The Divine Names: Scriptural Sources and the Convergence Narrative
Does the seed planted contain the fruits produced?
I was struck recently by the depth of Pseudo-Dionysius’ knowledge of the scriptures. Each of his divine names (the attributes of God) correspond to at least one passage in scripture, or are deducible from at least one passage in scripture.
This shouldn’t have surprised me, but lately, as you might have gathered from my earlier series “reorienting the mind,” I have had my faith restored in natural theology. That is, I have come to take seriously the ancient, metaphysical reasons why people have believed in God, and have become obsessed with the idea of theological convergence. By this, I simply mean that many different cultures at different times and in different ways have converged upon a similar idea of God, the source and ground of all reality that contains, but is not limited to, mind, consciousness, spirit. I have David Bentley Hart to thank for that.
But the idea is a powerful one, because it frees religious belief from relying solely on the historical reality of particular interventionist narratives. For instance, we do not have to believe that the Old Testament authors were narrating a straightforward history about how God has revealed Himself to them, in order to take their ideas seriously. It may be that certain philosophical schools rightly arrived at the idea of God, and then constructed or reinterpreted a mythological history, giving their philosophical and religious ideas a concrete structure, an embodying narrative. Even if every aspect of that mythos was historically false, it could still be that God was in fact guiding them towards Himself, and, pleased upon seeing their progress, gave them further special revelation.
That last bit is an extreme conjecture, and between it and fundamentalist historical literalism lie many possibilities of mythology simultaneously expanding on and pointing back to genuine historical truths about divine revelation. My point is simply this: with such possibilities open before us, we are free not merely to ask whether the narrative(s) contained in the Hebrew Scriptures correspond to physical events in the past, but to go beyond these questions. Now we may ask whether the philosophical ideas present in and presented through those narratives are true, and if the divine was working in these authors, even if only in strange and subtle ways. (He may have been (and I think was) doing this in other cultures as well; to what extent, I do not know—I know little about other religions besides what I learned in undergraduate study, at the moment.)
Allow me to note an irony about this freedom: we now take history to be a more sure path to knowledge than philosophical speculation and metaphysical reasoning, for many of us still operate under the presumption that history is somehow empirically grounded, and regard it as a “science.” And so, my modern reader will likely find that I am trading the easier historical questions with more difficult—perhaps impossibly difficult—“abstract” ones. That is a topic for another day. Allow me to simply say that, after many years of practicing philosophy and reading history and biblical scholarship, it is much easier to reach solid conclusions through philosophical means rather than those limited to examination of archeological data, etc. Allowing ourselves to engage in open wonder and philosophical speculation can help us, I think, bypass the never ending complexities of history. (I have ranted about this many times, in regard to the increasingly popular ecumenical dialogues on Youtube.)
Anyways… a crucial point in what I’m calling the “convergence narrative”—the claim that God is guiding man, even if only in subtle ways, towards knowledge of Him, and as we move towards Him, He moves towards us (James 4:8), so that different cultures converge on one another through converging on God, a sort of double convergence—is that you can find the seeds of later, more fully developed theological and philosophical traditions planted in earlier phases. But is this really the case? Are what we commonly regard as “later” philosophical intricacies actually found, even if only in infantile forms, in the “simple,” “early” Christian and Jewish sources? Is there an actual unfolding and continuity of theological ideas, along some providential trajectory? Or is theological history disjointed, without any divine thread and purpose running through it?
If one had grown up listening to a non-denominational pastor preach on the Old and New Testaments, one would find medieval, neo-platonic Christianity exceedingly strange. It would appear to such an unfortunate person that the religion of the Bible is very different from the sophisticated religion of the great Christian tradition. (I note that many Biblical scholars seem to come from this background…) And so it would only be natural for such a person to want to “purify” what appears to been loaded with “accretions.” Such a person could never take seriously the idea that God has actually been, like a gardener, tending to the tradition, planting seeds and allowing them to develop over time, in an evolutionary, organic manner. For such a view of divine revelation would, sticking with the metaphor, require that the seeds contain in themselves the characteristics of the fruits born by the mature plant. (Growing up in such an environment myself, I wondered, until fairly recently, whether the God of “classical theism” was actually present in earlier Judaism and the earliest Christianity.)
Read with all this in mind, Chapter 1 of Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Divine Names is one of the most helpful sources for confirming/disconfirming the continuity of theological tradition. In just a few short pages, Pseudo-Dan (as my friend Thes calls him) lists out the major attributes (“names”) of God, pointing back to where the Jewish and earliest Christian texts had done so much earlier. Below, I link to my study notes: an incomplete, but substantial list of the divine names Pseudo-Dan gives, with their sources.
Overall, the image of God that had emerged in Jewish and Christian writings by the 1st c. AD does, in fact, seem to be the God of classical theism—of those wacky and speculation-loving philosophers of later epochs. Further, the Jewish seeds of this tradition clearly go back much further. In any case, this single chapter is enough to undo the impression that medieval and renaissance Christianity is somehow disconnected from 1st c. Judaism and Christianity. Frankly, the more I study, the more I find that this problem is really manufactured by philosophically and theologically illiterate biblical critics, mostly German in origin. (I am not an expert here, and this is what I have gathered from a decade of reading biblical criticism on the side of philosophy, so don’t quote me on that. Or, rather, do quote me, but don’t expect to be right.)
The list of Divine Names can be found here: NOTES ON THE DIVINE NAMES.
I will continue to update this document over the years as I find time to format it, and find more sources. In it’s current state, I think it is useful as notes catechists and teachers of young Christians. I hope it is useful, at least.