As for now, what happens is this. We use whatever appropriate symbols we can for the things of God. With these analogies we are raised upward toward the truth of the mind’s vision, a truth which is simple and one. We leave behind us all our own notions of the divine. We call a halt to the activities of our minds and, to the extent that is proper, we approach the ray which transcends being. Here, in a manner no words can describe, preexisted all the goals of all knowledge and it is of a kind that neither intelligence nor speech can lay hold of it nor can it at all be contemplated since it surpasses everything and is wholly beyond our capacity to know it. Transcendently it contains within itself the boundaries of every natural knowledge and energy. At the same time it is established by an unlimited power beyond all the celestial minds. And if all knowledge is of that which is and is limited to the realm of the existent, then whatever transcends being must also transcend knowledge.
How then can we speak of the divine names? How can we do this if the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge, if it abides beyond the reach of mind and of being, if it encompasses and circumscribes, embraces and anticipates all things while itself eluding their grasp and escaping from any perception, imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding? How can we enter upon this undertaking if the Godhead is superior to being and is unspeakable and unnameable?
I said in my Theological Representations that one can neither discuss nor understand the One, the Superunknowable, the Transcendent, Goodness itself, that is, the Triadic Unity possessing the same divinity and the same goodness. Nor can one speak about and have knowledge of the fitting way in which the holy angels can commune with the comings or with the effects of the transcendently overwhelming Goodness. Such things can neither be talked about nor grasped except by the angels who in some mysterious fashion that have been deemed worthy. Since the union of divinized minds with the Light beyond all deity occurs in the cessation of all intelligent activity, the godlike unified minds who imitate these angels as far as possible praise it most appropriately through the denial of all beings. Truly and supernaturally enlightened after this blessed union, they discover that although it is the cause of everything, it is not a thing since it transcends all things in a manner beyond being. Hence, with regard to the supra-essential being of God—transcendent Goodness transcendently there—no lover of the truth which is above all truth will seek to praise it as word or power or mind or life or being. No. It is at a total remove from every condition, movement, life, imagination, conjecture, name, discourse, thought, conception, being, rest, dwelling, unity, limit, infinity, the totality of existence. And yet, since it is the underpinning of goodness, and by merely being there is the cause of everything, to praise this divinely beneficent Providence you must turn to all of creation. It is there at the center of everything and everything has it for a destiny. It is there “before all things and in it all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). Because it is there the world has come to be and exists. All things long for it. The intelligent and rational long for it by way of knowledge, the lower strata by way of perception, the remainder by way of the stirrings of being alive and in whatever fashion befits their condition.
Realizing all this, the theologians praise it by every name—and as the Nameless One. For they call it nameless when they speak of how the supreme Deity, during a mysterious revelation of the symbolical appearance of God, rebuked the man who asked, “What is your name?” and led him away from any knowledge of the divine name by countering, “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful” (Jg. 13:17f.; cf. Gn. 32:29 and Ex. 3:13f.)? This surely is the wonderful “name which is above every name” (Phil. 2:9) and is therefore without a name. It is surely the name established “above every name that is named either in this age or in that which is to come” (Eph. 1:21).
And yet on the other hand they give it many names, such as “I am being” (Ex. 3:14; Rev. 1:4), “life” (Jn. 11:25, 14:6), “light” (Jn. 8:12), “God” (Gn. 28:13; Ex. 3:6, 15; Is. 40.:28), the “truth” (Jn. 14:6). These same wise writers, when praising the Cause of everything that is, use names drawn from all the things caused: good (Mt. 19:17; Lk. 18:19), beautiful (Sg. 1:16), wise (Job 9:4; Rom. 16:27), beloved (Is. 5:1), God of gods (Deut. 10:17; Ps. 50:1 LXX; Ps. 136:2), Lord of Lords (Deut. 10:17; Ps. 136:3; 1 Tim. 6:15; Rev. 17:14, 19:16), Holy of Holies (Dan. 9:24 LXX) eternal (Is. 40:28, Bar. 4:8), existent (Ex. 3:14), Cause of the ages (Heb. 1:2). They call him source of life (2 Mac. 1:25), wisdom (Prov. 8:22-31; 1 Cor. 1:30), mind (Is. 40:13; cited in Rom. 11:34 and 1 Cor. 2:16), word (Jn. 1:1; Heb. 4:12), knower (Sus. 42), possessor beforehand of all the treasures of knowledge (Col. 2:3), power (Rev. 19:1; 1 Cor. 1:18; Ps. 24:8), powerful, and King of Kings (1 Tim. 6:15; Rev. 17:14, 19:16), ancient of days (Dan. 7:9, 13, 22), the unaging and unchanging (Mal. 3:6), salvation (Ex. 15:2; Rev. 19:1), righteousness (1 Cor. 1:30) and sanctification (1 Cor. 1:30), redemption (1 Cor. 1:30), greatest of all and yet the one in the still breeze (1 Kgs. 19:12 LXX). They say he is in our minds, in our souls (Wis. 7:27), and in our bodies (1 Cor. 6:19), in heaven and on earth (Ps. 115:3; Is. 66:1; Jer. 23:24), that while remaining ever within himself (Ps. 102:27) he is also in (Jn. 1:10) and around and above the world, that he is above heaven (Ps. 113:4) and above all being, that he is sun (Mal. 4:2), star (2 Pet. 1:19; Rev. 22:16), and fire (Ex. 3:2), water (Jn. 7:38), wind (Jn. 3:5-8, 4:24), and dew (Is. 18:4; Hos. 14:5), cloud (Ex. 13:21f., 24:16, 33:9; Job 36:27f.; Is. 4:5, 18:4; 1 Cor. 10:1f.), archetypal stone (Ps. 118:22, cited in Mt. 21:42; Mk. 12:10; Acts 4:11 and 1 Pet. 2:4, 7; Is. 8:14, cited in Rom. 9:33 and 1 Pet. 2:8; Is. 28:16, cited in Rom. 9:33; Eph. 2:20, 1 Pet. 2:4, 6), and rock (Ex. 17:6 and Num. 20:7-11, cited in 1 Cor. 10:4; 2 Sam. 22:2; Is. 8:14, cited in Rom. 9:33 and 1 Pet. 2:8), that he is all, that he is no thing.
And so it is the Cause of all and as transcending all, he is rightly nameless and yet has the names of everything that is. Truly he has dominion over all and all things revolve around him, for he is their cause, their source, and their destiny. He is “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28; cf. Col. 3:11), as scripture affirms, and certainly he is to be praised as being for all things the creator and originator, the One who brings them the power which returns them to itself, and all this in the one single, irrepressible, and supreme act. For the unnamed goodness is not just the cause or cohesion or life or perfection so that it is from this or that providential gesture that it earns a name, but it actually contains everything beforehand within itself—and this in an uncomplicated and boundless manner—and it is thus by virtue of the unlimited goodness of its single all-creative Providence. Hence the songs of praise and the names for it are fittingly derived from the sum total of creation.
~(Pseudo) Dionysios the Areopagite, The Divine Names, I.4.592D-I.7
