Paper at the XIX. International Conference on Patristic Studies
In August next year, I will deliver a paper at the XIX. International Conference on Patristic Studies (5th 9th August 2024), joining a workshop proposed by the Dionysius Circle. The workshop is (at the moment at least) entitled “The Superabundant Good: Exploring the Reception of Pseudo-Dionysius’s Metaphysics and Ecclesiology of the Good.”
My title is as follows: “The Incommunicable Communicated: how the Good reveals and offers itself sacramentally and liturgically.”
And here is my abstract:
Following Neoplatonist philosophers Iamblichus and Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite maintains that God, the Good or the One, is beyond being, or supraessential or superessential (Gk. hyperoúsion). According to him, “it is not possible either to express or to conceive what the One, the Unknown, the Super-essential self-existing Good is, I mean the threefold Unity, the alike God, and the alike Good” (Divine Names, I, 5, 593B). God is, in Himself, utterly unknown, and cannot in any way be comprehended. Yet the same Good is “not entirely uncommunicated to any single created being, but benignly sheds forth its superessential ray” (Divine Names, I, 2, 588D). How is this possible? How can that which is beyond being share itself with being? What does the Areopagite mean by this shedding forth? And what is this ‘superessential ray’?
Engaging the research of Charles Stang, focusing particularly on the Divine Names and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and reading Pseudo-Dionysius’s works in relation to his Neoplatonic sources, particularly Iamblichus and Proclus, this talk will focus on his concept of deification through illumination, and how this manifests itself liturgically and sacramentally, exploring the paradox that the utterly incomprehensible, unknown, and incommunicable God still communicates Himself to those who earnestly seek Him.