Greco-Christian stream·Dionysius the Areopagite·Letters·Letters — Letter I — To Gaius Therapeutes
I. To Gaius — the divine darkness as super-light
First of the eleven letters. To Gaius the therapeutēs (servant) on the divine darkness as a super-light invisible to created intellect by its very excess of brightness. The famous Dionysian paradox: the darkness is the light that exceeds the eye's capacity to receive it.
Source context
- Theme
- initiatory epistolary address from a spiritual teacher to a named therapeutes-disciple
Steiner
not engaged in the GA corpus
Cross-tradition
- Therapeutae (Philo of Alexandria, De Vita Contemplativa)Philo's account of the Therapeutae describes a contemplative community near Alexandria whose members cultivated allegorical scripture-reading and communal spiritual practice, providing the likely historical-cultural register for a letter addressed to a 'Therapeutes'.
- Early Christian epistolary tradition (Pauline and pseudo-Pauline corpus)The convention of a named didactic letter addressed to a specific disciple (as in the Pauline letters to Timothy or Titus) establishes a cross-tradition congruence with the initiatory pastoral-epistle form employed here.
Letters — Letter I — To Gaius Therapeutes
LETTERS OF DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE.
LETTER I. To Gaius Therapeutes.
DARKNESS becomes invisible by light, and specially by much light. Varied knowledge (αἰ γνώσεις), and especially much varied knowledge, makes the Agnosia 62 to vanish. Take this in a superlative, but not in a defective sense, and reply with superlative truth, that the Agnosia, respecting God, escapes those who possess existing light, and knowledge of things being; and His pre-eminent darkness is both concealed by every light, and is hidden from every knowledge. And, if any one, having seen God, understood what he saw, he did not see Him, but some of His creatures that are existing and known. But He Himself, highly established above mind, and above essence, by the very fact of His being wholly unknown, and not being, both is super-essentially, and is known above mind. And the all-perfect Agnosia, in its superior sense, is a knowledge of Him, Who is above all known things.
Footnotes
p140:62 C. I. § 1.
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