"a sin against real desire": desire as such is not castigated (in any stretch of the imagination!) by Pseudo-Dionysius, but only deficient desire. The twentieth-century thinker Jacques Lacan had an ethical maxim that sounds strikingly similar to this position: "do not compromise your desire." Lacan, however, viewed the kind of transcendent deity that we find in Pseudo-Dionysius as the ultimate compromise of desire — a kind of heavenly stopgap measure that keeps us from confronting what he thinks we actually desire in this life: the continual circulation of desire itself.

Again, where does this weakness and deficiency come from? It seems that weakness and deficiency are somehow inherent in the process of the divinity's overflowing of goodness. The divinity in and of itself is supremely good, beautiful, existing, etc., but the second these begin to overflow into the universe they somehow become deficient in some way. I don't think Pseudo-Dionysius ever adequately addresses this potential implication.

The summary of the long argument just rehearsed so far. Is this a persuasive position on evil? What do you think?

This was a common enough teaching among various philosophical and theological traditions at the time. Quite a few viewed matter, in fact, if not as a source of evil, at least as a kind of dead weight or derivative phenomenon.

But where does this lack, deficiency, or inability come from to begin with? If all things are the result of the overflow of God's goodness, then is part of this overflow itself deficient?

What do you make of these claims?

Why do both Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius equate "permanence" with what is "good"? What are your thoughts on this equation? Is what is good even better if it is permanent or longer lasting? Or do you think that there is a kind of law of diminishing return with any good thing?

Here Pseudo-Dionysius has in mind a person being turned away from communion/the Eucharist in a church.

A very rich passage

A nice summary of Pseudo-Dionysius's argument. Are you persuaded by his claims, or do you find some weak points in his argumentation?

These various qualifications "in itself," "as evil," etc. are very important for understanding the sense of the argument here.

Evil, that is, is only a swerve or declination from existence and not something inherent to or opposed to existence.

If something is neither existing nor non-existing, then what exactly is it? Let's see what Pseudo-Dionysius claims.

Here we see the same equation of goodness with existence. Whatever exists, in Pseudo-Dionysius's eyes, must necessarily have as its goal goodness (even aims incorrectly at this goal), so evil is only a departure from the good and not its own distinct state of being.

Again, we already saw similar claims in Boethius.

We shall have occasion to speak of more of these with Avicenna.

This appears to be the movement undertaken in the current treatise, though the "fixed revolution" movement seems to be that undertaken in Mystical Theology, which we shall read next.

These three movements of the angels are treated at much more length in Celestial Hierarchy. Note that Pseudo-Dionysius assumes parallel movements with the human mind.

In other words, if we interpret "non-existence" to mean that that God so far surpasses whatever we know to exist in this world.

Here is an interesting recent article from the New York Times to read in light of these claims, though it is vital to note that the two pieces are doing drastically different things and asking very different questions.

Here Pseudo-Dionysius is making a pun in the Greek. "To call," or "to bid" is kalein, while "beauty" is kalos. In point of fact, the two terms are not as directly related etymologically as their spelling might suggest, but it is still a clever pun.

Where, presumably, Pseudo-Dionysius would have treated the divine name of "sun," which scripture occasionally uses.

Pseudo-Dionysius sounds like a New Yorker in January or February — I always took the sun for granted when I lived in Texas.

i.e., the sun and the moon

Note the distinctions of existence being made here:

1. angels are purely intellectual beings
2. humans are embodied animals that can nevertheless reason (because their soul, or animating principal, possesses this highest capacity)
3. other animals cannot reason but nevertheless possess a "soul," or animating principal (which still has the lower intellective and sensorial capabilities, like imagination, emotion, etc.)
4. plants and other living beings that are not animals, which possess an animating principal, or "soul," but only in its generative, life-giving capacities
5. Non-living things, which nevertheless still exist.

This work, too, either never existed or has not survived the vicissitudes of history. Presumably, in it Pseudo-Dionysius would have treated what he regarded as the human soul at length.

We don't have any surviving work from this writer of this name, though what Pseudo-Dionysius describes here he treats at length in Celestial Hierarchy.

From around the fourth century onward, various traditions developed about the death of the Virgin Mary. Here Pseudo-Dionysius claims to describe the scene of her death, which in some churches eventually came to be memorialized with the feast day of the Assumption or Dormition ("falling-asleep," i.e., death) of the Virgin Mary.

"presbyter," a partial transliteration of the Greek word "presbyteros," which literally means "elder," is the word from which the English "priest" eventually derived. Here Pseudo-Dionysius appears to be claiming that only priests (and not deacons or those not at all ordained in the church) can have access to the teaching he is taking up. This, as noted above, is in line with his general conception of hierarchy.

A thick rope or cable mooring a boat.

Here Pseudo-Dionysius means the Apostle Paul, whom he quotes.

Here Pseudo-Dionysius is no longer speaking about the differentiation between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit but rather about how something that exists in the unity of the divine nature (say "existence," or "goodness") comes to be multiple and diverse in the various levels of non-divine existence. Both a planet and a speck of dirt can be said to "exist," though the manner and degree to which they exist differs pretty markedly. Pseudo-Dionysius is thus asking how the divine unity persists as united amid such seemingly infinite differentiation of its effects or implications.

Pseudo-Dionysius tells us that his teacher is a person named Hierotheus, and supposed works by this person are even quoted. At least in some instances, the titles of these works and even some of the quoted content appears to come from the writing of a non-Christian philosopher of the period named Proclus. The literary fiction of "Hierotheus," therefore might be a way for Pseudo-Dionysius to "Christianize" Proclus's teaching or at least make it palatable for touchier readers of the period who might have felt hesitation about referencing the philosophy of someone who was not a Christian.

Here is a passage that contains claims that will be taken up or debated in further texts we'll read: especially in what we'll read from Moses Maimonides in the next unit and Thomas Aquinas in the third unit. Note that Pseudo-Dionysius appears to be claiming that the names given to God in scripture refer more to God's purportedly observable actions than they do to the divine nature itself. Aquinas especially will want to modify this claim, as we shall learn.

Note the qualification of all of these examples here as still somehow falling short of their task.

This is a common example that Christians in late antiquity provided to help understand the concept of the Trinity — a purportedly wholly unified thing that nevertheless has distinctions. Can you think of some other examples of something similar?

All of the names, that is, except Father, Son, and holy Spirit, which refer specifically to the separate substantialities, as Pseudo-Dionysius goes on to say.

In Pseudo-Dionysius's mind, his treatise should only be read by certain people. What does it mean for us to ignore this as readers and treat it as potentially open and understandable (though perhaps not agreeable) to anyone?

This is another work by the writer that either never existed or has not come down to us. Note the distinction that Pseudo-Dionysius makes here. The subject of the current treatise are the more conceptual names given to God by scripture (existence, life, goodness, etc.), whereas those with more sensory or bodily connotations he claims to treat in the sequel. All of these names, however, ultimately undergo the same process of negation from Pseudo-Dionysius. None of them are properly applied to God in their full sense according to him (though, as we shall see in Mystical Theology, some are more properly applied than others.

Again, a claim similar to that made by Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy 3.11–12.

This is a dense sentence to say the least. In Pseudo-Dionysius's mind, insofar as the divinity surpasses the human intellect infinitely, union with the divine entails that the mind become increasingly silent when thinking of God. This isn't any kind of neutral silence or inactivity, however, insofar as the mind is meant (on Pseudo-Dionysius's count) to follow a very particular pathway to this silence, a pathway that necessitates the "denial" or "negation" of all existing things as applicable to the divine. This "denial" or "negation" is not meant in an absolute sense, however, but only in the sense that God so far surpasses anything we might say, even using the most exalted language.

Here is an uncontroversial, but nevertheless important claim. Human knowledge is confined to that which exists. Obviously, we cannot know that which does not exist in any sense of the term.

i.e., the angels. In other words, not even the angels have a proper or full knowledge of the divinity.

This is a reference to an episode in some of the gospels in which Jesus is said to have brought a select group of his disciples up to a mountain, where he speaks with Moses and Elijah (two pivotal figures in the Jewish scriptures) and is transformed into a dazzling, ethereal being.

i.e., the Son, or Jesus Christ, as Christian teaching would have it anyways

Though not directly, insofar as the word "trinity" does not occur anywhere either in the Jewish Scriptures (what some call the "Old Testament") or the New Testament. The "Trinity" rather is a kind of summary teaching developed especially over the course of the third and fourth centuries that aimed to make sense of a great deal of scriptural passages taken to be about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Throughout this treatise, you will find similar language of proportionality. Especially in Pseudo-Dionysius's other works (Ecclesiastical Hierarchy and Celestial Hierarchy), he considers how the hierarchical structure of the church at his time and what he assumes to be the parallel hierarchical structure of the angels can reveal the divinity. In Pseudo-Dionysius's mind, hierarchy is able to facilitate the flow of divinity to all levels, insofar as only those levels of existence most prepared to receive the divinity do to a fuller extent and then distribute it to increasingly less prepared levels of existence below them. Such transposing of human hierarchies onto cosmic or celestial structures is not unique to Pseudo-Dionysius, however, insofar as plenty of other philosophers/theologians of the time made similar claims. This does not take away from the fact, nevertheless, that such conceptions are manifestly more dependent on contingent social realities (which eventually passed away) than any of these thinkers would have realized.

And this, Pseudo-Dionysius assumes, is what has been given in the scriptures — an authoritative account of God, so far as this is possible in human language, from God. Note, however, that our writer does not assume that the scriptures can be approached in any straightforward manner. A testament to this is the fact that this long treatise about how to understand the divine names in scripture is being written in the first place.

There are similar claims being forwarded here as we have already seen in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy 5.4, in which the various modes of human knowing are explicated and contrasted with what a more divine knowing purportedly would look like.

Pseudo-Dionysius often uses counter-intuitive language to reinforce his basic thesis — that the divine is above and beyond our conceptions of it, even if our conceptions do point in the right direction. Thus, by "unknowing" our writer means a knowledge that is far beyond human knowledge.

Either this work never existed or we no longer have it. In Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius tells us about the content of this purported work — in it he dealt with the matters concerning the supposed oneness of the divine nature and the threeness of this nature's subsistencies (i.e., what Christians typically call "the Trinity," that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are both distinct and somehow a single divinity).

"divine names" — those names given to God in the scriptures

This chapter heading, which might be a later addition in the manuscript tradition, alludes to two figures who are reported to have had some interaction with the Apostle Paul. The first is a figure named Dionysius, a philosopher whom the (hardly historically reliable) book of Acts in the New Testament claims met with Paul in Athens in the Council of the Areopagus. This work, therefore, although written in the fifth or early sixth century, is presented as coming from the first century. The Timothy to whom this work is purportedly addressed to was a close companion of the Apostle Paul and is mentioned both in Paul's authentic letters and in later letters attributed to Paul.

Aristotle

Here Maimonides seems to be saying that Adam in Genesis changed his orientation from one of blissful intellectual contemplation to one of sensual preoccupation. It wasn't that Adam was without pleasure or a body in the Garden before his disobedience. These he had, though his focus was primarily on intellectual realities. How do you read Maimonides here? Do you think that this is a compelling interpretation of the passage (you might need to read Gen. 1–3 if you haven't before)?

that is, Hebrew

A really interesting claim that Maimonides makes here: the act of giving any command presupposes intellect on the part of the person being commanded. Contemporary political philosopher Jacques Rancière makes a similar claim, though with more emancipatory intent: ". . . in order to obey an order at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you" (Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, tr. Julie Rose [Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999], 16).

The Mutakallimun were primarily found within both Muslim and Jewish circles and shared some broad philosophical and theological presuppositions. At least some rehashed a version of ancient Greek atomic theory and posited that everything in the universe was ultimately composed of irreducible elements ("atoms"). Yet they also argued that God had to intervene directly anytime that any kind of change or transformation occurred in the universe, even at the atomic level. As a result, what appeared to human eyes as the natural workings of the universe was actually in every instance the contingent intervention of God (if God so decided, that is, the sun could be green tomorrow or rain could suddenly begin to start fires).

Moses

By these phrases, Maimonides means Genesis 1–3 (the creation account) and Ezekiel 1 (an account of the prophet Ezekiel having a divine encounter), respectively, which the rabbis prohibited the vast majority of people from studying. Maimonides sees these as more broadly indicative of "physics" (the philosophical study of the world) and "divine science" (either metaphysics or theology, or both, depending on who is writing).

The wise person, Maimonides claims, is scandalized by literal reading of scripture. What do you think of this?

Maimonides claims he intentionally mixed up the order. What do you make of this?

The rabbis, that is

This is a common theme in medieval educational theory and practice in general. Mathematics and Logic were viewed by many as absolutely necessary preparatory sciences before undertaking the study first of more speculative philosophy then of theology (whether that be the Christian scriptures, the Torah and Jewish prophetic books as with Maimonides, or the Qur'ān).

Sacra doctrina = "on sacred teaching"