The Mystical Theology — Mystics

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The Book

Five short chapters — about ten pages in print, some 1,500 words of Greek — and arguably the most influential ten pages in the history of Christian contemplative prayer. Everything the later tradition calls the via negativa is here in seed: The Cloud of Unknowing, John of the Cross's dark night, Meister Eckhart, and by way of them a great deal of what is taught as contemplation today.

The argument is simple to state and hard to do. God is not one of the things that exist, so no name drawn from what exists can hold Him. We climb, therefore, not by adding true things about God but by taking away — first everything the senses report, then everything the mind can frame, and at last the denials themselves, since He transcends negation as surely as He transcends affirmation. What is left is not a blank. Dionysius calls it a Darkness that exceeds light, and the pattern he gives for it is Moses climbing Sinai into the cloud: the ascent ends not in a vision of God but in the place where God dwells, and in a silence past speech.

The author wrote under the name of the Athenian converted by Paul at the Areopagus (Acts 17:34). He was almost certainly a Syrian monk writing around 500 AD who knew his Proclus — the Neoplatonist who died in 485 — very well indeed. The pen name gave the work near-apostolic authority for a thousand years; the scholarship that unmasked it has not much dented his standing, and the East still reads him as a father.

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The Chapters

5

What is the Divine Gloom The prayer to the Trinity, and the counsel to Timothy: leave the senses and the intellect behind, and be led upward into the Ray of divine Darkness. Moses on the mountain is the pattern — he does not meet God, but the place where God dwells. How it is necessary to be united with and render praise to Him Who is the cause of all and above all The shortest chapter, and the hinge of the book. The negative way is not destruction but sculpture: like a carver freeing a figure from the marble, we take away rather than add. What are the affirmative expressions respecting God, and what are the negative The two ways set side by side. The affirmative descends from the highest category and grows ever more talkative; the negative climbs from the lowest and contracts its speech, until at the summit it falls silent altogether. That He Who is the Pre-eminent Cause of everything sensibly perceived is not Himself any one of the things sensibly perceived The first sweep of denials, over everything the senses can reach — opening, as Rolt's note points out, by denying that the Cause is lifeless or impersonal. The negations clear the ground; they do not empty it. That He Who is the Pre-eminent Cause of everything intelligibly perceived is not Himself any one of the things intelligibly perceived The second sweep, over everything the mind can reach — and then over the denials themselves. Neither darkness nor light, neither error nor truth; neither affirmation nor negation applies. The book ends, as it said it would, in silence.

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The Translation

Clarence Edwin Rolt (d. 1917) translated the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge — the Anglican publishing house — in its Translations of Christian Literature series. He died at thirty-seven, before the book appeared.

Rolt is chosen here over John Parker's 1897 version for his English, which keeps the heat of the Greek, and for his notes, which are unusually good at saying what the negation is not: that the via negativa is a sculptor freeing a figure from marble rather than a man smashing the block. Read with one caution. Rolt is an Edwardian reading Dionysius through the philosophy of his own moment; that frame is his, not the text's. Read the five chapters cold first.

The whole treatise takes about seventeen minutes to hear aloud — a public-domain reading is available from LibriVox.

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This Edition

Text

C. E. Rolt, Dionysius the Areopagite: On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology (London: S.P.C.K.; New York: Macmillan, 1920), pp. 191–201. Public domain — published 1920; C. E. Rolt died 1917. Free to read, copy and reprint.

Established from

The CCEL transcription, collated against the original 1920 printing (Wellesley College copy, Internet Archive). Paragraphing follows the 1920 pages. 4 transcription errors were corrected against the scan:

Wheat is the Divine Gloom → What is the Divine Gloom — ch. 1, CCEL reads 'Wheat'; the 1920 text reads 'What'.
Trinty → Trinity — ch. 1, CCEL drops the second 'i' in the opening invocation.
disinguished → distinguished — ch. 1, CCEL typo in Rolt's note on ἀγνώστως.
that the may apply → that we may apply — ch. 3, CCEL reads 'the' for 'we' in the closing sentence of the chapter.

Rolt's own readings are left alone.

Notes

All 29 of Rolt's footnotes are here. He numbered them 514–542 in the 1920 volume, running on from the Divine Names; they are renumbered from 1 within each chapter. Click any marker to open its note where you are reading; each chapter also collects them at the foot. Where the source markup gives no mid-sentence anchor, a marker sits at the end of the paragraph its note belongs to.

Not included

The Divine Names — the other two-thirds of Rolt's volume — and his long introduction.