Dissimilar Similitudes
The Teaching
If, then, the negations respecting things Divine are true, but the affirmations are inharmonious, the revelation as regards things invisible, through dissimilar representations, is more appropriate to the hiddenness of things unutterable. … In order that men might not suffer from this, by thinking they are nothing more exalted than their beautiful appearance, the elevating wisdom of the pious theologians reverently conducts to the incongruous dissimilarities, not permitting our earthly part to rest fixed in the base images, but urging the upward tendency of the soul …
There is then nothing absurd if they depict even the Heavenly Beings under incongruous dissimilar similitudes, for causes aforesaid.
— Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy II
Commentary
Around the year 500, a Christian writer who took the name of Dionysius, a convert of St Paul, faced an awkward fact. Scripture describes God in strange and even unflattering images: a lion, a panther, a rushing bear, a worm. He decided the strangeness was deliberate, and protective.
His reasoning was that a beautiful image of the divine is dangerous because it’s satisfying. People rest in it and take the picture for the thing. An absurd image never lets anyone settle. Nobody believes God is a worm, so the image keeps pushing the mind past itself. In Parker’s old-fashioned phrase, it won’t let “our earthly part … rest fixed.”
Modern research on metaphor describes images wearing smooth with use until they stop being felt at all (Carrying Over). Dionysius found a way to stop that happening: an image that never becomes comfortable can’t be worn down. His influence ran straight into the Christian mystics, including Eckhart.
Themes
Connections 5
Travelled
Judaism reached Christianity by 30 CE. Christianity began as a movement within Judaism.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. No known exchange while either’s teachings took shape. The Buddha’s life later reached Christian Europe as the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat (10th–11th c.), and a Christian church in Tang China used Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781).
Travelled
Neoplatonism reached Christianity by 355 CE. Marius Victorinus used Plotinus (c. 355–362), Augustine read ‘the books of the Platonists’ (c. 386; Confessions VII), and Dionysius (c. 500) built on Proclus.