Concerning "Wisdom," "Mind," "Word," "Truth," "Faith." 195.
1. Now, if you will, let us give praise to the good and eternal Life for 865B
being wise, for being the principle of wisdom, the subsistence of all wisdom, for transcending all wisdom and all understanding. It is not simply the case that God is so overflowing with wisdom that "his
understanding is beyond measure" 196. but, rather, he actually transcends all reason, all intelligence, and all wisdom. This is something which was marvelously grasped by that truly divine man, my teacher and yours and the light of our common instructor. For this is what he said: "The foolishness of God is wiser than men." 197. Those words are true not only because all human thinking is a sort of error when compared with the solid permanence of the perfect divine thoughts but also because it is customary for theologians to apply negative terms to God, but contrary to the usual sense of a deprivation. Scripture, for example, calls the all-apparent light "invisible." 198. It says regarding the
One of many praises and many names that he is ineffable and name 865C
less. 199. It says of the One who is present in all things and who may be discovered from all things that he is ungraspable and "inscrutable." 200. And here the divine apostle is said to be praising God for his
"foolishness," which in itself seems absurd and strange, but uplifts [us] to the ineffable truth which is there before all reasoning. 201. But, as I have ____________________
195.Despite the title, this chapter concentrates on the divine name "Wisdom" (Prv 8:22-31 and 1 Cor 1:30; "wise" in Jb 9:4 and Rom 16:27; see DN 1 596B 16 and 19). It also considers the name "Logos," or word or reason, beginning at 872C.
196.Ps 147:5.
197.1 Cor 1:25. Saint Paul is here presented as the teacher of our author and Timothy, and of their common instructor, Hierotheus (DN 3 681A 1f.).
198.Col 1:15; 1 Tm 1:17, 6:16; Heb 11:27; see DN 1 588C 39, note 6. 199.DN 1 596A 1-12.
200.Rom 11:33.
201.The apparent absurdity of 1 Cor 1:25 is "anagogical," that is, it uplifts the reader to a higher truth. The Areopagite's view of incongruous and absurd symbolism is thoroughly discussed in CH 2, with the necessary background of The Mystical Theology. See also DN 1 592C 40 to 593A 5, and DN 4 709C
33f.
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often said elsewhere, we have a habit of seizing upon what is actually beyond us, clinging to the familiar categories of our sense perceptions, and then we measure the divine by our human standards and, of course, are led astray by the apparent meaning we give to divine and unspeakable reason. What we should really consider is this. The human mind has a capacity to think, through which it looks on conceptual things, and a unity which transcends the nature of the mind, through which it is joined to things beyond itself. And this transcend
ing characteristic must be given to the words we use about God. They 865D
must not be given the human sense. We should be taken wholly out
of ourselves 202. and become wholly of God, since it is better to belong 868A
to God rather than to ourselves. Only when we are with God will the divine gifts be poured out onto us. Therefore let us supremely praise this foolish "Wisdom," which has neither reason nor intelligence and let us describe it as the Cause of all intelligence and reason, of all wisdom and understanding. All counsel belongs to it, from it come all knowledge and understanding, and "in it are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." 203. From all that has been said above, it follows that the transcendently wise Cause is indeed the subsistence of absolute wisdom and of the sum total and individual manifestations of wisdom. 2. The intelligent and intelligible powers of the angelic minds 868B
draw from Wisdom their simple and blessed conceptions. They do not draw together their knowledge of God from fragments nor from bouts of perception or of discursive reasoning. And at the same time, they are not limited to perception and reason. Being free from all burden of matter and multiplicity, they think the thoughts of the divine realm intelligently, immaterially, and in a single act. Theirs is an intelligent power and energy, glittering in an unmixed and undefiled purity, and it surveys the divine conceptions in an indivisible, immaterial, and godlike oneness. They become shaped as close as possible to the
transcendently wise mind and reason of God, and this happens through the workings of the divine Wisdom. 204.
Human souls also possess reason and with it they circle in discourse around the truth of things. Because of the fragmentary and va-
____________________
202.On this "ecstasy" as the interpretive process of negating and rising above human words and symbols, see DN 13 981B 16-20, note 266.
203.Col 2:3.
204.On the angels' knowledge and its comparison with human knowledge, see EH 1, note 7.
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ried nature of their many activities they are on a lower level than the 868C
unified intelligences. Nevertheless, on account of the manner in which they are capable of concentrating the many into the one, they too, in their own fashion and as far as they can, are worthy of conceptions like those of the angels. Our sense perceptions also can properly be described as echoes of wisdom, and even the intelligence of demons, to the extent that it is intelligence, comes from it, though we could more accurately describe this as a falling away from wisdom, since demonic intelligence stupidly has no idea how to obtain what it really wants and indeed does not want it.
I have said already that the divine Wisdom is the source, the cause, the substance, the perfection, the protector, and the goal of Wisdom itself, of mind, of reason, and of all sense perception. How, then, is it that God who is more than wise, is praised as wisdom,
mind, word, and a knower? 205. If he does not have intellectual activi 868D
ties, how can he possess understanding of conceptual things? How does he have knowledge of sense data when he himself transcends the domain of sense, while scripture, on the other hand, proclaims that he knows everything 206. and that nothing escapes the divine knowl
edge? But, as I have often said previously, we must interpret the 869A
things of God in a way that befits God, and when we talk of God as being without mind and without perception, this is to be taken in the sense of what he has in superabundance and not as a defect. Hence we attribute absence of reason to him because he is above reason, we attribute lack of perfection to him because he is above and before perfection, and we posit intangible and invisible darkness of that Light which is unapproachable 207. because it so far exceeds the visible light. The divine Mind, therefore, takes in all things in a total knowledge which is transcendent. Because it is the Cause of all things it has a foreknowledge of everything. 208. Before there are angels he has knowledge of angels and he brings them into being. He knows everything else and, if I may put it so, he knows them from the very beginning and therefore brings them into being. This, I think, is what scripture ____________________
205.The variant reading "knower," instead of "knowledge," is supported by DN 1 19f. It comes from Daniel 13:42 (Susanna 42), partially quoted below in 869A 13f.
(note 209). S. Lilla reports that most of the codices he consulted support this reading ("Osservazioni sul testo," #265, p. 171).
206.Jn 21:17. 207.1 Tm 6:16.
208.Proclus, in Plat. Theo. 4, 5.
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means with the declaration, "He knows all things before their birth." 209. The divine Mind does not acquire the knowledge of things from things. Rather, of itself and in itself it precontains and compre
hends the awareness and understanding and being of everything in 869B
terms of their cause. This is not a knowledge of each specific class. What is here is a single embracing causality which knows and contains all things. Take the example of light. In itself it has a prior and causal knowledge of darkness. What it knows about darkness it knows not from another, but from the fact of being light. So too the divine Wisdom knows all things by knowing itself. Uniquely it knows and produces all things by its oneness: material things immaterially, divisible things indivisibly, plurality in a single act. If with one causal gesture God bestows being on everything, in that one same act of causation he will know everything through derivation from him and through their preexistence in him, and, therefore, his knowledge of things will not be owed to the things themselves. He will be a leader, giving to
each the knowledge it has of itself and of others. Consequently, God 869C
does not possess a private knowledge of himself and a separate knowledge of all the creatures in common. The universal Cause, by knowing itself, can hardly be ignorant of the things which proceed from it and of which it is the source. This, then, is how God knows all things, not by understanding things, but by understanding himself.
Scripture also says that the angels know the things of earth 210. not because these latter may be perceived by the senses but because of the proper capacity and nature inherent in a Godlike intelligence.
3. If God cannot be grasped by mind or sense-perception, if he is not a particular being, how do we know him? This is something we must inquire into.
It might be more accurate to say that we cannot know God in his nature, since this is unknowable and is beyond the reach of mind or
of reason. But we know him from the arrangement of everything, be 869D
cause everything is, in a sense, projected out from him, and this order possesses certain images and semblances of his divine paradigms. We therefore approach that which is beyond all as far as our capacities
allow us and we pass by way of the denial and the transcendence of 872A
all things and by way of the cause of all things. God is therefore known in all things and as distinct from all things. He is known through ____________________
209.Dn 13:42 (Susanna 42). 210.Mt 18:10?
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knowledge and through unknowing. Of him there is conception, reason, understanding, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name, and many other things. On the other hand he cannot be understood, words cannot contain him, and no name can lay hold of him. He is not one of the things that are and he cannot be known in any of them. He is all things in all things and he is no thing among things. He is known to all from all things and he is known to no one from anything.
This is the sort of language we must use about God, for he is praised from all things according to their proportion to him as their Cause. But again, the most divine knowledge of God, that which comes through unknowing, 211. is achieved in a union far beyond mind,
when mind turns away from all things, even from itself, and when it 872B
is made one with the dazzling rays, being then and there enlightened by the inscrutable depth of Wisdom. Still, as I have said already, we must learn about Wisdom from all things. As scripture says, Wisdom has made and continues always to adapt everything. 212. It is the cause of the unbreakable accommodation and order of all things and it is forever linking the goals of one set of things with the sources of another and in this fashion it makes a thing of beauty of the unity and the harmony of the whole.
4. God is praised as "Logos" [word] by the sacred scriptures not 872C
only as the leader of word, mind, and wisdom, but because he also initially carries within his own unity the causes of all things and because he penetrates all things, reaching, as scripture says, to the very end of all things. 213. But the title is used especially because the divine Logos is simpler than any simplicity and, in its utter transcendence, is independent of everything. This Word is simple total truth. Divine faith revolves around it because it is pure and unwavering knowledge of all. It is the one sure foundation for those who believe, binding them to the truth, building the truth in them as something unshakably firm so that they have an uncomplicated knowledge of the truth of
what they believe. If knowledge unites knower and known, while ig 872D
norance is always the cause of change and of the inconsistency of the ____________________
211.This entire discussion on the knowledge of God through unknowing should be read with the "negative theology" of MT 1-5 and CH 2. This particular passage was cited in The Cloud of Unknowing, chap. 70.
213.Heb 4:12 (DN 9 912A 8-10); Wisd of Sol 7:24, 8:1 (?). The word "logos" must be translated by several terms, depending on the context. It appears in this chapter as "word" or "reason," elsewhere as
"speech" (e.g., MT 5 1045D 5f.).
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ignorant, then, as scripture tells us, 214. nothing shall separate the one who believes in truth from the ground of true faith and it is there that he will come into the possession of enduring, unchanging identity. The man in union with truth knows clearly that all is well with him, even if everyone else thinks that he has gone out of his mind. What they fail to see, naturally, is that he has gone out of the path of error and has in his real faith arrived at truth. He knows that far from being
mad, 215. as they imagine him to be, he has been rescued from the in 873A
stability and the constant changes which bore him along the variety of error and that he has been set free by simple and immutable stable truth. That is why the principle leaders of our divine wisdom die each day for the truth. They bear witness in every word and deed to the single knowledge of the truth possessed by Christians. 216. They prove that truth to be more simple and more divine than every other. Or, rather, what they show is that here is the only true, single, and simple knowledge of God.