Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas

One of the most important books on Aquinas. Pseudo-Dionysius was one of the most significant influences upon the metaphysics of Aquinas, yet the connection between their two philosophies is underexplored, particularly if we confine ourselves to scholarship conducted in the English language. O'Rourke's work fills a gap.

Don't mind the weird one star review guy, this is a remarkable treatment of Dionysian influence upon Aquinas. It is one book that subverts a lot of surface-level assumptions regarding Aquinas' relationship to the history of metaphysics.

Many students of Aquinas know quite well his intimate aquinatance with Aristotle, and often (mistakenly) see Aquinas only as a follower of Aristotle and his Philosophy. But Aquinas was also open to the Platonic heritage in Philosophy, as mediated through the East by Dionysius the Aeropagite, and through the West by St Augustine.Aquinas wrote a number of works commenting on Neo-Platonic philosophy and Neo-Platonic Christian philosophy, including the Aeropagite's theological work on the names given to God in the Bible, called 'The Divine Names.'O'Rourke's book draws out the connections between the thought of Aquinas and Dionysius, and the influence Dionysius had on the thought of Aquinas. Aquinas cites Dionysius very frequently in many of his works, accepting him as a substantial authority, but at times Aquinas also differs from Dionysius (and also John Damascene, the other great Eastern influence on his thought). Aquinas however develops a lot of Dionysius's apophatic theology in exploring God as transcendant or absolute Being, while jettisoning some of the more extravagant Neo-Platonic ideas, such as Being simply being another of the creations of the unnameable One beyond all names, categories, definitions and forms. While Aquinas seems prepared to accept God as an absolute mystery whose essence cannot be known as it is, he seems somewhat apprehensive about veiling God's being so far behind apophaticism we can't say anything at all accurately in our language which gives us any understanding of God.Aquinas instead sees God as the infinite perfection and actuality of Being, the infinitely perfect Being in which all things exist in their fullness and beauty and actuality, with no need for any further 'potentiality' or assimilation into the divine. At many points Aquinas gets rather technical, but his understanding of God has a beautiful and convincing feeling of concreteness about it in giving us a sense of what experiencing God may actually be like, whereas Dionysius seems to make God so remote and mysterious and inaccessible in his transcendance (even in the incarnation) one feels at times as though this God is somewhat like the 'grey tea' C.S. Lewis mockingly observed when he was told God was infinite, incomprehensible and formless, shrouded forever in totally obscure mystery.Yet Aquinas does not ditch the mystery of God and in fact tries to enhance and maintain it, as he felt Dionysius properly observed, while ensuring we can talk about God in a meaningful way using human language.This monograph is a useful work for any student of Christian Neo-Platonic thought and mysticism, as well as theologians or philosophers interested in either of these thinkers.

It really does seem that a lot of Catholic philosophical scholarship of a certain sort is nothing more than hobbyist enthusiasm in the end. To wit, it busies itself with its own fairy tales, and avoids the hard matters of intellectual history. For how else would you describe an effort like this, which deals with what is universally described as a complete piece of intellectual invention -- the Pseudo-Dionysian Corpus--- as if it were just another potential building block in Aquinas' philosophical edifice?? In other words, to not directly address the oddness of this famous Catholic intellectual having based so much of his work on what has been described as "the first resounding case of fraud in the history of letters" (as one more honest vintage scholar put it) is therefore also a piece of mere bizarreness. But this effort proceeds as if there is nothing weird in the fact that so much of Catholic intellectual life is related to a mere forgery. And that there is every reason to believe that Aquinas could have sniffed-out the false nature of the Dionysian Corpus if he had wanted to (he figured out that the Liber de Causis was by Proclus pretty easily) . More honest and recent scholarly efforts (for instance Rosemary Arthur) have seen the Pseudo-Dionysius with sort of a metaphysical ax to grind, and thus label him a "polemicist" .But O'Rourke proceeds in an intellectual blasé fashion, acting in blithe avoidance of actual cultural history like so many Catholic intellectuals today. O'Rourke even has the cheek to repeatedly highlight the fraudulent source's "biblical" approaches, as if it had been all a good faith effort deal with the Scriptures. In fact, the opposite is true. The Pseudo-Dionysian source was meant to deceive, and Western culture has been suffering under the ramifications of this deception for a long time. It is far past time for Catholic intellectuals to at the VERY LEAST incorporate some aspect of the intellectual fraudulence in their deductions about the most important Catholic philosopher of all time, Thomas Aquinas. That this book does nothing of the sort, makes it just a piece of fancy propaganda.