In creation “the One is said to become multiform.”  The world is a necessary process of God’s being.  He created it “as the sun shines,” “without premeditation or purpose.”  The Father is simply One; the Son has also plurality, namely, the words (or reasons) which make existence ([Greek:  tous ousiopoious logous]), which theology calls fore-ordinations ([Greek:  proorismous]).  But he does not teach that all separate existences will ultimately be merged in the One.  The highest Unity gives to all the power of striving, on the one hand, to share in the One; on the other, to persist in their own individuality.  And in more than one passage he speaks of God as a Unity comprehending, not abolishing differences.[165] “God is before all things”; “Being is in Him, and He is not in Being.”  Thus Dionysius tries to safeguard the transcendence of God, and to escape Pantheism.  The outflowing process is appropriated by the mind by the positive method—­the downward path through finite existences:  its conclusion is, “God is All.”  The return journey is by the negative road, that of ascent to God by abstraction and analysis:  its conclusion is, “All is not God.[166]” The negative path is the high road of a large school of mystics; I will say more about it presently.  The mystic, says Dionysius, “must leave behind all things both in the sensible and in the intelligible worlds, till he enters into the darkness of nescience that is truly mystical.”  This “Divine darkness,” he says elsewhere, “is the light unapproachable” mentioned by St. Paul, “a deep but dazzling darkness,” as Henry Vaughan calls it.  It is dark through excess of light[167].  This doctrine really renders nugatory what he has said about the persistence of distinctions after the restitution of all things; for as “all colours agree in the dark,” so, for us, in proportion as we attain to true knowledge, all distinctions are lost in the absolute.

The soul is bipartite.  The higher portion sees the “Divine images” directly, the lower by means of symbols.  The latter are not to be despised, for they are “true impressions of the Divine characters,” and necessary steps, which enable us to “mount to the one undivided truth by analogy.”  This is the way in which we should use the Scriptures.  They have a symbolic truth and beauty, which is intelligible only to those who can free themselves from the “puerile myths[168]” (the language is startling in a saint of the Church!) in which they are sometimes embedded.

Dionysius has much to say about love[169], but he uses the word [Greek:  eros], which is carefully avoided in the New Testament.  He admits that the Scriptures “often use” [Greek:  agape], but justifies his preference for the other word by quoting St. Ignatius, who says of Christ, “My Love [Greek:  eros] is crucified.[170]” Divine Love, he finely says, is “an eternal circle, from goodness, through goodness, and to goodness.”

The mediaeval mystics were steeped in Dionysius, though his system received from them certain modifications under the influence of Aristotelianism.  He is therefore, for us, a very important figure; and there are two parts of his scheme which, I think, require fuller consideration than has been given them in this very slight sketch.  I mean the “negative road” to God, and the pantheistic tendency.