The Mystical Theology (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite)

The Mystical Theology is the shortest and most influential treatise of the Corpus Dionysiacum, a set of Greek writings presented as the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian converted by Paul in the Acts of the Apostles. Modern scholarship has shown that the author was a Christian writer, probably in Syria around 500 CE, who absorbed the Neoplatonism of Proclus; the pseudonym gave his work near-apostolic authority for a thousand years until Renaissance critics such as Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus questioned it. In five brief chapters the treatise teaches the 'negative' or apophatic way to God. Since God transcends every name and concept, the soul must go beyond affirmations about him, and even beyond negations, into a 'divine darkness' of unknowing in which it is united to what is beyond being, a journey modelled on Moses ascending Sinai into the cloud. The text was translated into Latin by Hilduin and then John Scotus Eriugena in the ninth century and shaped medieval mysticism, from the Cloud of Unknowing and Meister Eckhart to Bonaventure and the Rhineland mystics, as well as Eastern Orthodox theology. Its language of darkness and transcendence also passed into Renaissance Christian Platonism and later esoteric thought. The archive's version is a 1923 translation by the editors of the Shrine of Wisdom. Readers today usually consult the Luibheid and Rorem translation of 1987 and the Göttingen critical edition.

What it contains

• Prayer to the Trinity and ascent into divine darkness
• Moses on Sinai as a model of mystical ascent
• Affirmative and negative theology
• God beyond all perceptible attributes
• God beyond all conceptual attributes
• Union through unknowing