Scholium to the work of Dionysius the Areopagite

The “Scholia to the Work of Dionysius the Areopagite” focuses on key themes: Divine light, the hierarchical structure of the world, the path of knowing God and mystical unity with Him. The scholia help to understand the complex philosophical and theological ideas of Dionysius. - Divine revelation and knowledge of God, which is possible only through purification of the heart and ascent to Him through prayer and asceticism; - hierarchy of existence. The commentary reveals the meaning of the heavenly and ecclesiastical hierarchy as the means through which God communicates his grace to the world; - mystical theology. God is beyond all comprehension and is known through “Divine ignorance” - the rejection of limited human concepts; - symbolism and allegory. The essay explains how the symbols and images in Dionysius's texts help to understand spiritual truths. St. Maximus the Confessor to the work of Dionysius the Areopagite “On Mysterious Theology.” 1. They are simple and absolute - as understood and contemplated apart from images, and not through allegory. He calls absolute that which is not comprehended by revealing and explaining the meaning of names or symbols, but is achieved by eliminating and abstracting from everything existing and conceivable. He previously called this immobility of the acting mind foolishness, but here he calls it the darkest and most invisible twilight, according to the Psalmist, who said: “Clouds and darkness are around Him” (Ps. 96:2) and “He made darkness His covering” (Ps. 17:12). 2. They are not filled with sensual eyes, but their very essence, being a living mind, is entirely a keenly seeing eye. That is why they are called “many-readers” in prayer. 3. Using a parallel, the same thing is revealed. The ancients called this sensory thing non-existent, since it is involved in all changes and does not exist forever in the same form. The mental, as a being, according to the desire of its Creator, is eternal, immortal and does not change its essence, they call it existing. We have stated this many times in the book “On the Divine Names.” 4. Towards the simplicity of the highest unit. And the fifth chapter of the book “On Divine Names” talks about how to strive in an unknown way towards God, and you will find a little here too. 5. He calls uncontrollable renunciation a way out of any connection, so that nothing is held back by any connection, either with oneself or with anything created. 6. And here he called complete incomprehensibility darkness. 7. Note that he calls uninitiated people who are not involved in the sacraments, who are embraced and held by the sensual and who imagine that there is nothing higher than existence. Of course, he immediately talks condescendingly about completely ignorant people. And note that he speaks separately about the unenlightened and separately about the uninitiated, that is, those not initiated into the sacraments. 8. Before this, he spoke about those who believed in the name of Christ, but did not come to perfect reason, who measured the truth with their ideas and did not know the difference between what exists in the proper sense of the word and what exists homonymously, between essences and the One who is above existence and therefore Superexistent. After all, such people, as uninitiated people, believe that that gloomy darkness is truly characteristic of the Highest, and consider it the radiance that among us covers God and hides Him from public view. Many of us truly suffer from this, because they do not know that immeasurable light darkens all vision. If there are those among us, what can we say about idolaters, completely uninvolved in all the sacraments and amazed at the statues! The mental is called an actual being, while the sensory is called a being homonymously, not in the proper sense of the word. The words “higher than such” indicate believers who are held back by corruption. 9. As existing entirely God-like, and not at all existing super-essentially. It is both affirmation and negation, since both of them are rightfully applied to divine greatness. What cataphatic affirmations and apophatic denials are and what are negative judgments is explained here, especially in the third chapter, and in the book “On the Divine Names” we have expounded at length in various ways. 10. When applied to God, negations do not contradict affirmations, for God is above both all negation and affirmation. Read in the book “On the Heavenly Hierarchy” shortly after you start. 11. Draw the conclusion from this that these writings of the great Dionysius are not counterfeit. In addition to those sayings of some of the contemporaries of the apostles, which he recalled in the previous words, he now in like manner cites the sayings of the divine Bartholomew, as the word “speaks” shows. After all, if he taught orally, he would say “spoke.” Note that he quotes the saying of St. Bartholomew, in what sense theology is both great and small. 12. The word polulogos; (“voluble”), with the emphasis on the penultimate syllable, means “talking a lot”; and the same word with stress on the second syllable from the end means “in need of many words.” Likewise, prototokos, with the stress on the third syllable from the end, means “born first,” and prototokos, with the stress on the second syllable from the end, means “a woman who gave birth for the first time.” As in Homer: “The first who gave birth, who had never before known the pain of birth” (Iliad 17, 5). 13. This means - expressing its nature externally. The same must be understood about thought. 14. He speaks of the sounds and speeches of heaven, mentioned in Scripture in connection with God, as not spoken and transmitted by earthly human thinking, but by divine inspiration. 15. Pay attention to how everything happened to Moses, when, having ascended the mountain and entered the darkness, he saw how possible it was for man, God. 16. Pay attention to the order of what happened to Moses before he was honored to enter the divine darkness. 17. What is the place where God stood before Moses, and what are the peaks, or extremes, of the mental and the visible? We talked about this at the end of the first chapter of the book “On the Heavenly Hierarchy.” 18. He calls descriptive expressions related to the contemplation of beings, which he considers to be the footstool of God, hypothetical. For with their help, that is, thanks to their stability, we understand that he reaches everything - but not by transition, but providentially. He calls mental peaks the heavenly rational beings existing with God, which he called His most holy places and which God Himself surpasses, being, as it were, separated from such and not at all similar to such. 19. The meaning of this period must be understood in such a way that Moses, when he saw the place where God stood, was then removed both from the visible, that is, from everything sensual, and from the speculative, that is, from everything verbal - I mean intelligible rational beings, including our souls, and only then did he enter the darkness, that is, into the non-understanding surrounding God, where, having closed the eye of all rational perception, he found himself in mental intangibility and ignorance, since God is beyond all rational perception, and thus plunging into ignorance and inactivity - I mean not just the inactivity of the mind regarding itself, or in relation to another, when you don’t think about yourself or anything else - but then plunging into a transcendental ignorance completely unknown to any understanding, he knew everything. 20. Note that by darkness he means ignorance. 21. How God is known through ignorance, and he speaks here, and we said in more detail in the book “On the Divine Names” in the second chapter. You should know that in Exodus, where it is written that Moses entered the darkness in which God was, the Hebrew word “araphel” is used. Seventy interpreters, Aquila and Theodotion translated “arafel” as “dusk.” Symmachus translated “araphel” with the word “mist.” The Jew (Josephus) says that “araphel” is the name of the firmament that Moses reached. After all, there are seven firmaments, they say, which are called heaven, and they give names that there is no need to remember now. I read about these seven heavens in the dialogue between Papiscus and Jason, composed by Ariston of Pella, which Clement of Alexandria says was composed by St. Luke. However, he philosophized more divinely about the darkness, contemplated in divine ignorance, in his epistles; in the fifth he writes about this completely. 22. Notice that by renouncing all knowledge we unite with the unknown. 1. And here he speaks of divine darkness and ignorance. And note: this is what it means to be under the divine twilight - through unseeing and ignorance, to see and understand the Being above contemplation and knowledge in unseeing and ignorance itself. This is, he says, truly seeing and knowing. Nowhere else does he explain in this way what knowledge in ignorance is. Read also the fifth letter to Dorotheus. 2. This is due to the fact that in general we do not know anything similar to Him by nature. This is what he called weaning. He calls a native statue an image sculptured in undivided material, for example, in an intact stone, in which it stands when someone carves something living, as Euripides explains in Andromeda: From natural serf stones, He called natural sculpture made of stone native. But the same thing applies when you cut out a certain part from a standing and flowering tree and make it part of a bed, just as, says Homer in the Odyssey, Odysseus did, or carved a monument of victory from this tree. And he also talks about a sculpture made of a precious stone, as if an emerald, having been cleared of adhering earth, suddenly turns out to be a sculpture, that is, an ornament, which, looking mainly at, he pronounced the prokeimenon, like the poet Dionysius in the second book of “Poems on Precious Stones”: From deep green jasper, or from amethyst, A sculpture shimmering with crimson, made of pitch-black hyacinth. All this reveals the great learning of this holy man. 3. The father himself further explains this passage. Additions are when something is said about God in a positive way, for example, that He is Life, Light, and the like. Denials are when something is denied as alien to God, for example, that God is not a body, not a soul, and nothing that is known or accessible to thought. Otherwise. We learned differently what affirmations and denials are from the essay “On the Divine Names.” 4. The knowledge of things, he says, does not reveal the ignorance relating to God and does not make it obvious, but rather covers and hides it. And the light associated with being should be understood as the knowledge of being as it is, which will be discussed further. 1. What does the book of “Theological Essays” contain? These are the theological principles and starting points concerning all divine enlightened knowledge and Orthodoxy, necessary to understand why there is only one divine nature, which the later 318 fathers called consubstantial; why is the nature threefold, which we call trinitarian; what do the properties of persons mean, i.e. Fatherhood and Sonship; what is the sanctifying power and theology of the divine Spirit; why is it said “Good words poured out from my heart” (Ps. 44:2); why is it said about the revered Spirit that it proceeds from the Father; and why the Son and the Spirit in the Father, in Himself, and the Friend in the Friend are eternal, indissoluble and indivisible in an inexhaustible existence. It is also appropriate to know that staying and standing are one and the same, but movement is the other side of staying. He says that the divine nature, which is always immobile, appears to be moving by moving into each other. 2. The meaning of what has been said is this: he says that the existence of the Holy Trinity is eternal, and that She was not once different, but later became something else, and She did not receive any division or transformation, but together, simultaneously with the Father and from Him, the Son and the Holy Spirit exist, and not after Him. 3. Note - against the Nestorians and Akephals. 4. What does the book “On Divine Names” contain? 5. What does Symbolic Theology contain? 6. The first he calls “Symbolic Theology.” 7. Why “Theological Essays” and the book “On Divine Names” are less wordy than “Symbolic Theology”. 8. Speaking about the reduction of speculation, he means the intangible simplicity of contemplation appropriate to it. And he said “shrinking” instead of “collapsing”. 9. He calls dumbness the inability to represent in words what is higher than words; unreasonableness is the inability to form a concept and think about what is above the mind. 10. Since there are mental and transcendental units of God, God is one, or rather above one. Naturally the word is shortened, since He is indivisible and non-multipliable. After ascending to God, as it descends to the sensual, the word increasingly comes into contact with the divisible, decomposing and plural and multiplies in accordance with the divisibility and diversity of the sensual. “To the limits” is from the area of ​​“Theological principles”. 11. From the primary, he says, as from a more suitable and corresponding thought, such as, for example, that God is Existent, as He called Himself. 12. How it is appropriate to use affirmations and subtractions in relation to God, and that we begin affirmations with what is primary and more akin to God; taking away - from that which is as far away from Him as possible. 13. Cataphase is the expression of something either generally accepted, or controversial, or connecting, or juxtaposing, such as: God is Life, God is Goodness. A hypothetical judgment is one that denies something in general, or the words of some opponent, or explains something intricately woven. An example of a hypothetical cataphasis about God is that God is Life and Goodness to a greater extent than air or stone. Withdrawals as negations are the opposite of affirmations. If with a cataphatic statement it is said that God is Life to a greater extent than air, then with an apophatic withdrawal it is said that God does not get drunk and is not angry. After all, when making statements, we begin with what is more related, and life and goodness are more related to God than air and stone. With withdrawals, we ascend from the extreme. Let's say that the fact that God cannot be shown in words or thought is closer to God than the fact that He is not hungover and is not angry. And yet we begin the withdrawal from the second, for God does not get drunk to a greater extent than it is impossible to think about Him. To get drunk (kraipale means to become very drunk, as when there is a kind of “dizzy” (karapale)), which is: “the head (to kara etoi ten kephalen) shaking (pallousa) and moving strongly.” And anger is not a random irritation, but a long-lasting one. Ascending from the sensual to the speculative, it is appropriate that all such abstractions concerning the incorporeal should be understood not vulgarly, but each time bearing in mind what was said by the blessed Dionysius himself - that God is nothing of what was said, of what we know or can think, and also nothing of what all mental powers know; for in general everything that can be said comes from God and is His gift. How, in the proper sense of the word, can He who cares about them be one of them? We examined all this one way or another in the book “On Divine Names.” After all, everything, as something accidental, belongs to existence, which is beyond God. God is both above being and its Cause, so above both. 14. Otherwise. Life and goodness are cataphasis, or affirmation. It is not drunkenness or anger – this is apophasis, or withdrawal. 15. Air - since in the “Kingdoms” it is said about a “still breath” (1 Kings 19:12), “stone” - said the prophet (Ps. 117:22). More than these, such statements and expressions as “life” and “goodness” are suitable for God. Likewise, when the opposite is taken away, such phenomena as hangover and anger are more distant from God and alien to Him; and the fact that He is inexpressible in words and unthinkable is more fitting and closer to God, because He is above all mind and word. 1. Necessarily, the father thereby warns the listener that as a result of the apophases one should not think that the divine does not exist at all; with them he precisely affirms its existence; in this case he shows that it is not anything that exists, but is super-essential. 1. Differ from each other, as was said above, imagination, opinion, word and understanding, which are represented by the properties of the mind. But we must also understand that Reason does not have a word similar to our word, nor does it have an understanding similar to that of creatures endowed with intelligence; everything else should be perceived the same way. Otherwise. And in these cases it should be understood in the same way as when it comes to our knowledge. And when they say “life” or “light” in the sense in which they are contemplated among the born, then they speak, he says, about what is outside It, that is, beyond the limits of the divine nature, which means they are talking about creatures, thanks to which we comprehend the One who gave them existence; Thanks to them, we cannot say anything positive about His nature; again we make a subtraction by saying that none of this is divine. 2. One and unity differ from each other: one is something superior, and the other is a quality inherent in it, such as, for example, whiteness and whiteness, goodness and goodness. And note that neither goodness is the essence of God, nor any of the above and the opposite; so she's none of those things. For all such things are not His essence, but an idea of ​​Him. The philosopher Sextus Ecclesiasticus and Gregory the Theologian say the same thing in the third of their theological words - that neither divinity, nor unbornness, nor fatherland mean the essence of God. 3. Notice that She is neither spirit in our understanding, nor sonship, nor fatherhood. To all proposed apophases add the words “in the sense known to us,” for they indicate the area subject to our knowledge. 4. Let not this chapter trouble you, and let not you think that this divine man is blaspheming. His goal is to show that God is not something existing, but is higher than existing. After all, if He, having created, brought all this into existence, how can He turn out to be one of the existing things? He says that existing things do not know God, who caused everything; however, it is obvious destruction to not know God. Soon, however, he clarified this by saying “as He is,” that is, that nothing that exists knows God as He is; meaning His inconceivable and super-essential essence, or existence as He exists. It is said: “No one knows the Son except the Father; and no one knows the Father except the Son” (Matthew 11:27). And from the opposite, the great Dionysius concludes that no one knows God as He is, nor God Himself knows existence as it is, that is, he cannot approach the sensible sensually or to beings as beings, for this is not characteristic of God. People perceive what is sensible either through sight, or taste, or touch; We understand the mental either through study, or through teaching, or through insight. God knows what exists, not using any of these methods, but possessing the knowledge appropriate to Him. This is what is meant by the expression “He who knows everything before he was born” (Dan. 13:42), showing that God knows existing things in a way that is not characteristic of the being of existing things, that is, not sensually, but in a different way of knowledge. The angels know him with their minds, immaterially, and not like us - sensually. So God also knows existence in an incomparable and superior way, without being likened to it. Otherwise. A being, or a creature, cannot rise above its nature in thinking. Naturally, what looks at itself does not know the divine Nature as It is. Likewise, divine Nature, looking at Itself, does not know that in It there are beings according to the logos of essence. He clarified this by saying “is it a being,” since He is above all things that exist and has acquired existence itself super-essentially. Otherwise, it is impossible to say that God does not know His creations. 5. That no one knows the Most Pure Trinity as it is; in other words, that there is nothing like Her, capable of knowing Her as She is. We know what human nature is because we are human. What is the image of the existence of the Most Pure Trinity, we do not know, for we do not come from Her being. In the same way, God does not know things as they are, as we know them, because He is not one of things or similar to them. And if God is a Spirit, and that’s what the Holy Spirit is called, then the Spirit is in a sense unknown to us and the angels. And why, having said above “He is neither light nor truth,” a little lower he again says: “He is neither darkness nor light, neither deception nor truth”? You can try to answer this way: first, he speaks of light in the absolute sense of “and not deception,” as in the beings of angels, “and truth” is in itself absolutely and without cause the truth. And after this, that He is not one of those things that relates to anything, such as light arising from darkness, as if from a potential state it turns into actual light - from light and darkness correlated with each other. For this is neither darkness nor strong light, so He translated both of them not from opposites, from potential error, into actual truth. For all such things are secondary in relation to Him, having providentially spread from Him. There is nothing that is not from Him. Greek σχόλιον - comments that were placed by the “scholiast” between the lines or in the margins of an ancient manuscript. You might be interested in: