An Introduction To The Pseudo Dionysian Corpus: Contents And Viewpoints

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. I hope this works. I'll be perfectly honest with you, I'm sort of doubting that it will. We have tried to do this program since Thursday, and if you want the term providentially hindered, that's what we've been running into.

I'm not even going to go through all of it, including running into a Native American ceremonial parade that closed all of downtown Gallup, New Mexico, without signs, without warnings, that had me literally going down side streets at 57 feet long, going up 20 grades between parked cars, I mean, with 50 ,000 pedestrians, none of whom seemed to care that you had to go anyplace.

Yeah, that was fun. If it could go wrong, so far it has, so I'm going to keep an eye on things. Evidently, we've never done a program from here in the park where we stage the unit anyways, and so evidently the cell connection here isn't good, so we're running on low instead of high, and we'll see.

Evidently, this topic isn't supposed to be discussed. We'll find out. Anyway, so yeah, I'm home, but the cameras and stuff are still here in the unit, and so we're trying to do something on a Saturday.

I realize nobody's watching on a Saturday. Maybe you're watching the WNBA melting down. It would sort of be fun if, like, Shaq, you know, Shaquille O 'Neal, and this other guy that is declaring himself for the draft and all that stuff, that would be funny just for one year, you know, or at least for a few months, you know, just to watch these men just score 187 points, and, you know, just because, I mean, that's the way it is.

Honest women like Martina Navratilova, no liberal or no conservative, Martina, no, but, you know, she's said just honestly that any guy in the top 500 could beat her 6 -0, 6 -0 on her best day. She wouldn't be able to return most of their serves because they're that much stronger, and can you imagine Shaquille going down the lane even at his age now or any modern NBA player, male NBA player, if we know what a male is?

You know, we don't know what a male is, don't know what a female is. No society that can't answer those questions really has any claim to continuation when you think about it. You know, why continue a society that's so dull that you don't know what a woman is?

I don't know. Yeah, get one team to draft them all. Yeah, 313 to 12, and the 12 would only be fouls, and never lose a game. Sort of illustrate what it's all about, I suppose. Anyway, so why have I been trying to do a program anyways?

It's not like what I'm going to do is necessarily earth-shattering or anything. You know, I've mentioned that it's pretty dangerous for me to be doing what we're doing right now. Maybe now that I'm thinking about it, the timing's really been bad.

You know, the summers are notoriously difficult for ministries. People are on vacations. Any type of discretionary income is going toward... Man, when my family used to go on vacations, that was a really stressful time, because we'd always drive all the way out to Kansas so my dad could work on my grandmother's stuff that she needed in her little teeny tiny house she lived in.

Not even part of this. It wasn't even the size of a garage. I visited it a few years ago. Anyway, and I just remember the stress on my parents, like when we had something go wrong with the car. It was always in Ohio.

Ohio was our bad luck state, coming or going. We lived in Pennsylvania, we were traveling to Kansas. And I just, as a kid, I picked up on financial stress signals from my parents, and so I've always been very sensitive to that stuff.

And so summers are like that for Christian ministries, because people have other things going on. You know, they're spending the money they might give to a ministry fixing the tires on the family vehicle, because they had problems in Ohio.

Anyway, so I come along, and I don't think about what part of the year it is. I don't think about that kind of stuff a lot, really. And here we are gearing up for October 17th, for March 9th. If you're not tracking those, October 17th is the debate with Craig Trulia on icon veneration, the first debate we've done on Eastern Orthodoxy.

March 9th, I think, is the debate with Stephen DeYoung on atonement issues with Eastern Orthodoxy, with his understanding of Eastern Orthodoxy. There are Eastern Orthodox with different perspectives than his.

That'll come out. That'll be an issue. So anyway, I have just made the decision, maybe not thinking about what time of the year it is, things like that, that we're going to tackle these things, just like I made the decision a long time ago that we were going to tackle Islam.

Why Eastern Orthodoxy Requires Careful Apologetic Engagement

And we spent years with that as a major emphasis on the dividing line. That was not a popular topic. And of course, how we approach it isn't a popular way of approaching it either. We're not doing the nuke Mecca approach to Christian apologetics, which some people did.

But it's just how we've, you know, we didn't do the popular way of dealing with Mormonism, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or Roman Catholicism, none of those things. If someone wanted to tap into the worst of the human soul in doing apologetics, then there'd be a way to do that, too.

And we just have this silly idea that when we wrap all this stuff up, when Rich and I start talking about retirement, and when we're going to pull the plug on things, and, you know, wrap it all up, we want to have a body of work that will be useful long after we're moldering in the ground.

And in order to do that, you know, I can think back at people who've taken the easy route in apologetics, and not only are they pretty much forgotten now, many of them, but what they did and what they produced is no longer considered relevant.

And that's sort of a self-defeating way of doing things. From the long, looking at in the long term, looking at things in the long term is not really how people function these days. Is that a boomer thing, looking in the long term?

Not really. Boomers didn't really look long term very well either. Anyway, so looking at responding to Eastern Orthodoxy has to be done very carefully. It is a complicated subject. I avoided it for years, and I openly admitted it, and I explained why.

I said, I don't think I'm smart enough to explain this stuff. And not only that, it's more complicated than people believe that it is. And there's a lot more to Eastern Orthodox tradition, despite the normal claim that, well, you know, we have all this unity and all the rest of stuff.

There's actually a lot of diversity. And I know Eastern Orthodox who profess to trust in the imputed righteousness of Christ. You know, what do you do with that? You know, Rome anathematizes that. That makes it a little bit easier, but what do you do with someone that says otherwise?

So there's a lot of complexities. And yeah, there are a few of you out there who are seeing the uptick in interest. Some of you who have family members who have converted, church members who've converted.

And you're going like, yeah, with it just, ooh, about time you got around to this. And yeah, it needs to be done right, and needs to be done seriously and carefully, and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

But there are not that many of you. Most folks, even most folks that support us, this isn't front burner stuff quite yet. You know, even if you haven't started actually engaging Muslims, for example, you can see how on a worldwide level that's really an important thing.

And you might look at Eastern Orthodoxy and go, yeah, it doesn't seem to be on the same level as Islam. And on many levels, it's not. But on other levels, it's actually more complex, because we're dealing with an ancient perspective that comes from the biblical lands.

And the things that Christians need to know, Protestant Christians, I hate using that term, because Protestant doesn't actually have any defined meaning other than not Catholic and not Orthodox. So it doesn't have any positive defining element to it.

But Protestant Christians Christians need to know certain things. They're just not a part of the normal Christian education, and even solid churches, to be able to engage this subject in such a way as to, as I would put it, in such a way as to honor God in how you approach the topic.

Which is, all of this is to say, this is a rough time to be doing this. And maybe that's all on me for not thinking along those lines. I just don't think along those lines. I think about the upcoming debate.

I think about stuff farther down the road. And sometimes that's sort of like, you know, I drove a lot over the past few days to get home a day early, including eight and a half hours one day. And sometimes you're thinking farther down the road, you're seeing signs down there, and there's, you know, maybe there's something going on down around the next corner.

And that's when you hit the big, huge pothole, because it's closer by. Maybe I'm thinking down the road toward the debates and stuff with Eastern Orthodoxy, and then you hit the pothole because it's the middle of the summer and things are rough.

So, all of that just to basically say to our supporters, yeah, it's a rough summer, and I'm probably to blame for choosing to address topics that don't exactly make people go, oh yeah, I'm gonna, that's exciting stuff.

And I'm probably going to illustrate that today with what we're gonna do. But all that just a reminder, just remember us if you're, if you do happen to run across a, you know, a few extra denariuses hiding in the cup holder after coming back from family vacation.

I saw, I think the school near me is already open, and I'm like, it's August in Phoenix. That's cruel, unusual punishment. I mean, to put kids in the concentration camp in August? I mean, I don't know what the temperature is.

The temperature in my backyard right now is 110 degrees, and the official is only 108 in Phoenix, I guess. But yeah, it's, you know, dew points in the 60s, evaporative coolers are not working very well.

It's our hell month. I mean, August for Phoenicians is January for everybody in New York or northern climes. It's the rough month where you really do consider living someplace else. There's no two ways about that.

The summer starts getting really long, and everybody goes, but it's a dry heat. In August, it's not. We have something called the monsoon. There will be 70 plus dew point readings on a few days. So anyway, here we are on a very warm Saturday afternoon, and I want to do this.

Let's see if I can make this work for you. Yeah, it does look like it's going to look all right. So I've been talking about this, and so let's see if we can get this in, because I have about 45 minutes to work through this, and you may be sitting there going, yeah, I'd rather watch the WNBA, which would hurt.

Introducing the Pseudo-Dionysian Corpus

You know what? That would be pretty devastating if you'd rather watch the WNBA and learn about the Corpus Dionysiacum. The Dionysian corpus is how I like to put it, but if we're going to be pigs on the Latin, then that's what we do there.

I hate when I, you know, I try not to touch my screen there, but anyway. He's cleaning the screen. Yeah, don't worry. I'm not using that camera anyway. I don't know, about a month and a half ago, well, two months ago when we were on the last trip, right toward the end, I read, because I was sitting here, I read to you from Pseudo Dionysius.

I read an entire book, the shortest book, on the mystical theology, and most of the comments were, huh? And I think that many people just go, why should I know anything about this? Well, you know, if I were to say, why should you know anything about Athanasius, what would you say?

Most people, most people recognize that Athanasius was vitally important in the defense of the deity of Christ during the period of time between the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople.

We certainly have explained that Arianism became predominant during that time, and the majority of the external church adopted a compromised position in regards to the deity of Christ, with the exception of Athanasius.

So, Athanasius against the world, Athanasius contra mundum, okay, probably a lot of people in our audience know that, but how many people in evangelicalism as a whole could even put Athanasius in the right century, let alone identify the topic that he's in, one of the topics he's important for, a very small percentage.

So, when you talk about pseudo-Dionysius, vast, vast, vast majority, 98 .9 minimally, of graduates from Southern Baptist seminaries and evangelical seminaries and Bible seminaries and so on and so forth, if they've even heard of him, and even heard of the books, don't have any earthly idea what they're about, and less knowledge of how that's relevant to almost anything.

So, why in the world should you care on a Saturday afternoon? As you will see, I have a slide that will talk about the impact. Many of the things in the more ancient church, and this is, I would date the writing of this corpus of materials around the year 500.

As I've mentioned, I just finished an article refuting, from my perspective, the claims of Craig Trulia and another individual, published in 2024, claiming that pseudo-Dionysius isn't pseudo, that this is the writings of Dionysius, the convert of Paul, in Acts 17, 34, and it comes from the first century, and therefore it's radically important, because this is like the closest Christian writing to the New Testament that we possess, which would be, which would overthrow all of church history, as it stands today.

That perspective, however, had existed for a thousand years. Thomas Aquinas quotes from Dionysius, the third most of anyone, only Aristotle and Augustine more often. I went with the small number for him of 500 citations, but I've seen as much as 1 ,700 citations of Dionysius, and of course that gets into, is he referring, and stuff like that.

That's why the numbers are different. Anyway, for a thousand years, people, both in the East and West, believed that Dionysius, these writings came from Paul's convert. What else do you have like that in church history?

When you think of the Didache, when you think of Ignatius, any of what are called the apostolic fathers, they're still long after that time period. This would be the earliest writing outside of the New Testament that we would possess, and it is incredibly complicated.

It's soaked in Greek philosophy. It has an incredibly complicated and developed ecclesiology. It would change everything, and that is why there is almost nobody who takes the position that Craig Trillia does on this subject, but that doesn't make him wrong.

It just means that that's a really unusual position to take. All of that to say, you can engage with Eastern Orthodoxy without spending a great deal of time on Dionysius. You do need to recognize that Dionysius is exceptionally important in the development of modern orthodox theology, but it's not the central issue.

It is a very important issue. We know who Dionysius the Areopagite was, Acts 17, 34. Paul preaches in Neopagus in Athens among his converts. Dionysius the Areopagite, a member of the elite core of the Areopagus, the ancient Athenian council, this is the identity claimed by the author of the Corpus.

If this was written in 500 AD, then this is a forgery on the technical side, but it was certainly not unheard of in the ancient world. There's all sorts of pseudo-Ignatian epistles and pseudo-Athanasius, and these forgeries have been a really important part of church history, a really, really important part of church history.

In 1895, Cook and Stiglemeyer independently demonstrated the language of the Corpus belongs to the same era and school as the 5th century Neoplatonism of Proclus, not the 1st century AD. The author is therefore called Pseudo-Dionysius, a deliberately chosen pseudonym, the identity behind which remains contested to this day.

That is certainly the consensus scholarly view of Catholics, Protestants, Agnostics, Atheists, Buddhists. I don't know if there are any Buddhist scholars of ancient church history. There might be, but that is the vast majority perspective.

But, as I said, there are those who are promoting a different perspective, and that's why I wrote the article that I did. The world that produced the Corpus, late 5th, early 6th century, scholarly consensus states the Corpus to 475 AD, so 500 is a nice round number, right in the middle there.

The age of Proclus, 412 to 485, the last great Neoplatonist, and of the Christological controversies following Chalcedon. We often think of the Christological stuff that prompted the Council of Chalcedon, Hypostatic Union, issues related to that.

So, you know, once the assertion of Christ as being homoousius is finally defended and established, and that does not just happen at Nicaea. Nicaea is overturned by Eriminum, Sirmium, but it's then rehabilitated and re-established at Constantinople in 381.

So, after that, now further questions are being asked. So, okay, if Christ is consubstantial with the Father, then what about the Incarnation? What is the nature of the Incarnation? What's the relationship of the divine and human in Christ?

All these questions start popping up with a number of different responses, and so you have controversy that comes from that. The corpus stands at the intersection of three streams, Alexandrian Jewish wisdom tradition, Philo, the wisdom of Solomon, Alexandrian Christian theology, Clement and Origen, and late Athenian Neoplatonism.

Now, you can see why that means that not everybody is overly excited about reading this material, but since the majority of us have not read any of that, and the majority of us, majority of evangelicals would struggle to know which Clement's even being discussed there, and have probably heard only negative things about Origen, which is really easy to do because his theology was a royal mess, but he was the most prolific author in the ancient world.

He had scribes following him around 24 hours a day just writing down everything he said. You get a lot of books written that way, but, you know, late Athenian Neoplatonism, ah, that's something I talk about every morning.

Oh, no, it's not really. The pseudonymous strategy by writing as a first century convert of Paul, the author gave his speculative theology apostolic authority. The fiction was widely accepted until the Renaissance and is still defended by some orthodox scholars.

So, think about it, from the middle of the 6th century until the Renaissance, it is just general acceptance. That would be Thomas Aquinas, that would be the immediate predecessors of the reformers themselves, all believed that this writing was fundamentally the earliest Christian writing outside of the New Testament that we possess.

So, think about how important, for example, the Didache is as an early extra-biblical writing to give us an insight into what the early church was like. Okay, now, throw this in. Now, this was pre-critical thinking.

This was during a time period where anachronism was not recognized the way that it's recognized today. And that's why this issue even exists. We've talked about anachronism before. You know, I've given an illustration of why is it that you can look at medieval paintings of David and he looks like he's a knight living in a castle because of anachronism.

People did not understand the progress of time in the sense that they thought that, since in their experience, their great-great-great-great-great-grandparents had lived in the same world that they lived in, pretty much same level of knowledge, same cultural situation, that it had always been that way.

So, if David was a king, then David lived in the castle and rode a horse and had knights with armor and so on and so forth. That's not the way it was, but that's how people thought. That's what they experienced.

And when most people during the medieval period never traveled more than seven miles into one direction from where they were born, you can see how you could get the idea that the world's pretty much the same everywhere, when, of course, it's not.

The Corpus's Manuscript History and Late Emergence

The corpus surfaces definitively at the Council of Constantinople in 532, cited by the Monophysites. Both Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians quickly claimed it, indicating its content was theologically versatile.

In other words, it could be used and interpreted in a wide variety of fashions, and therefore it could be useful to both sides at the same time. A lot of political documents are that way, too. The earliest witness of the corpus is not Greek.

It's a Syriac translation by Sergius of Roshaina, who died in 536, preserved in a certain Syriac or Sinai manuscript here. This predates all surviving Greek manuscripts by centuries, so if it's written between 570 and 530, we get Sergius in the 530s.

And then, really important, John of Scythopolis, the prologue in Aeschylus' Aescholia, creates the aditio viriorum archetype for all Greek manuscripts after that. Then, in 708, the second Syriac translation, focused by Sergius, and then 9th century, the earliest surviving Greek manuscripts come to date.

So, yeah, are there textual critical issues? Yeah, there are. And there is a critical edition of Dionysius. It's not cheap. I did obtain it for purposes of the article and other things. Does that have major impact?

No, not really. It's not vitally important. It's interesting, but not vitally important. So, what's in it? I think I showed this once before. You have four major books. Now, when I call the Mystical Theology a major book, it's a standalone book, but I read it.

I read the entirety of it to you on the program, so it's not that it's very short. It's only five chapters, but it is the summit of the work. So, you have four books and then ten letters. So, the books are called the Divine Names.

The first one is called the Divine Names, and it's interesting, by the way. When Dionysius appears in history, it appears as a body of documents. It doesn't start off where the Divine Names appears first in one area, and then the Celestial Hierarchy in another area.

No. Boom. Starting about 530, it's just there, fully developed. All the language there, all the books, all the letters, everything is there, which definitely suggests that it was produced in that form to begin with.

The Four Treatises and Their Ecclesiology

So, the first book, the Divine Names, interprets the biblical names of God, good, being, life, light, beauty, love, wisdom. It is the longest and most philosophically dense workbook in the Corpus. Then you have the Celestial Hierarchy.

Hierarchy is probably the key term in Dionysius. The fact that Eastern Orthodox theology and ecclesiology is very much hierarchical is directly related to that. The exposition of the nine orders of angels, as described in Scripture, establishes the theory of hierarchy and symbolic interpretation.

So, hierarchy, there are certain aspects to it. Certain things only flow downward. Certain other things only flow upward. And this ends up being applied to all sorts of aspects of Christian theology. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy interprets the rites and orders of the Church, baptism, Eucharist, Chrismation, monastic rite, the earthly image of the Celestial.

So, what you really need to know there is, the viewpoint of the Church that is presented is highly complex. For the vast majority of Christian scholarship, again, outside of Orthodoxy, so even Roman Catholic scholarship, would say that the complexity of the ecclesiastical system found in Dionysius did not exist in the 1st century, or the 2nd century, or the 3rd century.

It developed long afterwards. So, Chrismation, the monastic rites, this is stuff that everybody else believes was developed over time. But, if you accept Dionysius as 1st century, it's apostolic. It was there from the beginning.

Now you have to explain why nobody else knew that. There's the real problem. Accepting the Nicotopoulos-Trulia theory, which is what my paper was about, which we'll talk about later, not today, obviously, don't worry.

Accepting that theory creates mountains of anachronism. Why didn't Ignatius know about this? Why didn't the Didache know about this? Why didn't everybody you can start talking about it? Didn't know any of this stuff.

Dionysius did. Evidently, Paul taught it, and then everybody forgot it for a very, very, very, very, very long time. The questions that the theory produces are massive. They truly are. The mystical theology I read to you a number of weeks ago, shortest work, only five chapters, the summit of the corpus, apophatic theology carried to silence and union beyond all knowing.

Apophasis is denial in Greek. It's sometimes called negative theology, where instead of saying anything positive about God, you describe God negatively by saying what he isn't, not what he is. The fundamental idea is that our language is too weak to positively tell us what God is, but it's sufficient to tell us what God isn't.

It is generally viewed as more respectful, but also more mystical, because once you emphasize negation, that really opens up the door for mystical experience to fill in. It's more amenable to mysticism than positive theology, cataphatic theology, positive statement theology, which is what we in the West are accustomed to, because it leaves all those doors open for all sorts of interesting speculation.

Once Dionysius became known in the West, and especially was cited over and over again by Thomas Aquinas, it became central to the development of Western mysticism. And so when you read the Western mystics, they are soaked in Dionysius, and because they believe Dionysius was a convert to Paul.

It's getting warm in here. I turned the AC off. That 110 degree sun is blasting that window right there, and so I have a fan sitting in the other room, just around the corner there, blowing in here. But yeah, we're only going to go until 4 30, because then I'm going to be mopping my brow and everything else, I imagine, as it gets.

I mean, I can turn the AC on, but then I might have to sign language everything after that, because it's so loud. Then the epistles, the 10 letters addressed to name recipients of ascending hierarchical rank, all the way up to John the Apostle.

They treat specific theological questions. The sequence itself mirrors the hierarchy. There is a very possible reference to the Dormition of Mary in that, again, something that started becoming popular around 500, so it would fit there, but it would be wildly out of place in the first century or early second century.

I find the epistles to be the most non-genuine sounding. In other words, it's sort of forced to try to make it sound that these were really epistles written to these people. Because again, one thing you have to recognize, there is no reference to any of this for 500 years.

And if these were real epistles sent to multiple different places, again, and when we do see them, they just, boom, appear, poof, as a body in history. No development. You don't have one of these 10 letters being quoted in the year 350, and then the other 10 letters get discovered in 450, which would make more sense.

They all just, boom, are there. Because this body was produced as one body of literature, and it appears as a body of literature, including the letters which are sent to different people. Real quickly, the intellectual background, Neoplatonism, the late ancient philosophical tradition running from Plotinus, 205 -270, through Iamblichus, and Proclus 412 -45, provides metaphysical architecture that Pseudo-Dionysius both employs and transforms.

So he's not just repeating Neoplatonism, he's Christianizing it, which I think was one of the encouragements for Thomas to Christianize Aristotle as well. See, if Convert Paul could do it, then I can do the same thing.

Neoplatonism and the Christianization of Greek Philosophy

So what are some of these key issues? Well, the One, Tahen. The ultimate reality transcends all predication, even being. It is beyond thought and speech, the source from which all proceeds and to which all returns.

Dionysius maps this onto the God of Scripture, describing God as super essential, huperousios, a very important term in Dionysian theology. The precession and return, praadas, and the epistrophe, all reality flows outward from the One into multiplicity.

That's that's precession. So you've got One, and then it multiplies into multiplicity, then returns to its source, reversion. So Proclus, every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it, and reverts upon it.

Dionysius Christianizes this as divine self-giving love and the soul's uplifting to God. So there is a serious attempt on Dionysius's part to Christianize and to use scriptural language. Just because you don't think that this is the convert of Paul doesn't mean that you can't be fair to it and recognize that there is clearly an attempt being made by Dionysius to at least make this perspective consonant with scriptural language.

But realize, that started early on. You see that in Justin Martyr in the 150s. So the Greek thinking, philosophically oriented Christians from the start seek to Christianize Greek philosophy. And the big question is just how far can you go with that?

Can you do that? What does it look like? You know, that's the issue there. Hierarchy. Really, really important here. Reality is stratified in descending grades of being, each reflecting the higher. Dionysius transforms this into a theological concept.

A sacred order, knowledge and activity whose goal is assimilation to God and union with him. Celestial Hierarchy 3 .1 puts it that way. So everything is hierarchical. There is the proper flow. This becomes very important in the form of the church, everything.

Theurgia, theurgy, in Neambicus, ritual action, not mere contemplation, affects union with the divine. Dionysius Christianizes this. The sacraments, Eucharist and baptism, are theurgy. They are divine works that purify, illuminate, and perfect the soul through material symbols.

So if you're sitting in Athens in 500 as a Christian and you want to attract as many followers of Neoplatonism as you can, this is what you're going to do. This is how you're going to express it. You could, if you really wanted to extend the best benefit of the doubt, you could see this as a Christian tracked to Neoplatonists from a Christian who understands Neoplatonist thought and is trying to use it.

We see people do this all the time. It's almost like the crazy churches that do Star Wars-themed stuff, you know? Use the culture, use what's popular, bring them in, whatever it takes, you know? Is that what's going on?

I don't know, but you give them credit for trying. If there's pauses, it's because I'm chugging my protein drink to try to... All right, in the Divine Names, it's not a philosophical treatise on divine attributes in the abstract, but an expression of the names Scripture itself uses for God.

Dionysius asks, what may we say of the God who is beyond all speech? So, here's a quote. The good is not ineffable as if it were some kind of thing that may be spoken of. Indeed, we maintain that it is celebrated by many names, yet since it is the cause of all things, we celebrate it with the names of everything it causes.

You might have to think about that more than once. It's there on the screen. It actually does make some sense. So, the names of God, Agathos, On, Zoe, Sophia, Dunamis, Kalas, Eros, Agape, all of these are names of God.

Perfection, One, Hen, all drawn from Scripture, explained as modes of divine self-giving. Catephatic theology, affirmative theology, we may say what God causes and gives, light, life, and goodness. These statements are true, but always partial, always falling short of the divine reality they point toward.

Now, is there truth in that? Well, yeah. Human language, even when used by God to communicate to us, is not exhaustive of the divine reality. That's true. Where apophatic theology becomes imbalanced is when you then do not realize that God chose to create in such a fashion that that would be the reality, and that he chose to cataphatically, positively reveal the truth about his own existence and nature, and that he holds us accountable for the positive element, not the negative element.

So, that's where massive imbalances have developed over the years. The priority of the good, the divine names opens and closes around the good as the supreme divine name, the source of all procession, desired by all creation.

Thomas Aquinas noted that the D .N. itself traces procession beginning with good and return ending with the one. So, that was important in Thomas' development of theology as well. The celestial hierarchy is a sacred order, a state of understanding, and an activity approximating as closely as possible to the divine with the help of God being raised up to imitation of him.

Celestial Hierarchy, Angelology, and Liturgical Order

So, the big thing here is this gets into a lot of angelology, which you know, there are still people that really get into a lot of this stuff, but they frequently end up on TVN, so I don't spend a lot of time with them.

But you have three triads of threes. So, the first triad is Sarah from the cherubim and the thrones. Closest to God, receive the divine light directly. The second triad, dominions, virtues, and powers.

They mediate the order, the hierarchical illumination downward. They mediate and order the hierarchical illumination downward. So, remember hierarchy, certain things only go one direction, other things only go the other direction.

And so, divine light goes to Sarah from the cherubim and the thrones. From them, the dominions, virtues, and powers mediate and order the hierarchical illumination downward. And then the third triad, principalities, archangels and angels.

They are the nearest to humanity, directly ministered to the earthly realm. But of course, they are only receiving what has come to them from above them in the hierarchy. Now, there's lots of discussion of this stuff in the early church.

Clement of Alexandria, Origen, have extensive discussions of angelology, and powers, and things like that. It's not like this just popped up out of no place. But there's a very specific organization here.

Then, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the earthly church, as an icon of the celestial. Each liturgical rite is a theurgical act, working divine transformation through material symbols on those who participate.

So, sacramental rites are interpreted here. So, baptism, birth into the divine light, purification from darkness. Eucharist, the synaxis, the gathering into unity, communion with God. Cusmation, the gift of the spirit, sealing of the initiate.

This is particularly central in Eastern Orthodox theology, more so than in Western theology. The monastic rite, the consecration to the life of the angels. Ordination, conferral of hierarchical functions.

See, hierarchy is absolutely central. Funeral rite, the soul's return to its source. There are three hierarchical orders. You've got the clergy, the bishop, priest, deacon, the initiators, those who perform and communicate the sacred rites.

You have the initiated, the monks, holy people, catechumens, those being purified, illumined, and perfected. And you have the three movements. You have purification, catharsis, to illumination, fortis mass, to perfection, teleiosis, the universal pattern of hierarchical ascent.

And again, this has all had great impact on the development of Eastern Orthodox theology. In the Mystical Theology, the shortest treatise, which I read to you on the last trip, five brief chapters, yet the crown of the entire corpus, it marks the point where all language, all theology, all knowing falls into silence before a God who exceeds every affirmation and every negation.

So, Mystical Theology 1 -1. Remember, this is how it started. Trinity, higher than any being, any divinity, any goodness, guide of Christians in the wisdom of heaven, lead us up beyond unknowing and light to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture, where the mysteries of God's Word lie simple, absolute, and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.

You see the apophatic nature of this. So, every affirmation about God is transcended by a corresponding negation, not as a contradiction, and that's how we hear it. Western thinkers just don't think this way.

It's one of the reasons I've said I've wanted to avoid Eastern Orthodoxy. We just don't think this way. That's not, from Dionysius's perspective, a contradiction, but as acknowledgement that God exceeds all categories.