Beauty and mystery in 'The Mystical Theology'

When traveling through Rome, many a pilgrim is struck and even overwhelmed by the great beauty contained in the cathedrals and museums.

The works of art hanging over ornate altars and displayed in crowded halls are of great theological significance and have even inspired revolutions in artistic expression. To the casual observer, however, some of the lessons of these masterpieces remain mysterious as they become less well known over the passage of centuries.

Perhaps it was fitting then as I traveled through the Eternal City in September, encountering great and mysterious works of art that I chose "The Mystical Theology" of Dionysius the Areopagite for that month in my year of reading one spiritual classic a month.

The author of this short work is himself shrouded in mystery. He wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, an Athenian judge who was converted to Christianity in the first century by St. Paul and was referenced in the Acts of the Apostles. He was often cited in this way, including by St. Thomas Aquinas in the "Summa Theologiae." However, due to widely agreed upon 19th-century analyses of his works, he is now referred to as pseudo-Dionysius since scholars believe that he was a fifth- or sixth-century author who wrote under the name Dionysius.

In a 2008 general audience, Pope Benedict XVI pondered the question of why pseudo-Dionysius had assumed this name. "His intention was to put Greek wisdom at the service of the Gospel, to foster the encounter of Greek culture and intelligence with the proclamation of Christ," he said.

He also noted two additional hypotheses regarding his pseudonym. "The first hypothesis says that it was a deliberate falsification by which, in dating his works back to the first century, to the time of St Paul, he wished to give his literary opus, a quasi apostolic authority," he said. "But there is another better hypothesis than this, which seems to me barely credible: namely that he himself desired to make an act of humility; he did not want to glorify his own name, he did not want to build a monument to himself with his work but rather truly to serve the Gospel, to create an ecclesial theology, neither individual nor based on himself."

He credited pseudo-Dionysius with giving the word "mystic" a new meaning as "until then for Christians such a word was equivalent to the word 'sacramental,' that is, what pertains to the 'mysterion,' to the sacrament. With him the word 'mystic' becomes more personal, more intimate: it expresses the soul's journey toward God."

This journey toward God, he continued, is expressed through the "negative theology" of pseudo-Dionysius as "the Face of God is our inability to express truly what he is" and "it is easier for us to say what God is not rather than to say what he truly is."

In his "The Mystical Theology," pseudo-Dionysius wrote that "theology is both immense and most small and that the Gospel is broad and great and yet concise" as "the Good Cause of all is expressed with many words and yet with few and is even wordless, for there is no word or knowledge able to express It."

"We may offer Him that transcends all things the praises of a transcendent hymnody, which we shall do by denying or removing all things that are," he wrote, comparing the approach to "men who, carving a statue out of marble, remove all the impediments that hinder the clear perceptive of the latent image and by this mere removal display the hidden statue itself in its hidden beauty."

For pseudo-Dionysius, it is only by "not-seeing and not-knowing that we may come to see and to know, through this very same not-seeing and not-knowing, that which is above vision and knowledge." Speaking of the ascent of Moses to Mount Sinai in this way, he wrote, "By complete inactivity of any knowledge at all, in knowing nothing, he is being united to What Is in a knowing which is above the mind."

Apophatic theology -- or the idea of speaking of God through what he is not because of his transcendence over our limited human understanding -- had great influence over the years on both Eastern and Western mysticism. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that "man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows him not, inasmuch as he knows that that which is God transcends whatsoever he conceives of him."

The Angelic Doctor did, however, elsewhere make the key distinction that we know God "from creatures as their principle, and also by way of excellence and remotion (removal). In this way therefore He can be named by us from creatures, yet not so that the name which signifies Him expresses the divine essence in itself."

We speak of God by analogy through our limited human way of knowing him through creation as St. Paul wrote, "Since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made."

Pseudo-Dionysius wrote of the journey toward God that "the more that we soar upwards the more our language becomes restricted to the compass of purely intellectual conceptions, even as in the present instance plunging into the Darkness which is above the intellect we shall find ourselves reduced not merely to brevity of speech but even to absolute dumbness both of speech and thought."

Exploring the work of pseudo-Dionysius serves as a poignant reminder of our own limitations as we approach the mysteries of God. His writing also offers hope amid those limitations, as Pope Benedict concluded, "Pseudo-Dionysius shows that in the end the journey to God is God himself, who makes himself close to us in Jesus Christ."