Dionysius Circle. March 1, 2022. Divine Names 4.9-4.17.

Outline: 

1. God’s movement

2. Hierarchical Love as Divine Love?

3. Evil as failure to know divine love

4. Motion of Angels/Souls

Result of previous argument: Beauty is Cause of All.

“[Beauty] is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty...and there it is ahead of all as Goal...since it is the longing for beauty which actually brings them into being.”

“There is rest and movement for everything, and these come from that which, transcending rest and movement, establishes each being according to an appropriate principle and gives each the movement suitable to it.” 

1. Creation from on abundance of Goodness: the Divine Circle of Love

1. “...the Cause  of all things loves all things in the superabundance of his goodness, that because of this goodness he makes all things, brings all things to perfection, holds all things together, returns all things. The divine longing is Good seeking good for the sake of the good. That yearning which creates all the goodness of the world preexisted superabundantly within the Good and did not allow it to remain without issue. It stirred him to use the abundance of his powers in the production of the world.” (DN 4.10.708b)

2. “On the one hand he causes, produces, and generates what is being referred to, and, on the other hand, he is the thing itself. He is stirred by it, and he stirs it. He is moved to it and he moves it. So they call him the beloved and the yearned-for since he is beautiful and good, and, again, they call him yearning and love because his the power moving and lifting all things up to himself, for in the end what is he if not Beauty and Goodness, the One who of himself reveals himself, the good procession of his own transcendent unity? He is yearning on the move, simple, self-acting, preexistent in the Good, flowing out from the Good onto all that is and returning once again to the Good. In this divine yearning shows especially its unbeginning and unending nature traveling in an endless circle through the Good, from the Good, in the Good and to the Good, unerringly turning, ever on the same center, ever in the same direction, always proceeding, always remaining, always being restored to itself.” (DN 4.14.712Cff)

3. Hierotheus: “let us say that there is a simple self-moving power directing all things to mingle as one, that it starts out from the Good, reaches down to the lowliest creation, returns then in due order through all the stages back to the Good, and thus turns from itself and through itself and upon itself and toward itself in an everlasting circle.” (DN 4.17 713D)

II. Hierarchy of Love: (cf. 708A; 709D; 713B for more hierarchy passages)

Hierotheus: Love, in reaching down and turning back to itself, produces fractal loves:

1. Divine Love ↓      

2. Angelic love  ↓    ↑

3. Noetic love     ↓    ↑  (noeron)  

4. Psychic love    ↓   ↑

5. Physical love   ↓  ↑

In every case of love (1-5): “we should think of a unifying and co-mingling power which moves the superior to provide for the subordinate, peer to be in communion with peer, and subordinate to return to the superior and the outstanding.” (DN, 4.15.713b)

So God appears to have love as a power which through itself provides everything to creation and returns it to Himself. 

Recall 708B: “...because of this goodness he makes [poiei] all things, brings all things to perfection, holds all things together, returns all things.”

Problem of reversion: Is reversion the same metaphysical relation as proceeding?

God’s gift of a capacity for Longing is what constitutes a being in its being, inasmuch as it comes to be itself by desiring to be unified in the manner appropriate to its level. 

Cf. Perl, Theophany, p.69: “...the very receptivity of beings, which constitutes them as beings rather than God, is itself a gift...their neediness or receptivity, could be regarded as their love, which is prior to their being in that they are constituted as beings only by loving, or actively receiving, God. But this love itself, as God in them, is given to them.”

Inasmuch as God’s love is constituted by producing these longings, the fulfillment of true longings is the fullfillment of God’s love itself. (Cf. Perl, Theophany, p.47: “...God’s erotic love for the being, his moving or reverting it to himself, is the being’s reversion to or erotic love for God”) 

Yet the capacity to long for God can be denied, and so it appears that God’s Love is frustrated insofar as it fails to return all things which it has made insofar as they turn away from love.

Q: For creatures, does Rest = Determination and Motion = reception of that determination in activity? 

Q: How does the Good transcend rest and motion?

The Good transcends rest and motion, by being in everlasting circular motion

III. Evil

(DN 4.12, 709C): a preview of evil: “Others, however, tended naturally to think of a partial, physical, and divided yearning. This is not true yearning, but an empty image or, rather, a lapse from real yearning. The fact is that men are unable to grasp the simplicity of the one divine yearning, and hence, the term is quite offensive to most of them. So it is left to the divine Wisdom to lift them and to raise them up to a knowledge of what yearning really is, after which they no longer take offense.” [cf. also DN 4.35 736A on responsibility]

Here the idea is that man’s movement around physical, divided loves keeps him from attaining to the nature of his natural movement back into God. And that failure requires the “divine Wisdom” to “lift them and to raise them up.” 

So is this divine Wisdom the same motion of the Soul or another motion of God? How does God then re-awaken this original longing through another motion (Incarnation) that excites a return into this motion?  Does this refer to the necessity of Christ to allow us to revert?

IV. Movements of Intellect, Soul, Nature

1. “Illuminations of the good and beautiful without beginning or end”

1. Uncreated energy?

1. “Divine Intelligences”

1. First: Move in a Circle: As unified with these illuminations.

2. Second: Move in a straight line out of Providence to those below.

3. Third: Move in a spiral: moving while remaining where they are.

Q: What is the difference between the Divine Circular Motion and that of the Angels? Does God move spirally?

2. Souls: 

1. First movement: “moves in a circle”

1. First stage : “Turns within itself and away from what is outside”

1. Thus soul’s movement implies an inner and an outer necessarily.

2. The soul is in some sense “out there” and needs to come back in.

3. The angels’ circular motion is already “at one” with the illuminations.

2. “Inner concentration of intellectual powers” (noeron dunameon)

3. “Uniform sunelixis” first gathers it and returns it into itself from the many things outside.

2. Second stage: having become uniform, it becomes united to the powers ‘unifiedly unified.’

3. Third stage:  it is guided up to the beautiful and good beyond all things.

Commentary: So the soul has a movement which inherently leads it away from external things, back into itself, and when it becomes unified in itself, it is inevitably joined to even more unified powers [presumably beyond the soul], and this same motion which leads it back into itself, further  “guides it” [cheiragogousa] up even to the beautiful and the good itself.

B. Second movement: Straight line: (out of order in the text)

I.  “instead of circling in upon its own intelligent unity, it proceeds to the things around it, and is uplifted from external things, as from certain variegated and pluralized symbols, to the simple and united contemplations.” [cf. Gilsonian realism]

Straight line: Liturgy, natural contemplation? 

C. Third Movement: Spiral

I. when it “receives enlightenment of divine knowledge...through discursive reasoning, in mixed and changeable activities.”

3. Movements “in the realm of what is perceived”

1. Also caused by the Good and the Beautiful.

Microcosm? In some sense the motion of the soul unites the entire cosmos, the sensible and multiple things, are brought back into union with God through the motion of the Soul.

Q: Is this motion inevitably implanted in the nature of the soul? Virtue as peeling away the passions to uncover the inner natural motion that is already there? Christ as needed to successfully reach what is already there?