An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Dionysius the Areopagite
A Syrian monk writing in the sixth century took the pseudonym of 
St Paul’s convert, Dionysius the Areopagite, who was mentioned in the 
New Testament (Acts 17:34). Such seeming subterfuge was not an unusual 
practice in those days and gave his work added authority. When his true 
identity was discovered, he became known as Pseudo-Dionysius. His 
work, Neoplatonic in content, had a seminal influence on the Western 
mystical tradition.
Dionysius also wrote 
The Divine Names
as well as 
The Mystical 
Theology
and The 
Celestial Hierarchies
. The anonymous author of the
 
Cloud of Unknowing 
translated Dionysius’ 
Mystical Theology as 
Deonise Hid Divinite
, and based the Cloud of Unknowing on it. The 
main thesis of Dionysius’ work is that all one can say of God is what he 

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Religious and Spiritual Experience
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is not, this is known as the Apophatic Tradition or Via Negativa. Dionysius 
describes the absolute truth by the use of negatives, because it so infinitely 
excels all qualifications:
. . . He is neither soul nor intellect; nor has He imagination, opinion, 
reason, or understanding, nor is He any act of reason or understand-
ing. Nor can He be expressed or conceived, since He is neither number 
nor order; nor greatness nor smallness; nor equality nor inequality; nor 
similarity nor dissimilarity. Neither is He standing, nor moving, nor at 
rest. Neither has He power nor is power, nor is light. Neither does He 
live nor is He life. Neither is He essence, nor eternity nor time. . . . nor 
is He spirit, in the sense that we understand it . . . Neither does 
anything that is know Him as He is . . . the all-perfect and unique 
Cause of all things transcends all affirmation, and the simple pre-
eminence of His Absolute Nature is outside of every negation – free 
from every limitation and beyond them all.
145
This way of describing God begins with creation and multiplicity and 
moves upward through a process of negation to the Godhead. Its oppo-
site is the V
ia Positiva
which begins from an intellectual understanding of 
the universal First Cause and proceeds downwards to affirm the divinity 
in all things. For Dionysius, God could neither be experienced as an object 
of direct perception nor known by the intellect, but only experienced 
through contemplation. Dionysius suggested stages of mysticism: 
The Active Life through the Way of Purification, whereby we may 
become true servants of God;
The Inner Life, the Way of Illumination, and of real sonship with 
God;
The Contemplative Life, which is the Unitive Way, whereby we may 
attain to true friendship with God.
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