Thursday, March 23, 2017

Neti, Neti…

Dionysius 

"God is neither soul nor angel; God has no imagination or opinion or reason or understandings nor is he reason or understanding: nor can he be described or understood. Moreover, and here we are moving from high things to low, he has no number, order, greatness, smallness, equality, likeness, unlikeness; he neither stands still nor moves, keeps silence nor speaks. And if we turn back to the highest matters in our denying here, we assert that he has no virtue, nor is he virtue or light; he is not life or substance or age or time; we can understand nothing about him, nor is he knowledge or truth or kingdom or wisdom or singularity or unity or Godhead or goodness."
(quote continued tomorrow)

Dionysius’ Mystical Teaching, published in The Cloud of Unknowing

(The author is writing of God – via negativa, or in the way of negation. Because God is not the universe or an object in the universe, God is not open to observation or description, therefore it follows that God can only be spoken of analogically or poetically. It is easier to say ‘what God is not’ rather than what God is. When you eliminate everything God is not, you still do not have what God is. )

No comments:

Post a Comment

Leave a comment here.