In fact, it is almost certain that the writer was either a pupil of Proclus or, as is more probable, of Damascius, the second in succession from Proclus, and one of the last teachers of the Athenian Platonic school. It was natural that when he became a Christian writer he should assume a name which had sacred memories of Athenian faith, and which was also a link with Greek culture. But whatever his origin, the writings of this master mind early became the form and type of mystical religion within the Church, and their influence is discernible in every mystical sect of Christendom.
This anonymous, mysterious, monastic genius taught the foremost Christians for ten centuries both in the East and West, for nearly every great mediaeval scholar made use of his writings, and his authority came to be almost final. A modern writer says that even the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas — the Angelic Doctor — is but 'a hive in whose varied cells he duly stored the honey which he gathered' from the writings of Dionysius, and he became the bee-bread on which all the great mystics fed.
He kindled in multitudes of souls a pure passion for God, and taught very dark ages that that which is pre-eminently worth seeking with the entire being was God. He iterated and reiterated that God himself was the ground of the soul, and that there was an inward way to Him open to all men. He insisted on personal experience as the primary thing in religion, and so became the father of a great family of devout and saintly mystics who advanced true religion.
And he did well in maintaining that there was an experience of Reality which transcended mere head-knowledge — a finding of God in which the whole being, heart, will and mind were expanded and satisfied, even though language could not formulate what was being experienced.
Considering the far-reaching influence of the brief but profound Mystical Theology of Dionysius, it is comparatively little known, even to students who are ardent lovers and followers of some of the great Christian mystics who were themselves the spiritual children of the pseudo-Areopagite. As far as we are aware there are not many English versions of this work available; therefore the version here given may be a means of bringing this real treasure before a wider sphere of mystics; for it contains the very essence and foundation of true mysticism.
Supernal Triad, Deity above all essence, knowledge and goodness; Guide of Christians to Divine Wisdom; direct our path to the ultimate summit of Thy mystical Lore, most incomprehensible, most luminous and most exalted, where the pure, absolute and immutable mysteries of theology are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their Darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories surpassing all beauty.
Let this be my prayer; but do thou, dear Timothy, in the diligent exercise of mystical contemplation, leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual, and all things in the world of being and non-being, that thou mayest arise by unknowing 1 towards the union, as far as is attainable, "with Him who transcends all being and all knowledge.
For by the unceasing and absolute renunqatiop of thyself and of all things thou mayest be borne on high, through pure and entire self-abnegation, into the superessential Radiance of the Divine Darkness.
Unknowing, or agnosia, is not ignorance or nescience as ordinarily understood, but rather the realization that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One, and that therefore He is only truly to be approached by agnosia, or by that which is beyond and above knowledge.
There are two main kinds of darkness: the sub-darkness and the super-darkness, between which lies, as it were, an octave of light. Joshua J. Toddus Aurelius. Snejana Markova. Strand Philips. BudianTo Yang. Roberti Grossetestis Lector. Jodie Barry. Sam Pomeroy. Michael Gibson. Marcus Tullius Cece. The Concept of the Gnomic Will in St.
Maximus the Confessor. Nick Calibey. Davo Lo Schiavo. More From erik Declan Warner. Popular in Theism. How doyoudo. Ashiq Zaman. Steph Sumzx. Eswara Prasad. Zohaib Pervaiz. Le Concept d'Initiation in de Divinis Nominibus. For the higher we soar in contemplation the more limited become our expressions of that which is purely intelligible; even as now, when plunging into the Darkness that is above the intellect, we pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute silence of thoughts and of words.
Thus, in the former discourse, our contemplations descended from the highest to the lowest, embracing an ever-widening number of conceptions, which increased at each stage of the descent; but in the present discourse we mount upwards from below to that which is the highest, and, according to the degree of transcendence, so our speech is restrained until, the entire ascent being accomplished, we become wholly voiceless, inasmuch as we are absorbed in it that is totally ineffable.
But why, you will ask, 'does the affirmative method begin from the highest attributions, and the negative method with the lowest abstractions?
For is it not more true to affirm that God is Life and Goodness than that God is air or stone; and must we not deny to God more emphatically the attributes of inebriation and wrath than the applications of human speech and thought? That it that is the pre-eminent Cause of all things sensibly perceived is not itself any of those things.
We therefore maintain that the universal and transcendent Cause of all things is neither without being nor without life, nor without reason or intelligence; nor is it a body, nor has it form or shape, quality, quantity or weight; nor has it any localized, visible or tangible existence; it is not sensible or perceptible; nor is it subject to any disorder or inordination nor influenced by any earthly passion; neither is it rendered impotent through the effects of material causes and events; it needs no light; it suffers no change, corruption, division, privation or flux; none of these things can either be identified with or attributed unto it.
There are two main kinds of darkness: the subdarkness and the super-darkness, between which lies, as it were, an octave of light. But the nether-darkness and the Divine Darkness are not the same darkness, for the former is absence of light, while the latter is excess of light.
To avoid unduly delimiting the range of epistemic activities one employs, one should embrace a doctrine of ineffability: one should adopt the methodological claim that reality cannot be truly or fully known in itself because this claim will preclude our judging one epistemic activity or set of such activities from providing uniquely privileged knowledge about the world. This point was noticed by commentators upon Conquest of Abundance. The later Feyerabend is certainly a metaphysical realist because he affirms that there is an objective world and one can have knowledge of it.
The point he presses is that our knowledge of it is necessarily pluralistic because our epistemic activities are partial and fragmentary. But depending on our approach God may respond in a variety of comprehensible ways. Reality—or God, or Being—responds to a plurality of epistemic activities, so it would be illegitimate for us to pre-emptively identify any one of these as being privileged and providing true or final knowledge of what reality is like.
A doctrine of ineffability precludes such pre-emptions by introducing the methodological rule that no one conception of reality can be identified with reality itself. Feyerabend used Denys not only as a source of novel epistemological insights but also as part of a methodological and rhetorical strategy aimed at exposing and overcoming implicit intellectual prejudices. There are three main points.
Current philosophical debates can be informed and enriched by an appeal to sources which are too often demeaned or disregarded.
The second is that Feyerabend used Denys to demonstrate the historicity of contemporary debates, including the persistence of certain problems. Appreciating the historical nature of philosophical debate is essential to philosophical practice since otherwise we labour in ignorance of the presuppositions and developments which inform and enable our inquiries. These three points are related and I will discuss them in turn. Feyerabend was a methodological pluralist in philosophy as well as in science.
These included cultural anthropology, develop- ment studies, the history of witchcraft, classical scholarship, the history of art and, of course, the writings of figures such as Lenin and Mao. Using a medieval Christian mystic such as Denys as a component of an epistemological criticism of scientific realism is one example of this methodological pluralism at work.
Most philosophers of science would likely probably see little obvious value, if any, in appeals to medieval mystics.
However for Feyerabend, such inability to discern the value of these anomalous sources indicates the faults of those philosophers rather than any demerits of the sources themselves.
However he urges us to recognise that those Greeks who did take those beliefs seriously had excellent reasons for doing so, even if it takes imaginative and intellectual effort on our part to appreciate and understand those reasons see further Feyerabend Chs Even if the merits or utility of a particular source are not evident, the proper response, for Feyerabend, is to explore them, as he did with Denys, Dadaism, and other unusual sources.
Feyerabend often linked such pluralism to epistemic virtuousness. Those who resist such sources are guilty of epistemic viciousness—or so Feyerabend argues, and he constantly complained that dogmatism and intolerance, in science and philosophy alike, arise from the epistemic vices of scientists and philosophers. Those characteristics are, of course, ethical and epistemic vices, and elsewhere Feyerabend also criticises other vices, especially arrogance, conceit and intolerance.
In this case, the venerable philosophical issue is whether human beings can have complete or absolute knowledge of reality in itself. That debate of course was a topic for Plato, Descartes, Kant and other familiar figures, but Feyerabend emphasises that other theological figures, like Denys, also grappled with it.
However, although philosophers of science may consult Kant, few would likely imagine consulting Christian philosophy, even though, as Feyerabend demon- strates, they engaged in highly sophisticated debates about the limits of human knowledge. Instead, he urges us to consider that certain legitimate figures in these debates have been prejudicially excluded.
Looking to the history of philosophy, and of theology and religion, is one way that we can scrutinise the presuppositions and structures of our contemporary debates. Even if figures like Denys do not, after examination, promise to contribute anything to current debates, one can at least be sure that the methods and approaches currently being used were selected with care, rather than adopted by convention.
I argued that there is a coherent methodological principle at work in the appeal to such unusual sources. Such sources may enrich our current debates, aid in the cultivation of epistemic virtues, and help us to appreciate the historicity of our current debates. However, Feyerabend was quite aware that methodological arguments alone were not enough to challenge the sort of dogmatism and prejudice which militates against for instance medieval Christian philosophy. Even if such sentiments are not overtly secular or scientistic, they constitute a barrier to the consultation of figures like Denys who many philosophers—if they are aware of them at all—may prefer to see consigned to Departments of Theology or to courses on the History of Medieval Philosophy.
Feyerabend confronted such prejudices using dramatic and provocative examples. Feyerabend also peppered that book with references to unorthodox figures; for instance, the first persons quoted include Lenin and Bertolt Brecht.
Such rhetorical gestures were intended to provoke readers to identify and assess their implicit prejudices, or at least to indicate that sources which they regard as non grata may, in fact, be of value.
Feyerabend uses rhetoric to fulfil a central philosophical function, namely to expose prejudices and, if necessary, to overcome them see further Oberheim 31— In the course of such provocations, those readers may find their prejudices challenged and perhaps dissolved and may, perhaps, come to appreciate novel sources of insight and understanding which would otherwise have been occluded by their epistemic vices. This does not imply that every heterodox source will be useful, but Feyerabend does not promise that.
Instead, what Feyerabend wants is to demonstrate that at present our capacity to assess and employ the rich resources afforded by the history of human thought is impaired by our prejudices. By offering case studies, like that of Denys, which indicate the value of such reassessments, Feyerabend is trying to enrich inquiry rather than undermine or impugn it. The themes of the partial character of human knowledge of ultimate reality and the consequent ineffability of Being run throughout the work of both.
Philosophia , pp. Since reality is, if anything, a complex and worthy object of inquiry it makes good epistemic sense to employ the most diverse set of investigative tools at our disposal.
0コメント