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WorkPseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

The Divine Names

Thirteen chapters asking what scripture means when it calls God good, wise, living or one, and why evil, on this account, has no being of its own.

by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite131 passages held

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Original title
Περὶ θείων ὀνομάτων
First published
(aged 25)
Original language
Greek

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Overview

In 1895 two scholars working independently, Hugo Koch and Josef Stiglmayr, showed that the pages on evil in the fourth chapter of this book follow closely a treatise on evil by Proclus, the head of the pagan Platonist school at Athens, who died in 485. The book claims an author four centuries older. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite writes as Dionysius, the Athenian whom Paul converted in Acts 17:34, and addresses his fellow presbyter Timothy; historians now place the writing around 500, probably in Syria, by a Christian who knew the newest Athenian philosophy at first hand. The question he sets himself is what the names scripture gives to God can mean, when God is beyond every name. Good, Light, Beauty, Being, Life, Wisdom, Power, Peace, One: each, Dionysius argues, names not what God is in himself but what God gives, the goodness, being and life that everything receives from a source beyond it. Evil has no place among these names because it has no being to name: it is a lack, a falling short of the good, never a power of its own, and it is here that he leans hardest on Proclus. Along the way he quotes a teacher he calls Hierotheus, who may himself belong to the fiction. The book was put into Latin twice in the ninth century: by Hilduin, abbot of Saint-Denis, around 838, and by John Scotus Eriugena, the Irish scholar at the court of Charles the Bald, in 862. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas wrote a commentary on it.

Key concepts

What does 'superessential' mean in this book?

Beyond being itself, not merely the highest being. John Parker's translation uses the word dozens of times for God: not a thing among things, however great, but the source that gives things their being and so cannot be counted among them. It is why Dionysius can call God Being and also say God is not, without contradicting himself: the first names a gift, the second refuses to confine the giver.

Why does the book start with the name Good?

Because Good is the one name that covers everything God gives. Being, life and wisdom reach only what is, lives or thinks, but goodness reaches all things, from the highest angels down to the most remote, each as far as it can receive it. Light, the next name, is its image, as a portrait shows its original. Every other name in the book is a way of looking at that one outpouring.

What does participation mean for Dionysius?

Having something by receiving it from a source that keeps it whole. Things are good, alive or wise by sharing in what God gives, and the source is not divided or used up by being shared. His image is the centre of a circle: every line drawn from the edge meets it, and each has all of it, yet it stays one point. Differences between things come from how much each can take in.

What is privation, and why does it matter here?

A lack of something a thing ought to have. Dionysius uses it to say what evil is without giving evil any being: evil is the good missing where it belongs, as the evil in a soul is a falling away from the good things fitting it. A privation has no force of its own and lives only on what it spoils, which is why he calls evil weak and unstable.

Why is Peace one of the names of God?

Because God is what holds the many together without melting them into one lump. Dionysius praises Peace as the source of agreement and fellowship among all things, turning their divided multitude into a oneness and their tribal war into a shared dwelling. Each thing keeps its own nature and place, and the harmony comes from all of them sharing in the same divine Peace.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Names for a God beyond every name

If God lies beyond anything words can reach, what is scripture doing when it calls God good, wise or living? Dionysius answers that each name praises a gift, never a nature.

Good, Light, Beauty, Being, Life, Wisdom, Power, One: Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite takes the names one by one and reads each as the name of what flows out to creatures, the goodness, being and life that everything receives from a source beyond it. His image is the sun, which lights whatever can take light, not by choosing but by being what it is. So the names are true without being a definition, and God stays unknown in himself. He scolds readers who cling to the sound of a word instead of its force.

  • divine names
  • divine transcendence
  • apophatic theology
  • theological method
  • divine causality
  • participation
  • being
  • the good
  • divine illumination
  • trinitarian theology

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Evil as a lack, not a power

Where does evil come from, if everything comes from the Good? Dionysius refuses to give it any source of its own, and pays for that by denying it any being at all.

Nothing, he argues, does what it does while aiming at evil as evil; even a wrongdoer reaches for something that looks good. Evil is a falling short, and what counts as one depends on the nature in question: a lion without its fierceness would fail to be a lion. Even the demons are not evil by nature, only by the good they abandoned. Against any view that sets evil up as a rival principle, he makes it weak, borrowed and unstable. Here he follows the Athenian Platonist Proclus most closely.

  • evil
  • privation
  • goodness
  • nature
  • providence
  • divine providence
  • divine justice
  • metaphysics

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The Good that goes out of itself

Can God love the world the way a lover does, carried beyond himself? Dionysius says yes, and defends the boldest word for love against those who find it unworthy of God.

Paul, he writes, was a true lover, beside himself, no longer living his own life but Christ's. God loves in the same way: out of the overflow of goodness he goes out of himself in care for everything that exists, as if beguiled by love, and yet remains in himself. Readers who balk at the name Love are told that a name's force matters more than its sound. Love comes from the Good and turns back to it, so creation is less a single act than a circuit, everything going out from one source and drawn home again.

  • divine love
  • creation
  • unity
  • divine unity
  • unity and multiplicity
  • peace
  • causality
  • cosmology

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Within this work

passages held
131
distinct concepts
158
by passages held, corpus-wide
#451

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “divine causality” and “participation”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
divine causalityparticipation9
beingdivine causality7
divine transcendenceparticipation7
apophatic theologydivine names6
beingparticipation5
beingthe good5
divine causalitythe good5
participationthe good5
apophatic theologybeing4
apophatic theologydivine causality4
beingdivine transcendence4
divine causalitydivine names4
evilthe good4
apophatic theologydivine transcendence3
beingdivine names3
beingevil3
divine causalitydivine transcendence3
divine namesdivine transcendence3
divine namesparticipation1
evilparticipation1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 500 The Celestial Hierarchy (Περὶ τῆς οὐρανίας ἱεραρχίας)

    The heavenly half of a pair: the order of the angels, which The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy then follows down into the church. In the manuscripts it stands first among the treatises; Hugh of Saint-Victor, the Paris theologian, wrote a commentary on it in the twelfth century.

     EN
  2. 500 The Divine Names (Περὶ θείων ὀνομάτων) you are here EN
  3. 500 The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (Περὶ τῆς ἐκκλησιαστικῆς ἱεραρχίας)

    A walk through six rites of the church, written as the earthly sequel to The Celestial Hierarchy; after The Divine Names it is the longest treatise in the corpus. It is read here in John Parker's Victorian English.

     EN
  4. 500 The Letters (Ἐπιστολαί)

    The corpus ends on ten letters, from a few lines to many pages, addressed in that persona to Gaius, Dorotheus, Sopatros, Polycarp, Demophilus, Titus and John. Here the apostolic-age fiction is carried furthest.

     EN
  5. 500 The Mystical Theology (Περὶ μυστικῆς θεολογίας)

    The shortest of the four treatises, a few pages long, and the source of the language of darkness and unknowing that later mystics took up, from the Rhineland preachers to John of the Cross.

     EN
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