To an Unknown God: Preaching Dionysius the Areopagite

March 27, 2011 by Daniel Harrell

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Yet to do so for Dionysius was utter joy. Here's an excerpt:

Supernal Triad, Deity above all essence, knowledge, and goodness; Guide of Christians to Divine Wisdom; direct our path to the ultimate summit of your mystical knowledge, most incomprehensible, most luminous and most exalted, where the pure, absolute, and immutable mysteries of theology are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their Darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories surpassing all beauty. Let us . . . in the diligent exercise of mystical contemplation, leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual, and all things in the world of being and nonbeing, that we may arise by unknowing towards the union, as far as is attainable, with it that transcends all being and all knowledge. For by the unceasing and absolute renunciation of yourself and of all things may we be borne on high, through pure and entire self-abnegation, into the superessential Radiance of the Divine Darkness.

The danger of the apophatic way is falling prey to intellect-abandonment for the sake of a divine consciousness that has nothing to do with God at all—the error of philosophical traditions from Buddhism to Transcendental Meditation. Dionysius did not argue for an emptying of the mind but for its humbled acquiescence to God.

When it comes to knowing God, we must all approach Him acknowledging our weaknesses, limitations, and agendas. Christians along with religious people throughout human history commit the toxic sin of idolatry—be it with the works of our hands or the works of our mind—whenever we insist on shaping God into forms that serve our own wants and needs rather than submit ourselves to His will for us. In idolatry we make God into our own image rather than yielding ourselves to be crafted into his. We place our faith in our own effort and behavior in yet another twisted attempt at manufactured righteousness. By contrast, "un-knowing God," becoming like Jesus through the negative way, stresses Christ's call that we give up instead of trying to measure up.

Interestingly, the influential writings that bear Dionysius the Areopagite's name were not in fact written by the person Luke identifies in Acts 17:34. The Christian church mistakenly accepted them as such until the end of the 19th century when scholars determined that the author was much more likely a 5th-century Neo-Platonic monk from Syria. However the fact that the authorship was forged (a practice fairly common and accepted back then for the sake of getting a read) only invalidates Dionysius as an historical document; it does not diminish its enormous theological influence on Eastern Orthodoxy, as well as on Thomas Aquinas and others in the West.

Yet the question remains: Why would the lone mention of an obscure New Testament character warrant pillaging as the author of a 5th-century theological text? Perhaps it had something to do with the Acts passage itself. Paul was in Athens whereupon he became greatly distressed by the abundance of idols that filled the city. This led him into a series of plausibly heated discussions with Jews and other devout persons, as well as many others, namely Stoics and Epicureans, regarding the spiritual dangers of idolatry. Epicureans were of an empirical, materialistic, and atheistic bent, accentuating sensual pleasure as a chief end of life. Stoics, on the other hand, disparaged passion in favor of restraint out of deference to the logos, life's animating principle. As pantheists, Stoics believed that the logos evidenced itself in all matter and matters of life.

Paul offered a notable third way to the Epicurean's stress on gratuitous bodily pleasure as well as the Stoic's stress on an impersonal life force. He argued for an embodied, personal spirituality, one that acknowledged the significance and unity of the person, body and soul, as created in the image of God, decisively in the person of Jesus Christ whom God raised from the dead. The Epicureans and Stoics mocked Paul, deriding the resurrection of the body as some weird pipe dream. Nevertheless, their curiosity sparked, they brought Paul to a meeting in order that he might elucidate. Verse 21 describes how everybody in Athens spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas. Starbucks would have made a killing.

Paul began by observing that his audience was already religious—albeit an ambiguous observation given that religiosity ran the gamut (then as now) from naïve superstitiousness to sincere contemplation. He then drew particular attention to an altar inscribed TO AN UNKNOWN GOD and went on to famously declare that what they worshiped as unknown he in fact could disclose. Here is the essence of the New Testament meaning of "mystery." It does come from the word "hidden," but it does not imply staying hidden. The god worshipped as unknown was disclosed as the God of the universe become known in Jesus Christ. The logos became flesh, personal and embodied. Paul's was an early seeker-sensitive sermon. He employed Athenian terms in order to serve biblical truth. He affirmed their search but condemned their errors.

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About Daniel Harrell

Daniel M. Harrell is Senior Minister of The Colonial Church, Edina, MN and author of How To Be Perfect: One Church's Audacious Experiment in Living the Old Testament Book of Leviticus (FaithWords, 2011). Follow him via Twitter, Facebook, or at his blog and website.

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