or goodness; nor even spirit as we know it," etc., ad libitum.[1]
But these qualifications are denied by Dionysius, not because the truth falls short of them, but because it so infinitely excels them. It is above them. It is super-lucent, super-splendent, super-essential, super-sublime, super everything that can be named. Like Hegel in his logic, mystics journey towards the positive pole of truth only by the 'Methode der Absoluten Negativität.'[2]
Thus come the paradoxical expressions that so abound in mystical writings. As when Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, "where never was seen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than in itself."[3] As when Boehme writes of the Primal Love, that "it may fitly be compared to Nothing, for it is deeper than any Thing, and is as nothing with respect to all things, forasmuch as it is not comprehensible by any of them. And because it is nothing respectively, it is therefore free from all things, and is that only good, which a man cannot express or utter what it is, there being nothing to which it may be compared, to express it by."[4] Or as when Angelus Silesius sings:—
"Gott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn rührt kein Nun noch Hier;
Je mehr du nach ihm greiffst, je mehr entwind er dir."[5]
To this dialectical use, by the intellect, of negation as
- ↑ T. Davidson's translation, in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1893, vol. xxii. p. 399.
- ↑ "Deus propter excellentiam non immerito Nihil vocatur." Scotus Erigena, quoted by Andrew Seth: Two Lectures on Theism, New York, 1897, p. 55.
- ↑ J. Royce: Studies in Good and Evil, p. 282.
- ↑ Jacob Behmen's Dialogues on the Supersensual Life, translated by Bernard Holland, London, 1901, p. 48.
- ↑ Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Strophe 25.
