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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 fullfledged 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. + 187 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 187 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:19
