dark of union.
Transmission
Dionysius taught two ways of the knowledge of God. You can say that God is: light, good, love – this is the way of affirmation. But higher is the way of negation: God is not light as we know light, not good as we know good, not being as we know being. He is beyond all that can be said and thought. Ascending, the soul casts off image after image, name after name, until it enters what he called the divine dark. This is not the emptiness of ignorance, but an excess of light that blinds the mind. There, where every word and every knowing falls silent, the soul is joined to the One who is beyond knowing. The highest knowledge of God is to know Him through unknowing.
The full transmission — for members of the School. Here is its essence and its taste.
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