From the Tree to the Labyrinth (27 page)

And so on in this vein for page after page of dazzling mystical aphasia.

How then can we speak of divine names? How can we do this if the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge, if it abides beyond the reach of mind and of being, if it encompasses and circumscribes, embraces and anticipates all things, while itself eluding their grasp and escaping from any perception, imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding? (
The Divine Names,
trans. Luibheid, p. 53).

Not knowing what else to name it, Dionysius calls the divinity “the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence” and “the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything that is” (p. 135). At first blush, these appear to be oxymorons, expressing a contradiction, and therefore the impossibility of an unambiguous definition; they are nonetheless oxymorons based upon metaphors.

Dionysius, however, continues to insist that no metaphor or symbol can express the divine nature. But in so doing he swings back and forth between a kind of mystagogic attitude (under the influence of various non-Christian sources) and a symbolic theology, designed to help even the simple-minded comprehend the nature of God.

From the mystagogic point of view God is ineffable, and the only way to speak adequately of him is to be silent: as we ascend from lower to higher things “we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing,” (
The Mystical Theology
, trans. Luibheid, p. 139). When someone speaks, it is to hide the divine mysteries from those who cannot penetrate them: “it is most fitting to the mysterious passages of scripture that the sacred and hidden truth about the celestial intelligences be concealed through the inexpressible and the sacred and be inaccessible to the
hoi polloi.
Not everyone is sacred, and, as scripture says, knowledge is not for everyone” (
The Celestial Hierarchy
, trans. Luibheid, p. 149). Symbolic discourses regarding God are “the protective garb of the understanding of what is ineffable and invisible to the common multitude” (
Letter Nine
, trans. Luibheid, p. 283).

This mystagogic attitude is continually contradicted by the opposite attitude, the theophanic conviction (and it is this mode that will fascinate Eriugena) that, since God is the cause of all things, he is rightly nameless and yet all names are fitting, in the sense that every effect points back to its Cause (
The Divine Names
, trans. Luibheid, p. 56). In this way the form and figure of a man are attributed to God, or that of fire or amber, his ears are praised and his eyes and his hair, his countenance, his hands, his shoulders, his wings, his arms, his back, and his feet “They have placed around it such things as crowns, chairs, cups, mixing bowls and similar mysterious items” (
The Divine Names
, trans. Luibheid, pp. 56–57).

The symbolic theology that attempts to make the nature of God comprehensible through similes or “aistheta symbola” (“perceptible symbols”) (
Letter Nine,
trans. Luibheid, p. 281) swings between these two extremes. Still, it must be clear that these symbolic references are always inadequate. Hence the need for these representations to display their feebly hyperbolic nature (if I too may be permitted an oxymoron):

Furthermore, I doubt that anyone would refuse to acknowledge that incongruities are more suitable for lifting our minds up into the domain of the spiritual than similarities are. High-flown shapes could well mislead someone into thinking that the heavenly beings are golden or gleaming men, glamorous, wearing lustrous clothing, giving off flames which cause no harm, or that they have other similar beauties with which the word of God has fashioned the heavenly minds. It was to avoid this kind of misunderstanding among those incapable of rising above visible beauty that the pious theologians so wisely and upliftingly stooped to incongruous dissimilarities, for by doing this they took account of our inherent tendency toward the material and our willingness to be lazily satisfied by base images. At the same time they enabled that part of the soul which longs for the things above actually to rise up. Indeed the sheer crassness of the signs is a goad so that even the materially inclined cannot accept that it could be permitted or true that the celestial and divine sights could be conveyed by such shameful things. (
The Celestial Hierarchy
, trans. Luibheid, p. 150)

At the very end of this citation Dionysius continues with an apparent contradiction: he observes that “there is nothing which lacks its own share of beauty” (ibid., p. 150), given that Scripture states that God saw everything He had made, “and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). But what we have here is a bow in the direction of that pancalistic sensibility that will pervade the entire Middle Ages. The problem is rather that at this point Dionysius introduces the idea, which will return with some frequency throughout his corpus, of naming through
dissimilar similarity
or
inappropriate dissimilarity
(see, for example, chapter 2 of
The Celestial Hierarchy
, trans. Luibheid, p. 138), whereby the divinity is sometimes given a lowly name: “Sometimes the images are of the lowliest kind, such as sweet-smelling ointment and corner stone, Sometimes the imagery is even derived from animals so that God is described as a lion or a panther, a leopard or a charging bear. Add to this what seems the lowliest and most incongruous of all, for the experts in things divine gave him the form of a worm” (
The Celestial Hierarchy,
trans. Luibheid, p. 152).
³¹

Concerning this point, it has frequently been understood that for Dionysius the name that best expresses the inexpressibility of the divine nature is based on an inverse analogy, according to which what is emphasized are not the similar but the opposed properties. Some occultist interpretations of these passages speak of an image of God reflected as it were on the surface of the terrestrial sea in inverted symmetry (and this would be the sense in the famous passage from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians 13:12, where he says that we see now “through a glass darkly”). If this were indeed the case we might expect a theory of inverse analogy, which would go a long way toward confirming the idea of a symbolic naming that obscures in order to spur the intelligence to seek further—and we would therefore be quite close to the idea of metaphor as cognitive process. And this could be tied in with a strong suggestion from Aristotle (see
Rhetoric
1405a): “since opposites are in the same class, you do what I have suggested if you say that a man who begs ‘prays,’ and a man who prays ‘begs’; for praying and begging are both varieties of asking.” And it would be quite a challenge to require a semiotics of metaphor to account for a process by which two things are substituted for each other based, not on the properties they have in common, but on the maximum tension between opposite properties (like calling the sea solid, God malevolent, the gaze of the Medusa benevolent, and so on). To tell the truth, none of the examples given by Dionysius constitutes a case of dissimilar similarity (in the above sense), but at most of audacious similarity, linking the divine and the human on the basis of “unseemly” resemblances, but resemblances nonetheless.

The most extreme case of dissimilarity is cited in
Letter Nine,
which examines a passage from Psalm 78 in which God appears to get drunk. Since the image of a divinity shamelessly intoxicated is unacceptable, Dionysius engages in a prodigious example of exegetic subtlety only to conclude as follows:

In our terminology, inebriation has the pejorative meaning of an immoderate fullness, being out of one’s mind and wits. It has a better meaning when applied to God, and this inebriation must be understood as nothing other than the measureless superabundance of good things which are in him as Cause. As for being out of one’s mind and wits, which follows drunkenness, in God’s case it must be taken to mean that incomprehensible superabundance of God by virtue of which his capacity to understand transcends any understanding or any state of being understood. He is beyond being itself. Quite simply, as “drunk,” God stands outside of all good things, being the superfullness of all these things. He surpasses all that is measureless and his abode is above and beyond all that exists (
Letter Nine,
trans. Luibheid, p. 287).

A memorable example of an author clutching at allegorical straws, whereas all the Psalmist is doing is describing the wrath of God: “Then the Lord awaked as one out of sleep, and like a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine” (Ps. 78:65). Describing God as wrathful is in keeping with the Bible’s normal process of anthropomorphization; and what we have here is actually a simile: God awakens so full of wrath as to appear to be drunk. A powerful image, that truly
puts before our eyes,
as Aristotle has it, the wrath of God, but which Dionysius, with his lack of interest in the mechanism of metaphor, does not see, his attention being concentrated on the subtler exercises of allegory. So that, as Augustine points out, seeing that the literal sense appears repugnant, we look
in factis
for a spiritual sense.

The real problem is that Dionysius does not make a clear distinction between metaphor and allegory and tends to lump both together in the category of the symbolic. The difference between metaphor and allegory has already been made abundantly clear. What constitutes a symbol, compared with these two rhetorical techniques, is still an open question at this point in time and will remain so for centuries (see Eco 1984a: ch. 4): an image in the form of a luminous glowing mandala may be thought of as a symbol in a number of cultures, without its being either an allegory or a metaphor. After all, maybe the best way to grasp Dionysius’s hallucinated semiotics is to reconsider Goethe’s famous distinction:

There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it. Allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept, the concept into an image, but in such a way that the concept always remains bounded in the image, and is entirely to be kept and held in it, and to be expressed by it.

Symbolism … transforms the phenomenon into idea, the idea into an image, and in such a way that the idea remains always infinitely active and unapproachable in the image, and even if expressed in all languages, still would remain inexpressible. (Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, Nos. 279, 1112, 1113)

Now, we might expect Dionysius to consider allegories as didactic procedures (or procedures calculated to conceal the truth from the eyes of the profane) and symbols as epiphanies that make secret knowledge evident. The truth is that all the examples of symbolic theology provided by Dionysius have nothing whatsoever to do with a modern theory of symbols, nor do they propose an alternative. Let us consider a few examples.

In chapter 2 of
The Celestial Hierarchy
(trans. Luibheid, p. 148), Dionysius affirms that the Scriptures use poetic forms to represent formless celestial intelligences. It is unclear whether by poetic forms he means allegories
(in verbis)
or metaphors. And in the passage previously cited in which he speaks of God being named through the lowliest creatures, such as the bear and the lion, the example Dionysius has in mind is clearly Hosea 5:12–14, where God, still angry with Israel, says that he will be unto Ephraim as a moth, and to the house of Judah as rottenness, and unto Ephraim as a lion, and as a young lion to the house of Judah. The moth and the young lion are not “symbols” of the divinity. The Bible does not say that God is a moth or a lion, but that in a certain circumstance He will behave as His children are used to seeing the moth and the lion behave. These are perfectly comprehensible similes or metaphors (
in verbis
naturally) to which the prophets have accustomed us. Thomas Aquinas would have said that what the biblical author
intended to say literally
was that God, at the height of his wrath, was not about to give his erring children any respite.

Similarly, when in
Letter Nine
(trans. Luibheid, pp. 286–287) Dionysius speaks of those “occult and audacious enigmas” in which the Scriptures compare divine things to dew or honey, he is still thinking of Hosea 14:5, where the Psalmist says, “I will be as the dew unto Israel,” or Psalm 19:9–10, where he affirms that “the judgments of the Lord are … sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.” This time God is not angry but most loving, and the metaphor makes this clear. In no sense, however, is honey a symbol of God.

It should be obvious that these metaphors are comprehensible, because the traditional attributes of honey are its pleasant taste and sweetness, of the moth its annoying persistence, of dew its beneficial fertilizing qualities. When Dionysius is afraid that his audience may not be familiar with all the properties of the metaphorical vehicle, he lists them, as any self-respecting encyclopedist of the early centuries
A.D.
would have done. In
The Celestial Hierarchy
, for example, speaking of the symbolic presentation of fire, he points out that the Scriptures give us examples of flaming chariot wheels, fiery animals, men radiating fire, braziers of red-hot coals, rivers of flame, and he observes: “And indeed it seems to me that this imagery of fire best expresses the way in which the intelligent beings of heaven are like the Deity” (p. 183), and he proceeds to list a series of properties traditionally associated with fire. Fire passes through all things without mixing with them, it cannot be grasped but it seizes everything, it lies hidden until it finds the proper kindling, it transforms things, it vivifies them with its heat, it shuns adulteration, it tends upward, it penetrates, it moves by itself and makes other things move, it embraces everything but nothing can contain it, it is efficient, powerful, and when ignored it appears to be dead, but it springs unexpectedly to life when stirred, it flings itself upward and cannot be checked, and so on. With such an encyclopedia it is easy to produce not just metaphors but whole allegories based upon fire. Fire is not an obscure symbol that names without naming, that alludes without revealing: when intimately known in its very nature, as Dionysius shows that he knows it, it puts before our eyes the supernatural realities of which it is a metaphor or an allegory, and it does so effortlessly.