jesuve

I was hoping to get some feedback from you all. Does this make sense? Any suggestions and comments would be very welcome

TRANSGRESSING GOD: A Phenomenological Interpretation of God in Pseudo-Dionysius

Ein begriffener Gott ist kein Gott Tersteegen

I. A phenomenology of entities: In Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius couples a sense of spatial awareness and movement in his phenomenological interpretation of God when he exhorts his young initiate, Timothy, to keep the mysteries of divine darkness from the uninitiated. This is because the uninitiated are “…those who are entangled in ‘what is’ imagining that there is nothing exceedingly-existing in excess to entities [ta onta], and who believe that through their own ability they can come to know him who has made the shadows his hiding places” (1000A). Pseudo-Dionysius seeks to pull Timothy away from a static, single-voiced awareness through his use of dark imagery that emphasizes God’s ineffability. We can see how the juxtaposition between stasis and movement is further shown through the method by which the uninitiated arrive at their fixed, reductive, and prescriptive definitions of God. Believing they can come to know God by their own efforts, the uninitiated adopt an “everyday attitude” that is prior to the philosophical interrogation of entities in the unarticulated, excessive presentation of God. In turning aside from God’s excessive presence, they become staid, and attuned to a subjective and internal position. In contrast to the torpid position of the uninitiated, Pseudo-Dionysius shows there is a peripatetic movement into entities, or symbols, and as a result there is a suffering from, a wrestling with, and finally a transgression of the divine.

Nonetheless, the uninitiated do represent us all when we are immersed in our everyday lives, as “familiarly we receive what is in excess to us and by being wrapped up with what is habitual of sense perceptions [tōn aistēseōs], and through comparing the divine according to us” (DN 865C). Perhaps unsettled by God’s excessive manifestation, the uninitiated act from the self, which imposes itself upon phenomena with preconceptions. This forecloses the excess of entities through an act of premature definition which is brought about by those very preconceptions before the individual can actually reflect upon them.

Nevertheless, the uninitiated do not err due to sense perception, for of God there is a “…touching, sense perception [aisthēsis], opinion, and imagination…” (DN 872A). Aisthēsis has a double valence that simultaneously means: “to have a perception of thing, to perceive it,” on the one hand, and also “to give a perception, to become perceptible,” on the other. In this case, either the subject or the object can serve as the grammatical subject. In other words, aisthēsis names the relation of human thought and the world from the side of the object, or even as an event originating with the object. Thus when I have an aisthēsis of God, it is an appearance of God that I have received from the outside, from entities. And since God manifests itself through colors, shapes, sounds, scents and all that we perceive (CH 121C), we are in the midst of God, who is in the act of manifesting here in the lived world. Consequently, we cannot comport ourselves toward this or that thing without its having been presented, or its having presented itself to us in some way. We can see how the uninitiated separate what appears in the sense perception of entities from the excessive manifesting of God, and thus they construct a concept of “God.”

Here, Pseudo-Dionysius thematizes true theologico-philosophical thought in its problematic relation to the everyday attitude of the uninitiated. He contrasts his own thought with them, disrupting the latter’s understanding, and he immerses his own with a peripatetic movement. “It is necessary, then, for us, contrary to the popular assumption, to stride [diabainein] into the sacred symbols [sumbolōn] reverently and not despise them, since they are the offspring and impression of the divine characters and manifest images of the ineffable and exceedingly-natural visions” (Ep. IX 1108C). As Eric D. Perl observes “all sense perception is an apprehension of symbols,” or, an apprehension of entities; this is seen when Jesus, speaking in parables, made even a table a symbol (Ep. IX 1108A). Thus according to Perl, “every being, or symbol is a…presentation, a coming forth of God into openness, manifestation, availability.” Through actively striding into symbols as manifestations of the ineffable, they give us access to God’s excessiveness.

The initiated are attuned to an immediate and unreflective experience for which Pseudo-Dionysius must invent the neologism “thearchia” to engender an estrangement of meaning for his reader, since God is “all entities and none of them [panta ta onta kai ouden tōn ontōn]” (DN 596C). Contending with this and other such paradoxes establishes a true and properly human relation to the phenomenal being of God. Pseudo-Dionysius’ account of his teacher, Hierotheus, gives us an indication of this proper relationship. He writes of him as “having suffered the divine things [pathōn ta theia]” (DN 648B). Derived from pachein, pathos is a suffering from something. The grammar of the term insists on the intentionality of the experience or givenness of what is suffered. Pathos establishes a legitimate and necessary connectedness between us and what is intended by or given in the pathos, such that the breeching of the boundary between the internal and external has always already occurred in this experience. Therefore, pathos announces itself as a certain way in which we receive God’s self-presentation. Furthermore, Hierotheus had “sympathy [sumpatheias],” a “suffering-with,” which emphasizes an active participation with the divine. It is said that he had faith without learning, realizing a discursive account of God cannot be given. The condition of acknowledged non-knowing, with respect to God, is suffering the being of God as not known. After all, Hierotheus “both wrestled and practiced [gumnasias te kai tribēs]” with the divine (DN 648B). Tribē in its first definition means “a rubbing, a wearing away” and later comes to mean “a practice as opposed to a theory.” Etymologically, Hierotheus is scratched, chafed, and disturbed literally “wholly out of his home” (DN 681D) through his journey with the divine things.

And so, Pseudo-Dionysius actively responds to God’s initial phenomena, i.e., to appearances, symbols, and entities. The appearances are understood to be a connection that is already accomplished between the world and the observer through an approaching movement. For example, Pseudo-Dionysius writes “…from the arrangement of all entities [pantōn tōn ontōn], as throwing-forth from itself and containing all sorts of images and semblances of its divine paradigms, we ascend beyond, by path and order, as it is in our capacity, into that which lies beyond everything” (DN 869D). As images of the divine, the initial appearances of entities lead us back to God. God accomplishes this through “…entities appearing out of himself by himself [ekphansin onta heautou di’ heautou]” (DN 712C). We should pay special attention to this phrase. God “comes into the light or appears out of itself through itself” through entities in an act of givenness. Such an appearing is the movement of God emerging and approaching the one who is thinking God, indicating a connection that is already accomplished between God and the individual. Thus, we come to see Pseudo-Dionysius as a student of initial phenomena, which he understands as always in some way the real self-presentation of God. That is to say, Pseudo-Dionysius comes to stand before us as a peculiar proto-phenomenologist.

II. Being drawn beyond through symbols into ecstasy: Named twice in documents used in the Second Council of Nicaea, Pseudo-Dionysius shaped the early and subsequent Catholic churches’ view of iconography. The use of a symbol [sumbolon] gives one the ability to move from “effects to causes, and then Jesus lighting our way, we shall manifestly see the visions, the blessed making bright the primordial beauty [tōn archetupōn kallos]” (EH 428C). If we are to experience the excessiveness found in entities, we must be exposed to beauty, which “flashes like lightning as a light to all of the beautifying distributions of it, a fontal ray and as calling [kaloun] all to itself from where it is termed ‘beauty [kallos]’” (DN 701C). And when we hear the call of beauty, entities strike us suddenly like a bolt of lightning. Beauty discombobulates us, lighting up the excess found within entities. A sumbolon, then, allow us to traverse the gap from entities and the sensible world and to stride toward God giving us access to excessiveness.

A sumbolon is literally a tally-marker which has been cut in a certain fashion to fit with only one other half. As such, the sumbolon is defined more by what it is not than by what it is. It originates from what is lacking and not from itself. Through a sumbolon we are pulled outside of what it represents which must be expressed organically, out of the flux of manifesting. And in this manner it gives rise to our thought. For example, a sumbolon, an entity, allows us to participate in “the reception of the most divine Eucharist partaking in Jesus…which is given to us symbolically [sumolikōs]” (CH 124A). Through this we become like Paul who is “to be in possession of divine love, and participating in its ecstatic power” (DN 712A). Through an investigation of a sumbolon, we stand in ecstasy out toward the hidden source of conceptuality. A sumbolon, then, is itself an openness and rupture of the stable and secure presentation of entities. It allows us to pass beyond this and into the excessive manifestation of God’s phenomenal being.

III. Transgressing God: Regardless of whatever it is to live a meaningful Christian life for our mystic, we must continually challenge the established meaning of a symbol, defy our everyday attitudes, contest our own theological concepts, and disrupt our complacency. If we take Pseudo-Dionysius’ thought to its ultimate conclusion, we must understand that those who refuse God as a concept “stride through [diabainousi] both curses and the pure and pass beyond the summit of every holy ascent, they transgress [hyperbainousi] every divine light, every voice, every word from heaven, and go into the darkness, as scripture claims, to where dwells the one who is in excess of all of this” (MT 1000C). In this moment, Pseudo-Dionysius fully radicalizes his thought and this is where his thinking begins. He describes the overwhelming fatigue that accompanies apophasis which makes us ready for the exposure of the divine.

What makes the mystic radical is that he must crucify God, transgressing it, striding through curses, or perhaps sinning, so as to get to the pure. While a sumbolon may gesture toward that which it lacks, it can never become complete, for God dwells in divine darkness. And so, the mystic’s love requires God to be at risk, who, as crucified, cries out his despair on the Cross. In the throes of death, purged from all rational discourse, and made a sumbolon, Christ can only cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34), which is echoed in Pseudo-Dionysius’ own “cry of the prophet” found in Letter 5 1073A, “Knowledge of you is wondrous, it is outside of me [ek emou]; it is high, it is impossible for me.” Both cries are recognitions of God’s apparent withdrawal and a questioning of God. Knowledge of God becomes the impossible, as the divine as something discursively understood has forsaken us. These cries originate from the painful recognition that the divine symbols overwhelm the self, so that the ego is no longer present.

On the Cross, Christ is purged from the individualizing corruption of the rational mind through, and perhaps because of, the suffering endured, and thus our own participation in divine darkness is revealed. Completely spent, bewildered, tormented, and confused, we, like Christ have been overcome by suffering, and only now through the overwhelming exhaustion can we fully surrender to God, without an ego present.

This cry is a form of communication that speaks out without a subject being present. The cry is a supplication, a request for a reply, but since it is directed toward that which exceeds rational understanding, it is a request that will be met in vain. At this time, self-surrender reaches its peak. It is an utter abandonment of the self, a transgression against one’s own biological birth and a desire to die and to be born anew without an ego. This is exactly what Pseudo-Dionysius hopes for Timothy when he states “according to this, we pray to be born [genesthai] into the exceedingly light-darkness; and through blindness and unknowing, to see and to know the exceeding sight and exceeding coming to know itself” (MT 1025A).

Consequently, we must sacrifice not only entities and symbols but even words from heaven and God itself. We recognize that toward which we have an obligation cannot ever be satisfied. We are always under threat of becoming as stolid as the uninitiated. Perhaps this is what Pseudo-Dionysius attempts to cure when we writes that God is “…neither sonship nor fathership, nor anything else that is known by us or by any of the other beings” (MT 1048A). This is not uttered in an iconoclastic rage. Rather, it is said to save the advancement of a sumbolon in cultural life and to preserve its augmenting religious significance. A sumbolon evokes God in its relativity. But it does not evoke God through its manifestation alone, as seen by the uninitiated. Rather, it must invoke a personal revelation, as it does with Hierotheus. When a sumbolon no longer invokes wonder, excitement, agitation, and a deeply emotional response, it must be cleared away or denied just as a sculptor does to that which hides “the pure view of the hidden image” (MT 1025B). God’s hidden image is what always already concerns us, calling forth our striving and our thinking, which needs refinement through apophasis. To do so is to be in a state of never ending reevaluation of the value of symbols, even of God. This is the challenge of God with which Pseudo-Dionysius tasks us.