Oldal 189 [189]
TRANSCENDING TRANSCENDENCE
to analyse only the specific grounds Denys on which proves that God is good,
and what exactly he means by divine bounty and beauty. The analysis of the
Dionysian concept of God as the Beautiful-and-Good will allow us to realize
that there is a fundamental tension or even twoity in this openly Platonizing
idea. I shall name this tendency of productive contradiction or creative
tension in God—especially recognizable in the Dionysian idea of divine
Love—the transcending of transcendence, and shall try to characterize the
relationship between his Platonic inspiration and his Christian identity, as
mirrored in Part 4 of the De divinis nominibus.
2. PRINCIPLES OF DENYS’ THEOLOGY OF THE GOOD
The fundamentals of Dionysian positive (causality-based) theology are
exposited in Parts 1 and 2 of On the Divine Names. Here, Denys is making
a preliminary difference between, as it were, an ultra-transcendent fundament
and an outward-oriented periphery in God. A distinction is hereby made
between a unificationist fundamental theology and the trinitarian theology
of the divine persons. Unification (henosis) is for Denys the first determinative
momentum in the divine nature: he anticipates here that God is, in a first
approach, the (Plotinian-Proclean, perhaps even Platonic) One. But a full¬
fledged theory of God as the One is not offered in Parts 1 or 2—this is
developed later, gradually, in the course of Parts 8 to 12, with a climax in Part
13, where it is also at once abandoned for an open-ended vista of the infinity
of God.’ Part 3 being, in essence, a call to prayer and a eulogy of Denys’
unidentified master Hierotheos, the first entirely worked out interpretation
of a divine name comes in Part 4. This is the theology of the Good conceived
as an eminent cause. It is one remarkable feature of this causal theology that
as the text advances, it increasingly attributes even the character of universal
efficient cause to the Good—which is at the same time also considered to
year, though he lay greater accent on Denys’ creative differences from Proclus than probably
any author before him (Proklus als Quelle des Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita in der Lehre
vom Bösen, Philologus 54 (1895), 438-454).—Ihe most significant philological development
on Proclus’ De malorum subsistentia today is the English translation with extensive
introduction and notes by Jan Opsomer - Carlos Steel, Proclus, On the Existence of Evils,
London, Duckworth-Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003 (Ancient Commentators
on Aristotle).
On the gradual rise to a philosophical climax in De divinis nominibus, see Endre von
Ivänka’s classic Plato Christianus. Übernahme und Umgestaltung des Platonismus durch
die Väter, Einsiedeln, Johannes Verlag, 1964, Chapter 6: “Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita,”
225-289. From the recent literature, see Christian Schäfer’s The Philosophy of Dionysius
the Areopagite. An Introduction to the Structure and the Content of the Treatise On the
Divine Names, Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2006 (Philosophia antiqua, vol. XCIX), passim, but in
particular 84-88.
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