PREFACE

Saint Dionysius the Areopagite Saint Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 5th–6th century) was a Christian theologian whose writings on "apophatic" theology—the idea that God is better described by what He is not than what He is—profoundly influenced Christian mysticism., having experienced the insufficiency of words and of light, turns to the darkness to adore, in its depths, the unknown God: Luminous darkness, he says, marvelous darkness that radiates in splendid flashes, and which, being neither seen nor grasped, floods with the beauty of its fires the holily blinded spirits 1.

Those who are familiar with the great doctors of mystical theology: the study of direct, subjective experiences of the divine, with Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, with Saint John of the Cross: a 16th-century Spanish mystic and poet famous for his writings on the "Dark Night of the Soul", etc., will recognize in Angela of Foligno the ardent and pure practice of the sublime theories that have brought renown to this high science.

Words always fail Angela, and more and more so, because the glory she contemplates retreats while rising ever higher. Speech is a blasphemy in her eyes, because beyond the things that words define, her eye contemplates those things that words cannot define.

This is somewhat like those streaks glimpsed on summer nights that reveal themselves as nebulae: hazy clouds of gas or clusters of stars in deep space when telescopes are improved.

Then above appears another streak of vague light, which is to become a new cluster...

1. Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, Treatise on Mystical Theology, translation by original: "Mgr Darboy." Georges Darboy (1813–1871) was the Archbishop of Paris and a scholar who produced a well-known French translation of the works of Dionysius. Bishop Darboy, p. 466.