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TRANSCENDING TRANSCENDENCE
has always been seen as being beyond creation in a super-eminent causal
order. This divine move—essentially, an act of condescension—contradicts or,
better, overwrites the above-endorsed conception of God as an otherworldly
Platonic idea (as the unchanging idea of Beauty), which is characterized first
and foremost by self-identity (tavtév) understood in terms of unchangeability
(4uetaBAntov) over time.A logical contradiction thus arises between divine
sameness and immutability on the one hand, and this radical turn towards
the Different, on the other, which is the essence of Love. Hence, if God has
been unknowable (4yvwotoc) and unspeakable (appntoc) from the very
beginning because of His being utterly remote from the sphere of human
cognition, now He is doubly unknowable (vmepayvwotoc) and doubly
unspeakable (bmepdppntoc) as He quits His isolated abode and transcends
His own transcendence. In a historical respect, it may be pointed out that
this duality or “reflection” which is perceived in God in the momentum of
divine Love is just like the initial desire for self-manifestation—Begierde
in Bohme’s and Schelling’s respective terminologies—that the Godhead
conceives in its transcendent depths, according to Christian philosophical
Cabbala (a tradition also ultimately inspired by Neo-Platonic metaphysics).
The notion of divine Love may be the reason why God conceived as the
Good is really otherworldly and incomprehensible. Thus represented, the
divine nature appears paradoxically simple in a complex way as it is self¬
identical in the mode of a Platonic idea while at the same time it creates and
loves that which is different. In Dionysian theology, this turning towards
the Different is, apparently, not a peripherical move in God even though His
transcendent kernel still appears to be in complete isolation: Denys—as well
as his outstanding spiritual disciple St Maximus the Confessor—warns us
several times that divine philanthropia stems from the innermost of God. If
we consider that this self-overriding tendency in God is a sort of offer of the
divine Self, then we may want to see this thesis of God’s creative self-denial
as a point of intersection between Christian soteriology and Neo-Platonic
theology—a vantage point for Denys to dwell on.
Further, talking about Love in theology implies talking about a divine
person with interpersonal faculties and interests. Denys’ God, fundamentally
an impersonal Platonic idea, is thereby personalised, and becomes, at least,
an impersonal person or a featureless face—a Platonic idea still conceived as
a person displaying loving kindness.
While discussing the creative outflow of the Good, Denys reminds us in 4,
14 that it is not simply a one-directional, outbound motion: since the Good
has the character of a final cause, too, its emanations move ina cycle eternally
returning upon itself, in an exitus which invariably crosses over into a reditus.
This eternal circularity of divine Love “through the Good, from the Good,
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