great Dionysius takes a more cerebral approach: since God is the cause of being, he must be “above” being, and if he is above being, then there is no predicate (no attribute) that can be properly and fully applied to him. If the author of the Cloud is practical, warm, and impassioned, Dionysius is sublime, academic, brilliant, and challenging. He teaches an “apophatic theology,” that is, a negative theology, in which we review traditional divine attributes—God’s “names”—and declare them inadequate, or cancel them out, before we then super-affirm them as being true, but only in a transcendent
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