 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Naming the Nameless, the Pseudo-Dionysius. Here's a trivia question for you. What do Stephen King and Søren Kierkegaard have in common? Well, their initials, obviously, and an interest in fear and trembling. But I have in mind something else—their use of pseudonyms. King has written novels under the pen name of Richard Bachmann. Kierkegaard, meanwhile, used a variety of pseudonyms in philosophical works like Fear and Trembling, supposedly authored by one Johannes de Silencio. Another book by Kierkegaard, entitled Either Or, presents itself as having been written by a scholar named Victor Emerita, who is, in turn, presenting the work of further authors named A and B. No major philosopher has made more abundant or inventive use of pseudonyms. But as readers, we know that it is Kierkegaard behind all the false names. The same cannot be said for the most important and famous pseudonymous writer of antique philosophy. His works were translated into Syriac, into Arabic, and into Latin. He influenced visionary mystics and rationalist thinkers, making a mark upon medieval philosophy, theology, and even architecture. Yet we have no idea who he was, only who he claimed to be—an associate of the apostles and a witness to the crucifixion of Christ. He went by the name of Dionysius. Dionysius the Areopagite was, in the first instance, a minor biblical character. The book of Acts mentions him as a man from Athens who was converted to the new faith by St. Paul. Perhaps the connection to Athens made this an attractive choice of pseudonym for a Christian Platonist. But whatever his motive, our nameless philosopher ironically took over the identity of a man who is, for us, almost nothing but a name—a convert from the Apostolic era. The works of the self-styled Dionysius complete the deception by alluding, almost casually, to his own presence at events from the biblical era. He mentions that he was a witness to the eclipse that occurred when Christ was crucified, and that he enjoyed a vision of Mary along with the apostles James and Peter. One of a series of letters composed by the author is addressed to St. Paul himself in exile on the island of Patmos. But, of course, neither this letter nor any other philosophical compositions were written by a companion of the apostles named Dionysius. Instead, they were composed several centuries later, in about 500 AD. Thus, scholars have come to call this author the pseudo-Dionysius. The pseudo was a late addition. Within a generation, some were questioning the author's identity, and for good measure, adding that he would seem to be a heretic. But others leapt to defend his apostolic authority. In particular, a man named John of Scythopolis wrote a series of comments explaining the works of Dionysius, along with a prologue, which speaks out in favor of Dionysius's authenticity and orthodoxy. The Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor, who we'll be looking at next week, was also an enthusiastic supporter of Dionysius. Thanks to these early adherents, the mask adopted by Dionysius remained firmly in place. Dionysius's stature rose another level when he was, rather amazingly, confused with Saint-Denis, the patron saint of France. This was thanks to the abbot who just happened to be in charge of the abbey of, wait for it, Saint-Denis. That rather convenient bit of scholarly confusion occurred in the 9th century, when the works of Dionysius were translated into Latin in Carolingian France. In this age, the philosophical influence of Dionysius reached a peak, as his works were taken up with unblushing eagerness and great ingenuity by the translator and philosopher John Scodas Eriugena. Eriugena was the greatest philosopher of the early Middle Ages in the Latin West, and took Dionysius as one of his chief inspirations. This may have done Dionysius no favors, given that Eriugena was a radical and controversial thinker. Yet as late as the 13th century, no less a thinker than Thomas Aquinas was writing commentaries on Dionysius and quoting him extensively in other works. By this time, the works of Dionysius had become standard texts in Christian medieval theology. His influence can be discerned not only in the writings of theologians and philosophers, but even in the design of Gothic churches. Dionysius's theory of angelic hierarchies is represented on the Cathedral of Chartres, and his writings, suffused with images about light, also had an impact on the Gothic use of stained glass. Speaking of hierarchies, that word is another sign of Dionysian influence. He seems to have invented the Greek noun hierarchia, from which we get our word hierarchy. All of which raises obvious questions. How did this guy get away with it for so long, and how was his deception eventually uncovered? To answer the second question first, it was only at the end of the 19th century that two scholars pointed out the fact that Dionysius borrows liberally from the works of Proclus, yes that Proclus, the Neoplatonist philosopher. This is how we know that Dionysius wrote his texts around 500 AD. He must have come after Proclus, who died in 485, and Dionysius is already being mentioned by other authors in the first half of the 6th century, so he wrote his own texts before then. Dionysius made such extensive use of Proclus, and Neoplatonic ideas more generally, that even some contemporaries grew suspicious. If Dionysius had really been an Athenian of the 1st century AD who hung around with St. Paul, he would have been seriously ahead of his time. But other readers thrilled to Dionysius's ambitious appropriation of Neoplatonism for Christian purposes. Entertainingly, an early remark added to the manuscripts of Dionysius claims that it was Proclus who stole from Dionysius, not the other way around. Those manuscripts of the works of Dionysius preserve five separate texts. First, there is a collection of ten letters, culminating in the one supposedly addressed to St. Paul. Then there are two works on the notion of hierarchy. One entitled the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy explains the role of priests, including the purpose and function of the sacraments. The other, the Celestial Hierarchy, deals with angels and applies to the angelic world, the Neoplatonic idea that the immaterial world should be structured in ordered ranks. Here, we might pause to think of staunch anti-Christian Neoplatonists like Porphyry and, yes, Proclus, spinning in their pagan graves as Dionysius rewrites their metaphysics as a structure for Christian theology. But for historians of philosophy, the most exciting texts of the Dionysian collection concern human language and knowledge, and how these fail when we attempt to grasp the nature of God. These two remaining texts are the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology. Thanks to these texts, the pseudo-Dionysius could rightly be honored as the patron saint of negative theology, even if he was not the patron saint of France. Before getting into the texts themselves, let me say something about this phrase, negative theology. Theologians and philosophers of religion frequently contrast two attitudes concerning the human attempt to grasp God. On the one hand, there is positive theology, sometimes called kataphatic, which comes from the Greek word kataphasis, meaning positive assertion. When we say that God is good or powerful or compare Him to a lion or a cloud, we are making positive assertions about Him. Negative theology tries to explain how this is possible. Negative theology, meanwhile, is sometimes called apophatic, because the Greek word for denial is apophasis. Negative theologians are more pessimistic about the prospects of naming, describing, and conceiving God. They point out that if God utterly transcends us and the other things He has created, then our language and concepts are unlikely to apply to Him fully, if at all. In their most pessimistic moments, negative theologians may go so far as to deny that we can know God at all. The pseudo-Dionysius was this sort of pessimist, and the unknowability of God was his favorite theme. Imitators followed him for many centuries to come. In his mystical theology, for instance, Dionysius compares God to a darkness beyond all light. As late as the 14th century, this inspired a mystical author to write a theological text, called the Cloud of Unknowing. Dionysius doesn't just give us metaphors, though. He argues for God's unnamability and unknowability. For instance, God is simple, so it cannot be the case that our many verbal expressions pick out distinct features of His essence. But his most fundamental rationale is that human cognition is simply inadequate to grasp an object of God's transcendence. Sense perception cannot grasp things properly understood by the mind. In just the same way, the mind cannot grasp things properly grasped by a higher power, the divine power by which God grasps Himself. This is a power not given to us, at least not in this life. Although Dionysius holds out hope that we will be granted a better access to God in Paradise, for now we are stuck with cognitive tools inadequate to the task of understanding our Maker. The much later philosopher and occasional mystic, Ludwig Wittgenstein, had some advice that would seem applicable here. Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. In the mystical theology, Dionysius more or less follows that advice. He surveys the various sorts of language with which one might try to capture God, and says that some are clearly more inappropriate than others. It is not fully adequate to call God good, or to call Him a stone, but it's much easier to see why God is not a stone than why He is not good. We can rise in our understanding of God as we come to see how various expressions are inappropriate for Him, a process that Dionysius compares to making a statue by carving away stone bit by bit. Ultimately, though, we should dispense with all verbal description of God, and even with negations. If we cannot say that God is good, neither can we say that He is not good. Thus, even denials must be denied, a point Dionysius makes in the very last line of the mystical theology. Having stalemated himself in this game of theological chess, Dionysius does what Wittgenstein would recommend, and puts down his pen. Apparently, the first rule of negative theology is, don't talk about negative theology. Or rather, silence is where Dionysius expects us to wind up, not where we begin. Which explains how he could also have written another, even more famous work, The Divine Names. In this longer and more complicated text, Dionysius moves back and forth between positive and negative theology. His goal is to explain the positive language that is ascribed to God in the Scriptures. Here we have the classic dilemma of the Christian negative theologian, a dilemma that is equally pressing for Jewish and Muslim negative theologians, by the way, as we'll be seeing soon. On the one hand, philosophical considerations show us that human language is inapplicable to God. On the other hand, revealed texts apply human language to God. Dionysius's solution to the dilemma is to explore the extent to which each word applied to God in the Bible is applicable to him, while also admitting that these words are not really applicable to him. In fact, his project in The Divine Names is somewhat narrower than this. It restricts itself to scriptural language that seems to be at a conceptual, rather than physical level. In the Bible, God is compared to a stone, a cloud, is said to have eyes, a face, and other bodily parts, and so on. Dionysius claims to have written another work on these more physical descriptions of God, but if it ever existed, this work is lost. That leaves us with terms like good, love, powerful, eternal, righteous, and so on. It is these terms that form the subject matter of the Divine Names, which moves through the scriptural language and explains how each expression reveals something about God, while also posing the threat that we will be misled. It is all too easy to think that if an earthly king is good, and God is good, then God and the earthly king somehow share an attribute. But this is not so. Whereas we can experience the goodness of a human king, God is beyond our direct experience, inaccessible to both our sensation and our mind. How then are we able to ascribe goodness to God in any sense? Dionysius has a ready answer, he assumes that the things that God makes are somehow revelatory of God's nature. Since God's effects are good, we can say that God is good. At one level, this is simply standard Neoplatonic metaphysics as familiar from authors like Proclus. Proclus has taught us, and taught Dionysius, that effects are contained preeminently in their causes. For instance, the unity of each thing is the effect of the perfect unity of the first principle that is truly one. To some extent, this is just common sense. Fire, being the cause of heat, is preeminently taught. Yet Dionysius is not quite happy with this picture because it would allow us to do what Proclus does with his own metaphysical principles, apply human language and concepts to them in a more or less unproblematic way. But Dionysius is too negative a theologian for that. So, he insists that, even if we can make progress towards understanding God as a cause on the basis of His effects, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we will ever reach Him. Rather, when we call God good on the basis that His effects are good, we should remind ourselves that He is beyond any notion of goodness we can conceive. Dionysius marks this point with an influential bit of linguistic trickery. He applies the Greek prefix huper to each positive term. This prefix was translated into Latin as super. Thus, God is not good, but hyper or super good. The genius of this, or if you're feeling less charitable, the sneakiness of this, is that it encapsulates both the positive and negative aspects of Dionysian theology in a single term. In one word, he captures the idea that God is so preeminently good that He is no longer really good in any sense we can understand. The tension between positive and negative approaches to God is the theme that runs throughout the divine names. We see it again, for instance, when Dionysius turns to the question of whether the scripturally sanctioned names apply to God in his entirety. They do, he insists. God is simple, so it is impossible for one name to name one aspect of God and another name some other aspect. Yet he also wants to deny that the names are all synonymous. There is a real diversity of names, but the diversity is caused by our human conceptions, not by the nature of what we are naming. This only stands to reason. After all, we are naming God on the basis of what He has caused, and the things He has caused have many different features. Dionysius uses the analogy of a seal that has made stamps in many bits of wax. God is single and one, yet has many different effects by which we name Him. This stress on divine simplicity and unity might cause us to raise an eyebrow, especially given that we were just looking at the Cappadocians. Like them, shouldn't Dionysius be insisting that God is a Trinity, that He is three as well as one? Well, yes, and Dionysius is in fact careful to mention the Trinity towards the beginning of his divine names. But the names he deals with in the rest of the work are names that reveal God as a whole, insofar as they reveal Him at all. When we call God wise, or powerful, or good, this refers to the entire Godhead, not only the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. Dionysius frequently reminds us that by revealing something of God, such names tempt us to believe that God is being revealed fully. This is why Scripture sometimes calls God by crude physical names, as a kind of warning. No one would really be stupid enough to think that God is literally a stone, or a lion, never mind both a stone and a lion. And of course, Dionysius's final word on the subject of divine names is to use no words at all. In the end, negative theology trumps positive theology, and the highest knowledge of God is a sort of ignorance or unknowing. This is clear in both the divine names and the mystical theology. And it might prompt us to wonder, what is the difference between the mystical theologian who has achieved this highest state, and an atheist who simply never thinks or knows about God at all? If ignorance is the final destination, it looks like the theologian's fate is the same as the fate of Plotinus's undescended soul and Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. They were already where they wanted to be at the beginning of their journey. But while Dionysius might agree with Dorothy that there is no place like home, he would still say it is worth traveling the yellow brick road of negative theology. So he must somehow persuade us that the ignorance or emptiness reached once all divine names are transcended is distinct from the ignorance and emptiness of someone who has never given God a moment's thought. This is, of course, a problem that faces all negative theologians, but Dionysius has a distinctively Neoplatonic take on the problem. Under the influence of Proclus, he adopts the idea of precession and return. All of creation is a precession from God through the ordered ranks partially described in Dionysius's celestial hierarchy. We start our return from everyday physical names—stone, lion, face, and so on—which are applied to God, but are obviously not applied literally. From there, we progress to the sort of terms discussed in Dionysius's divine names. But we can go even further, leaving behind notions like goodness and power as we left aside the physical names. Thus, the end point is not the ignorance where we started, but the infinity of God Himself. Dionysius calls this unknowing not because it is a lack of knowledge, but because it transcends knowledge. It is, if you will, superknowledge. With our own reasonably superknowledge about the Neoplatonists, we might compare this to the way that their first principle, the One, mirrors matter, which is non-being and indeterminacy. Both are outside the scale of being, and both are infinite but for very different reasons. The One is beyond being, matter is below it. If you follow soccer, you might find the following comparison helpful. When a team is playing a game in the Pan-European Champions League, it is no longer playing in its National League. But that doesn't mean it has the status of a local club that isn't good enough for the National League. Rather, the club has transcended the English, French, or German League, it is now playing in Europe. The club is beyond the League because it is too good, whereas other teams are not in the League because they are not good enough. So that, in case you were wondering, is what the god of the Pseudo-Dionysius has in common with Bayern Munich. In the past couple of episodes, we've seen how Neoplatonic philosophy prepared the way for Christian theology. Thinking back to the pre-Socratics, we might remember that the first philosophers often took a critical stance towards traditional religion. Now, philosophical ideas are being pressed into the service of theology, and vice versa. With the medieval period looming not far in the distance, we are going to be looking at the interaction between philosophy and several religions, leading to innovation and increasing subtlety on both sides. But we won't have to leave late antiquity to see more outstanding examples of this productive interchange. Next time, we are going to tiptoe up to the brink of the medieval Byzantine world. We'll be looking at a man who could reasonably be counted as the last great philosophical theologian of late antiquity, depending on where you think late antiquity ends. For our purposes, it will be ending in the 7th century. I have to confess that this is pretty arbitrary, and a confession should put us in just the right frame of mind as we look at Maximus Confessor on the next episode of The History of Philosophy without any caps.