God, Grace and Gumption: Thomas Aquinas Class Two: Dionysius and Apophatic Theology

When you turn to The Mystical Theology, keep some of the following in mind.

• Dionysius is struggling with a perennial question: how do we talk about God if God transcends all our words? We say this sort of thing all the time, in Sunday School, in sermons, even in prayers. Dionysius is staring it straight in the face.

• Dionysius is working with a biblical image in his attempt to work this out: the trek of Moses up Mount Sinai in Exodus 19 and 20.18-21.

• When you're reading, don't only try to track with the argument. Also feel the effects of the language in your body. Chapter 4 and 5 are, themselves, your own sort of ascent up Mount Sinai, only a Mount Sinai of words.

What in the world are we up to? Recall two things, first off:

• "cataphatic" = the making of positive claims about God through language (God is love) • "apophatic" = the making of negative claims about God through language (God is not hateful)

Whereas some (postmodern) theologians have made a lot of hay out of being "apophatic" all the time, we tried to understand how cataphaticism and apophaticism actually form two strategies of theological speech that work together and in tandem. In other words, the cataphatic and the apophatic do not stand alone in a theology; they work together. This is what Denys Turner (interpreting Pseudo-Dionysius) calls the "dialectic of the cataphatic and apophatic." In any event, you have to say an awful lot of things about God (cataphatic) in order to un-say them (apophatic), and "un-saying" is really closer to the truth of what apophaticism is all about than just making negative claims about God through language. That is, we should understand "cataphatic" and "apophatic" in relation to Dionysius (and to Thomas Aquinas) more as:

• "cataphatic" = saying • "apophatic" = un-saying

Saying and Un-saying are both necessary to any theology that does justice to the mystery of God—to any theology that takes seriously the fact that, as talk about God, it's talking about something which is beyond all its talk. So the cataphatic and apophatic, saying and unsaying, work together. And the very best theologies find ways of both saying and unsaying at the same time, like Dionysius does when he calls God "the dazzling darkness of a hidden silence." As we discussed, phrases of mutual- contradiction (or mutual-bombardment) like "dazzling darkness" and "hidden silence" are trying to catapult you out of language, through language, into a place beyond language. Into God.

Recall that Dionysius's Mystical Theology is working off of the Biblical story of Moses's ascent up Mount Sinai – except in Dionysius's case, Mount Sinai is an allegory for the 'ladder' of language we ascended in the last two chapters. Dionysius writes,

Then he [Moses] breaks free of ... what sees and is seen, and he plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing. Here, renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible, he belongs completely to him who is beyond everything. Here, being neither oneself nor something else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing. (p. 137)

This is what the goal of those last two chapters is: un-saying everything Dionysius has previously said (in the book which precedes the Mystical Theology: The Divine Names) about God -- and then un-saying that very un-saying. There's really nothing quite like Chapters Four and Five of the Mystical Theology (pp. 140-41) in all of theology.

Also recall that this does not mean that we don't actually know anything about God. It means that God remains a mystery to us even in the act of knowing. Neither Dionysius, nor certainly Thomas Aquinas, thinks that all statements about God are equally true. In Thomas's account, for example, we know by virtue of our natural reason that there is a God, and by the grace of faith, we even know that God is Trinity. But even by the grace of faith, we do not know what we mean when we say God is Father, Son, and Spirit. God can never be captured by human language—even the language given to us by Scripture... not because God is too complicated or too complex, but because God is preeminently simple, too simple for our minds to grasp.

Moving forward, we might think about how Thomas is combining the Augustinian anthropology (Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee) with the Dionysian account of God's mystery (Trinity!! Higher than any being, any divinity, any goodness! Lead us up beyond unknowing and light, where the mysteries of God's Word lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence) in his theology (which, unlike Dionysius’s and Augustine’s, can seem kind of plodding and stale, as Denys Turner says). Thomas basically sums up this whole discussion in one sentence: "In this life, we do not know what God is, even by the

page 2 grace of faith. And so it is that by grace we are made one with God (quasi ei ignoto) as to something unknown to us." (Summa Theologiae I, Q. 12, A. 13, ad. 1)

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