Before commenting, I’ll quote an entire news item from the “WEDNESDAY, 14 MAY 2008” newsletter of the Vatican Information Service (EIGHTEENTH YEAR – N. 91):
=============================================================== PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE: MEDIATION AND DIALOGUE
VATICAN CITY, 14 MAY 2008 (VIS) – In today’s general audience, held in St. Peter’s Square, the Holy Father resumed his series of catecheses on the Fathers of the Church, concentrating his remarks on the figure of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite whose aim, said the Pope, was “to place Greek wisdom at the service of the Gospel”.
Benedict XVI explained how, during a period marked by “harsh disputes following the Council of Chalcedon”, this sixth-century author affirmed the fact that “the light of truth … eradicates error and brings the good to shine forth. With this principle he purified Greek thought, bringing it into relation with the Gospel”.
The Pseudo-Dionysius used Greek polytheism “to show the truth of Christ and transform the polytheistic world into a cosmos created by God” in which “all creatures together reflect the truth of God”.
“Because the creature is a glorification of God, the Pseudo-Dionysius’ theology becomes a theological liturgy. God is found, above all, by praising Him and not just through reflection”.
This Father of the Church created the first “great mystical theology. … With him the word ‘mystical’ took on a more personal and intimate meaning: it expresses the soul’s journey towards God. … The Pseudo-Dionysius shows that at the end of the road to God is God Himself, Who comes close to us in Jesus Christ”.
“Today Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite assumes fresh relevance”, said the Holy Father. “He appears as a greater mediator in the modern dialogue between Christianity and the mystical theologies of Asia, the well-known characteristic of which lies in their conviction that it cannot be said who God is, that He can be spoken of only in negative terms, … and that only by entering this experience of ‘no’ can He be reached”.
Dialogue, said Benedict XVI “does not accept superficiality. It is when we enter deeply into the encounter with Christ that a vast area for dialogue opens before us. When one meets the light of truth, one realises that it is a light for everyone: disputes disappear and it becomes possible to understand one another, or at least to speak to and approach one another”. AG/ PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS AREOPAGITE/… VIS 080514 (370)
=============================================================== Maybe Pseudo-Dionysius can be a mediator in a dialogue with mystics of Asia, though I find Pseudo-Dionysius’s writings strange almost to the point of repulsiveness. To be sure, those writings are rational in a sense, but it’s entirely what I call a ‘top-down’ rationality, a worldview imagined without a lot of contact with the nitty-gritty details of this world God inconveniently made. There are undoubtedly some Christian missionaries who can serve God by reaching out to those mystics of Asia, but it’s dangerous right now for the Church, or her separated sisters, to be reaching out publicly in this way when our main ways of expressing the faith have already become implausible to so many in the West, including most young adults who’d been raised as Christians.
I would propose we Western Christians examine our thoughts and feelings to try to understand why Christianity is suddenly implausible even in a Christian culture before courting Asian mystics. My take on the situation is very simple: Christian thinkers fell into the trap set by Spinoza and his theories of separate realms of knowledge, theories which not only consigned theologians to various ghettos but also turned theology and philosophy into studies of fairy-tales. We need to reestablish Christian connections to God’s Creation before we go chasing after polytheistically grounded conversations with Asian mystics.
An honest, and non-hostile, confrontation with modern empirical knowledge should lead to a regrounding of Christian thinking so that it could deal with God’s Creation from the standpoint of Christian revealed truths. Stated more positively:
- The Einsteinian view (speaking loosely) gives us a universe which plausibly can have the properties of a world as I define it: unity, coherence, and completeness. just as importantly, modern physics and mathematics gives us the possibility of defining this world explicitly as a phase of something greater, all of Creation, which might have another phase which we could call Heaven.
- Cosmological physics, evolutionary biology, history, literary and linguistic exegesis, and other fields give us the possibility of seeing this universe as a world, a well-ordered moral narrative, where the highest level of order is determined by God’s purposes which we know only through revelation.
We need to understand the historical importance of Spinoza, a distinctly non-liberal thinker, who taught liberals how to divide reality into realms of knowledge which weren’t even contiguous let alone overlapping or even, the Deity forbid, parts of one unified realm of truths. We have an opportunity to undo this particularly damaging aspect of modern thought while keeping those many truer aspects of modern thought and also keeping all those piles of partially digested modern knowledge which can become true knowledge. We can do this by adhering to a consistent Thomistic existentialism, updated in its view of Creation to consider modern empirical knowledge.
Against Pseudo-Dionysius’s books, I’d propose the intellectual biography of St. Augustine, a man whose early writings, even as a Christian, were in the same vein as Pseudo-Dionysius. By the end of The City of God, he’d become so strong a physicalist that he wasn’t so much concerned with angelic hierarchies as he was with such questions as: what happens to all our nail parings and hair clippings from our mortal existence when we participate in the bodily resurrection? He was also so concerned with bodily control, not control of an evil body but control of our very selves, that he made a rather vulgar joke about a man who could fart out a musical tune. Most readers seem not to notice such disturbing trends in the thought of the great bishop of Hippo. St. Augustine of Hippo led us away from the types of thought we read in the books of Pseudo-Dionysius. Strange it was that Pseudo-Dionysius didn’t learn the lesson since he followed Augustine by a century or so.
Etienne Gilson didn’t think highly of Augustine as a philosopher though admitting freely that great bishop was likely the greatest of all Christian theologians, but I think Gilson didn’t give enough credit to Augustine for a very difficult journey not by way of ascension but rather by coming to a better understanding of empirical reality including his own human nature and also his immediate environment and even his historical context. Gilson does note that Augustine was a brilliant psychologist as well as a genius at theology and a little meditation on Augustine’s main insight into the psyche of man will bear fruit: God is more deeply inside of us than we can ourselves reach. As the Creator and sustainer of the stuff and entities of His story, the Almighty is also so deeply inside those genes and the nasty events of evolution, that we can’t see Him without a serious effort to understand the empirical levels of that story.
We don’t approach God so much as we become more aware of His immediate presence. We develop that awareness by listening to God rather than by trying to ascend to Him by ladders built of human dream-stuff. When Einstein tried to impose his own preconceptions upon Creation: “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” Bohr responded (perhaps): “Don’t you tell God what to do.” (See Einstein and Bohr: Don’t Tell God What to Do!.)
We are soaked no longer in Christ in the conventional way but we are soaked in poorly digested knowledge of Christ’s Creation. This tells us what we need to do to preach the Good News of Christ to our neighbors and our children and to most modern Asians. Anyone who wants more details or further arguments can explore the writings in this blog, Acts of Being or join the few, the silent, the readers of my first published book: To See a World in a Grain of Sand.