Praising the Nameless One with Every Name
by (Pseudo) Dionysios the Areopagite
Feast of the Beheading of the Holy and Glorious Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist John
Anno Domini 2020, August 29
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
Share this Post on Your Preferred Platform
"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
Late-Night Bookstores and Spiritual Reading
On St. Benedict and the Making of Vows
The Pursuit of Truth in the Age of AI
On the Theology of Raising Chickens
G.K. Chesterton and Raising Small Children
"Seal of the Fathers"
In Memory of Warren Farha, 1955-2026
An Ode to St. Brendan the Voyager
