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

morsels of bread? In this section, I first argue that Dionysius’ dialectical way of thinking
leaves an ambiguous attitude towards the earthly church. On the one hand, it is the
earthly correlate of the celestial hierarchy, but Weigel also seems to suggest that this
church is transcended in the ascent towards union with the Godhead. Weigel picks up on
the latter aspect of Dionysius’ thought, and I will show that Weigel suggests that truly
devout Christians should pray in order to reconnect with God within, but the form of
prayer he suggests turns out to closely resemble Dionysian apophasis.
Dionysius’ attitude towards the earthly church is ambiguous. On the one hand,
Dionysius concluded that the existence of a hierarchical universe entails the existence of
an ecclesiastical one; to each procession belongs a hierarchy to lead its members back up
to God, and God has arranged for each hierarchy to be adapted to the ability of its
members to receive the divine. 627 The human hierarchy, for instance, caters to our nature
as sensible material beings by using material sacraments: “the heavenly beings, because
of their intelligence, have their own permitted conceptions of God” whereas “for us...it is
by way of the perceptible images that we are uplifted.” 628 For Dionysius, in other words,
the sacraments, as “perceptible symbols,” have an anagogic function, “lifting us upward
hierarchically until we are brought as far as we can be into the unity of divinization.” 629
The sacrament has power to transform the soul because God has “established for us those
627 “It is the same one whom all one-like beings desire, but they do not participate in the same way in this
one and the same being. Rather the share of the divine is apportioned to each in accordance with merit.” EH
373B.
628 EH, 373B.
629 EH, 373A. As Wear and Dillon point out, the hierarch performing the liturgy “mimics the divine activity
of differentiation and unity, and full reversion,” as does the effect of the sacrament itself. All three have a
“cosmic relationship.” Sarah Klitenic Wear and John Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite and the
Neoplatonist Tradition: Despoiling the Hellenes (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007), 103. Of
the eucharist, for instance, Dionysius writes: “the divine rite of the synaxis [i.e. the eucharist], although
holding on to its unique, simple and indivisible cause, still becomes pluralized in a sacred multitude of
symbols because of love for man, and it travels to the whole range of hierarchcic images, but it draws back
together all these images unitedly into its own unity and it makes united with those being led sacredly
towards it.” The Dionysius passage they refer to is EH, 429AB.
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