The Creator-Creature Distinction of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
In Acts 17 the Apostle Paul gave a speech at the Areopagus to a group of philosophers and was successful in making a few converts from them. In the account we are given two of the coverts’ names, Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, and a woman named Damaris. Nothing more was said about either of these figures until around the fifth century when suddenly a significant corpus attributed to Dionysius began to circulate in the Eastern Roman Empire. This work was met with some initial skepticism but was ultimately adopted by the church as authentically belonging to the first century.1 Thus, for the entire medieval period this work was taken as having been written by one of the chief disciples of the apostle Paul, and became foundational for the theological method of men such as Albert the Great (c.1200–1280) in the West and Maximus the Confessor (c.580–662) in the East.2 This consensus remained until Renaissance scholars such as Lorenzo Valla (c.1406–1457) and Erasmus of Rotterdam (c.1467–1536) raised some doubts about its authenticity, chiefly on the grounds that these works drew heavily from the thought of Syrianus (d.437 AD) and Proclus (c.412–485 AD), two late Neoplatonists.3
The current consensus about the Dionysian corpus is that they are a pseudonymous collection of writings which were likely written somewhere around the turn of the 6th century by a Syrian cleric.4 This collection of writings includes: The Divine Names (DN), Mystical Theology (MT), The Celestial Hierarchy (CH), The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (EH), and the Letters (EP). This revision in the scholarship raised alarms immediately for figures like Martin Luther who warned that, “[Dionysius] is downright dangerous, for he is more of a Platonist than a Christian.”5 The principal concern of Luther was that Dionysius seemed to want to know God apart from Christ, and revelation altogether, in a rationalistic move.6 These questions, joined with John Scotus Eriugena (c.800–c.877) and Meister Eckhart’s (c.1260–c.1328) pantheistic appropriation of these works, certainly warrant raising questions about what sort of creator-creature distinction there is in the Dionysian corpus.7
Scholarship on this question can generally be divided into two major streams. One side is the view that the Dionysian corpus has strong panentheistic leanings, or at the very least provides some of the groundwork for such a view. This is best seen in John Cooper’s 2006 work which argued that the Dionysian idea of procession and return represents a dialectical relationship between God and man, which is panentheistic in orientation.8 The other view would be to say that he held a stronger creator-creature distinction, a view argued for recently by Christopher Iacovetti, who made the case that both Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas utilized categories and distinctions from Dionysius at critical points in order to avoid pantheism in their work.9
It is this paper’s contention that Dionysius did indeed construct his understanding of the creator-creature distinction along Platonic lines, with added biblical references or correctives, and did so in such a way that strengthened the distinction rather than undermined it. This case will be made principally by examining key passages of Dionysius against the thought of Plotinus and Proclus in order to show that he had a greater dependence on the latter rather than the former for his view of the ontological divide between God and man and his doctrine of analogy., as well as showing how he applied revelation to the question to clarify or correct the philosophical school that he was dealing with. This will require a brief summary of the different schools of Neoplatonism and then a few demonstrations of how Dionysius incorporated them. All of this will be done with an eye towards how his philosophical influences effected his understanding of the creator-creature distinction ontologically and epistemologically.
In order to engage this question a brief survey of the difference between Plotinian and Iamblichian Neoplatonism is required. It is critical to note that Plotinus had adopted certain Stoic tendencies which introduced pantheism into his broader system of thought.10 This comes out most readily in how Plotinus taught that states of consciousness were to be identified with the metaphysical states—that is, the One, the Intellect, and the Soul.11 On this understanding, the One (which is effectively god in Plotinus’ view) is entirely present with us and in us, only perceptible to those who have the capacity to know it, and it is the philosopher that has such a capacity.12 Plotinus was aware of his departure from Plato and the broader platonic tradition and openly disputes with Plato’s view of the descent of the soul.13 It should be noted that Plotinus was not entirely consistent on this view, in fact this “train of thought is just one among many,” for him, but in his pupil Porphyry this tendency to remove the barriers between the states of being became far more pronounced.14
The Iamblichian, or late Neoplatonists, by contrast returned back to a more traditionally Platonic metaphysical framework, which advocated for a stronger distinction between the One and the lower states. This approach took a step back towards Plato in particular, who “saw a clear dividing line between the human and the divine, seeing the aim of one’s life in ‘assimilating oneself to god as far as possible.’”15 Proclus, likewise, stated clearly that “Every particular soul, when it descends into temporal process, descends entire: there is not a part of it which remains above and a part which descends.”16 Here there is a staunch denial of any idea that each metaphysical state is wholly present in the other, a point that he draws out in greater detail over the course of his various works. This view allows then for a real distinction between the One and all that it causes. This is by no means an entirely Christian conception of the creator creature distinction, mostly because it lacks the insight of creation ex nihilo, but it does guard against the latent pantheism of Plotinus in certain unmistakable ways.
Dionysius signaled his agreement with Proclus with statements such as, “it is characteristic of the universal Cause, of this goodness beyond all, to summon everything to communion with him to the extent that this is possible.”17 This qualification is very similar to how Plato would indicate the degree of ultimate otherness between creation and the divine. Elsewhere, he noted that,
in reality there is no exact likeness between caused and cause, for the caused carry within themselves only such images of their originating sources as are possible for them, whereas the causes themselves are located in a realm transcending the caused, according to the argument regarding their source.18
This phrase “insofar as it is possible,” or some variety of it, occurs frequently through the Dionysian corpus as a means of expressing the way in which we relate to God or reflect him without ever being confused with his essence or creating some new relation in God to us. God remains utterly transcendent regardless of our likeness or close fellowship or union with him.
In carving out this creator-creature distinction Dionysius was not simply following Plato, but also drew heavily from the biblical principle of the incomparability of God, and discussed how in scripture things are said to relate to God yet are “dissimilar to him in that as effects they fall so very far short of their Cause and are infinitely and incomparably subordinate to him.”19 God is indeed imminent to all by his providence “yet at the same time he remains within himself and in his one unceasing activity he never abandons his own true identity.”20 In these passages there is not a trace to be found of the sort of Plotinian tendencies that were outlined above. This brings a great deal of clarity to those several mystical passages in Dionysius, where he spoke about the mystic being “supremely united to the completely unknown,”21 or being “made one with the dazzling rays.”22 Whatever the exact nature of this union is, it should be clear from the rest of his writings that this is not an absolute union where the mystic’s mind or even whole nature enters into God’s essence like a drop in the ocean. There is no need to take Dionysius as inconsistent with himself in these instances as the aforementioned qualifications can easily be applied to these passages.
Moving now to consider the epistemological question, it is perhaps unsurprising, given what was stated earlier, that Plotinus had a certain tendency to try and stretch and “overcome” the uncapturable essence of the One with concepts and language.23 He did have an idea of using apophatic and analogical cataphatic language, which will be explained more below, but he had a certain abiding belief that he could comprehend the incomprehensible One, not unlike his belief that he could have direct union with it. Not unlike before, the late Neoplatonists give a more modest account of the use of language and content themselves with a more consistent use of analogical and apophatic language, never claiming to capture the One as it is in words.24 On this point Proclus claimed that “it is only by analogy with the first terms participating in it that we transfer causality (whether final or efficient) onto the first principle together with the notions of the good and the one.”25 Put less obscurely, the argument here is simply that we speak about the Good approximately by reasoning up from the effects to the cause. So, all of matter, reason, ideas, etc., speak of the One from which they all came, and so words used to describe those things can be attributed to the source, though with some caution as it is always merely an approximation.
Turning back to Dionysius, we will see again that he took his cues on the question of epistemology from the later Neoplatonists rather than from Plotinus. This can be seen in a very pronounced way in Dionysius who, after discussing some of the conceptual names of God and what they mean, asked how it is we can know God since he “cannot be grasped by mind or sense-perception” as he “is not a particular being?”26 He clarifies what cannot be grasped about God by saying “It might be more accurate to say that we cannot know God in his nature.” 27 What God is is unknowable to us. This is a basic affirmation of the utter transcendence of God as a starting point to any discussion about our knowledge of him. This then leads to a discussion of the ways which God is known, “through knowledge and through unknowing.”28 The way of knowledge for Dionysius, is what we would call positive attribution, to say what God is. The basis of these positive predications is the relation to God that exists in all things, as he is the cause of all things, so to some degree all things speak about him “according to their proportion to him as their Cause.”29 Yet, this is never a univocal relationship because, as has already been quoted, “in reality there is no exact likeness between caused and cause.”30 Though in principal all things relate to God, thus all things could be said to speak of God, Dionysius limited the discussion from the outset to “what the sacred scriptures have divinely revealed,” so that we might “look as far upward as the light of sacred scripture will allow.”31 This “positive theology” falls entirely in line with, and indeed strengthens, the sort of creator-creature distinction laid out above. Dionysius’ theology on this point placed a clear ontological and epistemological distance between God and man, while also grounding genuine union with and knowledge of God.
Moving now to consider Dionysius’ “negative theology” it can be seen that his approach here is essentially an expansion of his understanding of the incomparability of God mentioned above. The basic idea here is that God being the source of all things is more unlike us than he is like us, and so we speak most exactly of God when we deny those things which we know God is not in his essence than we do when we speak positively of God’s essence because his essence is unknowable—the word here unknowable being ascribed to God itself being an example of negative theology. For Dionysius the more our language seeks to rise up to express what God is the more “we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.”32 There is a sort of convergence where both positive and negative attributions fail and a point is reached “beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and, by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation, beyond every limitation; it is also beyond every denial.”33 Here the whole concept of knowledge by negation is predicated on the firm distinction between what is caused and their cause.
Recent scholars such as Cooper have interpreted this move in largely Hegelian terms, seeing positive in negative theology as a sort of thesis and anthesis with the synthesis being the reconciliation of the two.34 The silence that he arrives at, however, is by no means a reconciliation of affirmations and denials, but, as seen above, is simply the termination point of any language we try to apply to God. All attempts at speaking of him, or even denying of him, ultimately fall short. This interpretation from Cooper and others tends to impose a Plotinian pantheism on Dionysius, whom he claims, “strongly distinguishes the world from God, [but] he emphasizes the inclusion of all things in God.”35 This point is true of what he would affirm but the manner of inclusion in himself is of relation, all things relate to God, as noted above, and derive their existence from him. Relation with God, in Dionysius, goes one way. The fundamental flaw with this reading is not to take stock of how Dionysius positions himself within the Platonic tradition.
What has been seen thus far in this brief survey is that Dionysius tended to align himself very closely to the ideas of God that were prominent in late Neoplatonism over and against those that were adopted by figures like Plotinus. Further, the formulations that he adopted from them helped to steer his overall system away from pantheism. Yet, it was not as though he was simply Platonizing Christianity but was instead bringing Platonic categories into communication with biblical ideas. Such as, drawing a connection between Platonic notions of transcendence with the biblical idea of incomparability, or how he augmented the Platonic doctrine of analogy and bound all positive attributions of God to what could be found in scripture. All of this functioned as a demonstration of how Dionysius used Platonic terms and methods to ground his creator-creature distinction. Thus, as we consider Dionysius as an object of study for theological retrieval it is important to frame him properly in his context and not fall into the tendency of flattening out the conceptual world of Neoplatonism in order to see his best insights clearly.
Footnotes
1 Hubertus R. Drobner, The Fathers of the Church: A Comprehensive Introduction, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 533.
2 John Anthony McGuckin, “Dionysius the Areopagite” in The Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).
3 Drobner, The Fathers of the Church, 533.
4 McGuckin, The Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology, “Dionysius the Areopagite.” For this paper I will be referring to Pseudo-Dionysius as Dionysius for ease of reading.
5 Charles M. Stang, Sarah Coakley, and Piotr J. Malysz, “Luther and Dionysius,” in Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite (Malden, Ma: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 150.
6 It should be noted here that both in the East and the West a great deal has been done, as early as Maximus the Confessor, to apply a “Christological corrective” to the Dionysian system, so it would be unfair to claim that he was received uncritically or without alterations by any major theologian East or West. See: John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 189–192; Maximos Constas. “Maximus the Confessor, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the Transformation of Christian Neoplatonism.” Analogia 2, no. 1 (2017), 1–12; Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius a Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), specifically the sections where he deals with the reception of PD during the medieval period. In short, the Christological deficiency in Dionysius is something noted by both friends of his work and his opponents.
7 Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius, 167–8.
8 John W. Cooper, Panentheism The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 42–6.
9 Christopher Iacovetti, “God in His Processions,” Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology 26, no. 3 (2017): pp. 297-310.
10 Radek Chlup, Proclus: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 26; an interesting note worth consideration brought up by Chlup on page 17 is that Plotinus enjoyed greater popularity in the Latin West than he did in the East, which may provide some help in explaining why figures like John Scotus Eriugena interpreted Dionysius in a more pantheistic direction.
11 Ibid., 24.
12 Ibid., 22–23.
13 Plotinus and Stephen Mackenna, The Enneads: A New, Definitive Edition with Comparisons to Other Translations on Hundreds of Key Passages (Burdett New York: Published for the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation by Larson Publications, 1992), IV 8.
14 Chlup, Proclus, 24.
15 Chlup, Proclus, 26 (emphasis added); This sort of qualification is used elsewhere by Plato to express the limitations of the Philosopher to be free of bodily desires in this life (Phaedo 67A).
16 Proclus. The Elements of Theology: Diadoxos Stoixeiōsis Theologikē. Edited by E. R Dodds.
Seconded. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), Prop. 211.
17 Pseudo-Dionysius, Luibhéid Colm, and Paul Rorem. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works.
(New York: Paulist Press, 1987), CH 177C (emphasis added).
18 Ibid., DN 654C (emphasis added).
19 Ibid., DN, 916A.
20 Ibid., DN, 912D.
21 Ibid., MT, 1001A.
22 Ibid., DN, 872B.
23 Chlup, Proclus, 54.
24 Ibid., 55.
25 Ibid., 56.
26 Dionysius, DN, 859C.
27 Ibid., DN, 859C.
28 Ibid., DN, 872A.
29 Ibid., DN, 872A.
30 Ibid., DN, 645C.
31 Ibid., DN, 588A.
32 Ibid., MT 1033B.
33 Ibid., MT 1048B (emphasis added).
34 Cooper, Panentheism, 46.
35 Ibid.