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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 selfidentical 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, «193 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 193 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:20
