Overview

For more than fifteen centuries, an anonymous Syrian monk has been teaching Christians how to speak about a God beyond all speech.Writing under the borrowed name of an Athenian convert to Paul, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite produced one of the most consequential bodies of theology in late antiquity: four short treatises and ten letters that fused the philosophical rigor of late Neoplatonism with the radiant grammar of Christian revelation. From Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century to John of the Cross in the sixteenth, every major mystical writer in the Christian East and West drank from this strange, anonymous spring. The Wisdom of Pseudo-Dionysius: Silence, Symbol, and the Names of the Unnameable traces the contours of his thought with patience and precision, showing how the Corpus Areopagiticum continues to shape Christian contemplation today. Inside, you will discover: How the borrowed name of an apostolic convert became a piece of theology in itself The double rhythm of affirmation and negation that drives all theological speech The doctrine of dissimilar similitudes, by which strange biblical images become safer than dignified ones The luminous darkness of the Mystical Theology and the ascent of Moses on Sinai The graded transmission of divine light through the angelic and ecclesiastical hierarchies The long afterlife of the corpus from Maximus and Eriugena to Eckhart, Aquinas, and the Spanish Carmelites Written in the contemplative cadence its subject demands, the book is itself an exercise in the discipline it describes. It follows the master of unsaying through the cataphatic survey of the divine names, into the apophatic ascent, outward through the cosmic and ecclesial hierarchies, and at last into the silence at the end of all speech. For readers seeking a contemplative theology that can hold both rigor and reverence, this volume opens a doorway into one of the deepest currents in the Christian intellectual tradition.

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