Pseudo-Dionysius redux

I have this term in a reading group been reading the influential mystical writer Pseudo-Dionysius. I have been experiencing alternatively bafflement and excitement in reading his stuff: perhaps more bafflement to tell truth. As Bertrand Russell once pointed out, it is hard to tell sometimes between a profound paradox and complete nonsense.

Here is a classic Dionysian passage, from his letter to Gaius:

Darkness disappears in the light, the more so as there is more light. Knowlegde makes unknowing disappear, the more so as there is more knowledge...However, think of this not in terms of deprivation but rather in terms of transcendence and then you will be able to say something truer than all truth, namely, that the unknowing regarding God espcapes anyone possessing physical light and knowledge of beings: His transcendent darkness remains hidden from all light and concealed from all knowledge. Someone beholding God and understanding what he saw has not actually seen God himself but rather something of his which has being and which is knowable. For he himslef solidly transcends mind and being. He is completely unknown and non-existent. He exists beyond being and he is known beyond the mind. And this quite positively complete unknowing is knowledge of him who is above everything that is known.

Is it just me, or is there a bit of slippage in the use of the word 'knowing' here? Is this utterly orthodox, or is it heterodox mystical neoplatonism? Is the knowledge of God which is revealed to us (ie John 1:1-14) in fact some kind of unknowing knowledge? What the?

Martyrdom as communicative act III

I am trying hard here to express a question that is bugging me a little... Martyrdom is an act of witness - which implies that it is an act which communicates a particular meaning or significance. Now, of course, if anyone recognises the divine agency at work in and the divine authority revealed by the act of martyrdom, it is because the Holy Spirit gives it to them to so recognise it. It is not the act in and of itself that communicates this: it is the Spirit testifying through it. Like the parables of Jesus, spiritual insight, given from above, is required to really understand in full.

Now, not recognising this is a mistake Christians often make. We see this when they point to- and even focus on - the extreme suffering of the martyr, or to the pathos of their words, or to the miraculous signs that attend the martyrdom (these have been features of martyrology since the beginning). It was fascinating that, when the recent Turkish martyrdoms were first reported, the writer felt compelled to exaggerate the extent of the torture of the victims - something that a later (very wise) letter sought to correct. (This was of course the mistake made by Gibson in The Passion of the Christ - imaginging that he needed to focus on the torture as a device to move the audience with sympathy for Christ, as if that was the means by which the gospel would be best communicated. Wrong, wrong, wrong.)

BUT: it is not aside from or arbitrarily next to the drama of a martyrdom that the Spirit testifies. It is in the very structures of this particular action that he works. Which is to say: just because spiritual insight is needed to fully understand does NOT mean that what we have before us is otherwise unintelligible. Again, taking the parables as an analogy: the parables are not runes that need to be decoded only by the select few to whom has been given the secret key. Far from it: the meaning of the parables is available for public scrutiny. A martyrdom occurs in front of us and, we may say, it has terms on which it makes sense - though we may not accept those terms of course.

In sum: while affirming the sheer givenness and transcendence of the knowledge of God, I also want to affirm that revelation does not occur arbitrarily or outside of the ordinary world of speaking and acting, but rather through it and in it.