Pseudo-Dionysius: The Mystical Theology

The heading reads "Wheat is the Divine Gloom." The text opens with an invocation to the Trinity, which exceeds all Being, Deity, and Goodness, and which instructs Christians in heavenly wisdom. It prays for guidance to the topmost height of mystic lore, where the mysteries lie hidden in dazzling obscurity and secret Silence. The author counsels Timothy to leave the senses and intellect, to renounce himself and all things, and to be led upward to the Ray of divine Darkness. He warns that these things must not be disclosed to the uninitiated, meaning those who cling to human thought, nor to those who describe the Transcendent Cause by low qualities. He states that the Cause possesses all attributes yet transcends them, citing the teaching of the blessed Bartholomew, who said the Divine Science is vast yet minute. The blessed Moses is described undergoing purification, hearing trumpets, seeing lights, ascending with chosen priests, yet beholding not God but the place where He dwells, before plunging into the Darkness of Unknowing. The next chapter urges union with and praise of the cause of all, attaining vision through loss of sight, and offering praise by denial, likened to sculptors removing marble to reveal a hidden statue. It distinguishes the negative method from positive statements. Another chapter recounts the affirmative treatments in the Outlines of Divinity, Divine Names, and Symbolic Divinity, noting that ascent contracts terminology toward dumbness, and explains why the negative method begins from the lowest category. The final chapter maintains that the Pre-eminent Cause is neither impersonal nor lifeless, is not a material body, possesses no shape, quality, quantity, or perception, and none of these sensible things can be attributed to It.

The chapter's title states that the Pre-eminent Cause of everything intelligibly perceived is not itself any of the things intelligibly perceived. The text then ascends higher and maintains that It is not soul, mind, or endowed with imagination, conjecture, reason, or understanding; nor any act of reason or understanding; nor can It be described or perceived by these. It is not number, order, greatness, littleness, equality, or inequality; neither immovable, in motion, nor at rest; it has no power and is not power or light; it does not live and is not life; nor is It personal essence, eternity, or time; nor knowledge, truth, kingship, wisdom, one, unity, Godhead, or Goodness; nor a Spirit, Sonship, or Fatherhood; nor any thing knowable by us or other beings. It belongs neither to non-existence nor existence; existent beings do not know It, nor does It know them as they actually are. Reason cannot name or know It; It is neither darkness nor light, error nor truth. No affirmation or negation applies to It, since It transcends both—transcending affirmation as the unique Cause of all, and transcending negation by the pre-eminence of Its simple, absolute nature.