the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

This is admittedly a nonsensical assertion within the bounds of everyday language,
but a necessary conclusion in Dionysius’ logic: God is beyond assertion and denial
because denying something requires us to know what we are denying, and knowledge of
God of any kind is not possible. 590 To be able to mean anything when I deny that the sun
is shining, I need to know what I mean when I say that the sun is shining. When I say that,
for instance, God is not good, this denial is not, properly speaking, a denial, because I
cannot by definition know precisely what is meant by the proposition “God is good.”
Denying that either my assertion or my denial truly signifies anything amounts to a
double negation. 591 And so, having affirmed and negated every possible name for God,
and having negated that negation, what else is there left to do but fall silent? Dionysius
falls silent at this point as well, as the Mystical Theology ends with this double negation.
With this grounding in the basic concepts of Dionysius’ philosophy—that God is
one, that God’s unity implies the participation of all things in God through a process of
emanation and return, that therefore God can be named by every name and yet is
nameless, and that, finally, the most responsible way to talk about God is to fall silent—I
now turn to Weigel’s works, exploring how Weigel puts these ideas to work in his
critique of the confessional church. The next section shows how Weigel, in an early work
that constitutes the first proof of his having read Dionysius, he uses the Dionysian
dialectical hierarchy to imagine a universe where man not only issues forth from God in
the act of creation, and so remains irrevocably connected to his creator. The implication
590 My understanding and explanation of this point relies on Denys Turner’s clear exposition of the subject.
Turner, Darkness, 39.
591 As Turner puts it, we don’t even know how far short of the mark our language about God falls: “For
whereas in non-theological cases, for example scientific, we are normally able to state in what respect a
metaphor falls short of what it metaphorises, in the case of God the only language we have for describing
the inadequacy itself falls short, as deficient in the description of the difference. We can only say that every
utterance about God falls short of God 'infinitely'. But to say that is to say that we have no conception at all
of the degree of shortfall, and therefore no language at all in which to describe it. Turner, Darkness, 39.
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