Works of Dionysius

the same, we have confirmed by the oracles of the Chaldeans. Our Plato, too, writing to Hermias, names the Father and the Son in divinity. And soon after, he celebrates both in the singular number. Iamblichus reports the mysteries of the Egyptians. In them, they introduce a God shining forth from Himself, and they name the Son the father of himself, where they place one nature in the first of the generator and the generated. Plotinus, where he discusses divine love. Also, where he argues about the One and the Good and the freedom of the First, he posits a certain interior generation in the divine, through which he asserts that something existing generates, and that God proceeds from Himself. ¶ From this divine fecundity, therefore, all fecundity has emanated into the angels, into the souls, into the celestial, and into things inferior to the heavens. From that generator, generators proceeded; from that generated, the generated proceeded. From the producer and the product alike, the producing and the produced [proceeded] equally. God is also called Cause, because all things receive essence from God, since the divine goodness wills it so: just as Plato says in the Timaeus a dialogue on nature and the cosmos, but not by the necessity of nature. Wisdom and beauty are noted, because He inserts harmony and decorum into things: interior harmony, and exterior decorum. Through these two, indeed, all things both are and are well. ¶ After these, Dionysius says that the eternal Son of God, by wondrous kindness, assumed human nature to Himself, without being changed in any way in the meantime. ¶ The Platonist Amelius, commemorating the gospel of John, venerates this mystery. Plato, too, arguing against the Pythagoreans, says that man is not the measure of all things, but God: especially if God becomes man. The reasons for this mystery, however, we have treated in the book on the Christian religion.

¶ Divine names signify in large part the beneficent processions from God. God is called unity, trinity, cause, wisdom, beauty, kindness.

These as if initiated

b we have received from the sacred utterances.
You will find, however, that the entire sacred praise of the theologians, if I may so speak, fashions divine appellations to explain and praise the beneficent processions of the supreme divinity. Thus, in almost every theological treatise, we see the supreme divinity being holily celebrated. ¶ As a monad, indeed, and unity, because of the simplicity and the unity of His nature, which surpasses all impartibility. From which, as if from a unifying power, we are made one, and our divided diversities, gathered together in a manner above the world, are collected into a deiform monad and a union imitating God. ¶ As a trinity, indeed, because of the expression of the superessential fecundity in three subsistents. From which all fatherhood in heaven and on earth exists and is named. ¶ Furthermore, as the cause of all things that exist, because all things have received essence so that they might exist through His productive goodness; then indeed as wise and beautiful: because whatever things are of the number of those that are, they keep their own proper nature inviolate, being full of divine harmony and sacred decorum. ¶ Especially, however, [as] propitious to our race. Because in the one nature of His persons, He truly and entirely assumed our nature, recalling human humility to Himself and applying it to Himself. From which the simple Jesus is ineffably composed. And He who is eternal took on a temporal procession. And He who eminently exceeds every order of the whole of nature in a manner above essence, arrived within the intimacy of our nature. Yet, meanwhile, He preserves His own [nature] entirely immutable and unconfused. These things, I say, we have learned as those who are initiated; and whatever other deifying lights were drawn from the sacred utterances, the tradition of the secrets of our divine precepts has brought to us by clear explanation.

¶ The One itself and the Good is above being, intellect, and the intelligible. Also why we use figures to declare divine things. Also concerning the resurrection and the fruition of God.

Readers are to be warned

i we had to warn our readers: that these words, essence, and being, and things that are, were to be forgiven by the philosophers, to be granted as their tools to each craftsman. Furthermore, that we are not able, wherever Dionysius names ousia substance/essence, to interpret it sufficiently by substance: but [it is] to be expressed by essence, especially where he argues about the One and the Good, where about evil, where about matter. For philosophers do not drag into the contest with the One and the Good substance, which is one category, but essence and being, which embraces all categories. The Peripatetics certainly think being, one, and good are equal. But the Platonists, among whom our Dionysius holds the primacy, place the One and the Good outside of controversy before being, as being most ample, more simple, prior, and more sufficient. Therefore, he willingly calls the supreme God, the One and the Good, above essence.