1
Pseudo-Dionysius. Knowing God.
From The Divine Names 7.2-4
Section 2
…The Divine Mind does not learn about existing things from existing things. Instead from itself and in itself, as Cause, it pre-contains and pre-comprehends the awareness and knowledge and essence of all things. It does not approach each individual thing according to its kind, but knows and contains all things, within one grasp of the Cause. Light, as cause, presupposes in itself the notion of darkness, not by knowing the darkness, but by being light. Likewise, the Divine Wisdom, by knowing itself, knows all things. It both knows and produces all things: it knows material things in an immaterial way; it knows divisible things in an indivisible way; and it knows a plurality of things in a single act. For even, if as a single Cause, Almighty God bestows being upon all things that exist, he will not know all things from the things that exists themselves, but rather he will know them as things that exist from himself and are pre-existing within Himself, as is fitting for the self-same, unique Cause. He will, in fact, even provide to each of them, the knowledge they have of themselves and their mutual knowledge of each other.
Almighty God, therefore, does not have one knowledge of himself, peculiar to himself, and some other separate knowledge that embraces in common all things that exist. After all, the very Cause of all things, by knowing itself, could hardly be ignorant of the things that come from itself and of which it is Cause. In this way then, Almighty God knows all existing things, not by understanding the things that exist, but by understanding himself.
For the scriptures also affirm that the angels know things on the earth, not because they know them by perceptions through the senses, even if such objects can be perceived in that way. Rather, they know them by a proper power and the inherent nature in a godlike mind.
Section 3
In addition to these things, we must examine how we know God, if God cannot be grasped by the intellect or by the perception of the senses, nor is he some particular being among the things that exist.
It is never strictly true to say, then, that we know God. We cannot know him from his own nature, since that is unknowable and surpasses the ability of all reason or mind to reach. Rather, we know him from the organization of all existing things since they are, in a sense, projected from himself and so contain sorts of images or similitudes of his divine exemplars. We may ascend, as far as we have the ability, to that which is beyond everything, only by the way and order that abstracts from and transcends all things, and by a way of the Cause of all things. Wherefore, Almighty God is known even in all things, and apart from all things. And Almighty God is known through knowing and through unknowing. Concerning him there is both conception, and expression, and science, and touch, and perception, and opinion, and imagination, and name, and all the rest. Yet he is neither conceived, nor expressed, nor named. And he is not any of the things that exist, nor is he known in any existing thing. And he is all things and in all things, but he is not any thing among things. And He is known to all from all, but to none from none.
For, we must speak in these ways concerning God, for he is celebrated from all existing things, according to the analogy of all things of which he is Cause. And there is, further, the most divine knowledge of Almighty God, that knowing which is known through unknowing. It occurs in a union beyond the mind, when the mind, turning away from all existing things, even dismissing itself, is made one with the dazzling rays, and is then and there illuminated by the unsearchable depth of Wisdom.
Yet, we must learn even about this Wisdom from all things, as I have said. W e may know it, for according to the sacred text it the Cause that forms all things and continues to harmonize all things. It is the Cause of the unbreakable adaptation and order of all things, and forever unites the purposes of some things to the sources of those that follow, and beautifies the one symphony and harmony of the whole.
Section 4
Almighty God is celebrated in the holy scriptures as “Logos” not only because he provides reason and mind and wisdom, but because he also anticipated uniquely within himself the causes of all things and because he penetrates into all things, reaching, as the scriptures say, even to the end of all things. And even more than these, he is called “Logos” because the divine Word is simpler than every simplicity, and, as the Super-essential, is independent of all things. This “Logos” is the simple and really existing truth. Divine faith revolves around it for it is a pure and unerring knowledge of the whole. It is the enduring foundation for all who believe, establishing them in the truth, and the truth in them, as something so unchanging, they having a pure knowledge of the truth of what they believe. For, if knowledge unites the knower and the known, but ignorance is always a cause of change and of the ignorant person’s separation from himself, then, in keeping with the sacred Logos, nothing will move one who has believed in the truth away from true faith’s foundation upon which the believer will gain the steadiness of his unmoving, unchanging identity. For, as the believer knows, all is well with the one who has been united to the Truth, even if the multitude may admonish him as “wandering.” For, what they likely fail to see, is that the believer is wandering away from error and, through genuine faith, into the truth. As such, the believer knows that, far from being insane as others may imagine, one is liberated from the unstable and ever-changing course of various errors, being set free from that through simple and unchanging, stable truth. This is why the early leaders of our divine wisdom are dying every day, on behalf of truth. They bear witness by their every word and deed to the single knowledge of the truth Christians possess. They demonstrate that this truth is both more simple and more divine than any other. Indeed, they show that it is the only true, single, and simple knowledge of God.