St Dionysius the Areopagite

"Triad supernal, both super-God and super-good, Guardian of the Theosophy of Christian men, direct us aright to the super-unknown and super-brilliant and highest summit of the mystic Oracles, where the simple and absolute and changeless mysteries of theology lie hidden within the super-luminous gloom of the silence, revealing hidden things, which in its deepest darkness shines above the most super-brilliant, and in the altogether impalpable and invisible, fills to overflowing the eyeless minds with glories of Surpassing beauty."

- St Dionysius the Areopagite

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St Dionysius the Areopagite, prior to his conversion to Christianity, lived in the city of Athens and received a traditional Greek education. He witnessed the solar eclipse that occurred during Christ's death and is recorded as saying “either the Creator of all the world now suffers, or this visible world is coming to an end.” He later rose to the Areopagus Council where he encountered St Paul at the Hill of Ares during his sermon recorded in Acts chapter 17. He is mentioned only once in Scripture at the end of the chapter, which we are told that he "joined Paul and believed." 

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St Dionysius wrote extensively on Christian Mysticism and has had immense influence on the theology of Eastern Christianity. Many of his writings are an outworking of two central ideas:

 

1) That God transcends beyond us, therefore he is necessarily outside of all affirmation and all negation.

2) That God condescends towards us in theophanies of every created thing.

These are the foundations upon which Mystical Theology is built, for they reveal God as both infinitely surpassing us and continually drawing near us; as both Non-Being in His dissimilarity to us and as Being in His condescension toward us; as both hidden and revealed. 

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It is not a coincidence then that Dionysius is mentioned by name in Acts chapter 17, nor that he was a student of Paul, for in his sermon the Apostle offers to the Athenians two comparisons to describe this God of which he speaks: First, in regards to their altar to The Unknown God he says "What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you" and second he says, "Yet He is not far from each one of us, for ‘In Him we live and move and have our being," quoting a Greek poet of the time. These comparisons are not in tension with one another, but reveal to us a mystery of God: that The Unknown God has made Himself known.