SOURCE: "Apophaticism and Deification," in Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries, E. J. Brill, 1996, pp. 114-24.

In the following essay, Parry examines the paradoxical characterization of God by John of Damascus—in which he described God's humanity as well as His divinity—and discusses how this depiction affected the iconoclastic controversy.

The two doctrines of apophaticism … and deification …, are here treated together because they often complement one another in Byzantine theology. For example, Pseudo-Dionysius writes: 'Since the union of deified minds with that light which is beyond all deity occurs when all intellectual activity ceases, those deified and unified minds who imitate the angels, as far as they are capable, praise it most appropriately through the abstraction … of all things." In this passage the two doctrines we are dealing with are made the foundation of mystical theology.

Here our attention is drawn...