The Complete Works of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite

1 Corinthians 8

...they testify to, is knowledge. Furthermore, if anyone should reject these discordant portrayals, asserting that it is shameful to attach such shameful images to the godlike and most holy adornments, it should be enough to answer him that the mode of that sacred, mystical manifestation is twofold.

One mode, indeed, as is fitting, proceeds through images that are similar to the sacred figures; the other, however, is fashioned through dissimilar forms original: "dissimiles efformationes." Dionysius argues that "unlikely" images (like calling God a "worm" or a "rock") are actually safer than "likely" images (like "light" or "mind") because they are so obviously metaphors that they prevent the mind from thinking it has truly captured God's essence. into a total unlikeness and difference. Finally, the mystical traditions of the enlightening scriptures sometimes praise the venerable, super-essential original: "superessentialis." This refers to God being "beyond" the very category of "being" or "existence" as humans understand it. blessedness of the Godhead as the Word, and as Mind, and as Substance, declaring the rationality and wisdom that belong to God; they likewise describe Him as the essence that essentially exists, and the true cause of the existence of all things, portraying Him like light and calling Him life. Although such sacred depictions are more fitting and seem in some way to excel material figures, they nevertheless still fall short of the truth of the divine likeness; for He exceeds all essence and life, nor does any light express Him, and every reason and life falls incomparably short of His likeness.

At other times, however, He is celebrated in a way that transcends the world by the same scriptures through dissimilar clarifications, when they call Him invisible, infinite, and incomprehensible, and by which not what He is, but what He is not is signified. And this, I believe, is more proper to Him: for, as that secret and priestly tradition has suggested, we speak truly when we say that He is not according to anything that exists, though His super-essential and in- The text continues on the next page, likely completing the word "incomprehensible" or "infinite."