Pseudo-Dionysius

To sum it up: It [the inscrutable One] is the life of the living, the Being of beings, It is the Source and the Cause of all existence, and therefore Itself transcending existence. It alone could give an authoritative account of what It really is.

A Patristic Treasury: Early Church Wisdom for Today, edited by James R. Payton, Jr

God

We cannot know God in His nature, since this is unknowable and is beyond the reach of mind and reason.

We must not dare to resort to words or conceptions concerning that hidden Divinity which transcends being, apart from what the sacred Scriptures have divinely revealed.

Since the way of negation [when talking of God] appears to be more suitable to the realm of the divine, and since positive affirmations are always unfitting to the hiddenness of the inexpressible, and manifestation through dissimilarities is more correctly to be applied to the invisible.

What might the first centuries post-Constantine looked like for the Church if only negative statements were used to describe God and the Trinity? Not getting divided over what God is, but instead focusing only on what He is not.

Those who continued to believe what the Church has concluded that God is not would have left – just as happened after a few of the early Church councils. However, we would have avoided splits over disagreements about the words used to describe what God is.

Likely we would have had fewer splits.

The divine Mind, therefore, takes in all things in a total knowledge which is transcendent. Because It is the Cause of all things, It has foreknowledge of everything.

The idea of God’s foreknowledge is a stumbling block for some. I have heard it described in a way that might be helpful: it demonstrates God’s grace and favor; God’s intimate knowledge of a person.

Immutability

Even if disorder and confusion should undermine the most divine ordinances and regulations, that still gives no right, even on God’s behalf, to overturn the order which God Himself has established. God is not divided against Himself.

God does not change, nor do His ordinances. Man’s cultural, social, and intellectual evolutions and deviations don’t change God – as if God’s laws applied to the first century, but we know better or know more. These changes just mean we are wrong, that we are putting ourselves in the place of God.

Prayer

We must begin with prayer before everything we do, but especially when we are about to talk of God.

Teaching

Those who do not know must be taught, not punished. We do not hit the blind. We lead them by the hand.

Divinization

Divinization consists of being as much as possible like and in union with God.

He gave us a most perfect share of His nature by completely taking on our own, and in this way He made it possible for us to enter into communion with Himself and with divine reality.

The Christian life is so much more than finding the right formula to avoid hell and enter heaven.

Biographies / Sources

A Greek speaking Christian penned several documents under the name Dionysius the Areopagite, at the latest by the early sixth century.

Acts 17: 32 And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, while others said, “We will hear you again on this matter.” 33 So Paul departed from among them. 34 However, some men joined him and believed, among them Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

Initially, these words were accepted as written by the apostle Paul’s traveling companion. Doubts about the authorship would arise periodically, and by the sixteenth century were widespread.