Nielsen’s Nook

Saint Gregory of Nazianzus (329 - January 25, 389), also known as Saint Gregory the Theologian or Saint Gregory Nazianzen, was a 4th-century Archbishop of Constantinople. He is widely considered the most accomplished rhetorical stylist of the patristic age. As a classically trained speaker and philosopher he infused Hellenism into the early church, establishing the paradigm of Byzantine theologians and church officials.
St Gregory made a significant impact on the shape of Trinitarian theology among both Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking theologians, and he is remembered as the “Trinitarian Theologian.” Much of his theological work continues to influence modern theologians, especially in regard to the relationship among the three Persons of the Trinity. Along with two brothers, Saint Basil the Great and Saint Gregory of Nyssa, he is known as one of the Cappadocian Fathers.
Gregory is venerated a saint in both Eastern and Western Christianity. In the Roman Catholic Church he is among the Doctors of the Church; in Eastern Orthodoxy and the Eastern Catholic Churches he is revered as one of the Three Holy Hierarchs along with Saint Basil the Great and Saint John Chrysostom.

View the rest of this Wikipedia article.

9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. 11 Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. (ESV)

It’s amazing how sometimes just a turn of a phrase will strike you in a way that makes an amalgamation of the familiar burgeon into something fresh and stirring. Writing about Colossians 3:9-11, Farley writes:

The only abiding reality is Christ—He is all and everything and the only thing that matters. And He is in all. He is in everyone in the Church, without regard for their former race, religion, culture, or social position….¹

There is a boldness here that, to some, might verge upon audacity. Farley’s point is that the Apostle Paul seems to intimate that if Christ is the Incarnate Deity, the Savior of the World, the Perfect Imprint of the Father; then, indeed there is a cosmic reordering that is at hand. You see this echoed in Farley’s idea of former. In a very real and transcendent sense there is no longer race (and gender, c.f., Gal 3:28-29). There is no longer religion. There is no longer culture. There is no longer society. There is Christ—all in all.

Have we contemplated what it would be to allow Christ to more fully transform and renew the way I think about race, for example? In Christ, I am formerly a Caucasian. What does that mean? It seems to mean, at least on the surface, that Salvation circumscribes every aspect of the world in which we live, every facet of who I am as an individual and member of humanity. It does not obliterate our distinctions but puts restores them to their purposed places in the mosaic of Creation.

Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Help us to think cosmically about your work in our lives and in this world. Amen.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 182-3.

In Chapters in Church History, discussing the Puritan Revolt in England, Powel Mills Dawley writes:

…Puritan intolerance would have imposed a religious system as unpalatable to the mass of the people as Anglicanism was to the few.¹

This of course made me smile, given my Presbyterian background. It also made me think of my favorite definition of Puritans from H. L. Mencken that a Puritan was someone that feared that someone somewhere might possibly be having fun. Caricatures aside, the impact of the Puritans on the Church of England has been lasting as Dawley continues:

… it called forth the famous defense of the Church of England against Geneva, The Laws of Ecclesiastical polity by Richard Hooker, the most notable Anglican scholar of the sixteenth century. ²

However, the most profound impact might be what Dawley records regarding the placement of the Gospel in the self-consciousness of the Anglican Church as a historical continuation of the apostolic faith and practice:

The evangelical concern [imparted from the Puritans] with “Gospel before Church” would enable Anglicanism to call itself into judgment. The Catholic element, on the other hand, would bind the Church, even while under judgment, to the traditional stream of Christian life and experience in all ages. By means of this creative tension Anglicanism has remained aware that in religion of Incarnation, history is both the means of God’s self-revelation and the scene of God’s redemption. ³

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¹ Dawley, Powel Mills. Chapters In Church History. (New York: Protestant Episcopal Church, 1950), 186.

² Dawley, Powel Mills. Chapters In Church History. (New York: Protestant Episcopal Church, 1950), 186.

³ Dawley, Powel Mills. Chapters In Church History. (New York: Protestant Episcopal Church, 1950), 187.

Some of our friends turned us on to a promotion at an online dating service, that rates blogs along the lines of movie ratings. I do not recommend online dating, generally because it tends to emphasize physical quantifiable aspects of a human being over the more complex personal aspects that are better intuited than stored in databases for anonymous observation. That being said, it is funny to see my blog is rated PG, because it refers to “death” 6 times and “hurt” 1 time (on the front page at least).

If one rates the pages that come up under Nielsen’s Nook’s “Suffering and Grief” category, interestingly we go of the charts, receiving a NC-17 rating for the following words that appear on that page:

• pain (27x)
• death (18x)
• dead (4x)
• murder (2x)
• hell (1x)

This marketing gimmick is not able to discern between words and concepts, literal uses and figurative uses of words. No real surprises there. However, is it not at least worth stopping to consider the fact that most of us have the same aversion to suffering and grief “Don’t talk to me about ‘pain’ man!” We spend so many of our resources and so much of our lives seeking to ilk out a life less suffered. We like living in the matrix, as it were.

Then there is reality. Some will say, “You’re being morbid. We should not seek out suffering.” The former is false and the later statement is unnecessary, both being non sequitors. I am saying there is life in a world condemned in and corrupted by sin that is at the same time being renewed and reformed in the life of Christ. Sin has cosmic proportions as does the incarnate- crucified- resurrected- and- ascended Christ.

I am reading Justinian’s Flea, by William Rosen presently. In it he presents a rendition of the bubonic plague that hit Constantinople in 542 AD. He interacts with Michael Behe, an Intelligent Design (ID) advocate, though he himself takes an evolutionary approach. Behe argues that the flagellum, the rotary motor used by bacterium to propel themselves, is an irreducibly complex component that indicates it could not have evolved and must have been created. Rosen points out that the same proton pump used to propel the flagellum is used to pump the deadly endotoxins of Y. pestis, into its victims causing tortuous death. Rosen then admits that neither ID nor evolution have satisfying answers regarding why the Y. pestis bacterium is constituted this way. ID implicates God in evil in its irreducibly complex argument and evolution cannot explain why the bacterium would slaughter its host so rapidly that it extinguishes its own life.

We do have revelation; a point that neither ID nor evolutionary theory want to acknowledge. It does not give us pithy answers, but it does tell us of a Fall that had cosmic significance. This revelation, found in the bible, puts that awful consequence, squarely upon the shoulders of the human race and more profoundly in the context of a God who is bent at redeeming a world out of suffering and grief through taking that suffering and grief upon himself. While I would never in the least desire the plague on anyone for a moment, plagues come. They come like tidal waves and without warning. Some come through illness, others through oppressive circumstances. The good news and the real news of the gospel does give itself to hope in the midst of suffering that we see in the words of one who also suffered much, the Apostle Paul:

⁹Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. (2 Corinthians 1:9, ESV)

Out of the brief second section of Osborne’s article on interpreting Paul there are nuggets of insights into Paul’s world. The letters of the Apostle Paul generally follow the traditional bounds of “Hellenistic letters”; however, Paul “felt less bound” to these structures, mixing several forms to accomplish his literary task.¹

Osborne incorporates nine types of Hellenistic letters into his catalog of letters with which Paul was likely familiar: ²

1. Letters of friendship (cf. 2 Cor 1:16; 5:3; Phil 1:7–8)
2. Family letters
3. Letters of praise and blame (1 Cor 11; Rev 2–3)
4. Exhortatory or paraenetic letters (1 Thess 1-5; the Pastorals)
5. Letters of mediation or recommendation (Phil 2:19-30, Philemon)
6. Juridical or forensic letters (1 Cor 9:3-12; 2 Cor 1:8-2:13)
7. Private or documentary letters
8. Official letters
9. Literary letters

There is an issue in the text here that seems to be glossed over in many translations. Deuteronomy 4:32-40 specifically (and larger parts of the OT generally) are making polemic against social and theological norms that are aberrant. This seems evident in the Hebrew. In Deuteronomy 4:32 most translations capitalize the word God, which seems right given that the god in view is the one who created (barah). Conceptually, this is God, the Lord, YHWH.

As most translations catch, the word for god (elohim) is rendered lowercase (i.e., god not God). But when the Hebrew text uses the definite article or the reflexive pronoun (hu’), the NIV and KJV do not bring out the polemic that appears to be going on here. The ESV and NRSV do the best job of catching this, but do not stay as consistent as the Hebrew would seem to warrant.

For example, in Deuteronomy 4:33-34 we read this abridged in the ESV:

Did any people ever hear the voice of a god speaking … and still live? … Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself … which the Lord your God did for you in Egypt…

The KJV alone here in missing the argument in the Hebrew reads in abridged form:

Did ever people hear the voice of God speaking … and live? … Or hath God assayed [i.e., attempted] to go and take him a nation … according to all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt …

The difficulty here is that you have an impossible question to answer if you follow the KJV’s translation. “Did God do ‘x’ according to what God did when he did ‘x’ ” is the logic of the translation. The problem here is that when the KJV has the only subject as the covenant God, and not gods and God, then we get a sort of tautological idea that really seems out of place.

When we come to Deuteronomy 4:39, it is the KJV over against the ESV, NIV, and NRSV that does a better job translating the Hebrew. These translations lack in that they don’t bring the weight of the argument to confront their English speaking readers. The Hebrew here is:

The maroon text above may be translated as:

… for YHWH himself is the God in heaven above and upon the earth below - there is no other.

The Hebrews were living among a polytheistic peoples and had demonstrated polytheistic tendencies in their history (e.g., the golden calf, Exodus 32). YHWH had broken into time and space and crushed Egypt before this tiny people in order to deliver them. However, it was in Israel’s deliverance that we find God revealing much about himself to his new people. In the means God employs to deliver his people we find he declares himself to be the only God anywhere, anytime.

In omitting the pronoun hu’, taken reflexively in my translation (i.e., himself), the ESV, NIV and NRSV all obfuscate the singularity of the claim that is being made. Even the KJV in catching the pronoun, leaves out the article that has been missing up to this point in the passage. It is possible to discern this in the English texts because they all include the “there is no other” clause at the end of the verse; however, the emphatic nature of the Hebrew seems diminished unnecessarily.

This has implications for how we understand the nature of salvation as applied today. Polytheism is alive and well in quite sophisticated ways in the twenty-first century. We worship money, power, possessions, and even Buddha, Allah, rivers and animals (e.g., in India). It is not merely a third-world country issue. It is rampant in all the world. It is not just “out there” in the world, but as Calvin noted, “our hearts are idol factories”. Thus, we take away from Deuteronomy 4:32-40 that if God will crush the Egyptian pantheon to deliver his people then and bring them near to himself at that time, then we may expect that he will invade the pantheons of our own hearts without hindrance and deliver us to union with himself in the same bonds of love.

Humanity’s Relationship to God
The Image of God that every human being is represents the basic building block in understanding our relationship to God even after the Fall. The redemption of fallen humans required that Christ take on the same ’stuff’ as they were and are. St. Athanasius writes, “The death of all was being accomplished in the body of the Lord, and on the other hand, death and corruption were destroyed by the Word which dwelt in that body.” (p 118)

This dynamic of dying and purification lead us to the spiritual relationship of humanity to God in Christ. Major aspects of this Spirituality can be summarized as such:

• Original participation
• Analogous Freedom of the Image of God
• Sin as a consequence of servitude to the demonic
• Redemption as a recapitulation of the human nature in the risen Christ

Meyendorff, again, warns his Western readers that Anselm or the Augustinian vs. Pelagian controversy are alien paradigms to these Eastern concepts. Reading these alien paradigms into the Eastern will inevitably result in skewing our understanding of what the East is actually saying on their own terms.¹

During the time of the great controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, the monks focused on the incarnation of the church in its heavenly aspect as opposed to the institutional structures rooted in this world [Dualism?]. They were preoccupied with realizing the participation in the divine life, from which Adam was deprived and which became accessible again in Christ.

As mentioned in previous chapters, Evagrius employed Platonic thought (viz. Metaphysics) explaining the Fall of the νους from its original dignity being now consigned to a bodily state. His system and terminology are based first of all on a distinction between praxis (πρακτική μέθοδος) and theoria (or γνωσις). The praxis was double edged. First there was the fight against the passions and second the practice of the evangelical commands. “The passions” (τά πάθη) were not simply a state of the soul but a means of the devil to enslave humanity. (p 119)

In speaking of this fight against the passions, Evagrius intimates that humans are most vulnerable when they are idle. Temptation is external to the human being who is the victim of the passions. All can be vanquished by faith which leads to continence and ultimately to apatheia (απάθεια), the supreme aim of the praxis. It is this arrival at impassibility in which a human being would find herself free to develop in herself the divine agape, consecrating herself entirely to theoria, “of which ‘intellectual’ and perpetual prayer is the most adequate expression.” (p 120)

While for Evagrius the state of prayer is an impassible state, as a state of liberation it also implies dematerialization [neo-Platonic metaphysic]. Thus prayer for Evagrius is the ‘prelude to the immaterial gnosis’ (προοίμιον της αϋλου γνώσεως). “…[A]s for Origen,” writes Vladimir Lossky, “the ψυχή (soul) would be for Evagrius a distortion of the νους (intellect), which moves away from God by becoming material.” (p 121) Once liberated, the intellect can engage in theoria without being distorted by the passions which once held the intellect captive. Now the intellect contemplates in light of the Logos.

Ultimately the liberated can contemplate and know God himself, being predicated on the Origenist metaphysic that drew a “natural kinship” between the divine and intellectual. (p 121). In great (and this writer would say problematic) divergence from the Cappadocians and Pseudo-Dionysius, Evagrius blurs the distinction between Creator and creature when he writes, “God does not transcend the intellect; once purified, detached from matter and ’simple’ in its contemplation, the intellect sees God as he is, in his essence.” (p 122) The result being an extreme form of Pelagianism, being seen most extremely in the Isochrist monks, “who claimed that they became ‘equal to Christ’ by the restoration of their minds in contemplation of God…” (p 122)

Alternately, a tendency that excluded Platonic dualism enjoyed great influence, seeing humanity’s way towards deification in a Christ-centered sacramental spirituality. The so called St. Macarius of Egypt (some think him to be Symeon of Mesopotamia).

The asceticism of Evagrius and Macarius must be understood in a more full orbed context, incorporating the assumptions about the nature of sin, the original destiny of humanity and salvation in terms of deification. For example, Evagrius taught that the passions were manifestations of the corruption of human nature. In other words, sin as an external action only manifests our “passionate” state. (p 123) This way of viewing sin gave way to the role of the “spiritual father”, being a guide for the journey through this world.

Many aspects of the ascetical tradition of the Christian East can present to the Western observer a Pelagian aspect…. [If] one remembers the conception of the image of God as it prevails in the Greek Fathers, the problem of the relationship between grace and human freedom is on a different level from that which opposed Augustine to Pelagius in the West. Nature, and therefore true freedom, presuppose communion with God in grace…. It is not the blasphemous juxtaposition of divine grace and human effort but the concrete realization in Jesus Christ of man’s primitive image. (p 124)

Or as Gregory of Nyssa writes, “What has been made in all aspects in the image of the divinity must undoubtedly possess in its nature a free and independent will, in order that participation in the divine advantages should be the prize of virtue.” This doctrine of synergism (συνεργεία) is developed further in Marcarius:

The more one loves, the more one gives oneself to the fight, in one’s body and in one’s soul, in order to accomplish the commandments, the greater the communion one achieves with the Spirit into the spiritual growth of the renewing of the mind; acquiring salvation by grace and divine gift, but receiving by faith, by love, and by the effort of free choice, progress and increase in the measure of this spiritual age….Thus, eternal life will be inherited by grace, but also in all righteousness, since it is not only through the divine grace and power without human collaboration (συνεργεία) and effort that progress is made… (p 125)

A passage like the one from Macarius above will sound Pelagian or semi-Pelagian unless Eastern notions of participation and communion accepted. Human freedom and effort are to be understood as entailing participation in the divine life. This in turn assumes real communion with the Archetype of whom humanity is image. This is what the Christian East calls deification. This is for Athanasius and Cyril the very basis of the Gospel.

Deification implies then that the soul becomes one with God. Humanity is called to participate in God, without there ever being any confusion between God’s nature and that of the person, without any diminution of human freedom. In this a person fulfills the destiny for which humanity was created.

Byzantine monastics sought to fill their minds with God pressing forward towards the goal of deification. One significant manifestation of this thought is seen in the Jesus Prayer an essential element of Byzantine hesychasm (’ησυχία rest or contemplation). Thus constant prayer is the mark of a mind truly freed from the passions. Isaac of Nineveh writes:

When the Spirit establishes his dwelling in man, the latter can no longer stop praying, for the Spirit never ceases praying in him. Whether he sleeps or stays awake, prayer is not separated from his soul. (p 127)

It is in Christ that humanity recovers his original destiny, rediscovers true freedom which perished in its slavery to Satan. In Christ humanity makes use of this regained freedom, working with the Holy Spirit, that a person may love and know God. It is deification (θέωσις) that gives the mystical character to Byzantine spirituality. ‘Mystical’ here is referring not to the subjective experience but the objective reality of union with Christ. As a person is the image of God, deification is the free and conscious participation in the divine life, which is proper only to humanity. As St. Athanasius gives in his great patristic principle: “If God did not become man, man cannot become God.” (p 129)

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¹ I might add here how much I have enjoyed the interaction with Acolyte4236. While Meyendorff’s point is well taken here, I - as a Westerner - do not know how to gain this understanding with out extended dialogue with those who do have these categories already in place.

The first five chapters considered the successive problems of Eastern Christianity from the fifth century C.E.:

1. Christological Crisis
2. Origenism
3. Integration of neo-Platonic thought

In the context of these crises at least three basic truths of the Christian religion were at stake:

1. Salvation of humanity
2. Humanity’s relationship with God
3. Humanity’s final destiny

The full force of St. Athanasius’ polemic against Arianism would evaporate if the Word were nothing more than a glorified creature. Thus he could say, God “became man in order that man might become God in him.” (p 113)

Salvation of Humanity
Three elements are key to understanding the Eastern conception of salvation:

1. Image of God in humanity and the destiny of that image
2. Original Sin
3. Redemption

The Image of God and Its Destiny
There is no consensus patrum for the exegesis of Genesis 1:26-27. Both the depth of what the image consists and the breadth of its distinctions must be considered. On the one hand, St. Irenaeus argued that image included the whole person (material and immaterial, body and soul). On the other hand, a later tradition, influenced by Platonic anthropology, said that image only pertained to the νοῦς (mind). Regarding the breadth of distinctions, we are considering two terms: εἰκών (image) and ὁμοίωσις (resemblance). Irenaeus and Origin saw a fundamental distinction between the two words, while Cyril of Alexandria and Athanasius regarded them as synonyms.

There is an “absolute consistency” in the Greek patristics that asserts that the image of God is not something external to humanity, that is received by humanity, and preserved by human nature as some kind of property independent of its relationships with God. “Image implies a participation in the divine nature.” (p 114)

So even Adam in the garden had to go beyond himself and receiving “illuminating grace”. For the Eastern Church the notion of “grace is identified with that of participation; grace is never a created gift but is a communion with divine life.” Or as R. Leys writes about St. Gregory of Nyssa, “grace makes man in the image of God….the world was created by grace.” Nature and grace presuppose one another in the Fathers. “Nature stops being really ‘natural’ if it abandons its own destiny, which is to communicate with God and to rise ever higher in the knowledge of the Unknowable.” (p 115)

Freedom then, being entailed in image, presumes participation in the divine life. St. Basil tells us that Adam received from the Creator a free life (αὐθαίρετον ζωήν). Thus, neither nature or freedom are opposed to grace; rather, they suppose it. St. Cyril explains that since we understand the Diety to be free, and humanity is His image, then originally humanity was free.

But original freedom also supposes the possibility of the fall, which the Fathers interpreted as a revolt against God and therefore as a sort of suicide, for a crime directed against God [archetype] necessarily deals a blow at man [ectype] himself. (p 116)

Original existence presupposed free participation in God through the intermediary of the intellect; the fall enslaved humanity to Satan through the intermediary of the passions on account of separation from God.

Sin is thought of as a deadly illness (φθορά) contracted by Adam and passed on to his posterity. The consequences of sin may be transmitted to others; however, the guilt of sin remains with the culpable individual. The human race possess the corrupted human nature passed down from Adam; however, the race does not partake of Adam’s guilt, but merely imitates it. Sin simply darkened the image and limited human freedom.

The redemption of human nature accomplished by Christ the new Adam consisted essentially in the fact that a sinless hypostasis, even that of the Logos, freely took over human nature in the very state of corruption in which it was (and this implied death) and by the resurrection re-established its original relationship with God. In Christ, man participated again in the eternal life destined for him by God. … In the same way in which corruption appeared to the Greek Fathers as a disease contracted by man rather than a punishment inflicted by divine justice, so are the death and resurrection of the incarnate Word (the sacrifice for which Christ was both priest and the victim) understood by them as, first, the accomplishment in Christ of our common destiny, and then as a new creation that could not be achieved unless the human nature of Christ had really become ours, in death itself. (p 117)

Two dangers became evident in Dionysian thought that stemmed from the notions of unions and distinctions in God:

1. Pantheism
2. Platonic Emanationism

These dangers are indigenous to any form of Platonism. Pseudo-Dionysius (PD) avoided the problem of emanationism, in which each emanation of the divine implied a fragmentation of God having lost its fullness of the divine being as it emanated. He did avoids this writing:

It is common, synthetic, and unique for the whole Diety to be participated in fully and entirely by all the participants, and never by any of them in a partial way, as the central point of a circle is participated in by all the radii … without being in any way fragmented. As for the unpartakableness of the Diety, universal cause, it also transcends [these participations], for there is with it no sort of contact, no sort of community, nor any synthesis between it and its participants. (p 97)

In other places PD distinctly divorces himself from neo-Platonism and articulates a Christian knowledge of God that accommodates neo-Platonist categories. Nevertheless, PD “cleverly avoids” explicit reference to the personalist concept of hypostasis. In a well-known passage from On the Divine Names, PD speaks of God being at once Trinity and Monad.

Two Great Dionysian Victories
In trying to use “against the Greeks the Greeks’ own goods”, PD accomplishes two great victories in essential areas. First, he successfully demonstrates that the knowledge of God is not discursive or identifiable with any natural process. Rather, it transcends our natural faculties and represents a mode of knowledge sui generis. Second, PD goes beyond Origen emanationism and pantheism in showing that the divine manifestations (i.e., “names”) in the world do not interfere with his essential transcendence. (p 99)

It would seem almost certain that PD’s intent was to protect (advance?) the Christian tradition in the context of the neo-Platonic intellectual culture in which he participated. Specifically, he was seeking a method which would allow for a deductive rediscovery of the proper order of things in the world, incorporating Christian religious forms into the intelligible structures of late neo-Platonism.

Philosophically Christian
PD remains fundamentally Christian. He maintains that God is still “above” the “Platonic One”, not belonging to the lower hierarchical orders. Further, he demonstrates that the hierarchical procession is not a diminution of the divine being but God’s presence was fully in each being. Dionysius is the source of the classical classification of the angels into nine orders, subdivided into three triads, which has no foundation in Scripture. (p 102) He remains trapped in the sense-mind dichotomy and lacked the philosophical means to express the realities linked with the incarnation.

His ecclesiastical hierarchy sought to follow as much as possible that of the angels or celestial hierarchy. The ecclesiastical hierarchy, being essentially arbitrary, seems to have twisted the perspective followed by the ecclesiology of the Church of the first few centuries. The Dionysian hierarch, designating not only bishops but great figures like Melchizedek, is essentially a Gnostic who transmits esoteric knowledge to those below him in the hierarchy. This notion reduces the idea of a sacrament down to a transmission of personal illumination. For example, the Eucharist is for PD only an ethical lesson for the “imperfect” and not a participation in the body and blood of Christ.

Theologically Christian
In terms of theologia PD was in the tradition of the Cappadocians, overcoming the antinomy between God’s immanence and his transcendence. The different interpretation that the West has given On the Divine Names, has caused many misunderstandings between East and West on the “real sense” of Dionysian thought. (p 107)

Contributions to Christian Spirituality
Some lesser known areas of Dionysian influence are seen in ecclesiology and liturgical piety, essential elements of Christian spirituality. PD’s cosmic hierarchy sought to relate that all beings were created in view of their union with God and the universal tendency to draw closer to God (imitation). This was a view that had been central to patristic anthropology since St. Irenaeus and later developed by St. Maximus. Strangely, PD asserts this in “complete separation” from the mystery of the Incarnation. (p 108)

For PD there are two distinct modes of union with God. On the one hand, there is theologia referring to the mystical, individual and direct; on the other hand, theurgy, describing the intermediary activity of the hierarchy. Dionysian theologia belongs to the realm of piety; however, theurgia is not so simply classified. Theurgia rests on the same neo-Platonic ontology as theologia; however, its aim was to transmit gnosis (knowledge), and the sacraments themselves are reduced to initiating symbols.

Christian liturgy, in trying to satisfy the needs of the masses, underwent a transformation. Preaching insisted on the sanctity of the sacramental action. The idea of esoteric initiation borrowed from Corpus Hermeticum, was used to communicate to the faithful the sense of the sacred and to remind them of how difficult it is to approach it. In the absence of such initiation, one possesses only indirect knowledge through hierarchical intermediaries and symbols. To penetrate these mysteries requires that one initiated.

“Byzantine thought never escaped from the great problem of the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christian revelation.” It was the condemnation of Origen by Justinian that brought a great blow to neo-Platonism, which had gained respect in Christian circles after it had been adopted by the Gnostics. It is a view that presented the cosmos as a hierarchy in which the higher beings were intermediaries for the lower, while all emanated from God. Insofar as all idea of creation ex nihilo was excluded, this method made it impossible to avoid a monistic and essentially pantheistic worldview.

Nevertheless Origen did bring the doctrine of free-will as a corrective to neo-Platonism. However, out of the ashes of Origen’s condemnation the “Alexandrian vision” rose, a phoenix flying on the authority of a source claiming to be from Dionysius the Areopagite, a disciple of St. Paul in Athens. While we are certain that the historical Dionysius did not write Corpus Areopagiticum, many today believe Pseudo-Dionysius (PD) belonged to Severian circles of Syria, which represented the moderate Monophysites. These circles sought to integrate within a Christian system the hierarchical world of neo-Platonism. PD’s contribution was in introducing the corrective of God’s absolute transcendence, influencing Byzantine thinking along the lines of theology and hierarchies.

Enomius and the Cappadocian Fathers
Arian extremists of the fourth century C.E., such as Eunomius, had argued that humanity could know God in his essence; i.e., as God knows himself. The Fathers made recourse through apophatic theology (negative theology). In other words, we may know what God is not, but it is impossible to say what God is. While Eunomius maintained that God in his essence (i.e., the Father) is knowable, the Cappadocian Fathers responded with the absolute transcendence of the divine essence (i.e., God is not knowable in his essence).

It is important to understand that the negations of apophatic theology are not on account of humanity’s fallen position and resultant incapacity to know God; rather, it reflects the unknowability of God of God in his essence. Gregory of Nyssa explains to us that God “who by nature is invisible becomes visible through his energies, appearing in what is around him.” (p 94). The Fathers in their controversy with Eunomius defended the biblical conception of the living and acting God over against a “philosophical and intellectualistic conception of Deity-Essence.”

In the Platonic and Origenist traditions, the mind, in order to know God, must free itself from the prison-house of the material world and become its own self again. This was insufficient for Pseudo-Dionysius, who taught that the mind must come out of itself because the knowledge of God is beyond the mind (ὑπέρ νοῦν).

Thus, PD detaches himself from two important neo-Platonic postulates:

• The natural divinity of the νοῦς (mind)
• The knowability of the divine essence

This does not exclude … the meeting between God and created beings; on the contrary, this meeting constitutes the aim and ultimate meaning of beings. It supposes a descending movement on the part of God, out of himself, to make himself approachable and knowable, and an ascending movement on the part of beings who first of all recover their ‘analogy’ with God, that is, their capacity to participate in the virtues of God; then, coming out of themselves, to participate in the very being of God (but not in his essence), and ‘go back’ (ἐπιστροφή) to God.(p 95)

It is precisely because PD does not identify the divine essence with the Platonic “One” that it is possible for him to speak of distinctions in God.