The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure 019894697X, 9780198946977

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 The Silence of the World
How to avoid speaking
World as outscape
Two traditions
The promise of measure
2 Guarding the One
Contemplation and negation
The Neopythagorean matrix
Drawing figures
Measuring forms
3 The Aneidetic Condition
Magnitude and line
Logos and autarchy
Erotic hazards
Specters of formlessness
Interlude: Space
4 The Limits of Negation
Apophasis and kataphasis
Divine figures
A ray in the darkness
The shape of hierarchy
5 The Extension of Desire
Circling the perimeter
The erotic singularity
The source of measure
An indelible name
Interlude: Size
6 Kenosis into Magnitude
Return of the icon
Speaking in Dionysian
Longing for figures
Reduction to quantity
7 The Icon as Figure
Line in exile
The geometry of circumscription
The shape of the body
Shadows and diagrams
Interlude: Surface
8 Trinity and Form
The western portal
The fold of lines
Eternal measure
The Form of forms
9 The Figure as Icon
A hidden heritage
Infinite beauty
Eternal square
Guarding the Many
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

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The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure David Albertson https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198947004.001.0001 Published online: 06 May 2025 Published in print: 17 July 2025

Online ISBN: 9780198947004

Print ISBN: 9780198946977

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Copyright Page  Page iv

Published: May 2025

Subject: Christianity, Religion, Mysticism, Philosophy of Religion Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

p. iv

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © David Albertson 2025 The moral rights of the author have been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, used for text and data mining, or used for training arti cial intelligence, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available

Library of Congress Control Number is on le at the Library of Congress ISBN 9780198946977 DOI: 10.1093/9780198947004.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd., Croydon, CR0 4YY The manufacturer’s authorised representative in the EU for product safety is Oxford University Press España S.A., Parque Empresarial San Fernando de Henares, Avenida de Castilla, 2 – 28830 Madrid (www.oup.es/en).

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure David Albertson https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198947004.001.0001 Published online: 06 May 2025 Published in print: 17 July 2025 Print ISBN: 9780198946977

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Dedication  Pages v–vi

Published: May 2025

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p. v

in memoriam

p. vi

Nancy Marie Badanes Albertson (1950–2017)

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The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure David Albertson https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198947004.001.0001 Published online: 06 May 2025 Published in print: 17 July 2025

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Epigraph  Pages vii–viii

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p. vii

It is a marvelous gift, granted to few persons, to go beyond all that can be measured and see the Measure without measure, to go beyond all that can be numbered and see the Number without number, and to go beyond all that can be weighed and see the Weight without weight. . . . In the realm of spirit or mind, measure is limited by another measure, number is formed by another number, and weight is drawn by another weight. But there is a Measure without measure, and what comes from it must be squared with it, but it does not come from something else . . . . 1

—Augustine of Hippo

God’s measures and forms may not be split up: the measured form which he proposes is perfect from the outset, even if it is subjected to a temporal course of events . . . and, like a statue, must be walked around in order to be seen as a whole. 2

—Hans Urs von Balthasar

p. viii

The shortest schema is the concept of the straight line only because it is rst the drama of the Idea of line, the differential of the straight and the curve, the dynamism that operates in silence. The clear and the distinct is the claim of the concept in the Apollonian world of representation; but beneath representation there is always the Idea and its distinct-obscure depth, a drama beneath every logos. 3

—Gilles Deleuze

Notes Footnotes

1

2 3

Augustine of Hippo, De genesi ad litteram, IV.3–4 (8), ed. Joseph Zycha, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 28 (Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1894), 99–100; trans. John Hammond Taylor, The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Ancient Christian Writers 41 (Paulist Press, 1982), 108–109. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. I: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo LeivaMerikakis (Ignatius Press, 1982), 476. Gilles Deleuze, “La Methode de Dramatisation,” Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie 3 (1967): 89–118; trans. Michael Taormina as “The Method of Dramatization,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade (Semiotext(e), 2004), 103.

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure David Albertson https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198947004.001.0001 Published online: 06 May 2025 Published in print: 17 July 2025

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Acknowledgments  Published: May 2025

Subject: Christianity, Religion, Mysticism, Philosophy of Religion Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

For reasons both personal and pandemic, this book has endured a particularly long gestation, and I pray it is the better for it. Many friends and colleagues supported my work along the way. My rst thanks are due to the writing circle that was a patient audience for the roughest drafts—Douglas Christie, Charlotte Radler, and Leah Buturain Schneider—and to our enduring inspirations, Bernie and Pat. A second thanks to Doug for the writing retreat and constant encouragement over breakfasts. In the course of my research, I bene ted from invitations from colleagues to speak at conferences and research institutes that sharpened my questions and altered my approach: Louise Nelstrop and John Arblaster at the Mystical Theology Network at Boston College in 2019; Patricia Beckman and the Christian Spirituality Group at the American Academy of Religion in San Diego in 2020; Jeffrey Hamburger at the Mahindra Humanities Center of Harvard University in 2022; and Katja Krause and Tracy Wietecha at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin in 2023. In 2021, the USC School of Religion hosted a manuscript workshop that proved pivotal for the arguments of the book. I thank the organizer, my colleague and former chair Lori Meeks, and the generous external participants, Kevin Corrigan, Eric Perl, and Robin Darling Young. I hope they still recognize the Plotinus they know and love. I have relished the opportunity to work through some of this material in courses I taught at USC over the last decade in Religion, Visual Studies, and Thematic Option, and remain grateful to my students for their questions and insights. I have learned a great deal from friends and colleagues in conversation over the last several years while writing this book. My sincere thanks to Yael Barash, Jason Blakely, Don Boyce, Tom Carlson, Nuno Castel-Branco, Fred Clark, Cavan Concannon, Fr. Luke Dysinger, Emmanuel Falque, Ian Gerdon, Adrian Guiu, Sean Hannan, Sherman Jackson, Katja Krause, Il Kim, Thomas Leinkauf, Megan Luke, Elizabeth Lyons, Divna Manalova, James McHugh, Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús, Arjun Nair, Matt Peterson, Stefano Rebeggiani, Hector Reyes, Vanessa Schwartz, and Brian Treanor. Special thanks to Cynthia Read, Thomas Perridge, and Rachel Atkins at Oxford University Press for their patience and support, and to the generous reviewers, including Charles Stang. Claire Mieher was a stellar research assistant who made many improvements late in my revisions; all mistakes remain my own, but there would be many more without her expertise.

p. x

At home, I must thank, for a million reasons, my brilliant wife, Annie Albertson, and our children Gabriel, Natalie, and Jordan. Your love, joy, humor, and mischief sustain me. In 2017, our family lost my mother, Nancy, at rst slowly and then quickly. This book is dedicated to her memory and in celebration of her gifts as a teacher of children learning to speak.

Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 2024

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure David Albertson https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198947004.001.0001 Published online: 06 May 2025 Published in print: 17 July 2025 Print ISBN: 9780198946977

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Abbreviations  David Albertson

https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198947004.002.0006 Published: May 2025

Pages xiii–xiv

Subject: Christianity, Religion, Mysticism, Philosophy of Religion Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

AR Theodore the Studite, Antirrhetici tres adversus Iconomachos CH Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy CI John of Damascus, Contra imaginum calumniatores orationes tres DN Dionysius, Divine Names EH Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy Ep Dionysius, Epistulae MT Dionysius, Mystical Theology PG Patrologia Cursus Completus. Series Graeca. J. P. Migne, 1800–1875 S Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz SA

Online ISBN: 9780198947004

Thierry of Chartres, Commentum Super Arithmeticam Boethii UD Achard of St. Victor, De unitate Dei et pluralitate creaturarum VP Vita Plotini: Porphyry, “On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books” p. xiv

Introduction A language dies when no one remembers how to speak it—​when no one embodies its uniquely textured world and props open its dimensions for the next generation to enter. The demise often comes slowly, when the young fail to hear the ancestral tongue in their ears and take too quickly to the new lingua franca. Exigence becomes habit, then habit constricts their world until the lost words erase whole possibilities of human experience. The vibrant living manifold erodes step by step, dimmed by a fading repertoire of names. Dead languages are nearly impossible to resurrect, for even if one can train a new community of speakers, still the rites and customs, shared visual memory, and silent lexicon of gestures that preserved their semantic world have vanished for good. Bare words might remain on the page, but there is no one left who knows what they truly express. I wrote this book out of a concern that an illness of language, if not yet an extinction, has taken hold of that most dynamic and generative of Christian dialects, namely Christian mystical traditions, which flourished in the ancient Mediterranean and medieval Europe and remain an ecumenical heritage today. At first glance, this might seem a bizarre anxiety to entertain. First of all, in the flesh and blood lurking behind my metaphor, it was often the Christians themselves whose empires dominated minority cultures and impoverished local languages, even if some missionaries sought to preserve native dialects. More to the point, scholars who best understand Christian mystical traditions might be quick to reject the comparison to endangered languages. On the one hand, mystical speech is not the everyday patois of Christians, but rather an eccentric, extreme, virtuosic instance of linguistic creativity. On the other hand, the successful retrieval of premodern mysticism over the last century by ressourcement has already begun to reinvigorate Christian thought. Perhaps we should conclude that the mystical language has not been forgotten at all, but newly remembered! Here language is more than a metaphor: the recovery of mystical texts has meant the discovery and preservation of a range of Christian authors writing in European vernacular languages beyond the Latinate mainstream of the monasteries and schools. A multilingual profusion of marginalized voices, many of them women, now fills the pages of the Christian past to an extent that would have stupefied historians just a century ago. Both of these observations are true. Christian mysticism does indeed represent a restless avant-​garde whose experiments in language offer resources for the tradition’s future. And the contemporary retrieval of Christian mysticism has indeed colored in the Christian past with greater energy, diversity, and The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0001

2  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation strangeness than ever before. The return of the mystical has the potential to transform Christian theological discourse: to reintegrate dogma and spirituality into a single whole, to recover medieval women’s voices—​half of the Christians, during half of the tradition—​and to restore poetic beauty to its desiccated literary genres.1 The recentering of Christian mysticism, moreover, ought to remind us of an analogous global transformation of Christian languages underway today, which decenters “Latinate” European authority and reveals a profusion of once-​marginalized voices. As Karl Rahner prophesied, the future language of Christianity will either be mystical or it will pass away altogether.2 It is not despite these signs of the times but because of their urgency and promise that I have grown uneasy about the ways we have come to read Christian mystical traditions. Too much is at stake at this juncture to mishandle the past; the epochal turn of ressourcement and the renewal it promises remain at risk if we only hear what we are accustomed to hearing. Accordingly, I begin with what may seem a paranoid question. Even as scholarship on Christian mystical traditions continues to expand, even as the chorus of Christian voices seems to multiply, is there something looming in the history of Christian mysticism that we have not perceived and have difficulty perceiving? Does something about our contemporary imagination limit our ability to comprehend all the Christian voices of the past? Does our late modern vantage point come with blind spots that prevent us from grasping mystical theology in its full alterity? The meaning of “mysticism” is anything but clear today, even in the academy. For the last twenty years, I have studied and taught the history of Christian mysticism. Yet I confess that I still hesitate whenever asked by a well-​intentioned relative or university colleague: What is mysticism? The question can mean very different things. Fellow Catholics often want to know when “it” began and if it appears in other religions. Others ask me to confirm their sense that “mysticism” means, in essence, Buddhism or the metaphysics section at the bookstore. Friends in the humanities often smile in winking recognition: here is something scandalous and subversive, commendably opposed to institutional Christianity, and tinged with sexuality. Mystical texts are challenging to navigate. Their authors claim to leave their bodies, suffer unseen pain, speak with another’s voice, or pass out of being. As Michel de Certeau writes, the modern reader peering into a mystical text is like a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a mirror: “He seeks one who has vanished, who in turn sought One who had vanished.”3 Yet Christian mystical texts typically 1 See Mark A. McIntosh, Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Blackwell, 1998). 2 Karl Rahner, “Christian Living Formerly and Today,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. 7, trans. David Bourke (Herder and Herder, 1971), 15. 3 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 11.

Introduction  3 unfold according to a fairly regular set of coordinates, family resemblances which evolved under particular conditions gradually repeated, accumulated, and transmitted through shared sources and practices: meditative prayer and contemplative vision; solitude, withdrawal, and isolation; liturgical prayer and sacramental worship; techniques of deep reading and writing; sequences of inner ascent or descent; an uninhibited creativity with poetic language; abstinence from food and drink, but also metaphors of feasting and inebriation; abstinence from sexuality, but also metaphors of intercourse and ecstasy: an entire sensorium of alternative somatic experience. The idea of Christian mysticism begins with the Greek term “mystical theology” (μυστικὴ θεολογία)—​literally, the “hidden discourse on God”—​that announces the influential essay by an anonymous Syrian monk calling himself Dionysius the Areopagite around the turn of the sixth century.4 In that work and others, Dionysius contrasts kataphasis (κατάφασις) and apophasis (ἀπόφασις) as two moments in Christian contemplation. The first refers to predicative speech, multiplying constative names for God. Apophasis is the contrary impulse to negate every name of God since God abides beyond human language; the Greek alludes to the mathematical operation of subtraction as a removal or un-​saying. God is near, and God is beautiful; God is also not near, and God is beyond every notion of beauty. Everything that can be named in poetry, commented in Scripture, sung in songs, rendered in visions, colored by sense experience, asserted in metaphor, or embodied in liturgy, all falteringly point toward mysteries far beyond themselves, and so their finitude must be exposed through the force of negation. For his part, Dionysius never opposes the two movements but harmonizes them in complex ways. A helpful definition of Christian mysticism is found at the outset of Bernard McGinn’s magisterial nine-​volume history: “The mystical element in Christianity is that part of its belief and practices that concerns the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the reaction to what can been described as the immediate or direct presence of God.”5 In short, mysticism is the claim to an immediate (nonmediated) encounter with God, one that short-​circuits the established mediations of text, institution, personal authority, and ritual, pointing even beyond knowledge, language, or reason itself. Christian mysticism therefore begins with the fundamental negation implicit in “hiddenness” (μυστικὴ). Once customary structures of being and knowing are removed, God seems to arrive with even 4 For a good introduction, see Andrew Louth, “Apophatic and Cataphatic Theology,” in Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, eds. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 137–​146. On the history of μυστικὴ, see Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, “Mysticism in Middle and Neoplatonism in Judaism, ‘Paganism’, and Christianity,” in Constructions of Mysticism as a Universal: Roots and Interactions Across Borders, eds. Annette Wilke, Robert Stephanus, and Robert Suckro (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2021), 30–​35. 5 Bernard McGinn, Foundations of Christian Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991), xvii.

4  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation greater presence, without mediation—​though often, McGinn notes, as a presence veiled under the guise of absence. Despite their claims to unique revelations, despite their tremendous variations, all mystical texts perform the same subversive, subtractive maneuver of non-​mediation. We can confidently say that all mystical texts are in different ways, both kataphatic and apophatic at the same time. This “hidden” dimension of divine mystery pervades Christian spiritual writings in the ancient Church, well before Dionysius, particularly in the pivotal fourth century. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christian mystical theology flowered into new themes and genres, thriving up through the seventeenth century as female authors and vernacular languages took center stage. After 1700, the mystical element in Christianity declined into poor health, less an organic nutrient of a living spirituality than an inert element of a distant past. Paradoxically, that decline meant that “mysticism” (la mystique) became all the more visible to the historical gaze.6 The term now offered a discrete conceptual container to collect texts with similar preoccupations, whatever their distance in space or time. In the first decades of the twentieth century, German intellectuals like Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and Max Scheler constructed a transhistorical “mysticism” that spanned Greek mystery cults, Indian and Chinese religions, and medieval Christian traditions related to Meister Eckhart.7 Within Christianity alone, “mystical” writings could now range from Middle Platonists in third-​century Egypt to female visionaries in medieval Belgium to dissidents in seventeenth-​century Italy to charismatic Pentecostals in Los Angeles.8 Soon texts from other contemplative traditions were welcomed retrospectively under the umbrella of “mysticism,” like Kabbalah in Judaism or Sufism in Islam. After the rise of comparative religious studies in American universities of the 1960s, this inclusivist thrust gained speed. To some, “mysticism” promised an elusive treasure: an anti-​institutional, authentic, universal experience of the religious a priori free from troublesome confessional differences, the happy neighbor of esotericism, Americanized Buddhism, or mindfulness. By this point, of course, it had little to do with ancient Christian contemplatives and their delicate economies of negation. Such popular confusion is hardly to be faulted. But do we scholars know what “mysticism” denotes today? The historicist answer I have just given usually clears things up in the university classroom by focusing on scholarly reasons for using the term and the distance between μυστικὴ θεολογία and la mystique. But imagine for a moment a different scenario. What if a similar confusion consistently 6 See Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One; and Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume Two: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Luce Giard, trans. Michael B. Smith (University of Chicago Press, 2015). 7 Almut-​Barbara Renger, “The Allure of the Mystical from the Fin-​de-​Siècle to the Interwar Years: Troeltsch, Scheler, and the Social Construction of Mysticism,” in Constructions of Mysticism, 215–​ 233; Volkhard Krech, “Just Another Invention of Western Intellectuals?—​The Concept of Mysticism Revisited,” in Constructions of Mysticism, 185–​214. 8 See Daniel Castelo, Pentecostalism as a Christian Mystical Tradition (Eerdmans, 2017).

Introduction  5 distorted the mystical past, not due to venial popular misconceptions, but misconceptions precisely among those most qualified as historians, theologians, and philosophers in the academy? What if the oblivion of Christian mysticism afflicted the engines of historiographical retrieval themselves or was even produced by them? What if the mystical past were teeming with phenomena that scholars unwittingly failed to detect, like the vast swathes of dark matter in deep space? The further one steps back from our recent successes in recovering premodern Christian mysticism, and the more one takes to heart our modern peculiarities, the more troubling the question becomes. First, most ancient and medieval Christian mystics located themselves deeply within the physical place they inhabited, which profoundly shaped their sense of self and God. Yet early modern Christians redefined the domain of religion as the nexus between the invisible, interior self and an invisible, hidden God, relegating the exterior “world” to the secular sphere of natural sciences. Today, we struggle to connect that cosmic exterior with our treasured religious interior. Second, premodern Christian mystics integrated negative and positive moments of speech and practice into an organic whole, harmonizing apophasis and kataphasis. Yet the modern study of “religion” established its intellectual credibility by elevating the hermeneutics of negation known as critique. Today, we instinctively favor the apophatic pole, awarding its denials greater prestige and philosophical attention than any kataphatic counterparts, which appear unsophisticated and didactic by comparison. Finally, the ancient Christians most learned in Platonist philosophies insisted that the Incarnation of God into the human body required a wholesale intellectual revolution. By contrast, modern scholars trace the origins of mysticism to Greek philosophical contemplation but then often insinuate that little changed with the onset of Christianity beyond some fresh paint on the Neoplatonist facade. The Christian language that is ailing today is not Christian mysticism per se, which was recently revived and is apparently flourishing, though looks can be deceiving. Nor is apophatic speech any weaker than it was in the ancient past; indeed, for reasons I suggest in Chapter 1, it has become our spiritual lingua franca today, its silences unceasingly spoken across its vast empire. Apophasis is well adapted to our contemporary world of uncertainty, crisis, trauma, and loss. Indeed, apophatic modes of speech can beautifully articulate the limits of human language in the face of our contemporary despair.9 Today’s endangered language is not Christian apophasis but Christian kataphasis. Kataphatic speech has mostly fallen into disuse outside a few uncultivated enclaves where its obsolescent argot has not 9 On this point, see the important work of Douglas E. Christie, The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss, and the Common Life (Oxford University Press, 2022). Andrew Prevot is right, however, that a “via positiva of darkness and blackness” must be part of this effort—​that is, a kataphatic renewal of the apophatic imaginary. Andrew Prevot, “Divine Opacity: Mystical Theology, Black Theology, and the Problem of Light–​Dark Aesthetics,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 16, no. 2 (2016): 166–​188.

6  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation yet been refined. To speak of God without the explicit or implicit promise of future negation will seem an amateur’s mistake to the historian or philosopher. But a weakened kataphasis will eventually affect the intelligibility of Christian speech by dissolving the original unity between apophasis and kataphasis, foreclosing Christian particularity, and severing the link between interior experience and exterior world. If kataphasis were lost, how could we claim to retrieve Christian mystical theologies of the past? Could we still hear that language as a living possibility today? The words might remain on the page, but no one would know what they express. In what follows, I trace the distinctive emergence of Christian contemplation at critical turning points across the first millennium. I find it helpful to frame the discursive field under examination as Christian “contemplation” (θεωρία) and not a priori as “mysticism.” The latter term remains fraught with misconceptions and question-​begging, and in order to renew its meaning, we need to keep in view concepts and practices quite possibly related to mysticism but standing outside or before its particular concerns. (John of Damascus, for example, had tremendous influence on the future of Christian contemplation, and therefore mysticism, yet his polemical works are rarely regarded as mystical.) In order to recover the proper harmony of kataphasis and apophasis, I pursue an unusual strategy: I propose that we must reexamine the role of the geometrical imagination in ancient Christian contemplation, namely, practices of measuring the world. How do line, shape, space, and quantity structure the visual apprehension of the world, the exterior in which the landscape of mystical theology takes place? How do the affirmative marks of geometrical figures resist negation? How did ancient Christianity challenge Plotinian Neoplatonism and attempt to say something truly new? In the spirit of apophatic denials, let me state what I am not attempting in this book. Although I have to make several assertions about contemporary apophaticism, I cannot survey those vast currents of research nor fully justify my claims about the changing state of theological aesthetics in modernity. Nor is this book a history of ancient geometry per se, a worthy enterprise but one requiring far more evidence than I have gathered here. Instead, I have selected a handful of promising sites and made preliminary soundings for different Christian attitudes toward “geometrical” ideas. Finally, thankfully, scholars have already taken tremendous strides to retrieve kataphatic texts written by women.10 While we still need to recover the full meaning of kataphasis, this is not the place to study the genius of Hildegard of Bingen or Julian of Norwich per se. I hope to take up this task in a second volume devoted to the Middle Ages. Here I first want to attend to the 10 See Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (University of California Press, 1998); Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian (Yale University Press, 2011); and Patricia Dailey, Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women’s Mystical Texts (Columbia University Press, 2013).

Introduction  7 oblivion threatening all such kataphatic masters in the first place. By necessity, I return to the sources we already know best or thought we did. My story travels past well-​known monuments but spies out details of figure, measure, and space that previous tours left unnoticed.11 Since a major onus of this book is to reconsider the legacy of Plotinus in ancient Christianity, readers will naturally wonder why Augustine of Hippo, that great Christian Plotinian, is conspicuously absent. One initial reason is that so very much has already been written about Augustine’s complicated relationship with Plotinus, beginning with Confessions itself. In Book VII, Augustine famously asks which theological ideas he found already in Plotinus and which he only found in Christian faith.12 Today, there is a small mountain of monographs weighing which Enneads, or their later mediators, must have been cited, altered, or absorbed by the good bishop, and I will not attempt to improve upon them.13 I do want to revisit Augustine’s question, yet with a historiographical breadth that, naturally, he could never reach in his century, but we—​if we avoid copying his example too narrowly—​could achieve in ours. In other words, Augustine is absent because this book repeats to a more intensive degree his signature gesture of measuring the dynamic transition from Plotinian contemplation to Christian contemplation. 11 There is no shortage of books exploring the Greek foundations of Christian mystical traditions, and it is fair to ask if another is needed. Endre von Ivánka’s midcentury study of the transformation of Platonism in the Church Fathers treated Neoplatonism as a uniform “system” and so elided the peculiarity of Plotinus. See Endre von Ivánka, Plato Christianus. Übernahme und Umgestaltung des Platonismus durch die Väter (Johannes Verlag, 1964). Other exceptional studies examine images and vision in early Christian mysticism with great success; none of them asks the questions I wish to pose about measure, geometry, and space. See Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Clarendon Press, 1981); Olivier Boulnois, Au-​delà de l’image. Une archéologie du visuel au Moyen Âge Ve-​XVIe siècle (Éditions du Seuil, 2008); Hans Boersma, Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition (Eerdmans, 2018); Thomas Pfau, Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022); and Enrico Peroli, Platonisme et Christianisme. Essai d’interprétation (Beauchesne, 2024). Despite its idiosyncrasies, the survey outlined by Michael Heller, winner of the 2008 Templeton Prize, is a step in the right direction. See Michael Heller, God and Geometry: When Space Was God, trans. Piotr Krasnowolski (Copernicus Center Press, 2019). 12 See Augustine of Hippo, Confessiones, Liber VII, 9 (13)–​21 (27), ed. James J. O’Donnell, Confessions, 3 vols. (Clarendon Press, 1992), Vol. I: 80–​87. See O’Donnell’s indispensable commentary in Confessions, Vol. III: 413–​484. 13 Classic studies include Charles Boyer, Christianisme et néoplatonisme dans la formation de saint Augustine (Beauchesne, 1920); Paul Henry, Plotin et l’Occident: Firmicus Maternus, Marius Victorinus, Saint Augustin et Macrobe (Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense Bureaux, 1934); Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin (E. de Boccard, 1950); John J. O’Meara, The Young Augustine (Longmans, Green and Co., 1954); John J. O’Meara, Porphyry’s Philosophy from Oracles in Augustine (Études Augustiniennes, 1959); Pierre Courcelle, Les Confessions de Saint Augustine dans la tradition littéraire: Antécédents et posterité (Études Augustiniennes, 1963); Olivier du Roy, L’intelligence de la foi en la Trinité selon saint Augustin (Études Augustiniennes, 1966); Cornelius P. Mayer, Die Zeichen in der geistigen Entwicklung und in der Theologie des jungen Augustinus (Augustinus Verlag, 1969); and Eugene TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian (Burns & Oates, 1970). More recently, see John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge University Press, 1994); Goulven Madec, S. Augustin et la philosophie (Études Augustiniennes, 1996); John Peter Kenney, The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Rereading the Confessions (Routledge, 2005); and Laela Zwollo, St. Augustine and Plotinus: The Human Mind as Image of the Divine (Brill, 2018).

8  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Rather than reread Augustine’s texts yet again, I will reiterate his question about Plotinus but attempt to answer it by calling upon the resources of contemporary, critical histories of both Greek Neoplatonism and ancient Christianity. I would note, without being able to elaborate further, that Augustine’s struggle to come to terms with Plotinus is also a struggle to measure space: the spatial location of God, the interior topology of the self, and the cavernous expanse of his memory, where both self and God remain. The first part of this book sketches an archaeology of our current imbalance. Chapter 1 introduces three interconnected problems of world, negation, and form. I propose a heuristic distinction between two traditions of theological aesthetics in Christian mysticism: God as Formlessness and God as supreme Form. I explain why turning to world measure (γεω-​μετρία) can help us retrieve the latter tradition and redefine kataphasis. Chapter 2 examines the invention of the aesthetic of formlessness within the henology of Plotinus. I show that his concept of formlessness is closely connected to his complicated engagement with the Neopythagorean philosophy of mathematics. That is, Plotinus’s aneidetic henology is premised on his misgivings about geometrical figures. In Chapter 3, I argue that his aesthetic of formlessness rests on three theological axioms: Logos, autarchy, and eros. The second part of the book outlines a genealogy of ancient Christian contemplation that attends to the exterior world. In Chapters 4 and 5, I study the original meaning of apophasis and kataphasis in Dionysius and emphasize the distance between him and his predecessor, Plotinus, with whom he is too often conflated in misleading ways. I show how Dionysian hierarchy grounds mystical theology by animating an economy of figuration that limits apophasis because it is centered on love. Next, I examine how Dionysius was read by the Byzantine iconophiles, first John of Damascus in Chapter 6 and then Theodore the Studite in Chapter 7. Together John and Theodore construct a theory of linear circumscription that invokes geometry because the Incarnation of God in Jesus is also a self-​emptying into magnitude. Finally, in Chapter 8, I discuss Boethius’s notion of divine Form and trace its afterlife among medieval Christian Neopythagoreans, especially Achard of St. Victor in Chapter 9. In between the folds of these chapters, I offer three interludes on episodes when the shape of God in Jesus appeared in space, size, and surface. As I hope to show, these major moments of resistance to Plotinian formlessness—​in Dionysius, the iconophiles, and the Boethians—​unfold with a coherence of their own. They charted a different path in the first millennium, and they can continue to challenge our imaginations today.

1

The Silence of the World How to avoid speaking The contemporary retrieval of Christian mysticism has undergone two major developments over the last few decades. The first is a new appreciation of the distinctive qualities of visionary mysticism, particularly among medieval women writing in the vernacular.1 For premodern women mystics excluded from educational institutions and regular access to traditional texts, the grammar of visuality offered a path to authorship and discursive authority. Historians of mysticism, learning from art historians, no longer confine themselves to the axis running from text to experience but now attend to the visual forms and visual cultures that coproduce texts, whether through images depicted narratively or those rendered in paint or ink. Mystical images create and inspire experience just as much as they reflect and record it. The second trend is the discovery of a surprising resonance between Deconstruction and negative theology. Continental philosophers have begun to borrow strategies from Christian apophatic traditions for naming the limits of language and challenging onto-​theologies of presence.2 Given their monastic and scholastic origins, apophatic texts are usually, but not always, written by men. Together these two insights spell a question. How does the new currency of apo­ phaticism relate to the vibrancy of kataphatic visions? For ancient and medieval Christian mystics, apophatic and kataphatic moments work together organically and indissociably. But we moderns should admit that we have trouble maintaining that harmony. The apophatic moment of Christian mysticism has been the subject of far greater intellectual investment and historical research over the last fifty years. Even in studies of female mystics like Marguerite Porete or Hadewijch of Brabant, a patently lopsided focus on silence, absence, darkness, unsaying, and unknowing has structured their historical reconstruction. This observation should be obvious to those who know the field, but its significance is rarely weighed. It is easy to separate apophasis from kataphasis, delicately rank apophasis above kataphasis,

1 See, e.g., Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (Zone Books, 1998). 2 See, e.g., Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1989); and John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Indiana University Press, 1997). For a critical assessment, see Lieven Boeve, “The Rediscovery of Negative Theology Today,” in Théologie negative, ed. Marco M. Olivetti (Biblioteca dell’Archivio di Filosofia, 2002), 443–​459.

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0002

12  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation investigate the logic of apophasis in provisional isolation, or apply apophasis alone to contemporary philosophical questions. The apophatic moment comports well with the critical reason of the Enlightenment, the Romantic aesthetics of the Absolute, and the postmodern sublime. But I fear the elevation of apophasis has allowed us to forget the meaning of kataphasis. For a time, insisting on the priority of the “unsayable” allowed more to be said. Apophatic mysticism seemed to correct the excesses of Neo-​Scholastic methods, or propositional doctrine, or formalism in worship, or somehow organized religion in general. If that were once the case, the persistent valorization of the unsayable in our new century has become stifling; it allows nothing else to be said. Apophasis has come to negate more than words and images out of reverence for God: today, it enforces a compulsory unknowing and unsaying upon a significant share of Christian mystical traditions. But the more we identify Christian mysticism with the apophatic moment, the less we admit the properly reciprocal dependence of kataphasis and apophasis, and the less we perceive that invisible matrix that surrounds and silently precedes both affirmations and denials. The less we keep both moments in view, the more we lose our sense of that great empty space, ubiquitous and transparent, that unfolds itself to embrace all the signs we mark or erase, namely, the figural contours of our ambient world. The analogical basis of Christian mysticism is not the erasures of negation but the inscriptions of measure, measures of the exterior world, or geometry. I will try to demonstrate this historically in the chapters that follow. But first I want to propose three interrelated challenges that beset the study of Christian mysticism today: on negation, on world, and on form. These three problems manifest themselves in subtle ways and could almost be overlooked were it not for the unsettling degree to which they reinforce each other—​minor oversights that add up to a major miscalibration. The first riddle to address is the problem of negation. Our focus on apophasis has allowed us to lose our sense of kataphasis. But defining the essence and legitimacy of kataphasis is more difficult than it seems, and not only due to the diversity of its expressions. Does kataphatic mysticism only arise passively, as the inverse or remainder left over in the wake of more prestigious apophatic traditions? Can kataphasis stand on its own, or should it always be corrected and superseded? But what is the nature of kataphatic positivity? Is it found in syntax, as a mode of speech that makes predications? Or is it a metaphorical and pictorial manner of speaking, fit for the masses but only preliminary to higher studies? Does kataphasis grow out of visual experiences communicable in representational art, preferring images to iconoclasm? Or should we identify kataphasis with affect and apophasis with intellect? Each of these suggestions denotes historical instances worth considering, but their binary oppositions keep us entangled within medieval political structures of gender and literacy: the visible versus the invisible, the exoteric versus the esoteric, the novice versus the expert, surface versus depth, emotion versus intellect—​and

The Silence of the World  13 ultimately, female versus male. If we are not careful, kataphasis can appear elementary, naive, and weak, inviting its own subordination and regulation by an apophatic elite. We have ample reason to suspect our contemporary fascination with apophaticism since comparative religious studies began as an Enlightenment project to purify religious speech. As Kant and Hegel turned from Protestant theology to rational religion, they concluded that the historical particulars of religious traditions needed critique if not cleansing. Whatever seemed too local or materialized (or too Jewish or Catholic)—​rituals, arts, bodies, customs, scriptures—​had to be stripped away to expose the moral or conceptual kernel beneath. The search for common denominators of the universal religion required constant subtraction. Kant elevated immensity and formlessness into two criteria of the sublime, making the Absolute intrinsically opposed to measure and form.3 The same economy of negation passed from German Idealism to Romanticism. For Goethe and Schleiermacher, the religious artist stands in awe before the naked, sublime Absolute. No measure or analogy can bridge the infinite distance between them, and the only ethic is to keep negating the penultimate.4 As the study of religion entered a more critical phase, its master theorists were notably iconoclastic: Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.5 Every projection of religious language, pretense to altruism, or longing for security begs to be unmasked and dethroned as a false idol. To comprehend religious speech means to think with a hammer; to think critically means to destroy iconologies. From Kant to Freud, even to Michel Foucault, what propels reason upward is the constant negation of word and image. Every determinate sign or figure is taken as provisional and arbitrary, foisted upon the blank slate of the world and thus illegitimate. The formless Absolute has become an unmarked universal horizon for the comparison, elision, and ultimately erasure of definite signs and particular images. Theological names or revealed truths appear as temporary marks, and only their gradual effacement will restore the aesthetic state of nature. The multifarious textures and colors of different religions seem to dissolve at the horizon into the same uniform, colorless Absolute; all the lines converge at that invisible point. Since all forms are penultimate, negation always leads to truth. Against this background, the Catholic ressourcement movement of Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and others recovered premodern Christian voices as worthy interlocutors in the present. Balthasar alone penned

3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §§ 23–​26, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 128–​140. See Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge University Press, 2015). 4 See Louis Dupré, The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). 5 See Jean-​ Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (Cornell University Press, 1990).

14  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation essays on Plotinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor.6 Soon the movement rediscovered later Dionysian receptions, including John Scotus Eriugena, the Victorines, and Meister Eckhart. Educated among the 1968 generation in Paris, Jean-​Luc Marion proposed that Christian apophasis in fact outstripped the radicality of Deconstruction, sparking a debate over Dionysius with Jacques Derrida himself.7 Following the Anglophone reception of Foucault and Derrida in the 1980s, the 1990s witnessed a swell of interest in Christian apophaticism.8 The best studies since then have worked simultaneously along two axes: the contemporary French controversy (and lurking behind it, Martin Heidegger) and the retrieval of Christian Neoplatonism, especially Dionysius.9 The philosophical and theological investment has only accelerated in recent years,10 and now the trend extends well beyond Christianity.11 The ethic of perpetual negation grounds many of our founding assumptions about the critical study of religions and of mysticism especially. It lies behind the relatively recent admission of comparative religious studies into secular universities and provides a platform for the philosophy of religion to proceed amid religious pluralism. It suggests a welcome posture of humble unknowing after several 6 See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. IV: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, trans. Brian McNeil et al. (Ignatius Press, 1989), 280–​313; Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, trans. Mark Sebanc (Ignatius Press, 1995); The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. II: Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles, trans. Andrew Louth et al. (Ignatius Press, 1984), 95–​210; and Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, trans. Brian E. Daley (Ignatius Press, 2003). 7 See Jean-​Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Fordham University Press, 2001); followed by Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold G. Coward and Tobey Foshay (State University of New York Press, 1992), 73–​ 142; and finally, Jean-​Luc Marion, “In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking It,” in In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (Fordham University Press, 2002), 128–​162. 8 Beyond those cited above, classic studies include Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Deirdre Carabine, The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition: Plato to Eriugena (Peeters, 1995); Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Jan Miernowski, La dieu néant: Théologies negatives a l’aube des temps modernes (Brill, 1998). 9 See, e.g., Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (University of Chicago Press, 1999); Stephen Gersh, Neoplatonism after Derrida: Parallelograms (Brill, 2006); and Jean-​Luc Marion, Negative Certainties, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (University of Chicago Press, 2015). 10 Just to name a few: Catherine Keller and Chris Boesel, eds., Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality (Fordham University Press, 2010); William Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014); Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (Columbia University Press, 2015); An Yountae, The Decolonial Abyss: Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins (Fordham University Press, 2017); David Newheiser, Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2020); William Franke, On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020); and John D. Caputo, Specters of God: An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2022). 11 See, e.g., J. P. Williams, Denying Divinity: Apophasis in the Patristic Christian and Soto Zen Buddhist Traditions (Oxford University Press, 2000); Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (Fordham University Press, 2014); Michael Fagenblat, ed., Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity (Indiana University Press, 2017); and Aydogan Kars, Unsaying God: Negative Theology in Medieval Islam (Oxford University Press, 2019).

The Silence of the World  15 centuries of Christian imperialism and now even influences the priorities that govern the historical retrieval of Christian mystical texts. Yet to the extent that premodern Christian mysticism holds together apophatic and kataphatic dimensions, the current hegemony of apophasis ultimately makes mystical theologies more difficult to comprehend, blocking access to a full recovery of kataphatic texts, which between 1100 and 1700 were often written by women. Nor is this simply a matter of doing justice to the full breadth of a religious tradition. Alain Badiou warns of a “crisis of negation,” just as Bruno Latour condemns the facile iconoclasms of the humanities, calling for a reevaluation of the entire project of modern “critique.”12 If kataphasis is nothing more than the negation of negation, apophasis itself can lose its bearings. Amid the surfeit of the negative, apophasis could begin to display symptoms of disorientation, wandering aimlessly, repetitive and fruitless.13 In a recent lecture, “Understanding and Misunderstanding ‘Negative Theology,’ ” Rowan Williams acknowledges that contemporary approaches to apophasis are in need of adjustment. Properly understood, theological negation should be neither “general agnosticism” nor “fastidious minimalism” but should rather clarify the distinctive truth requirements of speech about God: it “explains and contextualizes the sort of affirmations that theology makes.”14 Williams counts four legitimate apophatic styles and proposes three new ones for the future. The four styles are grammatical negation (excessive lists of alpha-​privatives), qualificatory negation (epistemic modesty and humility), metaphysical negation (the essential inaccessibility of the hidden God), and descriptive negation (reflexive accounts of experiences of unknowing).15 But according to Williams, apophatic theology today can pursue three new tasks.16 First, it should become an “ecclesial practice” that absorbs the individual into communal consciousness and applies negation to “catholicize” individual voices. Second, apophasis should imitate the risk-​taking of artistic creativity. Both the poetic artist and “apophatic practitioner” disrupt the known boundaries of the human sensorium by negating “accepted disciplines of perceiving.” Third, apophasis should cultivate an expectation of greater divine plenitude and seek aperture, not closure. 12 See John Van Houdt, “The Crisis of Negation: An Interview with Alain Badiou,” Continent 1, no. 4 (2011): 234–​238; and Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225–​248. On iconoclasm, see also Bruno Latour, “What Is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?” in On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, ed. Bruno Latour (Duke University Press, 2010), 67–​97. 13 “A recycling today of the classical, late antique, and medieval vocabularies of the apophatic, but uprooted from their soil in a metaphysics, leaves that vocabulary suspended in a vacuum of rhetorics, a displaced, residually Christian semiotics, retaining the illusion of a force from the metaphysics it has abandoned as no longer possible—​even if, for sure, half-​remembered traces of what it was once able to signify preserve the illusion of life, as a wrung chicken struggles and kicks for a while after death.” Denys Turner, “Atheism, Apophaticism, and ‘Différance’,” in Théologie negative, ed. Marco M. Olivetti (Biblioteca dell’Archivio di Filosofia, 2002), 241. 14 Rowan Williams, Understanding God and Misunderstanding “Negative Theology” (Marquette University Press, 2021), 21, 31. 15 Williams, Understanding God, 11–​19. 16 Williams, Understanding God, 23–​41.

16  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation My concerns are entirely consonant with those of Williams. But to my mind, his intervention misdiagnoses the problem and indeed misunderstands his own contribution. The three new criteria for apophasis that he proposes—​ecclesial location, poetic creation, and future possibility—​are all hallmarks of the kataphatic. When Williams contrasts the “apophatic practitioner” with “poetic practice,” what he means by the latter is kataphatic theology. Williams is, in fact, urging a turn away from well-​worn apophatic habits toward a kataphatic renewal: “to invite others to take a congruent risk in the construction of a new object for thought.”17 The quandary at hand, in other words, is not a misunderstanding of apophasis but a persistent uncertainty about the identity of kataphasis. It is telling that when someone as insightful as Williams seeks to correct misunderstandings of negative theology, the only option seems to be redescribing the function of apophasis, as if there were no alternative to the dominance of the negative. Even when his prescriptions are patently kataphatic, kataphasis remains unnamed and undetermined in the background, quietly funding the apophatic correction.

World as outscape The second problem is the more complex problem of the world. When we read mystical texts, we naturally ask about the unusual, arresting religious experience of authors. If we compare their texts to others, we’re also asking about the particularity or universality of that experience. A modern historian approaching the text might wonder about the surrounding world inhabited by a given author. But for mystical literature, that matter is customarily set aside, preempted by the question of access to inner psychological experience. Scholars of mysticism used to feel more confident in making judgments about authors’ states of “mystical consciousness.” Through the windowpane of the text, they could almost make out the contemplative in her cell and watch as she experienced the same episodes that all mystics (they said) undergo. In this older view, the transparency of the text and the universalism of the experience reinforced each other: readers already knew what to look for, and then they found it. Precarious as its assumptions are, the hermeneutic optimism of universalizing “mysticism” is exemplified in the influential views of William James.18 For James, true mystics have isomorphic experiences, which he can so precisely define—​ineffable, noetic, transient, and passive—​that his account validates or invalidates other “mystical” events. Since the 1980s, with better knowledge of the diversity of Christian mystical traditions and greater appreciation of the limits of psychologism, fewer scholars share James’s confidence. 17 Williams, Understanding God, 32. 18 William James, “Lectures XVI & XVII: Mysticism,” in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Collier-​Macmillan, 1961).

The Silence of the World  17 Two extremes are possible here: either mystical consciousness is entirely inaccessible to historians or historians can fully access such ravishing moments. In the introduction to his history of Christian mysticism, Bernard McGinn proposed a settlement that holds today.19 Both minimalist and maximalist positions, he reasons, possess only the text as a literary document; to “access” consciousness can only mean sifting through texts more scrupulously. In either case, the study of mysticism means no more and no less than the careful study of texts. Hence, McGinn wisely foregrounds textuality (including visual images) as the exclusive mediator of soul and God. There is no historiographical access to the psyche, he contends, that circumvents that textual mediation. Mystics make claims about ineffable subjectivity and ineffable divinity, both of which are concretized in the text, but neither soul nor God is phenomenally given to historians. The text is the indispensable conduit for accessing them both, and in mystical texts they are always mediated to us readers together, codetermined and co-​given. For all its merits, we should recognize that this settlement works by assuming relatively recent accounts of religion. To understand mystical experience as an affair between the hidden soul and hidden God is quintessentially, contingently modern. The genesis of modernity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a long and complicated story which this is not the place to review. Yet many of the best narratives point to something like what Louis Dupré calls the “loss of the onto-​theological synthesis,” namely, the loss of world.20 In these accounts, the cords tethering God to world, and self to world, grew frayed during the transition to modernity and eventually snapped. What remained was a dyad of self and God, without world. This reciprocal polarity of self and God is the modern point of departure for critical understandings of religion. The modern self is assertive, autonomous, and “buffered.”21 God grows distant, and the world grows silent. John Locke summarizes the primary qualities as “Solidity, Extension, Figure, Motion, or Rest, and Number.”22 We can paraphrase these as matter, motion, and mathematical measure. In modernity, each of these domains is excluded from religion’s legitimate purview, yet each has a rich premodern theological heritage, whose hermeneutic effects persist and remain in force today. Some historians trace the loss of world and even the rise of modern atheism to an altered understanding of matter and motion.23 But I follow Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, who 19 See McGinn, Foundations of Christian Mysticism, 263–​343. McGinn has since distinguished between “mystical experience” and “mystical consciousness.” See Bernard McGinn, “Mystical Consciousness: A Modest Proposal,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 8, no. 1 (2008): 44–​63. 20 See Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (Yale University Press, 1993); and Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (MIT Press, 1983). 21 See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007). 22 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.8.9, ed. Pauline Phemister (Oxford University Press, 2008), 76. 23 See Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (Yale University Press, 2009).

18  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation point instead to the altered role of measurement, specifically the mathematization of nature in seventeenth-​century Europe.24 The modern subject achieves epistemological sovereignty from tradition and political sovereignty from the state on the basis of the rational authority of natural knowledge. That scientific authority boils down to the new objectivity and exactitude of natural science, and this in turn succeeds because of a pervasive new mathematical imaginary. In this narrative, the ideal of precise mathematical measurement in Descartes, Galileo, Bacon, and others allows early modern subjects to disenchant the religious cosmologies and social hierarchies of the Middle Ages. Descartes calls the omnipresent invisible grid of mathematical measurement “mathesis universalis,” the possibility of universal measure. Its total extensive field makes possible a philosophical leap forward that replaces outmoded ontologies of substance and keeps pace with modern physics. This is the narrative mapped out by Husserl in his final book, The Crisis of the European Sciences.25 After Descartes and Galileo, the quantitative measurement of the world (“limit shapes”) became separated from its lived reality (“sensible plenum”). The division between an alien, objective world and meaningful human experiences remains with us today, sustaining the worsening “crisis” identified by Husserl. Husserl’s student Alexandre Koyré called the onset of mathesis universalis the “destruction of the Cosmos” through the “geometrization of space.” Another former student, Heidegger, argued that we live in technological epoch whose worldview (Weltanschauung) is a totalizing “world picture” (Weltbild).26 We envision all that exists as a premeasured whole, a kind of infinite sieve portioning out every possible event. As beings emerge within this “enframing” (Gestell) of technological efficiency, Being itself becomes a “standing reserve” (Bestand) of pure availability for technological use. Since metaphysics only thinks of beings as measurable, reproducible objects, the geometrization of the world leads to the oblivion of Being itself.27 The Husserlian and Heideggerian narrative about mathesis universalis is a narrative about geometry, which is to say, about world measure. The modern loss of world entails the fundamental opposition between the measurable and the nonmeasurable, the metric binary. The human soul is invisible, infinite, and unmeasurable, separated from human bodies and natural environments. God too is 24 See the introduction to David Albertson, Mathematical Theologies: Nicholas of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres (Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–​20. 25 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Northwestern University Press, 1970). 26 See, e.g., Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57–​85; and “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (HarperCollins, 1993), 271–​305. 27 Many have already identified Neoplatonist henology as a resource for escaping the ontological strictures of metaphysics. See Reiner Schürmann, “L’hénologie comme dépassement de la métaphysique,” Études philosophiques 3 (1982): 331–​350; but cf. Jean-​Marc Narbonne, Hénologie, Ontologie et Ereignis. Plotin—​Proclus—​Heidegger (Les Belles Lettres, 2001).

The Silence of the World  19 invisible, infinite, and unmeasurable, unlike the cosmos shaped by God in matter, space, and time. Only the lost world is the proper domain of measure. It is lost because it can only be measured. Every object available to sensation can be quantified and reproduced, given sufficient technical mastery. By definition, anything having to do with quantitative measure is irrelevant to God and self and therefore alien to religious experience. If something can be measured, then it has nothing to do with existential meaning, mysticism, theology, or religion, all of which, by definition, deal exclusively in the domain of unmeasurables.28 Now we can state the problem of world measure for the study of mysticism. Modern historians intuitively exclude the physical world from the invisible realm of the spirit, but the premodern mystical authors they study do not. When we late moderns open up a mystical text, our attention is absorbed by the dramatic exchanges between the soul and God. But premodern mystics do not operate within the metric binary and are not confined by the reciprocal polarity of self and God. We alone are preoccupied with sorting out measurables from unmeasurables. From our standpoint, we cannot help but be fascinated by the foreground; we cannot turn away from the face in the portrait. But any art historian would advise us to consult the negative space with equal care, namely the cosmic background within mystical texts. Mystical texts take shape within an intellectual environment, an intersecting set of discourses about the possibilities of knowledge in a given culture and time—​not only psychological and theological discourses but also overlapping scientific and aesthetic discourses about this world. It surely comes as no surprise to historians that one should consult contemporaneous extra-​religious discourse to make sense of premodern mystical texts. But the ordinary process of contextualizing religious language keeps in place precisely the problematic division I am trying to isolate and expose. We could certainly research scientific or artistic vocabularies in order to color in our understanding of the negative space around religious subjects and place them in a concrete world. Historians are familiar with this work. Often resisting the claims of the mystical author to uniqueness or divine privilege, they situate human agents back within the locale where they reside, tethering soul and world. But premodern mystical texts possess another tether that is more difficult for us to perceive and analyze: the missing link between God and world. What can scientific and aesthetic discourses about the world tell us, not about the ineffable soul but about the ineffable One figured in the mystical text? Does an unacknowledged anthropocentrism impede our ability to perceive the negative space around the human subject? In the words of

28 Recent attempts by cognitive neuroscience to measure “religious experience” only confirm the problem. In practice, such experiments cannot proceed until they denominate what religious experience is, which returns them hermeneutically to the history of mysticism, the McGinn settlement, and the loss of world. See Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-​Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton University Press, 2009).

20  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Catherine Michael Chin: “What did it feel like . . . to live in an early Christian universe?”29 To understand premodern mysticism within our own situation of the lost world, we must work overtime to listen for elements of cosmic order that are the ineluctable coefficients of premodern mystical texts about self and God. To read words about the world as they regard the world itself is ordinary history of science, or natural philosophy, or scientific explanation. To read words about the world as they regard the self, or even the self ’s religious beliefs and practices, is the ordinary method of historical contextualization. For example, what can Hildegard of Bingen’s use of term viriditas (greenness, greening power, verdure, or fecundity) tell us about the state of botany, color theory, paint recipes, biodiversity, or herbal medicine in twelfth-​century Germany, and how can these extra-​religious histories help us to determine her religious meaning? Now let’s turn from world and self to God. To read words about the world as they regard God is sometimes called “natural theology,” especially after the Enlightenment, that is, once the loss of world and the rise of critical negation is underway. Natural theology is a reaction to the loss of world.30 In natural theology, the appeal to nature—​the untethered world—​is a process of negating particular revealed traditions in favor of the most universal; particular names of God are curtailed if they are insufficiently “natural” or universal. But what if we were to rewind before modernity and consider words about the world as they regard God, but before the synthesis of self, world, and God breaks down? What do we call this category of discourse? Such words are not about the interior self; nor are they universally rational “natural theology.” What then do we call words about the world insofar as they name God, sideways so to speak, within mystical texts written before modernity? We hardly have a concept for it. Trying to name this elusive discursive category is an illuminating exercise. There are a few ways to point toward this unexplored domain, though all are awkward, inadequate, or imprecise. For instance, we might contrast anthropocentric perspectives on premodern mysticism versus cosmocentric perspectives or an interest in subjective mysticism versus object-​oriented texts. We might attempt an “ontological turn” that makes room for extinct nonmodern lifeworlds within a nondualist historicism.31 We might call it mysticism of the inside or interiority (one thinks of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “inscape”) versus mysticism of the outside, exteriority, or outscape. Although cosmocentrism, object orientation, and outscape indicate the exteriority of worldhood, they all fail to name the issue of world measure, which is the crux of the problem. In what follows, I will use the 29 Catherine Michael Chin, Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (University of California Press, 2024), 134. 30 See Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2015). 31 See Greg Anderson, The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History (Oxford University Press, 2018), 117–​126.

The Silence of the World  21 term “geo-​metry” as shorthand for “world measure,” intending a sense related to but broader than the customary mathematical meaning of that word. Christian mysticism could be fruitfully understood as another kind of measuring, an alternative topology, or a prequantitative spatiality.32

Two traditions The third problem is the most difficult to perceive: the problem of form. After the Berlin Wall fell, the social and cultural divisions between West and East should have died with it. But for many, the divide has survived up into the present as a fact of everyday life. Berliners call it die Mauer im Kopf, “the wall in the mind,” a psychic barrier as permanent as concrete. The problem of form is a Mauer im Kopf, dividing what can and cannot be said in Christian mysticism, though no such wall exists and no one polices the border. The barrier in this instance is the supposition that there is one universal aesthetic that governs Christian mystical traditions and denotes the “mystical.” In fact, there are two aesthetics, but one has grown so dominant, its kingdom still expanding, that it seems impossible to imagine an alternative. The problem of negation and the problem of world combine to generate the problem of form for the study of Christian mysticism. To overcome the first two problems requires us to excavate this forgotten second aesthetic. Uncovering its origins and familiarizing ourselves with its alternative logic is the principal task of this book. Since early modernity, but with roots in antiquity, “aesthetics” has meant a theory of beauty, in distinction from metaphysics, physics, epistemology, or ethics. More specifically, it is a theory of the appearance, perception, and analysis of beautiful forms, which as far back as Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium begins with divine Beauty itself. For Platonism, as for ancient and medieval Christian traditions, seeing the One means contemplating lesser and greater forms, or that which appears to vision, whether sensibly or intelligibly. Aesthetics in this particular sense is therefore a principled account of the contemplation of form. To the extent that Christian mysticism is an immediate seeing of God, mysticism implies aesthetics, namely, a theory of beholding the ultimate object of vision, or contemplation (θεωρία).33

32 I have offered some examples in “Cataphasis, Visualization, and Mystical Space,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology, eds. Edward Howells and Mark A. McIntosh (Oxford University Press, 2020), 347–​368; and “The Wild Science: Michel de Certeau and Cusan Topology,” in Cusanus Today: Thinking with Nicholas of Cusa Between Philosophy and Theology, ed. David Albertson (The Catholic University of America Press, 2024), 139–​167. 33 See Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

22  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Christian mystics owe many debts to Platonist contemplative traditions: notions of apophasis, eros, ecstasy, withdrawal into the self, the stages of ascent, and even a threefold divine nature. But at the center of classical Platonist contemplation is form (εἶδος). For Plato, form designates an ultimate, visible structure. Ultimate, because it grants being, and so precedes beings and makes possible their individuality and diversity. Visible, because it is fundamentally “seen” in analogy with optical sight, but perceived by intellect rather than eye, in the invisible light of the Good. Structure, because form manifests an elemental degree of definition, some determinate contour (σχῆμα) by which a being can be. Being takes shape (μορφή) as one thing and not another. It emerges into a given field of visibility through this minimal figuration, which allows it to be seen, known, and named (λόγος). Of these three elements of form, the first can be pitted against the other two. What is the ultimate vision? What is the ultimate structure? The search for ever higher and prior first principles drives the contemplative to carve away dross in search of ever more beautiful forms. I would submit, and I hope to demonstrate in what follows, that Christian contemplative traditions transmit two different accounts of form in relation to the divine, and likewise two different approaches to the status of images and the task of negation. These two aesthetics emerge historically in a particular sequence and particular contexts, yet they are also two complementary logical possibilities, two paradigms for explaining the analogical reference of form. They are, first, the aesthetic of absolute Formlessness, and second, the aesthetic of supreme Form; for convenience, let us call them Tradition A and Tradition B. Both have precedents in Greek Platonisms; both have even longer Christian legacies stretching from the fourth century until the decline of Christian mysticism after the seventeenth century. Both are authentic aspects of the diverse heritage of Christian contemplation, and many authors combine both paradigms together in complex ways with differing emphases. Yet as ideal types, Tradition A and Tradition B relate to modernity quite differently. When we read ancient and medieval Christian mystical texts, we should scrutinize their historical distance from us, but we should also assess their relative proximity to Tradition A or Tradition B. In Tradition A, God (or the One, or the First Principle) is formless, without form, or beyond form. To demarcate divine transcendence, God is elevated beyond all mundane forms. God is the source of beauty that grants form, but ultimately, as the form-​giver, possesses no form, for no one gives form to God. God is the formless Absolute, and consequently, all lesser sensible or intelligible forms must be negated if one is to move toward that transcendence. The names of God are provisional signs that point toward the formless but never overcome the distance. This tradition begins with the ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus (d. 270 CE), who engineered the concept of a formless One. From Plotinus, the tradition runs through Christian authors like Augustine of Hippo in the West and Evagrius of Pontus in the East. It was renewed in the Middle Ages, particularly by Meister Eckhart

The Silence of the World  23 and his followers in the Rhineland, and exemplified in apophatic masters like Marguerite Porete or the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing. It is probably the majority tradition among Christian contemplatives. In the Renaissance, Plotinus was rediscovered and translated by Marsilio Ficino, then was celebrated among the Cambridge Platonists and went on to influence Romanticism.34 In Tradition B, God is not absolute Formlessness, but supreme, primal Form, the Form of forms. The One is precisely the exemplary Form, of which the lesser forms are reflections. The lesser mundane forms are not ultimate like the supreme Form, but they share the same visibility and structure. The beautiful forms in the world flow from, participate in, and are impressed by the sovereignty of divine Form. God is a singular Form with a kind of definite identity, an inimitable uniqueness that can be positively known, so long as appropriate apophatic qualifications are kept in place. In this tradition, there conceivably could be names or images of God that withstand negation. Like Tradition A, Tradition B retains apophatic functions, but is more concerned with analogical participation than its sibling. It emerges partially in Augustine and the later Neoplatonist Proclus, flourishes especially in Dionysius, and appears squarely in Boethius and, above all, in the Byzantine iconophiles. Medieval readers of Proclus, Boethius, and Dionysius often make contact with Tradition B in their commentaries. Later mystics, often women, find a way into Tradition B by their own lights, including kataphatic visionaries like Hildegard of Bingen or Julian of Norwich. Since they were excluded from mainstream educational and monastic institutions, they were ironically liberated from the limitations of the discursively predominant Tradition A. To be sure, Tradition B remains a minority tradition compared to Tradition A. To be very clear: Tradition A is not identical with apophasis nor is Tradition B identical with kataphasis. Tradition A and Tradition B both make use of negation, but they deploy it differently. Tradition A elevates apophasis over kataphasis and thus pursues different modes and degrees of iconoclasm, whether discounting the contemplative value of art, commending imageless prayer, or classifying images as didactic illustrations in service of text. There are finally no limits on the application of negation. Images might be instrumentally useful, but eventually must be erased. Generally speaking, we can therefore associate Tradition A with aniconic contemplation. By contrast, Tradition B elevates kataphasis over apophasis and accepts some limits placed upon the application of negation, circumscribing its proper domain. Some images need to be overcome, but ultimately all images, as

34 It is a common but rarely articulated modern assumption: Christian aesthetics reach their fulfillment in German Romanticism; Plotinus influenced the Romantics; therefore, the best currents of Christian antiquity are marked directly by Plotinian aesthetics. For an unironic statement of this view, see Panagiotes Michelis, “Neo-​Platonic Philosophy and Byzantine Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 11, no. 1 (1952): 21–​45. Cf. André Grabar, “Plotin et les origines de l’esthétique médiévale,” Cahiers archéologiques 1 (1945); reprinted in Les origines de l’esthetique médiévale (Éditions Macula, 1992), 29–​87.

24  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation forms, participate in the One’s eternal self-​imaging. Tradition B embraces visual figuration in both sensible and intelligible registers as well as iconological contemplation. Put differently, Tradition A pursues a nondialectical infinite negation that leads to the formlessness of the One, beyond measure.35 But Tradition B pursues a dialectical negation, regulated by measure, which safeguards the One as Form of forms. The problem of form is not that there are two divergent aesthetics. The problem is that Tradition A has so overwhelmed our imaginations that Tradition B seems uncritical, unphilosophical, or else is entirely forgotten. Tradition B runs against the grain of our presuppositions as modern readers of premodern mystical texts. Its very existence challenges the aesthetic monopoly of Tradition A. Without it, Tradition A might seem to be the natural state of the world as such, and not one hermeneutical option among others—​less an element of the Christian past than the platform we use to interpret that past. If Tradition A has become naturalized and Tradition B elided altogether, contemporary readers of premodern Christian mysticism are severely restricted in their ability to interpret mystical texts well. This imbalance between two aesthetics has been exacerbated by the twin problems of negation and world. Since the rise of critique in the nineteenth century and the recovery of apophatic traditions in the twentieth century, we have stumbled into a mutually reinforcing alignment, an accidental collusion, between mathesis universalis and the via negativa. Our post-​Cartesian geometrical imaginary of an infinitely extended grid seems to endow the aesthetics of formlessness with self-​ evidence as if the world naturally wishes for continuous negation to purify it from images and restore its native transparency. Through geometrization, in Husserl’s sense, the world seemingly self-​negates: measurement is tantamount to iconoclasm. If everything can be measured except the soul or God, then the world’s susceptibility to measure is already a negation of divine presence or an admission of divine absence. Tradition A sounds eminently more credible. Its aesthetic of formlessness is far closer to our own tastes in contemporary art, architecture, and design—​what Byung-​Chul Han calls “the signature of the smooth.”36 If the Absolute is formless, its imaginary space is a blank infinity, upon which particular signs can be temporarily inscribed, but which bear an unknowable relation to the horizon. Every mark by definition is arbitrarily imposed by power, and justice requires erasure. We moderns struggle to take kataphatic moments in mystical texts as seriously as we do apophatic thinkers. They come across as elementary, incomplete, or otherwise 35 Denys Turner formulates this precisely if inadvertently. When it comes to metaphors of God, we moderns, he says, cannot settle for less than “pure negativity,” indeed “infinite” negation, and therefore we must abandon the task of measuring our distance from God, because now “no such language of measurement is possible.” Turner, Darkness of God, 42. Infinite negation negates measure first and last: this is a perfect articulation of Tradition A. 36 Byung-​Chul Han, Saving Beauty (Polity Press, 2018).

The Silence of the World  25 deficient; unlike Eckhart or Plotinus, they speak a foreign tongue. Their vivid images seem to beg us to decode them and translate them into sturdier conceptual language. The Mauer im Kopf of Tradition A prevents us from noticing that an entirely different aesthetic might govern kataphatic mysticism. But some Christian mystical authors do indeed inhabit that different world. They embrace a rich visual landscape bursting with forms, not as illegitimate marks but as traces of divine nearness. For them, the visible does not need to be shunned, tempered, or purified, and there are marks that ought not to be erased and inscriptions that perdure. Their figures can be measured without disrupting their iconological reference, for their measures are shared by God and world.

The promise of measure Our unexamined assumptions about negation, world, and form reinforce each other. Together the three problems compromise our ability to encounter ancient and medieval Christian mystical texts on their own terms and through them to see our world differently. Can we hear them when they speak not of a formless Absolute, but of a singularly indelible Form? Can they help us perceive our own limitations, caught as we are within the hegemony of the negative? Is it still possible for us to think kataphasis without mentally subjecting it to apophasis? So long as Tradition A governs all interpretations of Christian mysticism, these tasks will remain out of reach. To understand kataphasis alongside apophasis and to restore the possibility of Tradition B, we need to revisit the consequences of the early modern evacuation of the world through measure, quantity, and space. The modern diremption of the world was prosecuted through the geometrical imagination. Today, if we wish to make contact with the exteriority of Christian mysticism, we will need to follow the same path. We must turn our attention to world measure, not only as a feature of the world but as a figure with theonymic functions. The key to grasping the complex emergence of early Christian contemplation is geometry, of all things, its geometrical or world-​measuring function. What does geometry have to do with Christian contemplation? It turns out quite a lot. Geometry is a gesture of measure, but also an intrinsically visual act. The domain of arithmetic can afford to pass unseen, coded in the grammar of numbers, but the geometer’s work must be visualized by the eye or by the mind. To measure is to see. In geometry, the number graph becomes a line unfolding in space, inscribed as simultaneously as it is thought, chasing the concept into extension. Geometers see things—​points, lines, arcs, and spaces—​whose reality is optically invisible, yet the inner basis of all visible things. But to see is also to measure. Through quantity and magnitude we abstract from the field of what is seen. Measure subtracts one mode or dimension of visibility in order to see something more essential. In this way, measuring always involves negation. Yet in the very process of negating the

26  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation visible, measures inscribe definite figures in space, with marks that need not be erased. In this way, the measures of geometry harmonize negation and inscription. If geometrical measure can do this in the world, perhaps it can mediate the discourses of apophasis and kataphasis in an analogous way and place kataphasis on firmer footing. Before kataphasis and before apophasis, before speech or silence, there stands something prior: the originary clearing of figural space. The primary sense of the “mystical” as τὰ μυστικά or μυστικός is a hiddenness that opens into disclosure. As Carmel Bendon Davis has observed, if kataphasis or positive mysticism is taken as “a filling of the distance between God and the self, and negative mysticism as the emptying of the distance between God and the self, then the filled and the emptied space become the same thing because both enable access to God.”37 In other words, measure holds together negation and affirmation. World measure, geometry, is the larger unsaid encircling the progression from silence to speech and back again, an open space that precedes even the most radical apophasis. This is why the study of Christian mysticism could be advanced by adding a task to its agenda. Alongside investigations of apophatic mystics, somatic experiences, excessive desires, visionary art, and the retrieval of marginalized voices, we need to historicize our own acosmism by scrutinizing the history of the aesthetics of measure in Christian contemplation.38 When and under what conditions did measure in this sense emerge, submerge, or reemerge in ancient Christianity? Once we learn to look for them, geometrical figures are never far from theological forms. They make up a complex, ever-​changing “outscape” of point and line, shape and magnitude, arc and edge, surface and depth, and fold and enclosure. For Christians, Jesus is the “icon of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). As God’s ultimate image (εἰκὼν), his body manifests nothing other than God’s invisibility (τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτοῦ). Descriptions of Jesus in early New Testament witnesses can be curiously formal, focusing on the invisible structures of his body’s exterior contours. Jesus is the “form” (μορφή) of God who nevertheless preserves the “shape” or “figure” (σχῆμα) of human being (Phil 2:6–​8). He is the exact “outline” or “silhouette” (χαρακτήρ) of God, the projected “reflection” (ἀπαύγασμα) of the Unseen (Heb 1:3). Jesus is the precise “measure” (μέτρον) of divine Wisdom (Eph 4:13). Form, shape, outline, figure, and measure: these belong to what we typically 37 Carmel Bendon Davis, Mysticism and Space: Space and Spatiality in the Works of Richard Rolle, “The Cloud of Unknowing” Author, and Julian of Norwich (The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 109. 38 Scholars of mysticism can contribute to current efforts by art historians and historians of science to return geometry to the domain of historicity and expose its cultural contexts, resisting the modern illusion that quantitative measurement is a natural feature of the world delivering self-​evident, universal truths. See, e.g., Rebecca Zorach, The Passionate Triangle (University of Chicago Press, 2011); Andrew Hicks, Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 2017); and Richard J. Oosterhoff, Making Mathematical Culture: University and Print in the Circle of Lefèvre d’Étaples (Oxford University Press, 2018).

The Silence of the World  27 call geometry. The linear configurations remain invisible in order to allow more to be seen. The body of Jesus is the center of Christianity. But that body is more than words spoken by mouth, a hand that can heal or bless, a wounded head, or an open side. The entire body first appears through the invisible lines that mark off its phenomenal limits in the world, its dimensions in space, that make it measurable, tangible, and frangible. Turning to geometry can help us to recover Tradition B. If we track the appearance of measure in early Christian contemplation, we will end up tracing a genealogy of the aesthetics of supreme Form. Over the centuries, a pattern will emerge: when geometrical figures fall under suspicion, Tradition A reigns; when geometrical figures are prized, Tradition B flourishes. Geometry seems to operate as a kind of guardian of the iconicity of form, for its lines hover on the cusp between visibility and invisibility—​the first glimmer of the visible and the last shadow of the a-​visible.39 But what counts as “figure” or “geometry” in the writings of ancient Christian contemplatives? Many of the aesthetic terms featured in those texts have a mathematical past, like “figure” (σχῆμα) or “proportion” (ἀναλογία). At the same time, we would not want to overinflate the geometrical quality of Greek terms prejudicially from the outset. To keep me honest, and to begin with a neutral standard of the “geometrical” in ancient Christian contemplation, let us consult Charles Mugler’s two-​volume Dictionnaire Historique de la Terminologie Géométrique des Grecs.40 Mugler, a mid-​century French historian of mathematics, compiled hundreds of references from the most important writers on ancient geometry: Euclid’s Elements (fl. ca. 300 BCE), Aristarchus of Samos (d. 230 BCE), Archimedes (d. 212 BCE), and Apollonius of Perga (d. ca. 190 BCE), as well as the later commentators Heron of Alexandria (d. ca. 70 CE) and Pappus of Alexandria (fl. ca. 320 CE), plus Proclus’s Commentary on Euclid (d. 485 CE) and Eutocius of Ascalon’s Commentary on Archimedes (d. 540 CE). All things considered, this is a relatively compact tradition for 800 years of geometry. If Mugler includes a term, it ought to count as patently geometrical. Of course, geometrical words were not the province of a discrete discipline in the ancient world, like a separate university department. Ancient geometers reached poetically for the right word, heedless of modern divisions between philosophy, science, religion, and art. Language that precisely measured the world was woven organically throughout the fabric of elite contemplation, whether one was contemplating gods or figures; axioms in proofs or the procession of Intellect; the beauty of lines or Soul’s immanence in Nature, the forms in the mind of God, or the side of a triangle tangent to a helical curve.

39 See Sigrid Weigel, Grammatology of Images: A History of the A-​Visible, trans. Chadwick Truscott Smith (Fordham University Press, 2022). 40 Charles Mugler, Dictionnaire Historique de la Terminologie Géométrique des Grecs (Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1958).

28  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Mugler provides lengthy citations for each of his geometrical terms. As a vade mecum to orient future excursions, let us map the most important terms into different groupings: (1) Some words designate the geometrical domain itself: geometry (γεωμετρία), measure (μέτρον, ἰσόμετρος, σύμμετρος; μετρεῖν, καταμετρεῖν), equality (ἰσότης), continuum (συνέχεια), interval (διάστημα, διάστασις), surface (ἐπιφάνεια), place and space (τόπος, χώρα), breadth and depth (πλάτος, βάθος), quantity and magnitude (πόσος, μέγεθος), and limit and the infinite (πέρας, ἄπειρος). (2) Others are terms for particular figures: point (στίγμα, σημεῖον), line (γραμμή, εὐθεῖα), spiral (ἕλιξ), circle (κύκλος), center and periphery (μέσος, κέντρον; περιφέρεια, περίμετρος), sphere (σφαῖρα), and other polygons. (3) Other geometrical words live in the borderlands of visual aesthetics: writing or inscribing (γραφή; γράφειν, ἀναγράφειν, περιγράφειν), delineating (διορίζειν, ὁρίζειν; ὅρος), containing (περιέχειν), figure (σχῆμα), form (εἶδος), position (θέσις), proportion (ἀναλογία), relation (σχέσις), and definition (λόγος). (4) We might be surprised to encounter other words in Mugler’s Dictionnaire at all, yet there they are: ascending (ἀνάγειν), negating (ἀφαιρεῖν, ἀπόφασις), giving (διδόναι), remaining (μένειν, διαμένειν), and touching (ἅπτεσθαι); or body (σῶμα), order (τάξις), excess (ὑπερβολή, ὑπεροχή), and name (ὄνομα); or the contemplated (θεώρημα), the universal (καθολικός), and the irrational or unspeakable (ἄρρητος). Now consider this: every one of Mugler’s geometry words in my list (4), and most in list (2), appear in the mystical writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, the ancient Christian monk. And every word in list (3), and most in list (1), appear in the polemical works of Byzantine theologians praising the icons of Christ. This vocabulary, this universe of terms, belongs to the archive of ancient Christian contemplation. Yet they are also indubitably geometrical terms, audited and certified by a disinterested historian of science. The boundary between form and figure is more porous than we might think. Today, the term figure has myriad senses that often interact in fruitful ambiguity. Erich Auerbach’s classic essay, “Figura,” recounts the word’s origins in Varro and Cicero, its transformation in the Christian prophetic imagination, and its importance for medieval art.41 Since most of my sources are ancient and Greek, the first

41 Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Meridian, 1959), especially 11–​27. See more recently Bertrand Gervais and Audrey Lemieux, eds., Perspectives croisées sur la figure (Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2012); and Niklaus Largier, Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses (Stanford University Press, 2022).

The Silence of the World  29 sense is most relevant here (although the iconophiles discuss εἰκών as prophetic figuration). Auerbach notes that the original Latin sense of figura had to cover a range of Greek words: μορφή, εἶδος, σχῆμα, and τύπος. But in light of Plato and Aristotle, forma usually translated εἶδος and μορφή, while figura translated σχῆμα. Only later did the architectural sense (a blueprint or sketch), linguistic sense (figure of speech), and mathematical sense (geometrical shape) of figura arise. In Varro’s earliest usage, forma and figura enjoyed an intriguing spatial relationship, as Auerbach explains. In its infancy, forma denoted a “hollow mold,” while figura named the “plastic shape that issues from it.”42 In other words, from the very beginning, figure has been the inner space or interiority of form, the obverse side of the same space. Jean-​François Lyotard echoes Varro when he defines “figure” as an indeterminable mediation between text and image, discourse and art, or writing and drawing. For Lyotard, the figure challenges the autarchy of discourse: it is “a spatial manifestation that linguistic space cannot incorporate without being shaken, an exteriority it cannot interiorize as signification. . . . The figure is both without and within.”43 Between “letter” and “line,” between textual space and figural space, there lies nonspace, an “ontological rift.” In this situation, unfolding a line into existence occasions something greater than art; it is an event of world measure. “Drawing’s function consists in making sensory space speak in geometric figures,” writes Lyotard.44 What “speaks” in the space of sensation, beyond the silence of unsaying, beyond the muteness of the world, is the figure. The ancient Christians we are about to read would not disagree.

42 Auerbach, “Figura,” 13. 43 Jean-​François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 6–​7. 44 Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 205–​207, 218 (emphasis in original).

2

Guarding the One Contemplation and negation When Christians speak of seeing God, they mean visually perceiving the invisible God by means of a medium their eyes can look upon: an image of the face of Jesus, perhaps an icon; the poor and suffering around them; the Eucharistic host; a surprising act of mercy or solidarity; or perhaps simply the splendor of the created world. On occasion, they might also mean direct, unmediated appearances of Jesus or Mary in what we call mystical visions. When Christians speak of contemplating God, they might well have in mind one of these concrete visual media, but they probably also include another tier of visual encounters that are wholly interior, mental, or intellectual—​that is, empirically imperceptible to the naked eye. Contemplation in this sense designates a mode of visual experience other than ocular perception. This broader sense of contemplation is absolutely central to Christian mysticism, theological reflection, and arguably Christian experience in general. And yet for centuries, whenever Christians have spoken of contemplating God, they have most often described those intimate experiences in a language borrowed from a single non-​Christian philosopher named Plotinus. Plotinus was born in 205 CE in Upper Egypt. At the age of twenty-​eight, he moved to the intellectual hub of Alexandria to study philosophy, auditing several teachers before settling on Ammonius Saccas. After eleven years, he joined a military expedition eastward, hoping to study Persian and Indian thought, but when it failed, he escaped to Antioch. At that point, now forty years old, he moved to Rome and began to teach, where he remained until his death in 270 CE. Plotinus collected, disassembled, and reconstructed the most tantalizing passages of Plato’s dialogues—​and countless other fragments, practices, and images—​into a comprehensive system of contemplation (θεωρία). The structure of the Plotinian cosmos emerges from the different planes of reality that contemplatives encounter in meditation or prayer: passing from the visible realm of Nature (φύσις), into the interior Soul (ψυχή), then higher into the Intellect (νοῦς), and only then, after years of struggle, hopefully catching a glimpse of the divine One (τὸ ἕν) and possibly being drawn into total fusion with it. Porphyry tells us that Plotinus experienced mystical union with the One on four occasions. Christian contemplation is by no means synonymous with Plotinian contemplation, but the influence of this Roman ascetic so rapidly dominated the Christian imagination—​doubly channeled through the Cappadocian Fathers in the East The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0003

Guarding the One  31 and Augustine in the West, then swiftly absorbed into the bloodstream of early Christian ascetical theology, aesthetics, and theonymics—​that by now it takes considerable effort even to imagine an alternative. In Plotinian contemplation, the formlessness of the absolute One is self-​evident. But despite the future it would enjoy there, that founding principle developed outside of Christianity and originally had nothing to do with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We cannot understand Christian traditions of contemplation, visualization, and mysticism without understanding their deep roots in Plotinus—​even if he is not a “mystic” himself.1 But in the same way, we cannot understand Plotinus as a contemplative without taking stock of his own peculiar influences, his interventions in Platonist traditions, and the reasons for his judgments. In this chapter, I delve into the roots of Tradition A by taking a careful look at his major writings. The story Plotinus tells of the soul’s lonely ascent to the One enticed not only the early Christians but also Jewish and Islamic mystics, and later Florentine humanists, Cambridge Romantics, and German Idealists.2 To all of these descendants, Plotinus transmitted his signature dialectic. On the one hand, Plotinian philosophy is nothing other than the principles of a contemplative practice, ordered specifically toward techniques of visualization. His system is a method for teaching the blind how to see. On the other hand, the visible field he wishes to show us is a higher, optically invisible realm. What is truly visible can only be seen by the mind on its journey from Nature to Soul to Intellect to the One. To contemplate the One is to refocus the gaze again and again from superficial sights toward inner vision, as the mind’s eye peers into greater and greater depths. Everything depends on where I allow my vision to rest, and therefore what matters is what I choose to unsee along the way. The foundation of Plotinian contemplation is this aniconism. No image, figure, or form suffices as a destination, because in truth the absolute One is formless. To see it, one must gaze not through some images but eventually through every image, rendering every figure transparent. Michael Sells describes Plotinian negation as an “infinite regress in which every reference recedes beyond the name that would designate it. Language becomes indefinite and open-​ended. No closure is reached. Each saying demands a further unsaying.”3 To get a feel for Plotinian aniconism, the best place to begin is “On Beauty” (Ennead I.6 [1]‌), the first of fifty-​four essays that he sent to his student Porphyry. In this luminous exploration of contemplative experience, Plotinus searches for the 1 For a sober assessment of Plotinus as mystic, see John Bussanich, “Plotinian Mysticism in Theoretical and Comparative Perspective,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71, no. 3 (1997): 339–​365. 2 See Stephen Gersh, ed., Plotinus’ Legacy: The Transformation of Platonism from the Renaissance to the Modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 2021). 3 Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 15. Cf. Nicholas Banner, Philosophic Silence and the “One” in Plotinus (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 178: “[A]‌n overarching principle of Plotinian reading is that any kataphatic assertion about the One will be in some way negated or modified, resulting in irreducible indeterminacy of the object of discourse.”

32 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation invisible source of visible splendor.4 Where does beauty come from? Everything we desire to see summons us on a pilgrimage back to our origins. I see a face I cannot turn away from; I yearn for a lover’s body; a painting unwontedly arrests my gaze. Beauty cannot flow from the physical masses themselves—​the skin, hair, or brush strokes—​but from something looming within and emerging through them. Nor can it stem from pleasing proportions (συμμετρία), as if harmonious parts were calculable by number (ἀριθμός) or magnitude (μέγεθος) (I.6.1). Higher beauties, like acts of heroic virtue, cannot be measured at all. Plotinus decides that beauty must be a kind of crack in the fabric of the physical world through which the light of transcendence can shine. Because it escapes our immediate sight, our gaze chases after it beyond the merely visible. What I see optically draws me toward an invisible reality perceived by my intellect alone, a hidden scaffolding of being, the glint of which touches my eyes and beckons me. Plotinus calls this objective but invisible cosmic structure “form” (εἶδος). Transcendent form is the source of all that is “seen” in the intellect’s deeper sight. In experiences of beauty, these threads of intelligible form leave trails for contemplatives to follow back to the One. What is the fundamental unit of visual order among all the “images and shadows” (εἴδωλα καὶ σκιαί) perceived by the eye or the mind (I.6.3)? Plotinus uses the term μορφή to denote the minimal degree of form that allows us to recognize divine Beauty. Form gathers elements into unities through its colligative power (λόγος) that orders individuals into wholes and expresses them with a definite shape (μορφή) (I.6.2). The challenge comes in navigating that middle realm between here and there, in the mediating zones of lesser and higher forms. Contemplatives need to know where not to look in their discipline of un-​seeing. So Plotinus takes care to list all of the inadequate, penultimate manifestations of form. When Plotinus interviews experts on contemplation, those most passionate about the invisible, he asks what they feel when they see true inner beauty. They reply that it is “not shape or color or any size, but soul, without color itself and possessing a moral order without color” (I.6.5). To see form, he concludes, we must first subtract figure (σχῆμα), magnitude (μέγεθος), and color (χρῶμα).5 In the steep climb to the One, one must cast away all images and, like initiates in Greek mystery religions who strip off all 4 I use the text and translation of A. H. Armstrong in the Loeb edition, Plotinus, 7 vols. (Harvard University Press, 1966–​1988), which reproduces the text of the editio minor of Paul Henry and Hans-​ Rudolf Schwyzer, Plotini Opera, 3 vols. (Clarendon Press, 1964–​1982). I have also consulted the new translation by Lloyd Gerson et al., Plotinus: The Enneads (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and cite it on occasion. I provide the chronological number of a given Ennead in initial citations (e.g., Ennead I.6 [1]‌). 5 The triad of μέγεθος, σχῆμα, and χρῶμα has long roots in Philo, Alcinous, Maximus of Tyre, Justin, Origen, and Clement, suggesting preexisting Neopythagorean traditions drawing on Phaedrus 247C: “ἡ γὰρ ἀχρώματός τε καὶ ἀσχημάτιστος καὶ ἀναφὴς οὐσία.” Cf. Ennead V.8[31].2. See further John Whittaker, “Neopythagoreanism and Negative Theology,” Symbolae Osloenses 44, no. 1 (1969): 115–​117.

Guarding the One  33 of their clothing, endure the cleansing ablutions fully naked (I.6.7). The contemplative should retreat from merely ocular seeing (ὄψιν ὀμμάτων) and flee all “images, traces, and shadows” as if they were the deadly reflections of Narcissus. “Do not look,” he commands, but “awaken to a different seeing” (ὄψιν ἄλλην) (I.6.8). Cleanse yourself of attachments and “cut away excess” (ἀφαίρει) like a sculptor polishing marble (I.6.9). Those who succeed, Plotinus promises, will encounter a “true light.” The integrated mind will grow “deiform” (θεοειδής) and encounter “sight itself ” (I.6.9).6 He lists six negative qualities of that deiform light. It is “not measured by dimensions” (μεγέθει μεμετρημένον), “not bounded by shape” (σχήματι . . . περιγραφέν), and “not expanded by size by unboundedness” (εἰς μέγεθος δι᾿ ἀπειρίας). Rather, it is “everywhere unmeasured” (ἀμέτρητον πανταχοῦ), greater than every measure, and more than every quantity (I.6.9). In sum, the final shadows to leave aside are measure (μέτρον), figure (σχῆμα), magnitude (μέγεθος), and quantity (ποσόν). The final clothing to strip off is geometrical form; since it comes last, it must have been the closest and most intimate layer. Once fully naked, the intellect can behold the One: “one sees with one’s self alone That alone [αὐτῷ μόνῳ αὐτὸ μόνον], simple, single and pure” (I.6.7).7 Let us take a moment to register just how surprising this destination is. Plotinus’s grand vision of mystical ascent, in its original and most influential formulation, is haunted by the unsettling allure of geometry, of all things. Geometrical figures are his last dragons to slay before resting alone with the Alone. Yet once one knows to listen for it, it is difficult to miss this consistent Plotinian anxiety regarding quantity and measurement. When he describes contemplating the One, he warns his readers not to confuse form with its simulacra. True form is εἶδος. Its simulacra are shape (μορφή), figure (σχῆμα), extension (μέγεθος), and quantitative measurement (μέτρον or ποσόν). All of the most unfavorable impostors happen to be geometrical. “Let no one enter who cannot geometrize” was the mantra of Plato’s old Academy. Plotinus flips it on its head: None may enter who still geometrize!8 What does geometry mean for Plotinus? It is easy to find different emphases in different Enneads. Sometimes in a Pythagorean mode he traces geometrical figures back to the inner life of Intellect itself, giving them a transcendent origin. Just as Intellect’s beauty blooms into Quality (ποιόν), its activity generates primordial Magnitude (μέγεθος). Out of quality and magnitude arises the possibility 6 Two later accounts of seeing the true light are Enneads V.3[49].8 and V.5[32].7–​8. 7 Cf. Ennead VI.9[9]‌.11, where the contemplative leaves behind all things to “escape in solitude to the solitary” (φυγὴ μόνου πρὸς μόνον). 8 See H. D. Saffrey, “AGEOMETRETOS MEDEIS EISITO, une inscription légendaire,” Revue des Études Grecques 81 (1968): 67–​87. Carabine notes that although Plotinus revered Plato, he insisted on two negations the elder philosopher never did: the One is “unmeasured” and the One is “uncircumscribed.” Carabine, The Unknown God, 113, 117–​119.

34 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation of figuration (σχῆμα). With figure comes difference, and with difference, number (ἀριθμός) and extensive quanta (ποσόν), and from these, we begin to see circles, squares, and polygons (VI.2[43].21). Elsewhere, Plotinus defines number and magnitude as cosmic rhythms of movement and rest. The number unit (μονάς) is essentially a restraint (ἐποχή) placed upon the procession of magnitude (VI.2.13).9 On other occasions, Plotinus abstains from metaphysical derivations and takes a more pragmatic approach. Every line (γραμμή) is limited by a point; a straight line is a specified quantity (ποσόν) (VI.3.14). When analyzing Aristotle’s Categories in Ennead VI.1 [42], Plotinus rejects the distinction between continuous and discontinuous measure, which, just a century before, Nicomachus had raised to a Neopythagorean ontological principle.10 Instead, Plotinus begins by asking: what does it mean to measure (μέτρον)?11 Number, magnitude, space, and time are all measurable quanta (ποσόν). Numbers are the first quanta because they are measures, and measures have two characteristics. First, the unit of measure “marks off ” (ὁρίζει) the measured thing, and as it moves from one unit to the next, number “discloses” the quantity. Second, measure is indifferent to quality or state, such that quanta resemble each other more than the things they measure (VI.1.4). In these varying approaches to geometry, we witness the same tension that appeared in the first Ennead, “On Beauty.” Plotinus explores geometrical figures in detail since they undoubtedly leave an important trace of form (εἶδος) he wishes to track. But ultimately, they are intermediate, practical means, ladders to be kicked away. The absolute One is pure formlessness, not only a-​morphic (ἄμορφον, without μορφή) but also, as we shall see, an-​eidetic (ἀνείδεον, without εἶδος). Visible figures guide the contemplative toward the formless One, but ultimately the One is beyond figure and form as much as beyond being. Hence it seems that geometry both fascinates and disquiets Plotinus. Standing between us and the One, the abstract geometrical line is the final sacrifice, for the last border that guards the One is the line itself. To find out why geometry plays this unusual role in Plotinian contemplation, we have to understand his relationship to contemporary Neopythagoreanism.

9 On precedents for Plotinian number theory, see further Aphrodite Alexandrakis, “Neopythagoreanizing Influences on Plotinus’ Mystical Notion of Numbers,” Philosophical Inquiry 20, no. 1–​2 (1998): 101–​110; and Svetla Slaveva-​Griffin, Plotinus on Number (Oxford University Press, 2009), 42–​53. 10 See Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introductio arithmetica, I.2.4–​I.3.6, ed. Richard Gottfried Hoche (Teubner, 1866), 4–​8; Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic, trans. Martin Luther D’Ooge, Frank E. Robbins, and Louis C. Karpinski (Macmillan, 1926), 183–​186. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1020a7–​1020a15. On Nicomachus’s distinction, see Linda M. Napolitano Valditara, Le idee, i numeri, l’ordine: La dottrina della mathesis universalis dall’A cademia antica al neoplatonismo (Bibliopolis, 1988), 413–​434. 11 For Moderatus quantity (ποσότης) is not only the contrary of the First Principle (ἑνιαῖος λόγος), but the basis of matter. See Christian Tornau, “Die Prinzipienlehre des Moderatos von Gades,” Rheinisches Museum 143 (2000): 206–​208.

Guarding the One  35

The Neopythagorean matrix The synthesis wrought by Plotinus has been celebrated for its innovations. Plotinus applies apophatic negation as a tool to focus contemplation on the ineffable One, as it is manifested in the three levels of being. We now know that none of these components originated with Plotinus and that all of them are indebted to Middle Platonist traditions in the three centuries prior, particularly the Neopythagorean revival. In hindsight, Plotinus appears less to have designed a novel Platonism than to have reassembled some ready-​to-​hand notions of his contemporaries—​ less the architect of Neoplatonism than the general contractor. “The Enneads were not the starting-​point of Neoplatonism,” writes E. R. Dodds, “but its intellectual culmination.”12 Over the last half-​century, Plotinus’s intellectual debts have been retabulated. Insights long accounted to him have been transferred to lesser-​ known Neopythagoreans like Eudorus of Alexandria (fl. ca. 50 BCE), Moderatus of Gades (fl. ca. 50 CE), Nicomachus of Gerasa (ca. 70–​150 CE), or other Middle Platonists influenced by them. Such discoveries help us understand how Plotinus strove to distinguish himself from Neopythagorean henology. He did not craft his theology of the absolute One, or ascent through negation, or triplex mediation ex nihilo. Rather, he altered Middle Platonist and Neopythagorean doctrines, cutting this and combining that as he harmonized them into his new synthesis. This means that when we read Plotinus, we should listen confidently for moments of deliberate dissonance with Neopythagoreanism, where the conductor might hush a particular strain of number theory or amplify the thunderous refrain of the One. His philosophy of the One was permanently marked by that encounter, and under sufficient scrutiny the Neopythagorean trace always returns. According to Sarah Rappe, “a glance at any number of contemporaneous Pythagoreanizing texts easily settles the issue of Plotinus’s reliance on Pythagoreanism.”13 In his biography, Porphyry calls Plotinus the greatest exponent of both Platonist and Pythagorean principles and lists Moderatus and Numenius as his teacher’s most important predecessors (VP, 20–​21). We know that, much like the Gnostic Christians in his circle, Plotinus made use of Neopythagorean commentaries as guides to reading Plato. The complex history of these exchanges is still being written, and I can only survey its dimensions here.14 But one of the most 12 E. R. Dodds, “The Parmenides of Plato and the Origin of the Neoplatonic One,” Classical Quarterly 22, no. 3–​4 (1928): 140. Cf. Harold Tarrant, Thrasyllan Platonism (Cornell University Press, 1993), 177: “Plotinus’ great influence spring less from any new approach to Platonic exegesis than from his ability to make exegesis of an established sort intimately relevant to his own personal experience of Platonic life.” 13 Sara Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism: Non-​Discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus and Damascius (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 126. 14 A valuable overview of the via negativa and via eminentiae in this period can be found in Banner, Philosophic Silence, 147–​175. For a fuller treatment, see Mauro Bonazzi, Platonism: A Concise History from the Early Academy to Late Antiquity, trans. Sergio Knipe (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

36 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation important contexts for approaching Plotinus—​not only his number theory but his henology as such—​is what Svetla Slaveva-​Griffin calls the “Neopythagorean underground.”15 Let us briefly note just three hidden influences: Alcinous on negation, Moderatus and Eudorus on the One, and the Gnostic Platonists on quantity. To begin with, Plotinus does not invent apophatic negation himself but echoes the method of Alcinous, the author of a Middle Platonist scholastic manual ca. 150 CE.16 Alcinous distinguishes three methods for Platonist theologies of the One. First, one can reason analogically about the One by following effects backward to causes. For example, in the Republic, light bears witness to the sun, just as all beings bear witness to the Good. Second, moving in the opposite direction, we can follow our desires forward until they converge in the “great sea of Beauty” promised by Diotima in the Symposium.17 Alcinous’s third option is negative and mathematical. Rather than predicating divine attributes, we can name God by way of “removal” (ἀφαίρεσις) through a geometrical method: “by abstraction of these attributes, just as we form the conception of a point by abstraction from sensible phenomena, conceiving first a surface, then a line, and finally a point.”18 Note that Alcinous does not commend a formal negation that undoes predication; rather, his negative henology is constrained to geometrical space, subtracting successive dimensions until one arrives at the invisible point. That is, geometry is a necessary model for henology: its spatial logic compels contemplatives to take up the task of negation in the first place. The sources of Alcinous’s geometrical ἀφαίρεσις are contested. Dodds suggests a Neopythagorean source based on Plato’s Parmenides.19 H. A. Wolfson finds similar notions in Simplicius’s lost commentary on Euclid’s Elements four centuries later, but also in Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa.20 But John Whittaker has found the same movement from surface to point in Nicomachus of Gerasa, Iamblichus, and other Neopythagoreans, concluding that Alcinous’s 15 Slaveva-​Griffin, Plotinus on Number, 42. Cf. Hans Joachim Krämer, Der Ursprung der Geistmetaphysik: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Platonismus zwischen Platon und Plotin (Schippers, 1964), 309: “Neither the Platonic dialogues, nor the polemical arguments of the Aristotelian Pragmateia suffice to explain the Plotinian number doctrine. An undiscovered remainder endures, which must belong to another current of tradition flowing underground. But in this tradition, as found in Philo, Seneca, Nicomachus, Hierocles, the Valentinians, and finally the Old Academy itself—​what Aristotle precisely lacks—​numbers and divine thinking are originally thought together.” 16 See John Whittaker, “Platonic Philosophy in the Early Centuries of the Empire,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt II, Vol. 36:1, eds. Wolfgang Haase and Hildegard Temporini (De Gruyter, 1987), 81–​123. Cf. Alcinous. Didaskalikos: Enseignement des doctrines de Platon, ed. John Whittaker (Belles Lettres, 1990); trans. by John Dillon in The Handbook of Platonism (Clarendon Press, 1993). Until Whittaker, Didaskalikos had been attributed to Albinus. 17 H. A. Wolfson, “Albinus and Plotinus on Divine Attributes,” Harvard Theological Review 45, no. 2 (1952): 117–​126. 18 “ὅπως καὶ σημεῖον ἐνοήσαμεν κατὰ ἀφαίρεσιν ἀπὸ τοῦ αἰσθητοῦ, ἐπιφάνειαν νοήσαντες, εἶτα γραμμήν, καὶ τελευταῖον τὸ σημεῖον.” Αlcinous, Didaskalikos, 10.5; trans. Dillon, 18. 19 See E. R. Dodds, Proclus: The Elements of Theology (Clarendon Press, 1933), 312. Cf. R. E. Witt, Albinus and the History of Middle Platonism (Cambridge University Press, 1937), 114–​144. 20 See H. A. Wolfson, “Negative Attributes in the Church Fathers and the Gnostic Basilides,” Harvard Theological Review 50, no. 2 (1957): 145–​156.

Guarding the One  37 “mathematical illustration of the via negationis” is most likely a “Middle Platonic adaptation of Neopythagorean material.”21 Negative theology does not begin with Neoplatonism, but is first a “feature of Neopythagoreanism.”22 This historical lineage reveals something important about Plotinus’s henological use of negation: he kept the Neopythagorean idea yet discarded the geometrical template it was based upon. By doing so he not only concealed his sources but, more importantly, removed the constraints that the geometrical model had placed upon apophatic negation. Plotinus uses ἀφαίρεσις in comparable ways to mark the negative path to the One, beginning with Ennead I.6 above.23 In the process of “removing” the visual field, the eyes remain fixed on geometrical figures, both as target and as obstacle. Raoul Mortley describes Plotinian apophasis as a dynamic, subtractive “abstraction” (ἀφαίρεσις). “The negation of the concept ‘line’ simply results in ‘non-​line,’ ” he explains, “but the abstraction results in ‘point.’ ”24 But whereas for Alcinous, negation stopped at the figure of the point (σημεῖον), retaining geometrical figuration, for Plotinus, as we will see, negation dissolves the spatial field itself, removing every figure until God is amorphic and aneidetic. As we just saw in Ennead I.6, Plotinus requires the negation of μέγεθος and σχῆμα. By contrast, Alcinous specifically names the Good as the perfectly proportioned “Figure” (σχῆμα φύσει τέλεόν ἐστι καὶ σύμμετρον).25 Plotinus learns not only apophasis from the Neopythagoreans but also the very idea of an ineffable One. A century ago, Dodds showed that Plotinus’s signature doctrine of the One was not originally his, but was invented by Moderatus of Gades in his Parmenides interpretation. Heinrich Dörrie adds that “one sees more clearly today than before the extent to which Plotinus was indebted to his predecessors,” but suggests that Plotinus followed Eudorus, not Moderatus, and indeed “picked up right where Eudorus left off.”26 Whether Moderatus and Eudorus, both believed that Plato revealed several divine “Ones,” and they sought to harmonize 21 Whittaker, “Neopythagoreanism and Negative Theology,” 110–​115. 22 John Whittaker, “Neopythagoreanism and the Transcendent Absolute,” Symbolae Osloenses 48, no. 1 (1973): 79. 23 See Enneads VI.7[38].36, V.3.14, and VI.8[39].11. According to Whittaker, Alcinous does not use ἀφαίρεσις as “negation” in the Plotinian apophatic sense, but only as a formal model for thinking God through abstraction. But if abstraction is attained by negating geometrical space, as in Alcinous’s example, this seems a distinction without a difference. See Whittaker, “Neopythagoreanism and Negative Theology,” 123–​125. On Plotinus’s other debts to Alcinous, see Cristina D’Ancona Costa, “Separation and the Forms: A Plotinian Approach,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71, no. 3 (1997): 367–​403. 24 See Raoul Mortley, “Negative Theology and Abstraction in Plotinus,” American Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 4 (1975): 376. Cf. however Banner, Philosophic Silence, 213–​228. 25 Whittaker, “Neopythagoreanism and Negative Theology,” 115–​117. 26 Heinrich Dörrie, “Die Erneuerung des Platonismus im Ersten Jahrhundert vor Christus,” in Platonica Minora (Wilhelm Fink, 1976), 164, 161. On Eudorus’s negative henology, see Jaap Mansfeld, “Compatible Alternatives: Middle Platonist Theology and the Xenophanes Reception,” in Knowledge of God in the Graeco-​Roman World, ed. Roelof Van den Broek, Tjitza Baarda, and Jaap Mansfeld (Brill, 1988), 96–​103.

38 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation the Good of the Republic with the One of the Parmenides.27 If Alcinous’s model was geometrical, theirs was arithmetical. By separating the unit (μονάς) from the continuum of numbers, they found a paradigm for thinking separation of the One (τὸ ἕν) from all beings. The Middle Platonists had wanted to challenge Aristotle’s doctrine of νοῦς, but could not agree about the priority of One, Being, and Intellect.28 Moderatus’s Neopythagorean solution was not to elevate the One beyond Logos but to unify them such that the One was the unifying Form of all intelligible forms. So while Eudorus envisioned a supreme One beyond the monad and dyad, Moderatus postulated a threefold One, whose unfolding generated the quantity (ποσότης) that structures the cosmos. The highest One is beyond being; the second One contains the Forms; the third One is the world-​soul. In another fragment, Moderatus suggests that the One is identical to the Logos and generates ποσότης directly out of itself.29 A first principle that thinks and measures in this way is impossible to reconcile with the formless One of Plotinus. But within a Neopythagorean cosmos, Christian Tornau explains, “the highest One of Moderatus did indeed transcend being, but not intellect; rather it was itself the highest form of intellectual knowing.”30 In effect, Plotinus accepts the threefold One of Moderatus but decides to transfer its Logos function to the second hypostasis of Intellect in order to purify the One as formless. Against the backdrop of Middle Platonism, we can guess that Plotinus’s choice comes with a specific consequence: destabilizing the position of ποσότης in the hierarchy of being. A third region of Neopythagorean influence on Plotinus is still being reconstructed, beginning from the Nag Hammadi manuscripts discovered in 1945 that add an entirely new continent to our map of the ancient philosophical landscape. Monistic Gnostic philosophers like Valentinus or Basilides, or anonymous texts like the Tripartite Tractate or Apocryphon of John, echo the Neopythagoreans as much as contemporary Middle Platonists. The Valentinian theology of the Tripartite Tractate, for example, is directly influenced by Neopythagorean geometry. Moderatus defined Quantity as ἄμορφον, alluding to the shapeless Receptacle (χώρα) in Timaeus; in the Valentinian myth, Sophia is described as ἄμορφον. Moderatus taught that Quantity arises when the dyadic principle “extends” (ἐκτείνειν) into unlimited multitude; likewise, Sophia “extends” herself into an infinite flow out of desire for the lost Father principle. For Moderatus, Limit (πέρας) imposes a constraint on the Unlimited (ἄπειρον) in order to

27 See John M. Rist, “The Neoplatonic One and Plato’s Parmenides,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 93 (1962): 397–​401; and John Whittaker, “EPEKEINA NOU KAI OUSIAS,” Vigiliae Christianae 23, no. 2 (1969): 97. 28 Whittaker, “EPEKEINA NOU KAI OUSIAS,” 104. 29 Tornau, “Prinzipienlehre,” 216–​219. On Moderatus, see Tarrant, Thrasyllan Platonism, 150–​176; and John M. Dillon, The Middle Platonists (Cornell University Press, 1996), 347–​349. 30 Tornau, “Prinzipienlehre,” 218.

Guarding the One  39 generate number; for the Valentinians, Limit keeps Sophia far from the divine Pleroma and mutates into a Christ-​Spirit principle of form.31 Plotinus tells a similar myth about the “audacity” (τόλμα) of the child-​souls who seized independence from their Father, as an allegory of the emergence of magnitudes (μεγέθη) out of the One (V.1[10].1–​5). Four of the eleven Nag Hammadi treatises stand particularly close to Plotinus’s own contemplative orientation, ontological structures, and distinctive metaphors: Zostrianos, Allogenes, the Three Steles of Seth, and Marsanes. John D. Turner collects these into a philosophical quartet he calls the “Platonizing Sethian treatises” because they eschew the apocalyptic salvation histories, speculative Genesis exegeses, tragic cosmogonies, and female divinities common to other Gnostic narratives. Instead, they focus on the multistaged, ecstatic ascent of contemplative heroes associated in different ways with Adam’s son Seth, who first pass through a realm of disembodied souls (aeonic beings); then reach an eternal pure intellect (First Thought, or the Aeon of Barbelo) and its three sub-​emanations; and finally arrive at the Triple Powered Spirit or transcendent One.32 The rough similarities to Plotinus’s map of ascent from Nature to Soul to Intellect to the One are immediately apparent. This is no accident: Porphyry reports that during the years he studied with Plotinus in Rome, several Christian “dissenters” (αἱρετικοὶ) troubled his teacher’s seminars with their unusual ontological hierarchies (VP 16). Their works, named Zostrianos and Allogenes, are the same, or quite similar redactions of, treatises that Plotinus attacked in Ennead II.9 [33] as the finale to his Großschrift (discussed below). Like Plotinus, these third-​century triadic henologies draw from Middle Platonist commentaries on Parmenides and Timaeus and were influenced by Neopythagoreans—​precisely the same sources, same decades, and same philosophical circle in which Plotinus was crafting his own synthesis.33 Turner concludes: “One would expect to find the most likely sources of Zostrianos’s philosophical conceptuality in pre-​Plotinian sources such as the Neopythagorean technical arithmetical treatises of Nicomachus and Theon, the epitome of [Alcinous], and the theological doxographies of Moderatus . . . .”34 The treatise in which 31 Einar Thomassen, “The Derivation of Matter in Monistic Gnosticism,” in Gnosticism and Later Platonism: Themes, Figures, and Texts, eds. John D. Turner and Ruth Majercik (Society of Biblical Literature, 2000), 1–​17. See further Einar Thomassen, The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the “Valentinians” (Brill, 2006), 269–​294. 32 John D. Turner, “Victorinus, Parmenides Commentaries, and the Platonizing Sethian Treatises,” in Platonisms: Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern, eds. Kevin Corrigan and John D. Turner (Brill, 2007), 57–​64. On Plotinus’s encounters with Zostrianos and Allogenes, see also John D. Turner, Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition (Peeters, 2001), 709–​723. 33 On the turn in Gnostic Platonism from Genesis to Timaeus, see John D. Turner, “The Gnostic Sethians and Middle Platonism: Interpretations of the Timaeus and the Parmenides,” Vigiliae Christianae 60, no. 1 (2006): 9–​24. 34 John D. Turner, “The Setting of the Platonizing Sethian Texts in Middle Platonism,” in Gnosticism and Later Platonism, 201.

40 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Plotinus first articulates his doctrine of formlessness (Ennead V.5) was composed during his most intense rejection of Neopythagoreanizing Sethian Platonists. The likelihood of Neopythagorean influence on Plotinus becomes all the more certain once we recognize that similar apophatic and henological currents coursed through Sethian Platonizing milieux as well. The anonymous Neopythagorean treatise called the Turin Commentary on the Parmenides, once ascribed to Porphyry, is now considered to predate Plotinus and his Sethian rivals alike.35 The Turin Commentary posits two Ones: a transcendent unknown One of pure being (τὸ εἶναι) and a second One-​Being of determinate being (τὸ ὄν), linked by an intermediate procession of Intellect as Life. Here is a henology resonant both with Plotinus and with Zostrianos and Allogenes, yet one that does not rely on the difference of ἀνείδεον but rather elides the mediation of εἶδος altogether. Similarly, the four Sethian treatises engage apophatic strategies to elevate the supreme Spirit beyond ordinary knowledge, using the same methods found in Alcinous. The oldest Gnostic author we know by name, Basilides, taught that the One was “not even ineffable,” an apparent dig at the Hebrew tetragrammaton as an ineffable name for the biblical God.36 Turner has shown that Allogenes, the Apocryphon of John, and Marius Victorinus’s Adversus Arium reproduce identical, lengthy lists of denials. The One is ineffable, immeasurable, neither limited nor unlimited, neither large nor small, neither eternal nor temporal, and so on. Although the Sethian treatise frequently uses dialectical negations, only the parallels in Marius Victorinus describe the One as entirely without form.37 While the Sethian Platonists use highly developed forms of apophasis before Plotinus and draw upon similar Neopythagorean inspiration, they deploy negation in different ways. According to Curtis Hancock, both sides favor “exclusive” negation of the highest principle, but where the Gnostics distribute negation across all hypostases and planes of being, Plotinus directs all of his negation toward the One alone.38 Dylan Burns suggests that the “apophatic strategies” of Allogenes—​dialectical oppositions like “shapeless shape” or “formless form”—​ ­resemble Iamblichus and Proclus even more than Plotinus.39 Michael Williams urges caution lest we import Plotinian models of negation into texts like Zostrianos

35 See Gerald Bechtle, “The Question of Being and the Dating of the Anonymous Parmenides Commentary,” Ancient Philosophy 20, no. 2 (2000): 393–​414; and Kevin Corrigan, “Platonism and Gnosticism: The Anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides: Middle or Neoplatonic?” in Gnosticism and Later Platonism, 141–​177. For a compact summary of the controversies over this source, see Turner, “Setting of the Platonizing Sethian Texts,” 213–​214. 36 See Montserrat Jufresa, “Basilides, a Path to Plotinus,” Vigiliae Christianae 35, no. 1 (1981): 1–​15. 37 Turner, “Victorinus, Parmenides Commentaries,” 70–​95. 38 Curtis Hancock, “Negative Theology in Gnosticism and Neoplatonism,” in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, eds. Richard T. Wallis and Jay Bregman (State University of New York Press, 1992), 174–​176. 39 Dylan M. Burns, “Apophatic Strategies in Allogenes (NHC XI,3),” Harvard Theological Review 103, no. 2 (2010): 161–​179.

Guarding the One  41 or Apocryphon of John. The Sethian Platonists qualify their use of negation; for them, apophasis is never the sole linguistic strategy but leaves room for philosophical argumentation beyond silence, such that unknowability finds its place within a “total experience of knowing.”40 The more scholars scrutinize the Nag Hammadi treatises, the greater proximity they find between Plotinus and the Platonizing Sethians. Dylan Burns shows that although the Sethian treatises lack references to Jesus Christ or the Bible, they fit well “within the spectrum of Jewish Christianities,” not unlike the Ebionites or Pseudo-​Clementine literature, adopting “Abrahamic” soteriology and ritual practices (revelation, eschatology, alphabetic speculation, angels, and baptism) reminiscent of Hekhalot and Enochic texts.41 Like Clement or Origen of Alexandria, we should consider them “representatives of advanced Christian Platonism,” but beyond this rough sketch, the precise identity of the Gnostic participants in Plotinus’s “interconfessional reading group” remains a mystery.42 They are former acquaintances of his who are enthusiastic about Sethian Platonism and ambiguously related to the Jewish-​Christian movement; Plotinus unpolitely calls them “stupid bumpkins.”43 The controversial Sethian Platonists not only influenced Plotinian doctrine but exacerbated the growing division between Greek philosophy and Christian philosophy. Their eventual departure from Plotinus’s circle marks the “quiet but clear banishment” of Jewish-​Christian influence from a consolidated Hellenic philosophy.44 Alexander Mazur contends that Plotinus’s entire schema of mystical union with the One—​a structured noetic ascent recapitulating ontogenetic descent—​is a palimpsest of Sethian Platonist theory and assumes the vocabulary of their contemplative practices. The question is not whether Plotinus was influenced by them, but how such a “passing acquaintance” in his seminar could explain the “degree of correspondence.”45 Sifting through the biographical data, Mazur outlines a hypothetical apostasy narrative: Plotinus broke with his teacher Ammonius Saccas full of regret at his youthful Gnostic sympathies in the 230s, moved independently to Rome in the 240s, and reacted with embarrassment and anger when members of his former group visited him in the 260s.46 The residue of this encounter can be found in Plotinus’s discomfort with any unstable mediators that might threaten 40 Michael A. Williams, “Negative Theologies and Demiurgical Myths in Late Antiquity,” in Gnosticism and Later Platonism, ed. John D. Turner and Ruth Majercik (Society of Biblical Literature, 2000), 277–​302. 41 Dylan M. Burns, Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 6, 94, 138–​139. 42 Burns, Apocalypse, 147–​148. 43 Burns, Apocalypse, 44–​47. 44 Burns, Apocalypse, 147–​154. 45 Alexander J. Mazur, The Platonizing Sethian Background of Plotinus’s Mysticism, eds. Dylan M. Burns et al. (Brill, 2021), 229. 46 See Mazur, Platonizing Sethian Background, 231–​273.

42 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation his neat hypostases of Soul, Intellect, and the One—​precisely what happens with geometry, as we will see.47 This higher-​ resolution portrait of Plotinus’s immediate environs suggests several lessons. First, what the philosopher rejected in the end was a form of Jewish-​Christian mysticism. For his part, Plotinus sought to de-​Christianize his philosophy. It is therefore ironic, and not a given, that after these heated debates, fourth-​century Christian intellectuals began to view his ideas as acceptable and even salutary. Second, the One, negation, and geometry can have more than one constellation, and the Plotinian model represents only one possible outcome. Alcinous used a geometrical model to limit the practice of negation, since for him the One was the perfect Figure. For Moderatus, the One is the Logos and generates Quantity out of itself. Early Christian proto-​orthodoxy represents another trajectory altogether. Given the investment of Valentinian and Sethian Gnostics in Neopythagoreanism, Irenaeus of Lyons studiously avoided the suspect vocabularies of arithmetic and geometry in his nascent theological grammar.48 On the other hand, Philo of Alexandria’s Logos doctrine, which he passed to Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, was already shaped by Neopythagoreanism. The Logos exerts its ordering function precisely through the divine Decad, which, following Seneca and Nicomachus of Gerasa, Philo locates within the mind of God.49 The Sethian Platonists embraced the triadic One, apophatic negation, and geometrical metaphysics from the Neopythagoreans, but without the doctrine of an aneidetic One; the proto-​orthodox Christians largely refused apophatic negation and geometry and embraced only the triadic One. Against this background, we can make out Plotinus’s particular settlement: he accepts the triadic One, but intensifies apophatic negation in order to elevate that One beyond the Logos and beyond geometric figuration. In later centuries, Christian Neoplatonists would have to weigh how much of that Plotinian compromise they could still sanction in light of the revelation of Jesus.

Drawing figures Having examined the Neopythagorean backdrop of Plotinian henology, we can now turn to his texts themselves. In an early essay, Plotinus tells a parable. A man 47 “Plotinus’s dogmatic rejection of inter-​and intra-​hypostatic complexity was motivated by a sectarian desire to differentiate his own thought from that of the Gnostics, while his reticence about those implicit interhypostases that he could not entirely extirpate from his derivational schema was driven by an acute, almost reflexive reaction to conceal any residual similarities between his own thought and certain Gnostic doctrines with which he was undoubtedly quite familiar and which, I suggest, he suspected to be embarrassingly close to his own.” Mazur, Platonizing Sethian Background, 137–​138. 48 See Joel Kalvesmaki, The Theology of Arithmetic: Number Symbolism in Platonism and Early Christianity (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013). 49 Krämer, Ursprung der Geistmetaphysik, 272–​273, 281–​82.

Guarding the One  43 approaches a temple of the gods and scales the stairs toward the columned portal. First, he enters the outer courtyard filled with votive statues and icons (ἀγάλματα and εἰκόνες) of the different gods. Silently, they announce the deities he will meet within, preparing him for the encounter. Their eyes are the last he sees before stepping into the inner sanctuary (ἄδυτον). There in secret, he enjoys no mere images but intercourse (συνουσία) with the gods themselves, and he gives himself over to them in rapture (ἔκστασις).50 When he leaves the sanctuary, he passes back through the same courtyard, and once again the first thing he sees are the statues (VI.9.11).51 In the following Ennead V.1.6, God remains within the temple and the images remain outside. Plotinus notes that the contemplative can only gaze upon the images, but not the One itself. This scene painted by Plotinus conveys his doctrine that the forms are always penultimate, adorning the portico of Intellect but remaining outside the sanctuary of the One. Forms are the last things seen before ascending to the One and the first seen again upon descent, but the reality of the divine One is formless. Yet his parable conceals a secondary sense. In Plotinus, ἀγάλματα denote plastic shapes defined by their dimensionality and therefore measurable in space. The ἄγαλμα is not simply an image or reflection but a special receptacle of divine power, a privileged place where the divine intensifies itself.52 In the parable, Plotinus intends them as a metaphor for form (εἶδος), but in fact, ἀγάλματα are figures (μορφή or σχῆμα).53 Plotinus encircles the threshold of the divine with geometrical figures, so that what actually protects the sanctum of the One are spatial magnitudes. Geometry is the last thing seen before entering the temple and the first seen again upon exiting. As for Alcinous, so for Plotinus: the line and the point are the final stage of visibility glimpsed before negation reaches the One itself. In this way, Plotinus’s allegory of the temple accidentally confesses the ambivalence of figuration in Neoplatonist contemplation. His search for total formlessness only entangles him further in the skeins of geometry. Plotinus’s Großschrift (“Great Work”) is a sequence of four major Enneads: III.8 [30] (On Nature and the Contemplation of the One), V.8 [31] (On Intelligible 50 In Plato, συνεῖναι and συνουσία denote “intercourse” in both dialogical and sexual senses. See Frederic M. Schroeder, Form and Transformation: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus (McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 1992), 105. See further Schroeder, “Synousia, Synaisthêsis and Synesis: Presence and Dependence in the Plotinian Philosophy of Consciousness,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt II, Vol. 36:1, eds. Wolfgang Haase and Hildegard Temporini (De Gruyter, 1987), 677–​699. 51 On temple courtyard in Ennead VI.9 and other cultic images, see Rein Ferwerda, La signification des images et des métaphores dans la pensée de Plotin (Wolters, 1965), 189–​193. 52 Annick Charles-​Saget, L’Architecture du Divin. Mathématique et Philosophie chez Plotin et Proclus (Les Belles Lettres, 1982), 307–​308. 53 In Timaeus 37C, the universe arises as a dimensional figuring of the eternal gods (τῶν ἀιδίων θεῶν γεγονὸς ἄγαλμα). Plato also uses the term to denote the external appearance of divine beings in Critias 110B (τὸ τῆς θεοῦ σχῆμα καὶ ἄγαλμα) and Epinomis 983E (θεῶν εἰκόνας ὡς ἀγάλματα). At the same time, not all Greek statuary, even of the gods, is anthropomorphic, and the importance of aniconic plastic art in Greek antiquity has been routinely underestimated. See Milette Gaifman, Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2012).

44 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Beauty), V.5 [32] (That the Intelligibles are Not Outside the Intellect, and On the Good), and II.9 [33] (Against the Gnostics).54 Having taught in Rome since 245 CE, Plotinus composed this quartet in the period 263–​269 CE, during the contentious episode when Gnostic “friends” joined his seminar. Geometry haunts the Großschrift, and Plotinus keeps happening upon lines and curves by some unrecognized necessity. In Plotinian contemplation, geometrical figures are obstacles to overcome in order to contemplate the pure One. Yet Plotinus finds he must rely on figuration to define the relation between One and forms, as if geometry is lodged in the machinery of his system and he finds himself unable to remove it. When Plotinus argues for the formlessness of the One, geometry surfaces of its own accord; when he introduces his number theory, the One suddenly reappears. Let us examine some of the ways that geometrical images appear throughout these key Enneads. At the beginning of the Großschrift, Plotinus compares the activity of contemplation to the practice of geometry. Contemplatives slowly become one with what they contemplate. Strictly speaking, all natural phenomena contemplate—​trees, comets, bacteria—​just as philosophers do. By silently contemplating itself, Nature makes Nature; the fruits of its contemplation are individual species carved into “visible shapes” (μορφή) (III.8.2–​3). But in fact, Plotinus explains, Nature’s contemplation is both geometrical and trans-​geometrical. At first, Nature compares its contemplative activity to the constructions of geometers: “My contemplating produces an object of contemplation,” Nature says, “just as geometricians draw lines as they contemplate.” But then Nature introduces a distinction: “But without my drawing, while I contemplate, the lines of bodies come to exist as though falling out of me” (III.8.4).55 It turns out that Nature does not actually draw and does not generate lines; the lines “fall out” passively. This is a paradoxical example: initially, Plotinus states that Nature geometrizes the shapes of things into existence, but then he withdraws the metaphor. In fact, contemplation is a kind of geometrizing that inscribes nothing and measures nothing; the link between Nature’s contemplation and the generation of shapes is only incidental or accidental. Ultimately, for Plotinus, contemplation is speaking without language and seeing without figuration. He takes away with one hand what he gives with the other. The purest instance of contemplation is the abstract line—​which then must be disavowed. Plotinus sometimes uses geometrical figures to describe the forms themselves. In Plotinian contemplation, forms bestow a kind of knowledge more immediate than what can be gained in discursive arguments. Seeing the forms is like touching 54 On the themes and structure of the Großschrift, see Dietrich Roloff, Plotin. Die Großschrift III.8; V.8; V.5; II.9 (De Gruyter, 1970). 55 “Καὶ τὸ θεωροῦν μου θεώρημα ποιεῖ, ὣσπερ οἱ γεωμέτραι θεωροῦντες γράφουσιν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐμοῦ μὴ γραφούσης, θεωρούσης δὲ, ὑφίστανται αἱ τῶν σωμάτων γραμμαὶ ὣσπερ ἐκπίπτουσαι.” Enneads III.8.4; trans. Gerson. Armstrong translates: “But I do not draw, but as I contemplate, the lines which bound bodies come to be as if they fell from my contemplation.”

Guarding the One  45 “beautiful statuettes” (ἀγάλματα), as if the votive images of the gods were not merely painted (γεγραμμένα) but came to life (V.8.5). The forms manifest themselves in Intellect with clarity and distinction, “suddenly appearing like an imprint or icon [ἴνδαλμα καὶ εἰκόνα].”56 Form possesses a structure that can be communicated as a visible mark, even if left behind as a negative impression (V.8.7). In contemplating εἶδος, the philosopher sees a definite character plucked out of myriad possibilities. To see an individuated form means in some way to measure it and trace its contours. Plotinus congratulates the sages of the past who intuitively grasped this almost tactile immediacy of the forms. The ancient Egyptians chose hieroglyphics over alphabetic languages to name each being with a unique grapheme indexing its form. They “wrote” or “imprinted” such figures knowing that each one left behind a definitive impression, as if it possessed the solidity of a votive statue (V.8.6). The ancient Pythagoreans understood primordial numbers not as products of counting but as ontological realities. According to Plotinus, their teaching anticipated his view that each intelligible form exists objectively without regard to the intellect thinking it, like an “intelligible statue” (ἄγαλμα νοερόν) standing forth with its own volume (VI.6.5–​6). In each of these cases—​solid figures (statues), linear figures (hieroglyphs), and points (Pythagorean gnomons)—​the more Plotinus defines the forms, the more they take on the qualities of figures. Plotinus uses a host of images to convey a glimpse of the invisible One, often crafting beautiful exempla. According to Rein Ferwerda, sensible images in Plotinus always fail to convey their true intelligible meaning; there is a “painful lag between thought and expression.”57 For this reason, Plotinus favors geometrical figures like circles and spheres, which, as Sarah Rappe shows, operate like diagrams of his thought. These “emblem[s]‌of the non-​discursive” offer a kind of “geometric representation of consciousness” beyond the mere written word.58 “The image of the radiant circle is for Plotinus an emblem of visionary truth,” Rappe explains. It is a “visionary siglum, an index that Plotinus is reverting to an ancient wisdom whose voice can be heard only in the reverberations of a symbol.”59 For instance, he compares Intellect’s procession from the One to a circle “unrolling” or “unfolding” (ἐξελίξας) from a point. Only as it declines from pure unity does the point take on “shape and surface and circumference and center and radial lines [γραμμαί]” (III.8.8). Unlike the formless One, the form of Intellect assumes a space 56 On the semantics of εἰκών, ἄγαλμα, and ἴχνος, see Paul Aubin, “L’‘image’ dans l’oeuvre de Plotin,” Recherches de science religieuse 41, no. 3 (1953): 348–​379; and Werner Beierwaltes, Denken des Einen. Studien zur Neuplatonischen Philosophie und ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte (Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), 73–​113. 57 Ferwerda, La signification des images, 1. 58 Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism, 120–​122. 59 Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism, 125. For other instances of circles and spheres, see Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism, 78–​85 and 103–​106; and Sara Rappe, “Metaphor in Plotinus’ Enneads v 8.9,” Ancient Philosophy 15, no. 1 (1995): 155–​172.

46 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation of geometrical difference by inscribing itself into the realm of magnitude. To contemplate is to join one’s own psychic center to the Intellect’s center, and from there to chart a course from Intellect’s circle back to the One’s universal center (VI.9.8–​ 10). Frederic Schroeder suggests that the “new way of seeing” urged in Ennead I.6 is precisely a geometrical passage from exterior to interior. “The real tendency of the figurative use of interior space in Plotinus,” he explains, “is to qualify the spatial metaphor of conversion, of turning as from one thing as to another thing.” If Plato indexes transcendence through verticality, for Plotinus it is “inwardness and depth.”60 Plotinus commends the powers of the sphere to contemplatives in his famous guided meditation in Ennead V.8, where he leads readers through the following exercise. Close your eyes and imagine the entire visible cosmos as a transparent sphere, gathering all things together in their diversity and dynamism. Holding this sphere in your mind’s eye, subtract matter, mass, and place (τόπος). What remains is the pure spatial projection of a nonphysical sphere. Next, invoke the gods and seek their beautiful order untainted by “sensible shape” (μορφὴν αἰσθητήν) or “spatial dimension” (στάσει ἀδιαστάτῳ). Upon the advent of the gods, remove the last remainder of geometrical space and gaze upon the bare reality of εἶδος (V.8.9). Only then, he adds in the next Ennead, can one behold an “intelligible sphere” (σφαῖραν νοητήν) unconstrained by magnitude (μέγεθος) and dimension (διάστασις) (II.9.17). Clearly, Plotinus echoes the apophatic method of Alcinous, who subtracted dimensions of space as a means to negate predications about the One. But Plotinus approaches the sphere like an adept performing a theurgical rite: to invoke the presence of Beauty, he must methodically, solemnly sacrifice dimension, measure, and magnitude, in the hopes of ascending heavenwards.61 At the same time, the curvature of circles and spheres reminds Plotinus of the hazards of geometrical space as he tries to think the One. In Ennead V.5, Plotinus warns against “encompassing” (περιλαμβάνειν) the One with definitions; negative names like “beyond” (ἐπέκεινα) are permissible precisely because they index an indefinite openness (V.5.6). Here Plotinus outlines a spatial logic of dependence that we will encounter again in later treatises. The One cannot be contained by a closed “place” (κατέχει τόπος) or “encompassed” (περιείληφε) by any curve, lest it be “limited” (ὥρισται) or “grasped” (περιέχεσθαι) by something besides itself. Were this to happen, Plotinus reasons, the One would not be independently self-​ possessed but would be the slave (δουλεύων) of another. But since Plotinus is certain that the One would never take the form of a slave, be contained within another 60 Frederic M. Schroeder, “Plotinus and Interior Space,” in Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy, ed. Paulos Mar Gregorios (State University of New York Press, 2002), 89. 61 This is the suggestion of Gregory Shaw, “Eros and Arithmos: Pythagorean Theurgy in Iamblichus and Plotinus,” Ancient Philosophy 19, no. 1 (1999): 121–​143. Shaw proposes that Ennead V.8.9 anticipates the Neopythagorean theurgy of Iamblichus, even though Plotinus remained suspicious of both Pythagoreans and theurgy.

Guarding the One  47 being, or be poured out beyond itself, this is absurd. Consequently, the One can never be bounded within a particular closed space (V.5.9). We should not look for a place to put the One, but let it exist “outside all place” (ἔξω τόπου παντὸς) (V.1.10). Plotinus’s concerns about τόπος and spatial enclosure belong to a wider Gnostic-​Christian debate over “topological theology” common to Nag Hammadi literature, Philo, and Irenaeus.62 The delicate dialectics of geometrical containment are especially visible in Ennead VI.8 [39], composed shortly after the Großschrift, where Plotinus explains the error of accidentally “encircling” the One with one’s mind (κύκλῳ περιλαβεῖν). Even experienced adepts struggle to avoid confining the One subtly within a mental space (τόπος) or, more subtly yet, a noetic void (χώρα). Our minds naturally wish to place the One within a conceptual field or lend it some conceptual shape (μορφὴ νοητή), but every noetic space is a temptation to be renounced (VI.8.11). In this sense, Plotinus counsels the contemplative to “seek nothing outside the One” (μηδὲν ἔξω αὐτοῦ) that might bound or border it. Instead, we should grasp that the One is itself “the Outside, the encompassment, the measure of all things” (τὸ ἔξω αὐτός ἐστι, περίληψις πάντων καὶ μέτρον). It cannot be located or measured, for it exerts total Measure (VI.8.18). But then Plotinus takes another, more challenging step, as he proceeds to dialectically negate even this counsel. He has just called the One the absolute Exterior that measures all things. Now he states that the One is equally the “inside” or interior “depth” of all things (ἢ εἴσω ἐν βάθει). After this sudden shift in perspective, it is now Intellect that encircles the One, touching it from every tangent side (οἷον κύκλῳ ἐφαπτόμενον). Intellect is a circle whose radial lines (γραμμαί) emanate from the invisible center point, namely, the One which sustains its circular shape (κεντροειδής). As the circularity of Intellect is “unrolled and poured out” (ἐκχυθὲν καὶ ἐξελιχθέν) from that central One, the One recedes infinitely from its perimeter into an incomprehensible point. These lines of Intellect “manifest” (ἐμφαίνεται) the One as “traces” (ἴχνη) of the point that flow from its hidden power. This inscription into geometrical space marks the arrival of intelligible form out of the depths of the formless One. Although the extension of line represents a diminishment of the One’s invisibility, it effectively reveals the One’s power (VI.8.18). As we have seen before, Plotinus’s appeal to geometrical imagery begins to unravel under the pressure of his own apophatic logic. If the One is wholly formless, Plotinus needs to negate both absolute exteriority (ἔξω) and absolute interiority (εἴσω) as names of the One.63 Both are spatial parables for the One’s transcendence, 62 See William R. Schoedel, “ ‘Topological’ Theology and Some Monistic Tendencies in Gnosticism,” in Essays on the Nag Hammadi Texts in Honour of Alexander Böhlig, ed. Martin Krause (Brill, 1972), 88–​108. 63 On the coincidence of “pure interiority” and “pure exteriority” in the One, see Eric Perl, “ ‘The Power of All Things’: The One as Pure Giving in Plotinus,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71, no. 3 (1997): 303–​313.

48 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation useful as instruments but for the same reason dispensable. The One’s interiority is the basis for his conceit of the Intellect as a circle encompassing the One-​point. Obviously, that graphic image retains its validity only so long as one remains within the penultimate realm of Intellect. But to ascend higher and think the One itself rigorously, one must reject even that empty noetic space. Following Plotinus’s own apophatic imperative, we would have to undo this image dialectically, and therefore think the One not only as interiority but as exteriority as well: not as an interior point but as an exterior circle. Yet as soon as we do so, we violate the geometrical prohibition by lending the One μορφή and τόπος; we have encircled the One. Plotinus himself cleverly avoids this reciprocal example, perhaps recognizing that his geometry does not add up. In other words, when Plotinus invokes the topology of circles and spheres, he tells us more about his aesthetics of contemplation than he intends. Plotinus can safely use geometry to relate Intellect and One so long as the One is interior, that is, when the One is represented as a space-​less, infinitesimal point. But when the One is exterior, as absolute Measure, the infinite space extended within it would open up a similar topology of linear inscription, in which the graphic difference of radial lines manifests the unity of points. But if the One were absolute Exterior, Intellect could not be represented as point. The geometry of the One as Exterior, wisely elided by Plotinus, therefore fails; only the geometry of the One as Interior succeeds. His geometrical image only works in one direction, the vector of negation; still, Plotinus requires the logic of the circle in order to visualize the formless One in relation to Intellect. Without geometrical space, he cannot explain the journey from form (the radii of Intellect) to formlessness (the central point of the One). So he can only negate Exteriority, and not Interiority as well. In effect, we have discovered a contradiction between Plotinus’s desire to radicalize apophasis and his desire to construct geometrical models for contemplation purified of matter. The spatiality of geometry, against his wishes, impedes the movement toward total apophasis.

Measuring forms In Ennead V.5, we reach the summit of the Großschrift, where Plotinus announces a new divine name, ἀνείδεον. He will return to it again in Ennead VI.7 after finishing a longer essay on number in Ennead VI.6. But here, as he unfolds the concept for the first time, it becomes clear that numerical measures are at the front of his mind. To reach the pure, absolute One requires more than ascent, he writes. Ultimately, it is an art of holding still: remaining poised before the One without subtly turning away (ἀποστατῆσαι) into Two. The best technique for maintaining this difficult balance, according to Plotinus, is to repudiate number and quantity (ποσόν). When it comes to thinking the One, we must never count, he warns (οὐδ᾿

Guarding the One  49 ὅλως ἀριθμεῖσθαι), for the One lies beyond number, figure, and shape. Nor should we measure, for the One is “the measure never measured” (μέτρον γὰρ αὐτὸ καὶ οὐ μετρούμενον) (V.5.4). We heard similar appeals before in Ennead I.6, “On Beauty.” But now Plotinus adds a new demand that perfects his previous negations: “the One must be without form” (ἀνείδεον) (V.5.6). The formlessness of the Absolute will emerge as an axiom of Plotinian thought, its henological foundation. We naturally want to know the One, and our minds instinctively drift toward its formlessness (εἰς ἀνείδεον). Yet that very formlessness evades the knower and resists conceptualization; it lacks any tractable character to fix upon or retain, since it is wholly “undefined” (μὴ ὁρίζεσθαι). Its bare face is not “stamped with an intricate impression” (τυποῦσθαι ὑπὸ ποικίλου τοῦ τυποῦντος), but is so to speak an undifferentiated smooth surface naked of figuration, deracinated of every mark. The soul that seeks to know the One finds itself sliding away empty-​handed, tired from the effort to grasp it (VI.9.3). Plotinus might well have named the One “the Zero,” had he the numeral at his disposal.64 Plotinus will offer further arguments for formlessness in Ennead VI.7, as we will see. But his initial case in Ennead V.5 is built on a provisional number theory that he quickly outlines and will only fully develop in Ennead VI.6.65 Here he distinguishes between substantial number (ὁ οὐσιώδης ἀριθμός) and monadic number (ὁ ἀριθμὸς τοῦ ποσοῦ) (V.5.4–​5).66 This rough distinction, notes Slaveva-​Griffin, is “the first time mathematical number is mentioned in the Enneads.”67 Plotinus is therefore evolving two theories side by side, one on ἀριθμός and one on ἀνείδεον. He is working out his theological aesthetics of form in connection with his disagreements with Neopythagoreans. I will discuss Plotinus’s number theory more fully in the next chapter, but to grasp his concept of ἀνείδεον in Ennead V.5, we can peek ahead to that mature version. Like Aristotle, Plotinus rejects the strong Pythagorean claim that numbers completely precede substance by existing independently “before” beings. But he does not dismiss the idea entirely. According to Plotinus, some numbers are “in” beings, while others are “after” being; neither are strictly “before.” Only the One precedes both being and number, but for this same reason, being and number are equally ranked. Numbers do not preexist being, but being is inevitably marked by number (VI.6.9). He can say that “total being” would be “total number” (VI.6.15). Still, Plotinus distinguishes two species of number. The higher “substantial number” (ἀριθμὸς οὐσιώδης) is nonquantitative and is the source of the order 64 William Ralph Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, vol. I (Longmans, Green, 1923), 107–​108. 65 On the close relationship between the formless One and Plotinian number theory, see Narbonne, Hénologie, Ontologie et Ereignis, 71–​103. 66 On τὸ ἀριθμούμενον versus τὸ ἀριθμητὸν, see Aristotle, Physics 219B. See further Horn, Plotin, 201–​220. 67 Slaveva-​Griffin, Plotinus on Number, 97.

50 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation and intelligibility we encounter in the forms. Slaveva-​Griffin explains that “substantial number is the mold into which the Forms slip to exist.”68 Because beings have numbers at their core (ῥίζα and βάσις), they can be known as definite objects with hard edges, so to speak. The lower species of “monadic number” (ἀριθμὸς μοναδικός) designates the quantitative numbers commonly used to count beings. Derived from substantial number, they are mere reflections of the forms (VI.6.9). Plotinus first brings up numbers in Ennead V.5 in order to draw a henological analogy. Monadic numbers are to substantial numbers as substantial numbers are to the One (V.5.5). He reasons that if we understand the One’s supereminence over number, we will understand its formlessness as well. In principle, this strategy makes good sense: the singularity of the One as “the Alone” seems to mark it off with a distinction analogous to the precision of numbers. Plotinus thus draws his conclusion about formlessness as follows. Both monadic number and substantial number convey form, but only substantial number conveys form to beings in a way that images the One.69 Hence, the One is first imaged by substance (οὐσία), which is the universal “form of all things” (εἶδος παντός). But since Plato states in Republic, Book VI (509B), that the Good is “beyond being” (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας), the One cannot be limited either by being or by the form that gives being, namely substantial number. Consequently, the One must exceed form in every instance universally. To exceed form is to lack form; hence the One is altogether formless (ἀνείδεον) (V.5.6). Plotinus’s exegesis of Plato’s famous phrase (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας) is by no means self-​evident. According to Matthias Baltes, it is difficult to say whether Plato believed the Good to be without being entirely. The Old Academy may have leaned toward that view, and Neopythagoreans like Moderatus tended to quote Parmenides, not Republic. But for all other Middle Platonists until Plotinus, “the Idea of the Good is something like the highest being, τὸ ὂν αὐτό, which bestows upon all other beings their being.”70 As Eric Perl notes, “whereas Plato makes this remarkable claim only once, almost, as it were, in jest, and with scarcely any explanation, Plotinus elaborates this insight so that it becomes the dominant theme of his entire philosophy.”71 If for Plato the One is the Form of the Good, for Plotinus the One is beyond Form.72 In short, Plotinus innovates his concept of the One as formless against the background possibility of the One as supreme Form. This is the origin of the difference between Tradition A and Tradition B.

68 Slaveva-​Griffin, Plotinus on Number, 87. 69 Cf. Ennead V.1.5: “Each and every number which comes from [the dyad] and the One is a form [εἶδος], as if Intellect was shaped by the numbers which came to exist in it.” 70 See Matthias Baltes, “Is the Idea of the Good in Plato’s Republic Beyond Being?,” in Studies in Plato and the Platonic Tradition: Essays Presented to John Whittaker, ed. Mark Joyal (Ashgate, 1997), 22; cf. Whittaker, “EPEKEINA NOU KAI OUSIAS.” 71 Eric Perl, Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition (Brill, 2014), 115. 72 Cf. Banner, Philosophic Silence, 179 n. 15.

Guarding the One  51 When one examines it more closely, the number analogy used by Plotinus raises some questions. First, Plotinus places substantial number in between the One and quantity, but this ends up pulling the concept in both directions. Substantial number has to be different enough from monadic number to resemble the One, but similar enough to monadic number to remain number. If substantial number lacks all monadic quantity, then how qua number does it still index the One? As Slaveva-​Griffin notes, “the primary goal of Plotinus’ analogy is to show that the One and substantial number do not participate in quantity.”73 Yet, she adds, his univocal term ἀριθμός binds substantial and monadic number so closely that their resemblance to the One suffers.74 A second problem arises when Plotinus applies his analogy to form. Monadic numbers generate monadic quantities (ποσόν), giving quantities their form. Substantial numbers generate beings (ὄντα) and likewise give beings their form. Both kinds of numbers generate participations of form. Yet Plotinus asserts that only the beings, and not the quantities, manifest a “trace of the One” (τὸ ἴχνος τοῦ ἑνὸς) (V.5.5).75 Here the problem of univocity returns in a different key. How is the case that substantial number generates “traces” of the One, but monadic number cannot? If the analogical force of substantial number is due to number, are not both kinds of numbers traces of the One? But if it is due to substance, then why use this analogy? At the origins of the doctrine of ἀνείδεον, Plotinus’s troubled analogy does not shine much light on the nature of the One. It rather functions to elevate substance above number and purify εἶδος of any lingering Neopythagorean residue. The critical premise of Plotinus’s whole chain of reasoning is his initial disqualification of quantity as a trace of the One. Initially, he draws parallels between the twin vocabularies of being and number, and their two ways of manifesting form, just as his Neopythagorean contemporaries might have done. But once he restricts form to being alone, not number, it follows that the One must be formless. The very instability of his analogy, however, points toward an alternative path. If quantity analogically indicated form, like substance, then quantities would be traces of the One as well. In this parallel instance, the One would not need to be formless. The One’s transcendence would not require the total dissolution of form, since the One would remain reflected through form, either by substance or by quantity. This is the path Plotinus suddenly closed off, for had he not done so, the doctrine of divine formlessness could never emerge. To establish the formless Absolute, being and quantity had to be separated; to establish the aneidetic One, Neoplatonism had to be cleansed of its Neopythagorean past.

73 Slaveva-​Griffin, Plotinus on Number, 97. 74 Slaveva-​Griffin, Plotinus on Number, 98–​100. 75 Precisely this phrase presents a problem in the Greek text. Is the “trace” the substantial numbers themselves or the beings that they establish? Henry-​Schwyzer (vol. III, 346) follows the former option; Armstrong (170) follows the latter.

3

The Aneidetic Condition Magnitude and line In the last chapter, we saw just how much Plotinus learned from Neopythagoreanism even while he sought to distinguish himself from it. The trace of that conflict reappears again and again across his major works, the Großschrift, not only when Plotinus discusses number and geometry but also as he formulates his signature concept of the formless One. In this chapter, we need to follow both threads further by examining both Plotinus’s mature number theory and the implications of his aneidetic doctrine. Porphyry tells us that after the Großschrift, his teacher composed two treatises on mathematics: Ennead VI.6 [34] (On Number) and Ennead VI.7 [38] (On the Multitude of Forms and the Good).1 As Jean-​Marc Narbonne points out, we should ask “not only why Plotinus took it upon himself one day to write a treatise on numbers, but why he chose to do so precisely at that moment.”2 The answer is that Plotinus seems to have designed his philosophy of number to respond to competing accounts by others. Narbonne observes that Plotinus opposes his own “eidetic arithmology” to the “analogical arithmology” of Neopythagoreans, who assigned metaphysical properties to each number.3 Hence, the number theory expounded in these works represents the philosopher’s most explicit engagement with his Neopythagorean influences. In the Großschrift, he has already related the forms to the One, formulated the concept of ἀνείδεον, and rebutted Gnostic views of multiplicity. Now in Ennead VI.6, Plotinus clarifies his views regarding the One, form, and number, and he expands his account of divine formlessness in Ennead VI.7. I will take each of these steps in turn.

1 The most thorough analyses of Plotinus’s number ontology in Ennead VI.6 are Jean Pépin et al., eds., Plotin. Traité Sur Les Nombres (Ennéade VI 6 [34]) (J. Vrin, 1980), 9–​85; Christoph Horn, Plotin über Sein, Zahl und Einheit. Eine Studie zu den systematischen Grundlagen der Enneaden. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 62 (B. G. Teubner, 1995), 149–​288; and Slaveva-​Griffin, Plotinus on Number, 71–​130. A concise and clear summary can be found in Dmitri Nikulin, Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2019), 14–​32. On the relation between Ennead VI.6 and the Großschrift, see Pépin, Plotin, 18–​26. 2 Jean-​Marc Narbonne, “The Neopythagorean Backdrop to the fall (σφάλμα/​νεῦσις) of the soul in Gnosticism and its echo in the Plotinian treatises 33 and 34,” in Gnosticism, Platonism, and the Late Ancient World. Essays in Honour of John D. Turner, eds. Kevin Corrigan and Tuomas Rasimus (Brill, 2013), 419. 3 Narbonne, “Neopythagorean Backdrop,” 420, 424. On his debts to Parmenides in Ennead VI.6, see Jean Pépin, “Platonisme et antiplatonisme dans le traité de Plotin Sur les nombres, VI, 6 (34),” Phronesis 24, no. 2 (1979): 197–​208.

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0004

The Aneidetic Condition  53 Plotinus first broached his theory of monadic and substantial numbers in Ennead V.5. Now in Ennead VI.6, Plotinus explains the origins of those two kinds of numbers. The higher species of substantial numbers arise from the “force” of number “dividing” being and “splitting” it into multiples. The Many are born from the union of number and being: number engenders quantity in the womb of being and “sends it into labor with the many” (VI.6.9). By contrast, the lower species of “numbered numbers” or monadic numbers arise through concrete measurements (VI.6.15). When we count beings, we participate in “actualizing multitude,” as the practice of measure transforms the higher, substantial numbers in Intellect into the physical, quantitative numbers in Soul (VI.6.16). How much does Plotinus retain from the Neopythagoreans? We see here the same pattern as in Ennead V.5. His apparent attention to number has the effect of lessening its significance. For example, given the equal status of being and number, Plotinus has to decide which universal will embrace them both. He opts to define both domains in terms of number. At first, this sounds like a win for Neopythagoreanism, but it has the opposite effect, since it lets Plotinus ignore number as an irrelevant common coefficient.4 He can now classify Being as “henified number” (ἀριθμὸς ἡνωμένος), beings as so many “unfolded numbers” (ἀριθμὸς ἐξεληλιγμένος), intellect as “self-​ moving number” (ἀριθμὸς κινούμενος), and life as “embracing number” (ἀριθμὸς περιέχων) (VI.6.9). Number remains safely subordinated to his own ontic categories and his hierarchy of the One, Intellect, and Soul. One of the chief goals of Plotinus’s number theory is to refute the notion that multiplicity (πλῆθος) is evil per se, a view he regularly and sharply rejects. His opponents are either unidentified Middle Platonists influenced by religious dualisms (perhaps Numenius) or the Gnostic Neopythagoreans he had in his sights in Ennead II.9. Plotinus praises the beauty of the world and condemns those who malign it and fail to grasp its status as an image of the intelligible universe. The world could not be any more beautiful than it is, and we should be grateful for its providential order and splendorous forms (II.9.4–​5, II.9.16). Plotinus wants his students to appreciate the Many not as the enemy of contemplation but as an invitation to return to the One. The multitude of intelligible forms should be welcomed as a pathway to ascent. But if Plotinus cannot accept that multiplicity falls away into nonbeing irredeemably, he must find a way to explain how the Many keeps in contact with the One. What limits the decline of multiplicity and preserves its goodness? That preservative, that safeguard, turns out to be quantitative “magnitude” (μέγεθος). Following the pre-​Socratic Philolaus, Plato in the Philebus 4 Annick Charles-​Saget also notes the problem: the hierarchy of numbers Plotinus offers in Ennead VI.6.9 clearly descends from the Neopythagorean “flow of unities,” yet he has just denounced Neopythagorean measures of magnitude at the outset of the treatise. “All the ambiguity of Plotinus resides in this reference to arithmetic, at the same moment when he denies any ontological signification to the scheme of quantity.” Charles-​Saget, L’Architecture du Divin, 170.

54  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation had allocated this role to mathematics in general, such that ἀριθμός limits the Unlimited and makes it accountable to rationality.5 Plotinus localizes this function to μέγεθος alone. To grasp Plotinus’s complicated relation to Neopythagoreanism, we have to understand the special and equally complicated status he grants to magnitude in Ennead VI.6. His ambivalence toward geometry—​a necessary evil, a gift that invites negation—​is worked out metonymically through his ambivalence toward magnitude and its lines. Plotinus agreed with the Neopythagoreans and Gnostics that the world arose by falling from the One, but unlike them, he believed the resulting multiplicity was natural and necessary.6 Accordingly, he reluctantly embraces magnitude in his mathematical treatise, Ennead VI.6, giving it two conflicting roles. In itself, magnitude imparts a repulsive (αἰσχρόν) grossness to things. “The universe is large [μέγα] and beautiful,” he writes. “Beautiful not by largeness but by beauty; and it needed beauty because it became large” (VI.6.1). As he comments elsewhere, intelligible greatness brings power, but sensible greatness is nothing but indecorous bulk (ὄγκος) or spatial extension (II.9.17, VI.4.5). Beauty itself “does not lie in magnitude” (μέγεθος) (V.8.2). If matter “pollutes” beauty, magnitude completely “disintegrates” it (VI.7.31). Neither the contemplative nor the contemplated should be “circumscribed by magnitude” (περιγέγραπται μεγέθει), for the highest beauties are beyond figuration (III.8.5). At the same time, Plotinus has to be grateful for μέγεθος as one is grateful for emergency measures. Magnitude confers partial beauty because it achieves a partial return to the One’s unity. When something abiding in the One cannot tend to itself (νεύειν), it pours itself out (χέηται) and loses its identity.7 It extends itself (ἐκτείνηται) into space, suffering diminution in being and beauty. Losing the One, it loses its integrity; were its decline to continue, it would dissolve into infinite dispersal. But if that decline can be arrested, it can “turn back to the One and remain” (ἀνέστρεψε εἰς ἓν καὶ ἔμεινεν), becoming “multiplicity” instead (VI.6.3). When the Many “flees” the One, it must be “surrounded” and “caught” by a net to tame its wild infinity (VI.6.1, VI.6.3). This “net” that restrains the incipient chaos is magnitude (μέγεθος), which imposes a limit (πέρας) that bounds it (ὁρίζει) (VI.6.3). Hence, magnitude arises when something “abides even in its outpouring” (ἀεὶ χεόμενον μένον) (VI.6.1), like the crest of a rolling wave that maintains a stable formation. Once magnitudes have halted that infinite extension and imposed a 5 Plato, Philebus 16C–​17A. See further Carl Huffman, “The Philolaic Method: the Pythagoreanism Behind the Philebus,” in Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy VI: Before Plato, ed. Anthony Preus (State University of New York Press, 2001), 67–​85; and “The Role of Number in Philolaus’s Philosophy,” Phronesis 33, no. 1 (1988): 1–​30. 6 Narbonne, “Neopythagorean Backdrop,” 423. 7 On Gnostic senses of νεύειν, see Narbonne, “Neopythagorean Backdrop”; and more generally, Jean-​Marc Narbonne, Plotinus in Dialogue with the Gnostics (Brill, 2011). On this passage, however, Narbonne notes that the verb in the manuscripts was μένειν, not νεύειν, until Theiler’s emendation was adopted in Henry-​Schwyzer (“Neopythagorean Backdrop,” 420).

The Aneidetic Condition  55 boundary, numbers can calculate their measure. Still, it is the One and not magnitude that saves the phenomena from disintegration. “Through magnitude and as far as depends on magnitude,” Plotinus avers, “the Many loses itself; it possesses itself only insofar as it possesses the One” (VI.6.1). The One’s proximity is the source of the spatial order that magnitude metes out, for the One accompanies magnitude in a particular way: “if the One was not with [παρείη] continuous magnitudes, they could not exist [εἴη]” (VI.9.1).8 If magnitude stays close to the One and channels the One’s power, can it help us name the One? As we saw above, Plotinus named the One both absolute Interior and absolute Exterior; as the latter, the One exerts measure (VI.8.18). In Ennead V.5, Plotinus takes a similar approach to the name “Limit” and invokes μέγεθος in a surprising way. On the one hand, the One is “not limited” (οὐδὲ πεπερασμένος) in the sense that it is never bounded or defined by another (ὡρισμένον). Yet Plotinus holds that the One must be equally “not unlimited” (οὐδ᾽ ἄπειρος). To clarify his meaning, he adds the phrase “like magnitude” (ὡς μέγεθος), but the sequence of the Greek is ambiguous (V.5.10).9 Does Plotinus mean that magnitude, too, is not unlimited, just as the One is not unlimited? After all, it is clear in Ennead VI.6 that magnitude communicates the One’s limit to halt a decline into pure multiplicity. Or does Plotinus rather mean that the One is not unlimited, precisely unlike the way that magnitudes, by contrast, are unlimited? In the first sense, magnitude’s limit function is an analogy of the One’s limit function as absolute Exterior. In the second sense, the merely spatial infinity of extensive magnitudes provides a foil for the true infinity of the One.10 Here we see yet another symptom of Plotinus’s fundamental ambivalence over geometrical figuration. The concept of magnitude straddles both sides of the dialectical negation of the One.

8 Elsewhere, Plotinus traces the birth of magnitude not to the One but to Intellect. In Ennead VI.2, magnitude arises from Intellect’s “continuity of activity.” From Intellect’s beauty, “quality” (ποιόν) radiates forth, and out of Intellect’s silence, “magnitude” appears (μέγεθος προφαινόμενον) (VI.2.21). 9 “ἀλλ᾽οὐδὲ πεπερασμένος [εἶναι]: ὑπὸ τίνος γάρ; ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ἄπειρος ὡς μέγεθος: ποῦ γὰρ ἔδει προελθεῖν αὐτὸν ἢ ἵνα τί γένηται αὐτῷ οὐδενὸς δεομένῳ; .” Ennead V.5.10. 10 In Ennead V.5.10, Armstrong adopts the second sense: “But he is not limited: for by what? But he is not unlimited like a magnitude either: for where should he proceed to, or what should he intend to gain when he lacks nothing?” Here, magnitude signifies the crass extension of material bulk: the One is not “unlimited” in the way that magnitudes drift on without end. Gerson takes the same route and removes the dialectical negation altogether: “But it has not been limited. For by what would it be so? And yet it is not in magnitude that it is unlimited. For where would it have had to proceed to? Or in order to become what, given that it has no need of anything?” In this reading, the One is not limited, full stop; its unlimited character has nothing to do with the quantitative extension of unlimited magnitudes. However, given the apposite position of the phrase ὡς μέγεθος, both translations overlook another possibility supported by the parallel between the negation of ἄπειρον in Ennead V.5 (naming the One) and the negation of πλῆθος in Ennead VI.6 (naming μέγεθος). We could translate the phrase: “The One, like magnitude [ὡς μέγεθος], is not unlimited [οὐδ᾽ ἄπειρος].” To be sure, the Plotinian One is without geometrical magnitude, but as the One, it possesses “magnitude” analogically by measuring itself, a magnitude that is interior and intensive, rather than exterior and extensive. On this point, see Narbonne, “Neopythagorean Backdrop,” 421.

56  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation According to Plotinus, the function of magnitude is to inscribe lines in space. We already saw in Ennead III.8 that Plotinus uses the geometrical inscription of lines to define the space of contemplation. Now in Ennead VI.6, line becomes a name for the hidden structure of beings. When the Many threatens to slip away, Nature intervenes with the limiting function of magnitude: it “draws a line” (περιγράψασα) and the flow of number comes to rest (VI.6.11).11 When magnitude takes a stand (ἑστώς) against the chaotic descent of beings, substantial numbers become the source or root (πηγὴ καὶ ῥίζα) of the limited beings thus generated (VI.6.9–​10). Plotinus defines this ontological infrastructure beneath all things with three carefully chosen terms: “a kind of preparation [παρασκευή] for the beings and a preliminary sketch [προτύπωσις], and like unities keeping a place [τόπος] for the beings which are going to be founded on them” (VI.6.10).12 What the three examples have in common is the rudimentary visibility of empty spatial figures. In short, the structure imbued by magnitude is the line: a schematic outline, a traced impression, or a distributed space. By circumscribing multitude, magnitude inscribes space with line—​not only a drawing in space but the drawing out of space itself. Magnitude communicates the One’s power by imprinting a potential figural network of spatial positions for discrete beings to fulfill. That geometrical order may eventually contaminate the formlessness of the One, but in the meantime its linear patterns make multiplicity intelligible, guiding us toward a path of return and saving the beauty of the world. The concept of line returns when Plotinus takes up the problem of the infinite (VI.6.18). At first, it is unclear how the magnitudes of infinite lines (γραμμαί) or infinite figures (σχήματα) can relate to the absolute (VI.6.17).13 Plotinus reasons that if we could conceive an “infinite line” (ἄπειρον γραμμήν) as an intelligible, it could only exist as the concept (λόγος) of a line freed of limit (πέρας). He names this line an αὐτογραμμή, which we could translate as “absolute line” (Armstrong) or “unlimited line” (Gerson). Absolute line proceeds from the One with a kind of “extension” (διάστασις), but without determinate measure (ποσὸν μέτρον) (VI.6.17). Soul is like an “infinite line” circling around a point (VI.5[23].11). Plotinus 11 Soul “draws” the numerical structure of the forms into matter like an image reflected in water (VI.2.22). It radiates a “preliminary outline” (προϋπογραφὴν) into matter that leaves behind “traces” (ἴχνεσιν) that it subsequently brings to life as parts and wholes, each “befigured into itself ” (σχηματίσασα ἑαυτήν) (VI.7.7). 12 “But the theme of the sketch [l’esquisse, προτύπωσις] appears to indicate equally a middle way between two extremes that Plotinus runs up against time and time again. On the one hand, pure and spontaneous emergence, and on the other, the total prior determination of what emerges; on the one, number, the mysterious power taking shape only in its works; on the other, the numbers, realized essences so complete in themselves that they no longer appear elsewhere as accidents. The image of the sketch amounts then to a reconciliation, even if, as an image, it is only offered as a mere suggestion.” Pépin, Plotin, 59–​60. Charles-​Saget rates προτύπωσις “of capital importance” but characterizes it as non-​geometrical: “it confirms the Plotinian idea that quantity matters less than the connectedness of a structure.” Charles-​Saget, L’Architecture du Divin, 181–​183. 13 On infinite lines, see Aristotle, Physics III.7 (207b28–​34).

The Aneidetic Condition  57 proposes that this autographic line is the paradigm of the intelligible forms. The forms preexist their determination into bodies (corporeal shapes) or minds (noetic concepts). Before their deployment into particular destinies as this or that being, they have no need for extension or differentiation. At this moment, the forms still share a universal figurality since their “figure is always one” (VI.6.17). Plotinus defines them as “maximally unfigured figures” (ἀσχημάτιστα σχήματα) or as John Fielder translates, “primal configurations.”14 Form is “spaceless” (ἀτόπῳ) in itself, but “generates space out of itself ” (τόπους γεννῆσαν ἐξ αὑτοῦ) for those that participate in it (VI.5.8). The interiority of form (much like Auerbach’s “hollow mold”) is none other than pure figuration, endowed with a plasticity that makes it universal. Magnitude maintains access to the One by opening this space, which is extension without measure and line without limit, in which form can operate.15 Plotinus even compares his own discourse on the One to geometrical line in Ennead VI.5. His various attempts to think the One and the Many are like so many lines (γραμμαί) leading out from a center (κέντρον). We should take heart, he says, that even in their multiplicity the lines are already harmonized like points along the perimeter of the same circle (κύκλος) and plane (ἐπίπεδον). If the radius grew too compressed for any intervals (διάστημα) between lines, or even if the lines were to drop away to reveal bare points, the unity would still endure. But so long as the lines connecting the center to the circle are visible, they index the Many, and their extension does not distance the One from the Many but manifests the connection between them. The lines are that connection: “If, then, we liken all the intelligibles to the many centers, leading back to the one center where they are unified, they appear many through the lines [γραμμαί], not because the lines have produced them, but because they reveal them” (VI.5.5; trans. Gerson). In this way, the plurality of lines analogically (ἀνάλογον) reveals the presence of the One (VI.5.5). Each being that contemplates the One approaches it like so many infinite lines converging on a central point (V.1.11). Throughout these passages, magnitude makes the One present by communicating its power to delimit, contain, order, preserve, and integrate. When magnitude intervenes to prevent an infinite decline from the One, the result is the appearance of number to impose a limit. Plotinus compares this act to the imposition of the stroke of a line. A graphic mark halts the potential disintegration by forcing it into the plane of geometrical figuration where it can be seen and known 14 John Fielder, “Plotinus’ Copy Theory,” Apeiron 9, no. 2 (1975): 1–​2. 15 Plotinus rejects the Stoic view that matter is magnitude (II.4[12].1) or that it unfolds a spatial principle immanent to itself (II.4.9). Pure matter is incorporeal (III.6[26].7) and no more possesses magnitude than heat or color (III.6.16, II.4.8). Instead, magnitude is generated by form (εἶδος), which endows beings with number (ἀριθμός), measure (μέτρον), and dimension (ποσόν) (III.6.17, II.4.8). Beings are “magnitudinized” (μεγεθύνεται) when they are “dragged by the power of visible forms until they make space for themselves” (μεγεθύνεται δὲ ἕκαστα ἑλκόμενα τῇ δυνάμει τῶν ἐνορωμένων καὶ χώραν ἑαυτοῖς ποιούντων) (III.6.17; my translation).

58  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation and receive form. The lines of magnitude emerge into this minimum degree of visibility as they open the space of extension whenever magnitude draws a line.16 The first mark of ink on the page, the first brush of the mind against form, the first sound announced to the ear: all are minimal inscriptions that situate the contemplative in the horizon of the possible, where the geometry of difference becomes visible.

Logos and autarchy After his philosophy of mathematics, Plotinus returns his attention to intelligible forms in Ennead VI.7. Having studied the relation between number and magnitude, he now revisits his account of formlessness from Ennead V.5, and in the wake of his treatises on number offers three new arguments in defense of the aneidetic One. At first, his reasons seem unassailable. Each of his three arguments rests upon a postulate; if reversed, he says, the contrary would be absurd. But with some scrutiny, those contraries turn out to be equally plausible. The differences hang on axiological priorities in theological aesthetics, and one might well decide otherwise. (1) Logos (λόγος). His first decision concerns the status of the second principle after the One: Intellect in its various guises as the principle of intelligibility. The physical forms of Nature are constantly ramifying and mutating by chance and entropy. How do the intellectual forms keep pace? Plotinus answers that Intellect must be natively stamped with its own differences that precede and outstrip the lesser differences of physical nature. “Boiling with life,” he writes, Intellect brims over with “shapes” (μορφαί) that build a universal “pattern” (παράδειγμα) (VI.7.12). Intellect never proceeds by a straight “line” (γραμμή) from same to same, but wanders down every path, twisting into greater complexity and alterity, like a fractal or the whorls of a thumbprint. “Its nature is to become other,” and it does so through a geometrical operation: “by dividing, the other always appears” (VI.7.13). In other words, the forms in Intellect are infinite because they are infinitely divisible, burrowing ever deeper within (VI.7.14). Plotinus imagines their diversity as a well-​structured “One-​Many” (ἓν πολλά) (VI.7.14), like a “richly varied living sphere” or an “all-​facèd” creature “shining with living faces” (VI.7.15).17 Again, Plotinus reaches for the language of geometry: “In one figure [σχήματι] of Intellect, the One-​Many so to speak circumscribes [περιγράφει] all of the delineations [περιγραφάς] possessed within it, along with

16 What Sara Rappe writes about Neoplatonism captures the potentiality of figural line: “The geometric forms they favor overcome the need for semiotic interpretation. They subsist in an immediacy of contact with the reader because they purport to open up a space to which the text grants direct access. In a more modern jargon, one might say that Neoplatonic Pythagoreanism presents itself as phenomenological, as being about the unmediated space of consciousness and not about the tradition presenting or describing that space.” Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism, 123. 17 On the ἓν πολλά, see Plato, Parmenides 144E, and Plotinus, Ennead V.3.15.

The Aneidetic Condition  59 inner figures [σχηματισμούς], powers, and thoughts, not a straightforward division but one eternally interior to itself ” (VI.7.14).18 Intellect is a space that measures, writes, and rewrites its inner figures into infinite alterity. Through this activity of ceaseless figuration, intellectual forms keep pace with the wild diversity of Nature. But just as Nature is a “trace” (ἴχνος) of Intellect (VI.7.15), Intellect is an “imprint” (τύπος) of the One (VI.7.18). The manner of Intellect’s procession from the One is essential for Plotinus since he wants to view its difference as positive, not a Gnostic symptom of cosmic decline. The riddle is to show how the forms fill Intellect from the direction of the One, and yet also to maintain that the One itself is formless. Initially, Plotinus considers a fertility metaphor reminiscent of his Gnostic opponents. Perhaps the One “filled” (πληροῦσθαι) the barren Intellect with generative forms, but Intellect was too weak to endure its advance and fractured into parts (VI.7.15). But then he questions that mythical delay, as if Intellect could exist for a moment without its forms. In truth, Intellect is always contemplating the One and subsists by its relation to the One: “It came to be by being filled” (VI.7.16). Plotinus reasons that only once Intellect became “satiated and full” of forms could it even know itself as Intellect (VI.7.16). As it gazed on the One, Intellect received not only forms but figuration and is endowed with boundary (ὅρον), limit (πέρας), and shape (μορφή). Intellect can even be said to have “extension” (ἐκτάσει) (VI.7.17).19 The One granted form and shape to Intellect, even though it lacks both. “The shaper,” he writes, “while itself shapeless, brought form to the shaped” (VI.7.17).20 To be sure, Plotinus still rejects any geometrical sense of shape or boundary. Intellect is not encompassed by a quantitative magnitude since its living forms are infinitely many. Rather, when Plotinus says that Intellect possesses shape, boundary, or figure, he means Intellect possesses the pattern of infinite, interior figural extension, or perhaps we should say in-​tension. In this sense, Plotinus christens Intellect the “form of the first forms” (εἶδος εἰδῶν τῶν πρώτων), borrowing a phrase from Aristotle (VI.7.17).21 As we have seen, he has already named Intellect the figure of figures (σχήματι . . . σχηματισμούς) and the circumscriber of circumscriptions (περιγράφει . . . περιγραφάς). The Form of forms is the “one 18 “ἐν ἑνὶ σχήματι νοῦ οἷον περιγραφῇ ἔχων περιγραφὰς ἐντὸς καὶ σχηματισμοὺς αὖ ἐντὸς καὶ δυνάμεις καὶ νοήσεις καὶ τὴν διαίρεσιν μὴ κατ᾽εὐθύ, ἀλλ᾽εἰς τὸ ἐντὸς ἀεί.” Ennead VI.7.14; my translation. “In one figure of the Intellect, like an outline, it contains outlines inside, and configurations inside also, and powers and acts of intellection, not according to a linear division, but eternally inwards” (trans. Gerson). 19 This line contains a telling textual problem: “ἐπεὶ δὲ ὁ νοῦς εἶδος καὶ ἐν ἐκτάσει καὶ πλήθει, ἐκεῖνος ἄμορφος καὶ ἀνείδεος . . . .” Ennead VI.7.17. Henry and Schwyzer read ἐν ἐκτάσει where Theiler had proposed ἐν ἐκστάσει (editio minor, vol. III, 236)—​either the spatial aspect of Intellect (ex-​tension) or its dependence on the One (ec-​stasy). 20 “καὶ τὸ εἶδος ἐν τῷ μορφωθέντι, τὸ δὲ μορφῶσαν ἄμορφον ἦν . . . .” Ennead VI.7.17; my translation. Armstrong: “and the form was in that which was shaped, but the shaper was shapeless.” Gerson: “And the form is in the thing shaped, while the thing that shapes is without shape . . . .” 21 See Aristotle, De anima III.8 (432A).

60  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation figure” that circumscribes the other figures within it, spiraling into endless depths of difference, the primordial manifold containing all geometrical space within (VI.7.14).22 Here we encounter the first and strongest of Plotinus’s three arguments for the aneidetic One. He reasons that if Intellect is filled with interior shapes, it follows that the One must be “shapeless” (ἄμορφον) and “formless” (ἀνείδεον) (VI.7.17). Such freedom from form is a privilege of the One’s transcendence and primacy. Indeed, it is only because the One is formless that it can be form-​ generative (εἰδοποιεῖ).23 “The giver is beyond the gift,” he writes, “for it is stronger” than what it gives and stronger than the recipient (VI.7.17).24 In the hierarchy of One, Intellect, and Soul, the One is “seated” above Intellect, not, Plotinus emphasizes, because it is “grounded” (ἱδρυθῇ) by Intellect’s forms, but rather in order to “ground” (ἱδρύσῃ) those forms from above. When the One passively shines on the Intellect, form (εἶδος) is the resulting shadow or trace in Intellect, the reflected image of the unmoved One. Likewise, when Intellect shines on Soul, reason (λόγος) is its shadow in Soul (VI.7.17; V.1.6–​7). This sets up the first conditional postulate. For Plotinus, the One is without form, and the Intellect is the Form of forms. Plotinus rightly observes that if the One possessed form, this hierarchy would be dramatically disrupted. If the One were not absolutely formless, then it would have to serve as supreme εἶδος, and Intellect would have to cede its role as Form of forms to the One. Then Intellect rather than Soul would have to receive the shadow cast by the One’s εἶδος. This in turn would make νοῦς indistinguishable from λόγος (VI.7.17).25 Now Plotinus finds this carnivalesque outcome so ridiculous that it confirms the truth of the contrary: the One must be formless, lest Plotinus’s hierarchy of hypostases collapse. But we, suspending judgment momentarily, can also view his reductio ad absurdum as an insightful brief on the stakes of the aneidetic condition. The conditional structure of his argument inadvertently exposes an alternative theological aesthetics to consider. In effect, Plotinus lays out two incommensurable possibilities. In the first: the One is formless; Intellect is the Form of forms and the locus of figure (σχῆμα, 22 “One cannot overlook the fact that in the doctrine of Intellect, as in the whole Plotinian system, the precise mathematical structures and operations of the Academic model grow slighter and increasingly recede. It is a matter like vestigial remains or fossils, which point back to a larger whole, but whose softened and blurred contours disappear more and more . . . .” Krämer, Der Ursprung der Geistmetaphysik, 310. 23 Ennead VI.7.17 is the only time that Plotinus associates the One with εἰδοποιεῖν (not counting I.8.3, of dubious authenticity). See John Bussanich, The One and Its Relation to Intellect in Plotinus (Brill, 1988), 171. 24 “καὶ τοῦ διδομένου τὸ διδὸν ἐπέκεινα ἦν: κρεῖττον γάρ.” Ennead VI.7.17; my trans. “. . . and the giver transcended the gift: for it was stronger” (trans. Armstrong). “. . . and the giver transcends the given. For it is better” (trans. Gerson). 25 On the difficulties of construing the One as forms of forms, see Bussanich, The One and Its Relation to Intellect in Plotinus, 169–​170.

The Aneidetic Condition  61 μορφή, μέγεθος); and λόγος resides in Soul. In this first paradigm, Intellect sustains the unity of the forms and mediates that unity to their multiplicity resident in the λόγος of Soul. It mediates them, as we have just seen, precisely through figure, shape, and circumscription. The One remains altogether untainted by form and by figure. Geometry has no place in henology per se, or thinking the first hypostasis, but rather spans the distance between the second and third hypostases. But there is a second possibility posited by Plotinus himself: the One could itself be the supreme, singular Form, and hence the Form of forms; Intellect then would become the λόγος of the One; and Soul would be left to organize Nature immanently. In this second paradigm, the One no longer remains quarantined away from geometrical figures. As Form of forms, the One sustains the unity of the forms, and Intellect, now operating as λόγος, gathers them in their multiplicity. In this case, figure and shape still link and mediate supreme Form and lesser forms, but now this mediation takes place between One and Intellect, without fear of jeopardizing the One’s transcendence. Geometry has an immediate analogical function that does not halt at the second hypostasis but passes all the way to the first. These two paths promise different futures for geometrical figures. In Plotinian henology, the transcendent One is formless and geometry can only tempt and distract. But if the One were the Form of forms, geometrical figures would find a different destiny, as traces of the One and means of participation. When the One is the Form of forms, and when the second hypostasis is the λόγος of the One, then, Plotinus reluctantly predicts, geometrical figures would operate analogically. (2) Autarchy (αὐτάρκεια). If his first argument concerned the dynamics of mediation, Plotinus’s second argument concerns the dynamics of power. Plotinus wants to ward off any possibility that the One could depend on anything else. He spends the following treatise asking whether power and freedom can even be predicated of the gods (VI.8.1–​2). In his mind, even the slightest brush with form would already expose the One to the Many in some minimal but unacceptable manner. Any contact with form would mean the One had been formed by another, hence “dependent upon another” (ἀνήρτητο εἰς ἕτερον) and secondary to something else (VI.7.17). Any mitigation of its absolute autonomy contradicts the essence of the One. So Plotinus concludes that unless the One is formless, its self-​sufficiency will be compromised. For Plotinus, the threat of dependency stems from the logic of measure. Whatever has shape (μορφή) or form (εἶδος) has by that very fact already been passively “measured” by another (μεμετρήμενον). To be measured is not only a geometrical act but a political one of being mastered, judged, and governed. The One remains “beyond all shapes” (ὑπὲρ πάσας μορφάς) insofar as it remains “beyond all powers” (ὑπὲρ πάσας δυνάμεις) that could foist a figure upon it. On the contrary, the One reserves the right to exert its universal measure upon everything else (τὰ ἄλλα μετρήσειεν) as their maker (VI.7.32). Hence, for Plotinus, the One must be entirely “self-​sufficient” (αὔταρκες) without needing anything from

62  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation another. “The principle,” he repeats, “is the formless [ἀνείδεον], not that which needs form [μορφή], but that from which every intelligent form comes” (VI.7.32). The One has no need for shape and no need for magnitude (VI.7.32). Because it is “formless” (ἀνείδεον), the Good must be unmeasured (ἄμετρον), shapeless (ἄμορφον), and figureless (οὐδὲ σχῆμα) (VI.7.33). Plotinus might have discovered this link between “need” and formlessness alongside Sethian Gnostics.26 But the threat of dependency also stems from the logic of negation. In the following Ennead VI.8, Plotinus argues that thinking the Good through negation leads one to recognize its absolute “self-​determination” (αὐτεξούσιον). We ourselves only become free and self-​determined, he observes, once we escape the irrationality of chance and discipline our thinking by the rationality of Intellect (VI.8.3–​6). If we follow this path further, we see that beyond Intellect, the Good is the most self-​determined of all. Out of respect for that transcendence, we have to state this truth in exclusively negative terms. The Good is only “unique” (ἄτοπον) through its own self-​assertion, not by relative comparison with others. To define αὐτεξούσιον negatively, we need a better axis than unique versus common (VI.8.7). Actual versus potential does not suffice either, since the One’s unique actuality asserts itself without reliance on any conditional possibility (VI.8.18). It is not even “in its own” power (τὸ ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ), but something beyond such self-​relation, independent even of self-​identity (VI.8.4). Instead, Plotinus proposes a different opposition: master (κύριος) versus slave (δοῦλος). Some beings are slaves, and some are masters, but the one who uniquely has αὐτεξούσιον is master of all; even its uniqueness is independently self-​asserted (VI.8.7). The One has self-​determination in the sense that it has “supreme mastery” (VI.8.18) and a “pure” freedom since it is not “enslaved” (δουλεύσασα) to any being (VI.8.20). The One alone is freely itself; all other beings are enslaved (δουλεῦον) by existing in relation to others (VI.8.21). Because the One holds the highest place, he “has all things as slaves” (δοῦλα πάντα ἔχει). They look at him, but he does not look back at them; yet as he withdraws the One is “pleased with himself ” (ἑαυτὸν ἀγαπήσας) (VI.8.16). Here Plotinus cites Plato’s mysterious teaching in the Republic that the Good is “beyond being” (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας), and he claims that he has solved its riddle. To be “beyond being” means: . . . not only that [the One] generates substance but that he is not a slave [οὐ δουλεύει] to substance or to himself, nor is his substance his principle, but he, being principle of substance, did not make substance for himself but when he had made it left it outside himself [ἔξω εἴασεν ἑαυτοῦ], because he has no need of

26 Curtis Hancock identifies nine features of negative theology that Plotinus shares with Sethian Platonists like Allogenes, The Tripartite Tractate, and Apocryphon of John. Two are especially relevant here: “that the One is not Form”; that the One “must be without desire or need, since infinity implies independence.” Hancock, “Negative Theology in Gnosticism and Neoplatonism,” 177–​178.

The Aneidetic Condition  63 being, he who made it. He does not then even make being in accordance with his being. (VI.8.19)

According to Plotinus, Plato’s secret teaching is not simply that the One is the transcendent source of Being. Rather, the One is the master who has most fully liberated himself from Being, that is, the beings that he made. Purified of every need, the Maker successfully escaped the perils of remaining in relation with his progeny. The One’s mastery ensures its free self-​determination. Todd Ohara defines this radical principle as a “non-​reciprocal relationship of dependency.”27 Plotinus describes the freedom of the One in similar terms in the earlier Ennead VI.9. Rather than think of the One’s radical unity through number or magnitude, we ought rather to imagine it as maximal independence (ἱκανώτατον) or maximal self-​sufficiency (αὐταρκέστατον). All multitude comes from need, but the One is entirely without need (ἀνενδεέστατον). It needs no others and strictly speaking does not even need itself (VI.9.6). To be in need means to desire a principle above oneself, but the One desires no such principle because it lacks nothing. For the same reason, it does not think thoughts or will the Good. We cannot even name the One’s giving or gifts univocally “good”; the generosity of the gift received cannot redound to the One as the giver (VI.9.6). This is a major theme across the Enneads. The Good does not “need” (δεηθεὶς) the beings that flow from it, but rather “leaves what has come into being altogether alone [ὅλον ἀφεὶς].” Frankly, the Good “would not have cared [ἐμέλησεν] if it had not come into being” (V.5.12). “The One remains continually turned toward itself ” (V.1.6), and as the most self-​sufficient (αὐταρκέστατον) is also the most alone (μόνον) (V.4.1). The One has “escaped up” (ἀναπεφευγυῖα) into formlessness (VI.7.28).28 The Valentinian Gnostics described the One as “solitary and alone” (ἐρῆμον καὶ μόνον) because they believed it tragically lost its female consort. Plotinus cites the same Platonic phrase (V.5.13, VI.7.25), but recasts that solitude as a sign of potency (V.6.6).29 In sum, the Plotinian One remains formless only to the extent that one accepts Plotinus’s radical theology of autarchic self-​determination. For him, the One preserves its power, autonomy, and self-​sufficiency at all costs by avoiding contact with the “slaves” that are other beings. Its transcendence must guard preemptively against every loss or weakness, whether actual or merely potential. Above all, the One must shun every relation to others in order to avoid being compromised by 27 Todd Ohara, Radical Apophasis: The Internal “Logic” of Plotinian and Dionysian Negation (Pickwick Publications, 2020), 86–​87. As Ohara notes, when Plotinus compares the One to a “self-​ determining agent,” he bends his own rule of nonreciprocity, even as he requires that “illicit” likeness in order to maintain it. 28 Cf. Plato, Philebus 64E. On this phrase, see Pierre Hadot, Plotin. Traité 38 (VI, 7) (Éditions du Cerf, 1988), 311–​313. 29 Cf. Plato, Philebus 63B. See Jean Pépin, “Theories of Procession in Plotinus and the Gnostics,” in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, eds. Richard T. Wallis and Jay Bregman (State University of New York Press, 1992), 302–​304.

64  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation extending a gift or willing another’s good. Such autarchic power, which maintains its authority only under these extensive conditions, can only be described as fragile.

Erotic hazards (3) Eros (ἔρως). Plotinus offers a third argument in Ennead VI.7 for the formlessness of the One, an argument from love. Initially, he repeats the idea from Ennead I.6 that true Beauty lies beyond shapes and figures. Lovers first gaze upon each other’s bodies, a superficial imprint (τύπος) from the senses. But then they deepen their desire when they learn to transform the beloved “into greater shapelessness” (ἐπὶ τὸ ἀμορφότερον) by seeing not body but soul. The soul climbs upward when it learns to perceive in the shape of the beloved’s body the “trace of the shapeless” (ἴχνος τοῦ ἀμόρφου) (VI.7.33).30 The one who thirsts for greater beauties must “flee shape” and instead seek after “shapeless form” (ἄμορφον εἶδος).31 Beauty, he concludes, is thus “measured” (μεμετρῆσθαι) by the Good which is formless (ἀνείδεον) (VI.7.33). This much we have heard before about beauty. But now Plotinus adds a new corollary regarding love or desire (ἔρως). The intensity of desire, he suggests, varies according to the nature of the beauty desired. The more that object is defined and delimited, the more constrained and limited is the corresponding desire. When something is fully known, desire for it can be quickly fulfilled. Conversely, Plotinus reasons: When you cannot grasp the form or shape of what is longed for, it would be most longed for and most lovable [ἐρασμιώτατον], and love for it would be immeasurable [ἔρως ἄμετρος]. For love is not limited here, because neither is the beloved, but the love of this would be unbounded [ἄπειρος ἔρως] . . . . The nature of the most lovable is in the altogether formless [ἀνείδεον]. (VI.7.32–​33)

In this account, definition and limitation are inimical to the restless freedom of ἔρως. The geometry of circumscription and delineation only succeeds to the detriment of our loves. By the same token, Plotinus posits that the greater the 30 On the difference between trace (ἴχνος) and image (εἰκών) in Plotinus, see Georges Leroux, “La trace et les signes, aspects de la sémiotique de Plotin,” in ΣΟΦΙΗΣ ΜΑΙΗΤΟΡΕΣ, “Chercheurs des Sagesse.” Hommage à Jean Pépin, eds. Marie-​Odile Goulet-​Cazé, Goulven Madec, and Denis O’Brien (Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1992), 245–​261. 31 On the strength of this phrase, Deirdre Carabine mistakenly calls the One “formless form.” “The One has not size or extension; it is shapeless and has no parts. To have not shape or size indicates formlessness, or as Plotinus puts it, it is ‘formless form’ . . . . The One is both everywhere and nowhere; . . . it is simple and yet not simple; it is form which is formless, and unity which is partless.” Carabine, The Unknown God, 117, 146. This is a simple misreading of VI.7.33. Plotinus is not naming the One as ἄμορφον εἶδος, but rather naming the relative beauties that lovers should seek as they ascend toward greater beauties, a form unrestrained by visible shapes.

The Aneidetic Condition  65 formlessness, the greater the love. If the divine One is the ultimate source of beauty, and thus the most supremely desired object of all, then that One must be entirely formless. This third argument seems especially powerful at first because it reaches deeply into Plato’s thought. In the Phaedrus and Symposium, Socrates learned how to ascend to the Good by passing from lesser beauties to higher beauties, traversing the pathway from visible to invisible. Diotima taught Socrates to climb the “ascending steps” of love from the lover’s body up to the “great ocean of Beauty.”32 As Plotinus inserts allusions to both dialogues, he tenders his own system as a conceptual translation of the grand Platonist myths from centuries before. Yet his retelling is not as straightforward as it seems. Let us review his reasoning. According to Plotinus, the lover desires the beloved’s invisible soul more than the mere matter of the beloved’s body. The beautiful shape that first attracts a lover is only a “trace” of shapelessness, and after tasting true beauty, the lover will wish to remove every shape from his mind. Of course, Intellect has more form than soul, so it must be more lovable still. Since the One is infinitely lovable, Plotinus concludes that it must be entirely without visible shape, even more intensely than soul or intellect, hence completely formless (VI.7.33). This account raises some questions. As I progress from loving Soul to loving Intellect to loving the One, I climb from one beauty to an even greater beauty, from more external shape to less shape, but always from less form to more form. “Soul is more form [μᾶλλον εἶδος] and more lovable [μᾶλλον ἐράσμιον], and intellect is more form than soul and still more lovable,” he writes (VI.7.33). If the greater the beauty, the greater the form, and the greater the love, would not the One, as maximally lovable, possess the maximal form, rather than formlessness? In this passage at least, Plotinus denominates the One as formless by exploiting the ambivalence between μορφή as figure and μορφή as form. A similar difficulty appears in the early essay Ennead VI.9. While discussing ascent to the Good through beauty, Plotinus as usual warns contemplatives to avoid quantity (μέγεθος) and figure (σχῆμα) and to seek shapelessness (ἄμορφον) on the way to formlessness (ἀνείδεον) (VI.9.3). To illustrate this doctrine, Plotinus dramatically invokes Diotima’s speech in the Symposium where she explains the ladder of love. She exhorts Socrates to seek that “singular form [μονοειδές] itself, by itself ” (VI.9.3). Perhaps Plotinus suddenly noticed that Diotima describes the Good as a supreme form. He immediately adds the gloss: “—​or rather, the formless [ἀνείδεον] before all form” (VI.9.3).33 But his insertion completely reverses Plato’s 32 Plato, Symposium 210A–​211C; cf. Plato, Phaedrus 247A–​250E. 33 “ἀλλ᾽αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ μονοειδές, μᾶλλον δὲ ἀνείδεον πρὸ εἴδους ὂν παντὸς . . . .” Ennead VI.9.3. Cf. Plato, Symposium 211B: “ἀλλ᾽αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ μεθ᾽ αὑτοῦ μονοειδὲς ἀεὶ ὄν, τὰ δὲ ἄλλα πάντα καλὰ ἐκείνου μετέχοντα . . . .” Plato’s other uses of μονοειδὲς echo this one: each essence is “unique and exists by itself ” (μονοειδὲς ὄν αὐτὸ καθ᾽αὐτο: Phaedo 78D), or letters are “singular in form and indivisible” (μονοειδὲς τε καὶ ἀμέριστον: Theaetetus 205D). On Plotinus’s contradiction of Diotima, see

66  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation meaning. Plato names the One the unique, supreme form, the μονοειδές; Plotinus calls it the uniquely formless One, the ἀνείδεον.34 For Plato, the One’s maximal beauty indicates its maximal form, a singular Form unconditioned by others, but still form. For the sake of his doctrine of formlessness, Plotinus is willing to depart from Plato. One can sift through Plato’s dialogues in search of a textual precedent for ἀνείδεον. In Timaeus 51A, the “Mother and Receptacle” that serves as matrix of the forms must be empty, both “void of all the forms” (πάντων ἐκτὸς . . . τῶν εἰδῶν) and “a Kind invisible and unshaped” (ἀνόρατον εἶδός τι καὶ ἄμορφον). Yet here the “formless” is not the Demiurge or the supreme Good, but the passivity of matter awaiting form. In Parmenides 137DE, since the One is without beginning or end, it is “unlimited” (ἄπειρον), and if unlimited, certainly “without form” (ἄνευ σχήματος). But in context, the issue is clearly not ontological formlessness but geometrical shapelessness: the One partakes neither of roundness (extremes equidistant from center) nor straightness (center in between extremes). Willy Theiler points out the peculiarity of Plotinus’s concept after comparing Pythagorean aesthetics to Enneads VI.6 and VI.7. He notes: It is a paradox for Plotinus that the One, without having limits, nevertheless brings about limit, measure, and form—​εἶδος (and Intellect is indeed the height of εἴδη). The First Principle is ἀνείδεον. As ἀνείδεον the First Principle is characterized completely otherwise than Plato’s ἕν, which paradoxically is the counterpart of matter that is ἀνείδεον . . . .35

The Plotinian One is formless where Plato’s is not; Plato reserved formlessness for matter, while Plotinus also assigns it to the first principle; and the Plotinian One, for all its aneidetic purity, donates limit and measure as if it were the Form of forms. Another “paradox” of Plotinus’s philosophy is that the unformed One and unformed Matter stand opposed on either end of the ontological spectrum. “How is it to be understood,” asks Theiler, “that Plotinus sometimes takes form to be important in the descending natural hierarchy, but other times values the Unformed

Kevin Corrigan, Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism (Purdue University Press, 2005), 216–​217. 34 Carabine simply elides the problem: “As perfect, the One is also unique in form (monoeidés) or, as Plotinus prefers to say, formless (aneideon)” (Unknown God, 112). Hadot seems aware of the problem but attempts to harmonize the two (Plotin, 329–​336). As Krämer notes, when Plotinus cites a Platonic dialogue to support his position, his interpretation is sometimes “adjusted only retrospectively and often by force” (Ursprung der Geistmetaphysik, 292). 35 Willy Theiler, “Einheit und unbegrenzte Zweiheit von Plato bis Plotin,” in Isonomia: Studien zur Gleichheitsvorstellung im Griechischen Denken, eds. Jürgen Mau and Ernst Günther Schmidt (Akademie Verlag, 1964), 109. Cf. Willy Theiler, “Das Unbestimmte, Unbegrenzte bei Plotin,” Revue internationale de philosophie 24, no. 92 (1970): 290–​297.

The Aneidetic Condition  67 (matter excepted) more highly?”36 Matter is formless (II.5.4), but as matter comes to resemble the Good, it gains form, although the Good itself is formless (I.2.4). In Ennead I.8 [51], whose authenticity has been questioned, Plotinus defines evil as the “privation” (στέρησις) of the Good. Evil is a shadowlike “form of non-​being” (εἶδός τι τοῦ μὴ ὄντος), or rather a faux form (εἴδωλον) that withdraws from reality into chaos. Evil is marked by unmeasure (ἀμετρίαν), limitlessness (ἄπειρον), need (ἐνδεές), and formlessness (ἀνείδεον). The Good, by contrast, is a measure (μέτρον) and a limit (πέρας); it is self-​sufficient (αὔταρκες) and form-​giving (εἰδοποιητικόν) (I.8.3). Since beings increase in evil when they lack measure, one must posit an absolute evil which is wholly limitless and formless (ἄπειρον . . . καὶ ἀνείδεον) (I.8.3). In this text, Plotinus assigns the One not the title ἀνείδεον but rather εἰδοποιητικόν. No doubt Plotinus interpreters will be quick to add that while evil lacks form by privation, the One is beyond form by excess through its overflowing form-​giving. Nevertheless, the awkward univocity of the term ἀνείδεον—​the essence of evil and the essence of the Good—​clarifies how eccentric the Plotinian theonym is and how far it strays from Plato’s names for divine Form. One and the same procedure negates form and measure to think the evil of matter (I.8.9) and negates form and measure to think the transcendence of the One (I.6.9).37 It is important to grasp the deep connection between this aneidetic henology and Plotinus’s understanding of love. According to Plotinus, the formless One is the supreme instigator of all of our desires, because it generates the forms that radiate beauty and draw us toward them; the One is also the highest possible object of our love since it dwells beyond every limitation and so inspires maximal desire. At the same time, however, Plotinus teaches that the One itself in its self-​sufficiency does not love: “The One does not desire us [οὐκ ἐφίεται], so as to be around us [περὶ ἡμᾶς εἶναι], but we desire it, so that we are around it” (VI.9.8). The One inspires love but does not love, because in its absolute formlessness it dwells beyond desire. The One can inspire love passively, attracting desire like a magnet: every soul is “from the beginning moved to love by the Good” (VI.7.31). Even Intellect loves (ἀγάπη) the One, but the One never reaches out with its own love (V.1.6).38 Plotinus accepts Stoic accounts of sympathy among individuals but states that the One in its radical freedom is liberated from sympathy.39 This is simply another 36 Willy Theiler, “Von der begrenzten Form zur unbegrenzten Liebe bei Plotin,” in Islamic Philosophy and the Classical Tradition: Essays Presented by His Friends and Pupils to Richard Walzer on His Seventieth Birthday, eds. S. M. Stern, Albert Hourani, and Vivian Brown (University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 471. In a similar way, John Rist contends that the One exists uniquely and infinitely and that to call the One “simple indetermination” is to confuse it with the formlessness of matter. See John Rist, Plotinus. The Road to Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1967), 21–​37. 37 Jean-​François Pradeau suggests that Plotinus began with the formlessness of matter in Alcinous and converted it into a general principle of the “anteriority of indeterminacy” applicable even to the One. See Jean-​François Pradeau, L’Imitation du principe. Plotin et la participation (J. Vrin, 2003), 139–​147. 38 Pépin, “Theories of Procession,” 306. 39 Thomas Leinkauf, “Eros und Sympathie bei Plotin,” in Sympathy in Transformation: Dynamics Between Rhetorics, Poetics, and Ethics, eds. Roman Alexander Barton, Alexander Klaudies, and

68  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation version of the third postulate: If the divine One is to be rigorously formless, it may not love. To be sure, the accounts of desire found in Plotinus are rich and colorful.40 They can also be intensely erotic.41 Inexperienced lovers, he writes, are “lovers of images” (εἰδώλων ἔρωτες), who “embrace” (περιπτυσσόμενον) their beloveds with their flesh from the outside, loving bodies not fully real. More advanced lovers unite with the “true beloved” who can be “embraced and touched with the whole self ” (VI.9.9). The contemplative waits for the One to appear inside the self, like the beloved waits for the lover (VI.7.34). In a whole essay devoted to ἔρως, Plotinus describes the physical urges and cosmic movements that add up to universal desire for the Good, under the aegis of Aphrodite (III.5[50].1–​44). Desire is a volatile mixture of form and indeterminacy (εἴδους καὶ ἀοριστίας), reason and irrationality (λόγος . . . καὶ ἄλογον) (III.5.7). In other texts, Intellect contemplating the One falls in love, becomes drunk, and goes out of its mind with passion (VI.7.35). At one point, Plotinus himself itches so ardently for the One that his soul “goes into labor” (ὠδίνει) with sudden cramps (V.3.17). Yet for all this, Plotinus leaves the unilateral direction of ἔρως wholly undisturbed. The One is lovable by us (ἐράσμιον), it loves itself (αὑτοῦ ἔρως), and indeed it is love itself (ἔρως ὁ αὐτός) (VI.8.15). Nevertheless, the One does not love beyond itself toward us.42 The One does not (it cannot) give itself in love. The One must remain “master” of itself (κύριος ἑαυτοῦ), and we must respect the chaste independence that keeps it “alone and pure” (μόνος καὶ καθαρός) (VI.8.15). The soul’s highest union with the One Thomas Micklich (De Gruyter, 2018), 22–​23. Cf. Eyjólfur K. Emilsson, “Plotinus on sympatheia,” in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (Oxford University Press, 2015), 36–​60. 40 Plotinus uses a variety of terms to describe experiences of love: ἔφεσις, ὄρεξις, πόθος, ὁρμή, ἔρως, βούλησις, and ἐπιθυμία. See René Arnou, Le désir de Dieu dans la philosophie de Plotin (Presses de Université Gregorienne, 1967), 59–​64. 41 For more details, see Zeke [Alexander J.] Mazur, “Having Sex with the One: Erotic Mysticism in Plotinus and the Problem of Metaphor,” in Late Antique Epistemology: Other Ways to Truth, eds. Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Stephen R. L. Clark (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 67–​83. Cf. Mazur, The Platonizing Sethian Background of Plotinus’s Mysticism, 54–​55, 105–​106, 120–​122. 42 On this point, see Alberto Bertozzi, Plotinus on Love: An Introduction to His Metaphysics through the Concept of Eros (Brill, 2021), 64–​76. Following Lacrosse, Bertozzi divides Plotinian eros into ascending and descending love, and the latter into henological, noetic, psychic, and hyletic functions. See Joachim Lacrosse, L’amour chez Plotin. Erôs hénologique, Erôs noétique, Erôs psychique. Cahiers de Philosophie Ancienne 11 (Éditions Ousia, 1994). In effect, Bertozzi inadvertently tests how far one may derive a relational love ad extra starting from what he calls the One’s “absolute erotic self-​ identity” (59)—​and ends up displaying the almost comical acrobatics required to do so. As it turns out, the key maneuver is imputing the One’s mythical consent to the love achieved by other beings and then counting such consent at second-​hand as a co-​love by the One. Bertozzi outlines three steps: (1) The One loves only itself, but with such intensity that its self-​love overflows into generating beings. (2) Those beings are free to love the One, but the One only loves itself in them, that is, the One loves the fact that they love it. (3) If those beings love the One so well that they attain union with the One, the One loves itself again, viz. it loves the One-​ness they attained by loving it. In this way, the One can remain free of all of its beloveds—​who seem to love with greater freedom and generosity than it can—​yet still merit praise as a loving deity.

The Aneidetic Condition  69 does nothing to puncture the solitude: one remains alone with One who remains Alone (μόνῳ αὐτὸ μόνον, I.6.7; μόνου πρὸς μόνον, VI.9.11). René Arnou points out that even ascending love for the One sits awkwardly with absolute formlessness. To know an object of desire requires some resemblance, if not reciprocal sympathy, and “desire requires a certain immanence of that which is desired in that which desires”—​that is, the One immanent in beings. For Arnou, the solution is spatial: we must say that the One is both “inside and outside” all things.43 Lambros Couloubaritsis suggests that λόγος serves as permanent intermediary between the One and the Many and that this is the mode by which the One is immanent to all things while remaining absolutely transcendent.44 Joachim Lacrosse proposes that ἔρως works in a similar way, as a kind of second λόγος. As Plotinus says, “love is not a pure rational principle [λόγος . . . οὐ καθαρός], since he has in himself an indefinite, irrational, unbounded impulse” (III.5.7). For Lacrosse, ἔρως and λόγος work together as symmetrical mediations shuttling between the One, Intellect, and Soul: λόγος governs the procession out of the One; ἔρως governs the return back to the One. Yet the two can only perform these roles because the One lacks them both.45 Plotinus admits that the strict autarchy of the One makes it difficult to understand how the One can love or give itself. If the gifts are his, the One is not simple; if they are not his, the One does not give (V.3.15). We learned above that due to the constraints of autarchy, the One’s giving and gifts are not univocally “good.” “So we must not even call this One Good, the good which he gives, but the Good in another way beyond all goods,” writes Plotinus (VI.9.6).46 Eric Perl suggests that we save the One’s generosity by redefining what “giving” means. According to Perl, the One is easily misunderstood as something that gives (or emanates) something other than itself, but in truth the One is not “a giver, a being which has the attribute of giving,” but rather “pure giving, Giving itself.”47 Perl seeks to present the One’s nongift as a sign of power and indeed generosity.48

43 Arnou, Le désir de Dieu, 148–​185. 44 Lambros Couloubaritsis, “Le logos hénologique chez Plotin,” in ΣΟΦΙΗΣ ΜΑΙΗΤΟΡΕΣ, “Chercheurs des Sagesse.” Hommage à Jean Pépin, eds. Marie-​Odile Goulet-​Cazé, Goulven Madec, and Denis O’Brien (Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1992), 231–​243. 45 See Joachim Lacrosse, L’amour chez Plotin, 105–​127. 46 “ὀυ τοίνυν ὀυδὲ ἀγαθὸν λεκτέον τοῦτο, ὃ παρέχει, ἀλλὰ ἄλλως τἀγαθὸν ὑπὲρ τὰ ἄλλα ἀγαθά.” Ennead VI.9.6. “So, this should not be called ‘good,’ which is what it bestows on other things. Rather, it is the Good in another way, above the other goods” (trans. Gerson). 47 Perl, “ ‘The Power of All Things’,” 309. 48 Perl blames a common “mythic image” of the One as monad prior to the production of being and offers an alternative image. To establish the conceptual distinction between mythical “giver” and nonmythical “giving,” Perl adopts a spatial model: “The One, then, is comparable not to a point-​source from which light proceeds, but rather to the ambient light itself, playing over all things” (“ ‘The Power of All Things’,” 310). Note how Perl’s image relies upon geometrical distinctions: the One gives not as point but as extension, not rest but motion, not center but periphery. To guard the One’s transcendence, geometry reappears to mark off the final zone of difference.

70  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Readers have no choice but to apply this hermeneutical principle—​the gift prohibition—​in other passages where Plotinus uses the metaphor of the One’s loving generosity, which some have attempted to equate with Christian grace. In Ennead V.5, Plotinus says that the Good is “gentle and kindly and gracious” (ἤπιον καὶ προσηνὲς καὶ ἁβρότερον) (V.5.12). All beings that reproduce imitate the “generosity” of the One (ἀγαθότητα) which never grudgingly withholds itself (V.4.1). Other passages also tempt interpreters to hear a Christianized Plotinus: “We breathe, we are preserved, not by it giving [δόντος] and then leaving, but because it always provides for us, as long as it is just what it is” (VI.9.9). Or: “Each thing is what it is in itself, but it becomes desired when the Good itself colors it, because this gives it grace [ὥσπερ χάριτας δόντος] and love in the eyes of those desiring it” (VI.7.22; trans. Gerson). According to the principle of gift prohibition of Ennead VI.9.6, however, we should not interpret δόντος in these instances as if the One were engaged in generous activity resulting in a gift. Rather, such gift-​giving effects are properly understood as passive and autonomic, preserving the One’s autarchy. The same holds even for the metaphorical “overflow” (οἷον ὑπερερρύη) of the One into Intellect out of its “superabundance” (ὑπερπλῆρες) (V.2.1), another phrase much touted in favor of a Christianized Plotinus. But Plotinus clearly explains two features of “overflow” in this passage that work against such interpretations. First, overflow stems from the One’s perfection (τέλειον), but this perfection is found in that it “seeks, has, and needs nothing.” Its generous overflow is only conceivable as a fulfillment of its autarchic mastery. Second, the superabundant overflow is not a gift, let alone a self-​gift by the One. For the instant that the overflow “makes something other” (πεποίηκεν ἄλλο) than the One, it is already not One, but in fact Intellect gazing back at the One from a safe distance (V.2.1). The same considerations constrain other metaphorical images, whether the One “so to speak, boiling over with life” (οἷον ὑπερζέουσαν ζωῇ) (VI.5.12) or the One “unfolding itself as a seed does” (ἐξελίττεσθαι οἷον σπέρματος) (IV.8.6). If Christian notions of grace assume a generous divine self-​gift, Plotinian ὑπερερρύη means something quite different. Modern readers of Plotinus have made heroic efforts to rescue the One from such lovelessness. Kevin Corrigan proposes that the unity of “implicate and explicate orders” in Plotinus means that our love for the One is joined to, and secretly funded by, the One’s love for us.49 Frederic Schroeder has attempted to recover the One’s love for us by redefining ἔρως as being-​with, or intercourse (συνουσία).50 Plotinus depicts the One as “keeping company with itself ” (τὸ συνεῖναι ἑαυτῷ) (VI.8.15). Schroeder observes that this echoes Porphyry’s description of the solitary Plotinus, who habitually “kept company with himself ” (συνῆν ἑαυτῷ) even 49 See Kevin Corrigan, Love, Friendship, Beauty, and the Good: Plato, Aristotle, and the Later Tradition (Cascade Books, 2018), 96–​105. 50 Schroeder, Form and Transformation, 104–​107.

The Aneidetic Condition  71 when conversing with his closest friends (VP 8.19). Since the One loves itself, perhaps this inner self-​presence, like Plotinus’s introversion, is actually the highest form of love for another. Schroeder calls this a “Plotinian transformation of eros” that “defies the logic of Diotima, in Plato’s Symposium.”51 The One loves us only in the sense that its abiding self-​presence makes possible our presence to it. The One does not love us, but loves itself while near us. This does not so much rescue the One from erotic indifference as admit the full extent of it. Christian philosophers in particular have sought to refine Plotinus’s teachings. In his commentary on Ennead VI.7, Leo Sweeney struggles to put a brave face on the One’s unilateral loving: “Since love clothes itself with whatever sort of infinity the beloved wears, our love of Him is infinite, too, by transcending the restricted, definite, limited sort of love mere creatures call forth in us so that we love Him immeasurably, ineffably, endlessly.”52 His valiant attempt does nothing to change the fact that the One does not love, yet Sweeney nonetheless tries to compare the formless One to the God of Thomas Aquinas.53 Carabine admits that the One does not love, but suggests that metaphorical names like “father” and “king” remain a “forceful expression of intimacy.”54 Even Pierre Hadot could not resist some special pleading. Seizing upon a passing remark on the “grace” (χάριτας) of beauty (VI.7.22), Hadot insinuates that the One advances to us with a gift of love. Plotinus, he says, teaches the “gratuitousness of divine initiative” and “the absolute initiative of an original love.”55 Unlike Plato, “Plotinian love has a feminine totality,” which Hadot compares to the virgin Bride in the Song of Songs awaiting the “divine invasion” with “complete passivity.”56 None of this has any justification in the text, despite his eroticized translations, and even if Hadot belatedly adds: “Let the reader be reassured: this is not an attempt to Christianize Plotinus.”57 At the end of the day, Andrew Louth has it right: “The One has no concern for the soul that seeks him; nor has the soul more than a passing concern for others engaged on the same quest . . . . These limitations . . . disclose a radical opposition between the Platonic vision and Christian mystical theology.”58 We will return to the question of ἔρως in Chapter 5 when we take up the Christian Neoplatonism of Dionysius. Now, if the One were not formless, but instead singular Form (μονοειδές) as Diotima actually taught, then we would need to revise not only Plotinus’s aesthetics 51 Schroeder, Form and Transformation, 105. 52 Leo Sweeney, Divine Infinity in Greek and Medieval Thought (Peter Lang, 1992), 230. 53 Sweeney, Divine Infinity, 234–​236 54 Carabine, Unknown God, 106–​114. 55 Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision, trans. Michael Chase (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 50–​51. 56 Hadot, Plotinus, 56. 57 Hadot, Plotinus, 51. Carabine attempts the same maneuver with the same abjuration: “It is here that Plotinus comes closest to the theory of grace . . . yet we must not be tempted to read what Plotinus says in the light of the Christian doctrine of grace” (Unknown God, 129–​130). 58 Louth, Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 51.

72  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation but also his theory of ἔρως. In this hypothetical case, two amendments would be necessary. First, if the postulate were reversed, the contemplative would still love the One with an infinite love—​even if, as supreme Form, the One exerted some manner of limit or figuration. Pace Plotinus, ἔρως could still increase infinitely even if it desired a supreme Form of forms; the intensity of one’s desire would not be dulled or constrained on account of a definite beloved. Second, if the aneidetic condition were reversed, ἔρως would not pertain exclusively to the soul’s ascent as it desires beauties on the way back to the One. Rather, in this hypothetical case, ἔρως could also appear in descent, from the direction of the One toward the soul. The supreme Form could in fact desire, as Plotinus puts it, to be around us (περὶ ἡμᾶς εἶναι). In that case, the highest reality of love—​the maximal Form—​would be a prerogative of the One itself, a manifestation of its absolute sovereignty, come what may to its henological purity. In short, if the One were not formless, it would be free to love. In this way, reversing the aneidetic condition would trigger a parallel reversal of the Plotinian erotic condition. It is a shift in perspective that brings to mind Diotima’s original counsel to Socrates in the Symposium: “You thought love was being loved [τὸ ἐρώμενον], rather than being a lover [τὸ ἐρῶν] . . . . But being a lover takes a different form [ἄλλην ἰδέαν].”59

Specters of formlessness Plotinus’s proposal that the One is ἀνείδεον should startle us.60 “Plotinus argues in terms shocking for traditional Hellenic thinkers,” writes R. T. Wallis, that “as the source of Form, Measure and Limit, the One must itself be Formless, Unmeasured and Infinite.”61 A. H. Armstrong, translator of the standard Loeb edition, believes the novelty of the doctrine contradicts both Plato and the Christian Trinity.62 Jean-​ Louis Chrétien names the kernel of the problem in light of a principle found in Ennead V.3: the One gives what it does not have.63 Plotinus effectively distinguishes two modes of donation: when the giver possesses the gift and when the giver does not. When it comes to the One, Plotinus intends the latter, stranger version. The formless One has nothing to do with images of flowing emanations, radiating light, 59 “ᾠήθης δὲ . . . τὸ ἐρώμενον ἔρωτα εἶναι, οὐ τὸ ἐρῶν: διὰ ταῦτα σοι οἶμαι πάγκαλος ἐφαίνετο ὁ Ἔρως . . . τὸ δέ γε ἐρῶν ἄλλην ἰδέαν τοιαύτην ἔχον . . . .” Plato, Symposium 204C. 60 On ἀνείδεον generally, see John H. Heiser, “Plotinus and the Apeiron of Plato’s Parmenides,” Thomist 55, no. 1 (1991): 72–​78; Sweeney, Divine Infinity, 184–​195; and Suzanne Stern-​Gillet, “Le principe du Beau chez Plotin: Réflexions sur Enneas VI.7.32 et 33,” Phronesis 45, no. 1 (2000): 49–​53. 61 R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism, 2nd ed. (Hackett, 1995), 57. 62 See A. H. Armstrong, “Plotinus’s Doctrine of the Infinite and Christian Thought,” Downside Review 73, no. 231 (1954–​1955): 47–​58. Cf. A. H. Armstrong, “The Escape of the One: An Investigation of Some Possibilities of Apophatic Theology Imperfectly Realized in the West,” Studia Patristica XIII, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Akademie Verlag, 1975): 77–​89. 63 Jean-​ Louis Chrétien, “Le Bien donne ce qu’il n’a pas,” Archives de Philosophie 43, no. 2 (1980): 263–​277.

The Aneidetic Condition  73 or bonum diffusivum sui, which are more properly Proclian. It is also incompatible with the Christian notion of God’s self-​giving in the Incarnation. Indeed, such “retrospective Christianization,” Chrétien notes, conceals the fact that “Plotinus’s formula is in fact opposed term for term by a specifically Christian formula . . . . To the height of the One withdrawn in his hermitage—​giving that which it does not have—​corresponds the condescension of God by which . . . he deigned to be born of a Virgin.”64 “If the Good is and remains transcendent from its gifts,” he concludes, “God transcends by giving away this very transcendence.”65 Frank Regen, on the other hand, approaches ἀνείδεον as a response to the logical regression problem inherent in Plato’s doctrine of ideas.66 What forms a form, if not another form behind it? This conundrum, admitted by Plato in his late dialogue Parmenides, led Aristotle to abandon the theory of ideas and instigated what J. V. Stang calls the various “dialectical eidologies” of Neoplatonism.67 According to Regen, in the end, there are only two possible provisional settlements, neither of which solves the problem. Either one simply posits a formless Form that gives what it does not have (the unmoved Mover in Aristotle), straining the notion of form-​giving; or one posits a self-​forming Form of forms (νοῦς in Aristotle), forcing an artificial halt to the infinite regression. In Regen’s judgment, Plotinus adopts the first strategy but tries to synthesize both with the ambivalent phrase εἶδος εἰδῶν ἀνείδεον (VI.7.17). Regen concludes that Plotinian formlessness is by no means a hallmark of “mysticism” but is simply entailed as a “demonstrable logical necessity” by Plato’s aporetic idealism.68 Cristina D’Ancona Costa locates the problem of ἀνείδεον in the domain of causation. For Plotinus, the One bestows unity by remaining itself (μένειν), “a relationship of similitude which is involved in the pattern of eidetic causality.”69 But Plotinus also says that the One bestows form by virtue of its dissimilarity, giving what it does not have. For D’Ancona Costa, these are plainly “two different kinds of causality,” one for unity (similarity of form) and one for multiplicity (dissimilarity 64 Chrétien, “Le Bien,” 272. Chrétien cites a line from the Latin vespers in the octave of Christmas. 65 Chrétien, “Le Bien,” 277. 66 Frank Regen, Formlose Formen. Plotins Philosophie als Versuch die Regressprobleme der platonischen Parmenides zu lösen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 48. 67 See J. V. Stang, “Dialectical Eidology: An Interpretation of Plato’s Parmenides and its Consequences for Neo-​and Late Platonism” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1984); cited in Regen, Formlosen Formen, 29 n. 41. Cf. Plato, Parmenides 132D. 68 Regen, Formlose Formen, 47–​49. Werner Beierwaltes addresses the same problem. The One both has and does not have Being; it has absolute power to be (δύναμις πάντων). “This explains the double meaning of naming the One—​to the extent this applies at all—​as εἶδος εἰδῶν—​‘Form of forms’: as objective genitive, the Pre-​Form [Vor-​Form], which constitutes all others; as subjective genitive ‘Form’ by eminence or absolute ‘Form,’ which as not-​determined is the comprehensive ground of every determination.” Beierwaltes acknowledges that this philosophical judgment between the One as formless and the One as Form hangs textually on whether εἶδος εἰδῶν (VI.7.17) is construed as nominative or accusative. See Beierwaltes, Denken des Einen, 48–​52, esp. 50 n. 47. 69 Cristina D’Ancona Costa, “Plotinus and Later Platonic Philosophers on the Causality of the First Principle,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, ed. Lloyd Gerson (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 373. On remaining, see 360–​364.

74  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation of formlessness).70 Plotinus resists this conclusion and strives to hold together a univocal causation; yet he can only do so, D’Ancona Costa shows, by reverting to another Aristotelian term. Plotinus resolves the aporiae of the Parmenides by removing causes from the class of their effects, such that the least determined principles possess the greatest causative power. This results in a discontinuous hierarchy of causes since relative degrees of formlessness (ἄμορφον) eventuate in an absolute formlessness (ἀνείδεον)—​a state of affairs in “radical opposition to the very principle of eidetic causality, that is, the link of resemblance between an effect and its cause.”71 In short, Plotinus uses the model of causation to undo causation. The One acts as a form to cause unity; the One acts without form to cause multiplicity. This antinomy offers two contradictory accounts of the One’s single activity. Plotinus’s only remaining option, D’Ancona Costa suggests, is to retreat to the Aristotelian distinction of δύναμις and ἐνέργεια and redefine the Platonic One as infinite power (ὑπερβολὴν τῆς δυνάμεως) (VI.8.10).72 To maintain this power, the One’s autarchic mastery must be guarded with constant vigilance. The more we examine the roots of Plotinus’s ἀνείδεον, the more unstable it appears. As Chrétien, Regen, and D’Ancona Costa scrutinize the dilemma of the One’s relation to the forms (or God’s relation to the world), each arrives at the same conclusion: an insuperable antinomy between the aesthetics of absolute formlessness and the aesthetics of supreme Form. This is precisely Tradition A and Tradition B, as I outlined above, the first innovated by Plotinus and the second implied but excluded by the same innovation. Taken together, the two starting points complement each other reciprocally, totally, even logically. Yet the notion of an aneidetic One did not evolve itself, as if inevitably someone would formulate it eventually, and Plotinus were merely an accidental vessel. This ignores the very particular theological choices that determined Plotinus’s formulation, in departure from Platonist tradition, as we saw in the three postulates above. Once the horizon of ἀνείδεον has been broached in Greek and early Christian contemplation, it is impossible to think otherwise. The opposition between formlessness and Form has structured our philosophical approaches to henology, theology, metaphysics, mysticism, and comparative religion for two millennia. Our only recourse as historians is to attend to both traditions, to specify the particularity of Tradition A, and to struggle against the oblivion of Tradition B. As Kevin Corrigan has observed, even when Plotinus’s direct textual influence is “eclipsed or limited” for centuries, his spirit remains a pervasive “hidden interlocutor.” That ghostly shade of Plotinus, Corrigan marvels, is “a peculiar force of 70 D’Ancona Costa, “Plotinus and Later Platonic Philosophers,” 370–​375. 71 Cristina D’Ancona Costa, “ΑΜΟΡΦΟΝ ΚΑΙ ΑΝΕΙΔΕΟΝ. Causalité des formes et causalité de l’Un chez Plotin,” Revue de philosophie ancienne 10, no. 1 (1992): 107. 72 See D’Ancona Costa, “ΑΜΟΡΦΟΝ ΚΑΙ ΑΝΕΙΔΕΟΝ,” 108–​113. On the aesthetic consequences of Plotinian formlessness, see Frederic M. Schroeder, “The Categories and Plotinian Aesthetics,” Science et Esprit 72, no. 1–​2 (2020): 115–​136.

The Aneidetic Condition  75 thought and practice that tends to leap across boundaries and to stand outside the parameters of conventional experience.”73 In considering his legacy, however, it is a mistake to think of “Plotinus” statically, as if he sprang from the thigh of Zeus. As we have seen, Plotinus stitched together Neoplatonism out of the patchwork of Middle Platonist and Neopythagorean ideas, tailoring them as it suited his prerogatives. His Neopythagorean matrix urges us to ask why Plotinus chose the future that he did. Why should number not be an immediate trace of the One? Why should spatial figures lead away from the divine, rather than toward it, as Athenian Neoplatonists like Proclus would later conclude? Why must the sacrifice of form be so totalizing, even to the detriment of love? Each of these alterations leads us back to Plotinus’s original suspicion of geometry. His decision to suspend its anagogical function in order to safeguard the absolute One is neither accidental nor secondary. It is his founding philosophical act, which makes possible the radical formlessness of transcendence. Yet the strangeness and contingency of that Plotinian project have not always been considered as closely as they should.74 Plotinian Neoplatonism is the foundation of Christian mysticism. If that Neoplatonism begins with a fraught disavowal of geometry, then we should expect to see that fault line break into the history of ancient Christian contemplation as well. We should anticipate that unresolved questions and endemic problems of figure, measure, and space will resurface over the centuries to come. At first, it seems idly scholastic to worry over the place of geometry in Christian prayer. Yet that figuration strikes at the heart of the contemplative enterprise of deepened seeing: to see the world, and to see beyond the world, while remaining in the world, even as late moderns in our own century. The aneidetic condition is a “condition” in two senses: it names the grammar of Plotinian Neoplatonism (a conditional statement) as well as a syndrome to be endured (an ailing condition). We have already seen that Plotinus’s case for formlessness is far from conclusive. The aneidetic condition is itself conditional, and that structure invites us to consider the contrary as well. If the One were not formless, but a supreme Form, could that same geometry, previously subordinated, now sustain an alternative theological aesthetics? Is the Good formless, or is the Good the Form of forms? Is the figurality of forms a deficiency or a trace of the One? Do the precise dimensions of the world around me blind my gaze or enrapture it? Is love enflamed by formlessness or by singular Form? When

73 Kevin Corrigan, “The Partial Eclipse of Plotinus in the Middle Ages and His Recovery in the Renaissance,” Patristica et Mediaevalia 40, no. 2 (2019): 25–​43. 74 Even Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose readings of ancient sources are usually quite durable, makes claims about Plotinus’s uniqueness and influence that are difficult to defend today. He offers two hermeneutical alternatives for reading Plotinus defined by Plotinian philosophy itself: the way of Intellect (Hegelian, philosophical, and modern) or the way of the One (Christian, theological, and patristic). See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. IV: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, trans. Brian McNeil et al. (Ignatius Press, 1989), 280–​313.

76  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation we set out to study the genesis of Tradition A in Plotinus’s aneidetic condition, we end up bumping against Tradition B as its implicit, repressed, contrary. It is difficult to examine Plotinus and his Christian legacy with fresh eyes. The success of Plotinus’s Neoplatonist synthesis was so great, his influence so vast and largely invisible, that his beliefs continue to generate historiographical effects up into the present. Indeed, the doctrines of Plotinus’s philosophy of the One quietly guide how many historians of Neoplatonism interpret Plotinus himself.75 Given the importance of Plotinus for Christian theology and contemplative practice, this circular effect presents an obstacle to the study of ancient Christian mysticism. Since the days of Augustine of Hippo, studying Plotinus has been a way to gauge what is distinctively Christian in Christian contemplation; even modest adjustments to the Plotinian barometer can sway interpretations of the Christian past dramatically. Intellectual historians, especially historians of philosophy, are usually the first to spy differences and discontinuities over time, introducing distinctions where things seem similar to the untrained eye. Yet the long Neoplatonist tradition is often treated as if it were fundamentally or properly static. Neoplatonism begins with Plotinus, the story goes, and Christians adopt large portions into their own thinking with only superficial alterations or elegant variations. Ornamentations might accrue over the centuries, but the architecture of a unified, continuous tradition is supposed to remain the same. For example, as we have seen, Plotinus scholars familiar with Christian theology are fond of suggesting that the philosopher occasionally hints at divine grace or divine love. But on closer scrutiny, these claims turn on a single phrase, in some cases a single word, which needs to be interpreted with tremendous generosity to maintain compatibility with Christianity. One has to ask: why maintain it? Why might one feel compelled to defend the agreement of Neoplatonists in all essentials? For example, can we allow Plotinus and Dionysius to disagree? What is the source of the hermeneutical pressure to show that Plotinus already anticipated later developments, or that nothing in Dionysius is substantively new? What motivates the desire to assimilate Plotinus and Dionysius, to ensure that Plotinus is never fundamentally contested, and to guarantee that later Neoplatonists remain essentially Plotinian? Why search in Plotinus for Christian ideas he did not hold? I suspect that the quest for homogeneity is yet another consequence of the modern aesthetics of formlessness and that Plotinus’s henology still determines historical interpretations of Neoplatonism itself. For Plotinus, the One is formless and apophatic negation is autonomic, unsurpassable, and universal; the formless One is not a particular philosophical view but the revelation of a rational dialectic. Plotinus, on this view, discovered a mode of negation that is in a sense 75 On this problem of circularity, see Heinz Robert Schlette, Das Eine und das Andere: Studien zur Problematik des Negativen in der Metaphysik Plotins (Max Hueber, 1966).

The Aneidetic Condition  77 incontestable. If others differ, there is a hermeneutic pressure to assimilate them to Plotinus, in order to maintain the continuities, in order to confirm his universality, in order to keep in force his unlimited negation. So long as the aneidetic condition seems self-​evident, every other henological variant that a historian might unearth is not credible per se but urgently needs to be assimilated to the unsurpassably, naturally formless One. Hence, Dionysius cannot in essentials be permitted to differ from Plotinus on the One, on love, or on the status of images. Likewise, even the slightest textual basis proves sufficient to credit Plotinus with thinking the thoughts of later philosophers or distant religious traditions. He cannot have missed anything fundamental, because his view is universal. It is universal because its henology is maximally negative, the necessary result of the unsurpassable autonomic negation of the formless.76 In this chapter, I tried to reveal the contingency of Plotinian aesthetics (Tradition A) in order to make some room for the recovery of an alternative (Tradition B). Our first task was to appreciate Plotinus in his particularity and wake from the hypnotic mirage of an everlastingly homogeneous Neoplatonism. Our next task is to explore discontinuities between Plotinus and subsequent Christian Platonists like Dionysius. We need to de-​Christianize our reading of Plotinus, so that we can first perceive and then specify what the actual Christianization of Neoplatonism in fact entailed.77 In what follows, I will connect particular Christian alterations with the particular postulates of Plotinian henology described above. For despite its enormous legacy, Plotinus’s aneidetic aesthetics quavered on occasion in antiquity. In three distinct episodes, Christian thinkers began to overturn each of the axioms that enforce the aneidetic condition. As they did so, they also tacitly, largely accidentally, but almost necessarily, reversed Plotinus’s judgments about the status of geometrical figuration. Thus, after tracing the archaeology of formlessness in Plotinus, we can begin to perceive the slow emergence of an alternative.

76 Eric Perl’s method is a good example of the naturalization of Tradition A. Perl aims to “set forth a vision” by which we would no longer consider the large-​scale divergences between Plato and Aristotle, ancient and medieval, or pagan and Christian. Rather, Perl takes “western philosophy” from Parmenides all the way to Aquinas to constitute one unchanging “classical tradition [that] reaches its fullest flowering,” and apparently its permanent configuration, in the thought of Plotinus. “Our concern, however, is . . . rather, to articulate the strictly philosophical continuity and community between Aquinas’ metaphysics and that of Plotinus. For this reason, we may pass immediately from Plotinus to Aquinas and institute a direct comparison between them.” Perl, Thinking Being, 5–​6, 151. 77 Mazur has urged the same correction, albeit for different reasons. See Mazur, Platonizing Sethian Background, 5–​16.

Interlude: Space Evagrius of Pontus (345–​399 CE) is a pillar of Christian asceticism and the only desert father whose writings survive in multiple volumes. The son of a country bishop near the Black Sea, Evagrius was ordained lector and priest by Basil of Caesarea. After Basil’s death, he served Gregory of Nazianzus and followed him to Constantinople when Gregory became bishop. Two years later, Evagrius fell in love with a married woman, and after a troubling nightmare sailed to Egypt to pursue the monastic life. The ideal of purely imageless contemplation is the heart of Evagrian contemplation; the interior erasure of all figuration is the perfection of prayer. Yet despite his extreme aniconism, Evagrius rarely champions apophatic methods. Rather than negating names on account of God’s transcendence, Evagrius subtracts images on account of God’s simplicity. Some readers have been too quick to reduce his contributions to his critique of images and interpret him as the “quintessential iconoclast”—​an anachronistic charge that ignores his devotion to the Trinity, biblical exegesis, and even icons.1 Others strive to moderate the force of Evagrian aniconism. Evagrius is not exclusively aniconic, suggests Columba Stewart, because Evagrius uses “imagistic language” in prayer, like the divine light and the place of God.2 While Stewart acknowledges several terminological “parallels” between Evagrius and Plotinus, he suggests the monk discovered Neoplatonism in a “completely Christian environment.”3 Luke Dysinger has demonstrated that Evagrian prayer only intermittently requires imageless contemplation since he would have spent most of his time chanting the psalms and bathing in their rich imagery: Evagrius’s injunctions concerning the “time of prayer” do not refer to prolonged exercises in formless contemplation of God, but rather to the “refreshing” interval which followed each chanted psalm or reading at the daily canonical prayers. . . .

1 See Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton University Press, 1992), 68, 84. Cf. Augustine Casiday, “Christ, the Icon of the Father, in Evagrian Theology,” in Il Monachesimo tra Ereditá e Aperture, eds. Maciej Bielawski and Daniël Hombergen (Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo, 2004), 31–​60. 2 Columba Stewart, “Imageless Prayer and the Theological Vision of Evagrius Ponticus,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9, no. 2 (2001): 193. 3 Stewart, “Imageless Prayer,” 194–​195.

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0005

Interlude: Space  79 Wordless, imageless prayer takes place in an oscillating, dynamic relationship with word-​filled, image-​filled psalmody and biblical mediation.4

Out of the basis of psalmody, the mind occasionally rises to experience God without images. Yet even within this oscillating rhythm, imageless prayer remains higher than psalmody; it ultimately aims, Evagrius says, at total formlessness (ἀνείδεον). Evagrius is neither iconoclastic nor apophatic, but we can understand his aniconism as a precise recapitulation of the Plotinian aneidetic condition within Christian contemplation—​a paragon of Christian aniconism. Readers of Evagrius often detect notes of Plotinus in his writings.5 We know much about the succession from Plotinus to Porphyry to Victorinus to Augustine. But to the best of my knowledge, we still lack a parallel study on Plotinus and the Christian East, from Plotinus to the Cappadocian Fathers to Evagrius to Dionysius. Eusebius of Caesarea includes extracts from Enneads IV.7 and V.1 in his Praeparatio Evangelica, written around 314–​322 CE. Beyond that, other Enneads circulated through various channels. For his part, Evagrius almost certainly accessed Plotinian ideas through personal contacts with Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus.6 To be sure, none of the Cappadocians ever mention Plotinus, Porphyry, or Iamblichus by name.7 Gregory of Nyssa immediately seems the likeliest possibility since he clearly drew on Enneads I.6 and VI.9 in On Virginity.8 His theory of creaturely difference as spatial “interval” (διάστημα) 4 Luke Dysinger, Psalmody and Prayer in the Writings of Evagrius Ponticus (Oxford University Press, 2005), 196. 5 Irénée Hausherr finds Plotinian themes in Prayer and traces Evagrius’s ἀνείδεον back to Porphyry’s Vita Plotini. See Irénée Hausherr, Les Leçons d’Un Contemplatif. Le Traité de l’Oraison d’Evagre le Pontique (Beauchesne, 1960), 7, 93. Antoine Guillaumont regards Plotinus as a major source in Prayer and Reflections and offers several Enneads as possible candidates. See Antoine Guillaumont, “La vision de l’intellect par lui-​même dans la mystique évagrienne,” Mélanges de l’Université Saint-​Joseph 50, no. 1 (1984): 260–​261; and Antoine Guillaumont, “Preghiera pura di Evagrio d l’influsso del neoplatonismo,” Dizionario degli Instituti de Perfezione 7 (1983): 591–​595. These studies propose the following Enneads as Evagrian sources: IV.8.1, V.3.17, V.5.1–​9, VI.7.36, and VI.9.9–​10. According to Kevin Corrigan, Evagrius most resembles Plotinus when he discusses the “formless” place of God and “non-​imprinting.” See Kevin Corrigan, Evagrius and Gregory: Mind, Soul, and Body in the 4th Century (Ashgate, 2009), 170–​172; and Kevin Corrigan, “Thoughts That Cut: Cutting, Imprinting, and Lingering in Evagrius of Pontus,” in Evagrius and His Legacy, ed. Joel Kalvesmaki and Robin Darling Young (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 61. Corrigan adds to the list of possibilities: V.3.11, VI.7.32, and VI.7.33. 6 On Evagrius and the Cappadocian Fathers, see Nicholas Gendle, “Cappadocian Elements in the Mystical Theology of Evagrius Ponticus,” Studia Patristica 16, no. 2 (1985): 373–​384; and Brian E. Daley, “Evagrius and Cappadocian Orthodoxy,” in Evagrius and His Legacy, eds. Joel Kalvesmaki and Robin Darling Young (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 14–​48. On Plotinus’s influence across the three Cappadocians, see Daniele Iozzia, “A Beginner’s Success: The Impact of Plotinus’s First Treatise among Christians,” Journal of the History of Ideas 83, no. 1 (2022): 1–​16. 7 See Anthony Meredith, “Gregory of Nyssa and Plotinus,” Studia Patristica 17, no. 3 (1982): 1120–​ 1126; and Anthony Meredith, “Plotinus and the Cappadocians,” in Von Athen nach Bagdad: zur Rezeption griechischer Philosophie von der Spätantike bis zum Islam, ed. Peter Bruns (Borengasser, 2003), 63–​75. According to Meredith, the most common Enneads appearing in the Christian East were I.6, IV.7, V.1, and VI.9. 8 Jean Daniélou, “Grégoire de Nysse et Plotin,” in Congrès de Tours et de Poitiers, 3–​9 Septembre 1953. Actes du Congrès, ed. Association Guillaume Budé (Les Belles Lettres, 1954), 259–​262.

80 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation removes measure from God by definition.9 On the other hand, while Gregory commonly uses ἄπειρον and ἀφαίρεσις, he never references ἀνείδεον as Evagrius does.10 Moreover, there are reasons to consider Gregory’s opponents, Aetius and Eunomius, as the true inheritors of radical Plotinian apophaticism.11 Another option is Basil himself, who ordained Evagrius and introduced him to Gregory of Nazianzus. Basil read deeply in Plotinus and quoted several Enneads across his works.12 If we compare the Enneads predicted by Evagrius scholars and the Enneads known to Basil, the only overlap is Enneads VI.7 and VI.9.13 But these are exactly the two passages that I examined in Chapter 3, where Plotinus expounds his doctrine of ἀνείδεον. According to Evagrius, demons flood the monk’s mind with images to make contemplation of God impossible. They “impress” (ἐκτυποῦντες) arbitrary images upon the mind just as the monk begins to chant the psalms.14 This drives Evagrius to explore the economy of visual form in its different modalities, including impressed types (τύπος), graphic shapes (μορφή), and dynamic figures (σχῆμα). Demons can “imprint” (τυποῦσιν) or “befigure” (σχηματίζουσιν) the mind with impressions.15 Infected with impressed shapes (τυπούμενος μορφάς), the monk is distracted from prayer.16 Demons even touch the minds of seasoned contemplatives who have mastered the passions. Aware of their progress, they suspect nothing as the demonic power “places” (ὑποτίθενται) false concepts of God into their minds by “touching a place” (ἁπτομένου . . . τόπου) in the brain. That contact disturbs the light surrounding the mind and introduces a “certain figuration” (σχηματισμόν τινα) that engenders a “notion about God” (δόξαν θεοῦ). In this way, the demonic influence indirectly “localizes the divine” (πρὸς τοπασμὸν 9 See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, trans. Mark Sebanc (Ignatius Press, 1995), 27–​35; and T. Paul Verghese, “Διάστημα and διάστασις in Gregory of Nyssa,” in Gregor von Nyssa und die Philosophie, eds. Heinrich Dörrie, Margarete Altenburger, and Uta Schramm (Brill, 1976), 243–​260. 10 On Plotinus’s influence on Gregory, see further Corrigan, Evagrius and Gregory, 197–​208; Carabine, Unknown God, 236–​258; and Daniele Iozzia, Aesthetic Themes in Pagan and Christian Neoplatonism: From Plotinus to Gregory of Nyssa (Bloomsbury, 2015). 11 See Charles M. Stang, “Negative Theology from Gregory of Nyssa to Dionysius the Areopagite,” in The Wiley-​Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Julia Lamm (Wiley-​Blackwell, 2012), 162–​167. 12 Jean Daniélou notes that Basil used Ennead I.6 in his Homilies on the Hexaemeron. See Daniélou, “Grégoire de Nysse et Plotin,” 259. Anthony Meredith notes that Basil found access to Enneads beyond what Eusebius’s extracts provided. See Meredith, “Plotinus and Cappadocians,” 65–​68. 13 Paul Henry provides a full list of the Enneads cited in Basil’s works. See Paul Henry, Études Plotiniennes, Vol. I: Les États du Texte de Plotin (Desclée de Brouwer, 1938), 159–​196. The list is Enneads I.6, I.7, II.8, V.1, VI.7, and VI.9; with most regular attention to Enneads I.6, V.1, and VI.9. The aggregate list of possible Evagrian references to Plotinus, according to Hausherr, Guillaumont, and Corrigan, is Enneads IV.8, V.3, V.5, VI.7, and VI.9. 14 Evagrius, Eulogios, 28 (30), ed. Robert E. Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus (Oxford University Press, 2003), 330; S 55. 15 Evagrius, Thoughts, 4, eds. Paul Géhin, Antoine Guillaumont, and Claire Guillaumont, Évagre le Pontique. Sur Les Pensées. Sources Chrétiennes 438 (Éditions du Cerf, 1998), 162; S 155–​156. 16 Evagrius, Thoughts, 2, eds. Géhin and Guillaumont, 154; S 154.

Interlude: Space  81 θείας). The monk believes he has conceived a thought of his own about God, and his pride occludes its demonic origins.17 Evagrius evolves a kind of haptic epistemology that distinguishes imprinted νοήματα from nonimprinted νοήματα. The first kind “impress” (τυποῖ) or “befigure” (σχηματίζει) the mind, leaving behind figures that linger in the monk’s consciousness. The second leaves no residual impressions (τύποι), but only purely intellectual knowledge (γνῶσις) unmediated by figures.18 The mind generates thoughts through the eyes, ears, environment, and memories. Of these four channels, the latter three all produce νοήματα of both kinds, both imprinted and purely intelligible, or figural (μορφοῦντα) and nonfigural (μὴ μορφοῦντα). The channel of vision, however, is different: it can only produce imprinted, figural impressions.19 The “shape” (μορφή) of the object impressed upon the mind immediately and exclusively determines the noematic “image” (εἰκόνα).20 Demons can merely introduce an “outline of a shape” (μορφῆς γλύμμα) and their mental touch will be enough to incite the passions.21 Sounds, smells, and memories are nonfigural concepts that can represent the sensed reality to the mind. But in the case of vision, there is no such intelligible corollary; the image is nothing but the impressed figure. Evagrius concludes that vision is the sense most vulnerable to demonic attack, and therefore the one least fit for thinking God.22 Evagrius teaches that in prayer God is known exclusively through nonfigural νοήματα. “Mental representations of God,” he writes, “will not be found among the mental representations that leave an impress on the mind [τυποῦσι], but among mental representations that do not leave an impress [μὴ τυποῦσι].” “Spiritual knowledge” leads the mind away from impressed thoughts and presents it before God without impressions (ἀτύπωτον). Since “God is not a body” (οὐ γάρ ἐστι σῶμα ὁ θεός), God must be known without impressions. This is why the highest mode of prayer consists in removing all thoughts that originate in impressions. “It is necessary for the one who practices prayer,” he concludes, “to separate himself completely from mental representations that leave an impress upon the mind.”23

17 Evagrius, Prayer, 73–​74, ed. Paul Géhin, Évagre le Pontique. Chapitres sur la Prière. Sources Chrétiennes 589 (Éditions du Cerf, 2017), 286–​290; S 200–​201 [72–​73]. Note that Sinkewicz’s translation of Prayer still uses Φιλοκαλία τῶν ἱερῶν νηπτικῶν, vol. I, eds. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Makarios of Corinth (Aster, 1974), 176–​189; where his numeration varies from Géhin, I note that in brackets. 18 Evagrius, Thoughts, 41, eds. Géhin and Guillaumont, 290; S 180–​181. 19 Evagrius, Reflections, 17, ed. Joseph Muyldermans, Evagriana: Extrait de la revue Le Muséon 44, augmenté de: Nouveaux fragments grecs inédits (Paul Geuthner, 1931), 375; S 212. See further William Harmless and Raymond R. Fitzgerald, “The Sapphire Light of the Mind: the Skemmata of Evagrius Ponticus,” Theological Studies 62, no. 3 (2001): 493–​529. 20 Evagrius, Thoughts, 25, eds. Géhin and Guillaumont, 240; S 170. 21 Evagrius, Eulogios, 18 (19), ed. Sinkewicz, 322; S 45. 22 Evagrius, Reflections, 55, ed. Muyldermans, 379; S 215. 23 Evagrius, Thoughts, 41, eds. Géhin and Guillaumont, 292–​294; S 181.

82 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Prayer is essentially subtractive; it “destroys every earthly thought.”24 True prayer is therefore “amorphic” (ἀμορφία).25 Sustaining amorphic contemplation is no easy task, but Evagrius distinguishes three degrees of visual withdrawal in the face of increasing demonic attacks. First, prayer moves beyond the normal cognition of sensible objects by subtracting images of God from the mind. “When you pray do not form images [σχηματίσῃς] of the divine within yourself, nor allow your mind to be impressed with any form [μορφήν . . . τυπωθῆναι],” he counsels. “Approach the Immaterial immaterially [ἄϋλος τῷ ἀΰλῳ] and you will come to understanding.”26 True prayer exits “shape, figure, and color” (μορφήν τινα ἢ σχῆμα ἢ χρῶμα).27 Second, once the monk renounces sensible figures, demons stir up figural shapes from the memory. They urge the monk to localize the divine in space by conflating God with a quantitative object (ποσόν). But the wise monk responds that “divinity is without quantity and without form” (ἄποσον δὲ τὸ θεῖον καὶ ἀσχημάτιστον).28 God is not only beyond sensible images, but spatial measures. Only the foolish would “circumscribe the divine in forms and figures” (σχήμασι καὶ μορφαῖς περιγράφειν . . . τὸ θεῖον).29 Finally, as the demons accelerate their attacks, the monk strives for a state of “immaterial and formless knowledge” (ἄϋλον καὶ ἀνείδεον γνῶσιν) that is pure prayer.30 The Evagrian aniconic itinerary thus passes through three stages: negating type, shape, and figure; negating quantity, circumscription, and measure; and ultimately negating form itself. The final destination is total formlessness (ἀνείδεον). Evagrius often invokes this ideal of formless knowledge. Just as ascetic practice quiets the passions, reading Scripture quiets the mind and elevates one “to the formless [ἀνείδεον], divine, and simple knowledge.” When Jesus teaches the disciples to pray in secret in one’s “inner chamber” (Mt 6:6), this means entering the empty space of formlessness.31 The Trinity, like sunlight passing through a window, is formless in itself (ἀσχημάτιστον) and only receives figuration in our perception.32 Christ is the formless one who took form (μορφοῦται Χριστὸς ἄμορφος).33 24 Evagrius, Reflections, 26, ed. Muyldermans, 377; S 213. 25 Evagrius, Prayer, 117, ed. Géhin, 336; S 206. 26 Evagrius, Prayer, 67, ed. Géhin, 280; S 199 [66]. 27 Evagrius, Prayer, 114, ed. Géhin, 332; S 205. 28 Evagrius, Prayer, 68, ed. Géhin, 280; S 200 [67]. 29 Evagrius, Prayer, 116, ed. Géhin, 334; S 206. Evagrius considers circumscription (περιγράφειν) and localization (τομάζειν) as equivalent terms. See Géhin commentary at Prayer, 335 n. 116. 30 Evagrius, Prayer 69, ed. Géhin, 282; S 200 [68]. 31 Evagrius, Talking Back [Antirrhêtikos]: A Monastic Handbook for Combating Demons, trans. David Brakke (Cistercian Studies, 2009), 48. The text survives in Syriac with a Greek retroversion. For a partial Greek text, see Claire Guillaumont, “Fragments grecs inédits d’Evagre le Pontique,” in Texte und Textkritik: Eine Aufsatzsammlung. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 133, ed. Jürgen Dummer (Akademie Verlag, 1987), 219–​220. 32 Evagrius, Praktikos, 98, eds. Antoine Guillaumont and Claire Guillaumont, Évagre le Pontique. Traité Pratique, Vol. 2. Sources Chrétiennes 171 (Éditions du Cerf, 1971), 706; S 113. See the new translation with annotations by Robin Darling Young et al., Evagrius of Pontus: The Gnostic Trilogy (Oxford University Press, 2024). 33 See Géhin commentary in Prayer, 337; cf. PG 12:1189.

Interlude: Space  83 To enter pure prayer, the mind begins from a given representation but then passes into a “formless state” (ἀνείδεον κατάστασιν). Practical life requires representations, but in pure prayer, the mind enters into “the formless” (ἐν ἀνειδέῳ).34 Yet this is only to narrate God’s arrival in prayer from the side of the monk, who struggles to negate images, figures, and forms. Seen from the other side, God arrives with sovereign freedom and illuminates the mind intimately from within. The Holy Spirit looks beyond the soul’s impurities, reaches across the remaining distance, and “enters the mind and annihilates the phalanx of thoughts or mental representations encircling it.”35 In the empty clearing where mediating concepts once stood, God rushes in. God enters the mind of his child with ease, without needing any instruments or leaving any impressions, mercifully destroying all mediating forms because he has no use for them. Other objects might enter the mind through representation, but God is no object. “Contrary to all others,” says Evagrius, “the Lord visits the mind directly, and introduces within it knowledge of whatever he wishes.”36 God is Light and needs no other light to be seen. Ultimately, Evagrius integrates these two perspectives in his account of pure prayer, in which the mind beholds the “place” or “space” of God. This destination, somewhat surprisingly, is not figural, not formal, but a higher divine Space. Evagrius has in mind a scene from Exodus 24. After Moses received the law on Mt. Sinai, he brought the elders of Israel up the mountain, where they saw God enthroned on a pavement colored as blue as the sky. Like the Sinai elders, Evagrius says, the monk should ascend to behold the “place of God” (τόπον θεοῦ) that is a “heavenly sapphire” in color. Moses prepared the elders by building an altar and splashing them with the blood of the sacrifice. The monk prepares himself by stilling the passions and purifying himself from images. Only then does the monk “see the place of God within himself ” (ἴδοι . . . τὸν τοῦ θεοῦ τόπον ἐν ἑαυτῷ).37 This divine τόπος is the Lord’s dwelling in Zion, but also God’s luminous presence in the soul.38 To enter this space, the contemplative ceases not only sensible knowledge but all knowing as such.39 Then God “breathes” the heavenly blue light into him.40 The spatiality of that sapphire light, the place of God, is complex. It is unclear whether it arrives from the outside or arises within the mind.41 Evagrius imagines that once all figures and forms are removed, the divine light “appears to him” 34 Evagrius, Reflections, 20–​22, ed. Muyldermans, 376; S 213. 35 Evagrius, Prayer, 62–​63, ed. Géhin, 274–​276; S 199 [61–​62]. 36 Evagrius, Prayer, 64, ed. Géhin, 276–​278; S 199 [63]. 37 Evagrius, Thoughts, 39–​40, eds. Géhin and Guillaumont, 286–​290; S 180. At Exodus 24:10, the Septuagint substitutes “place of God” where the Hebrew text reads “God of Israel.” 38 Evagrius, Reflections, 23–​25, ed. Muyldermans, 376–​377; S 213. In his scholia on Psalms 67 and 75, Evagrius identifies the “place of God” with “the pure soul” (Géhin and Guillaumont, 288 n. 3). 39 Evagrius, Prayer, 58, ed. Géhin, 270; S 198 [57]. 40 Evagrius, Reflections, 2–​4, ed. Muyldermans, 374; S 211. 41 See Julia Konstantinovsky, Evagrius Ponticus: The Making of a Gnostic (Ashgate, 2009), 95–​97.

84 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation (ἐπιφανέντος αὐτῷ) in the open clearing. As we just saw, the monk also finds the light “within” himself (ἴδοι ἐν ἑαυτῷ), that is, in an interior space. In both cases, the space precedes the advent of the light. But on at least one occasion, Evagrius seems to suggest that God’s light brings a divine space of its own. To prepare for pure prayer, the monk drives out passions with thoughts and thoughts with contemplations. Then contemplations are in turn removed when the divine light “impresses that place that is of God” (ἐκτυποῦντος τὸν τόπον τὸν τοῦ θεοῦ).42 It is surprising that Evagrius describes God as the agent of impression, since usually thoughts of God are uniquely without impression, unlike all other knowledge.43 But here God’s sapphire light is none other than an imposed space. Evagrius clearly states that God leaves an impression of place or space (ἐκτυποῦντος τὸν τόπον), apparently the only legitimate one. After avoiding or renouncing every spatial impression, the highest form of prayer is, in point of fact, an experience of space. The paradox is only resolved once we consider the nature of τόπος. For what is impressed in this case is not a sensible figure or mental image. What God impresses is exactly nothing, an empty space (τόπος), a place that holds itself open without assistance from the monk. Evagrius makes the equation perfectly clear in Reflections: in pure prayer, the mind becomes “formless” (ἐν δὲ προσευχῇ γινόμενος, ἐν ἀνειδέῳ ἐστί . . .), and this state is the “space of God” (. . . ὅπερ ὀνομάζεται τόπος θεοῦ).44 The transparency of the formless is the transparency of God’s sapphire light, the transparency of space. At the ultimate limit of contemplative experience, one enters the choralogical clearing in which all other thoughts, representations, and images take their place, the infinitely empty Opening of the τόπος θεοῦ. Even for Evagrius, who gladly inhabits the aneidetic condition, God is a kind of space.

42 Evagrius, Thoughts, 40, eds. Géhin and Guillaumont, 290; S 180. 43 “Evagrius does sometimes use the ‘imprinting’ language where one would not expect it, such as in . . . the ‘place of God’ luminously imprinted on the mind . . . . It is a place of visitation rather than a location of essence. . . . The metaphor of the place of God is imagery that is stretched as thin as gossamer but still holds.” Stewart, “Imageless Prayer,” 189–​190, 197–​198. 44 Evagrius, Reflections, 20, ed. Muyldermans, 376; S 213.

4

The Limits of Negation Apophasis and kataphasis As he guards the formless One, Plotinus trains his gaze on the geometrical figures that encircle its sanctuary. The appearance of lines, quantities, and measures signals to the contemplative that he has reached the precipice of the One’s infinite negation, like the event horizon of a black hole, and to pass into that abyss they are the last figures to erase. Undoubtedly, Plotinus is the most comprehensive and influential theorist of apophatic discourse in ancient Neoplatonism. His only possible rival is an anonymous Syrian Christian monk from the sixth century who wrote under the name of Dionysius. Dionysius was influenced by Neoplatonism at least as much as Augustine or the Cappadocian Fathers were, but he drew his greatest lessons from the generations of Hellenic philosophers after Plotinus, who among other things took a different view of geometry. Iamblichus (d. ca. 325 CE), Syrianus (d. 437 CE), and Proclus (d. 485 CE) revived their philosophical tradition by returning to Neopythagorean teachings and placing number and figure at the center of their thought.1 Seeking the transcendent One through apophatic negation just as Plotinus had done, these Neoplatonists also found a way to embrace the measures of the world, charting an alternative henological tradition that renders Plotinus’s particular commitments more conspicuous and more contingent. The surviving writings of Dionysius mark the moment that this alternative henology, comfortable with geometrical figuration, meets the rich Christian philosophy that had matured by the fourth and fifth centuries across the eastern Mediterranean. Dionysius is no mathematician, but he begins to weave figure, measure, and shape into Christian Neoplatonism from the colorful threads of Christian scriptures, sacraments, and angelology. But how does Dionysius rival Plotinus in apophasis, radicalizing negation, yet at the same time modify his predecessor’s aneidetic henology? The answer is that Dionysius rethinks the essence of figuration in the folding layers and rippling textures that compose the fabric of the world. For Dionysius, divine Form becomes visible not through the transparency of erasure but through the opacity of difference. The cut of any distinct shape, no matter how small or faint, can spur the eye to ascend to supreme Form, whose utter clarity preemptively invites negation in order to show itself forth 1 See Dominic J. O’Meara, Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 1989).

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0006

88  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation even more clearly. If in Plotinus’s Enneads we find an archaeology of the formless One, in the Corpus Dionysiacum we encounter something different, something stubbornly inexpungeable: a heterology of form expressed through figure. The difference of supreme Form points the way toward a Christian alternative to Plotinian infinite negation. Even to perceive this possibility today requires no small effort, given the epochal success of the aneidetic condition. It is still too easy to view Dionysius through the lens of Plotinus and collapse their differences into homogenous, perennial Neoplatonism. But when we do, we miss the first strains of Tradition B that quietly sound in the pages of our anonymous monk. In Chapter 1, I asked whether the elevation of apophatic discourse in the last century has led to an oblivion of kataphasis. Recent readers of Dionysius tend to separate off some of his works (Divine Names and Mystical Theology) from others (Celestial Hierarchy and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy), in order to isolate the logic of apophasis and apply it alone to philosophical questions. But the Corpus Dionysiacum contains no such divisions.2 In fact, Dionysius associates kataphasis, not apophasis, with philosophy.3 Denys Turner describes this problem well and points toward its solution: We misconstrue the point of the via negativa if we tear it out of its context of relationship with the via affirmativa and represent it as an independent or even as an alternative theological strategy—​or, more paradoxically still, as an independent avenue of knowledge of God. . . . It is not that, first, as it were, we are permitted the naïve and unself-​critical indulgence of affirmation, subsequently to submit that affirmation to a separate critique of negation. . . . The “silence” of the negative way is the silence achieved only at the point at which talk is exhausted. The via negativa is not the requirement that we talk as little about God as we can, but that we talk as much as we can about God.4

How then should we properly understand the relation of apophasis and kataphasis in Dionysius, so that kataphasis is not subordinated or erased? The subtle demotion of kataphasis is unfortunately common, even as it is commonly denounced, sometimes by the same author. Endre von Ivánka, for example, 2 I use the critical text in Beate Regina Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I: Pseudo-​Dionysius Areopagita. De divinis nominibus. Patristische Texte und Studien 33 (De Gruyter, 1990); and Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum II: Pseudo-​Dionysius Areopagita. De coelesti hierarchia. De ecclesiastica hierarchia. De mystica theologia. Epistulae. Patristische Texte und Studien 36 (De Gruyter, 1991). I have consulted the English translation by Colm Luibheid in Pseudo–​ Dionysius: The Complete Works (Paulist, 1987), but only cite Luibheid where necessary, and mostly make my own translations. 3 In Letter 9, Dionysius describes apophasis as “hidden” (μυστικήν) and silent, while kataphasis is “manifest” (ἐμφανῆ); the first uses mystagogical initiation (τελεστικήν . . . μυσταγωγίαις) to lead to God; the second uses philosophical demonstration (ἀποδεικτικήν) and persuasion (πείθει) of the truth. Ep IX.1 (1105D). 4 Denys Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Interpretations of the Song of Songs (Cistercian Publications, 1995), 54–​56.

The Limits of Negation  89 claims to detect a fundamental tension in Dionysian theology between the mediations of emanative hierarchies versus the immediate union of the Creator and creation. Can God work in both ways? Ivánka resolves the problem by aligning God’s outward processions with mediation, epistemology, and kataphasis, on the one hand; and aligning the soul’s inward return to God through ecstatic union with immediacy, ontology, and apophasis, on the other. For Ivánka, kataphasis has pagan roots and is merely epistemological; apophasis is ontological and truly Christian.5 This view is more influential than it should be.6 Ivánka’s anachronistic distinction not only elevates apophasis above kataphasis, but is unnecessary on historical grounds, since neither Plotinus, nor Proclus, nor Dionysius oppose hierarchy and immediacy.7 This kind of ranking appears in other unsatisfactory guises. With a nod to Gregory Palamas, Vladimir Lossky suggests that for Dionysius, apophatic theology corresponds to divine unity or the hidden divine essence, while kataphatic theology pertains to divine distinctions or the energies revealed by God. The two ways are inseparable because they belong to one Trinitarian economy.8 This theological account is at least historically located, unlike the metaphysical proposition of John Jones: that kataphasis reveals the “immanence” of God in beings, while apophasis reveals the “transcendence” of God beyond being, such that “negative theology functions primarily to ‘correct’ what is said in affirmative theology.”9 Turner himself seeks to elevate kataphasis, but does so paradoxically by identifying it with negation. Apophasis is negation by subtraction; kataphasis is negation by excess or the “superfluity of affirmation.”10 “The apophatic in theology is simply the product of a properly understood cataphaticism,” Turner states. But then what exactly is kataphasis? The problem of coordinating positive and negative ways in Neoplatonism precedes Dionysius.11 What Dionysius achieved was neither the triumph of negation nor the emptying out of the affirmative. In Dionysius, Christian theology gains a novel, post-​Plotinian equality between apophasis and kataphasis. As Louth

5 Endre von Ivánka, “Inwieweit ist Pseudo-​ Dionysius Neuplatoniker?” in Plato Christianus: Übernahme und Umgestaltung des Platonismus durch die Väter (Johannes Verlag, 1964), 262–​289. 6 See Louth, Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 176–​177; Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite (Continuum, 1989), 105–​109; and, surprisingly, Turner, The Darkness of God, 27–​33. Cf. the just critique by Timothy Knepper, Negating Negation: Against the Apophatic Abandonment of the Dionysian Corpus (Cascade Books, 2014), 96 n. 73. 7 See Eric Perl, “Hierarchy and Participation in Dionysius the Areopagite and Greek Neoplatonism,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68, no. 1 (1994): 15–​30. 8 Vladimir Lossky, “La théologie négative dans la doctrine de Denys l’Aréopagite,” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 28 (1939): 207–​208, 217–​219. 9 See Jones’s introduction to Pseudo-​Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names. The Mystical Theology, trans. John D. Jones (Marquette University Press, 1980; reprinted 2011), 22. 10 Turner, Darkness of God, 33–​34. 11 For an overview, see Pietro Podolak, “Positive and Negative Theologies: Theories of Language and Ideas in Dionysius,” in Dionysius the Areopagite between Orthodoxy and Heresy, ed. Filip Ivanovic (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 13–​42.

90  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation explains, both Proclus and Dionysius link affirmation and negations together permanently; one does not replace the other. Proclus links apophasis to the procession of divine transcendence into the world while remaining beyond it, whereas the return to the One is made through positive analogies. But Dionysius flips this on its head: kataphasis is the descent of God into the world and apophasis is the way of return.12 The best modern readers of Dionysius understand the need to ground kataphasis in God’s preemptive, descending action. As Balthasar observes: the primordially divine power of affirmation . . . may never be attenuated, in Denys’ theology, in favor of the expressions of negative theology or relegated to the second rank. The ‘yes’ to the world that issues from God and is repeated at every level of being is just as original as the knowledge every creature has that it is not God . . . .13

René Roques adds that negation requires affirmation to remain anagogical, and affirmation is not canceled by negation but purified. “The negation must have penetrated to the very heart of the affirmation for the affirmation to be valid,” he explains. “And it is in this transcendent and purified affirmation that negation itself is justified.”14 The movement of return to God is not a final negation that retracts speech, but rather the “condition” of theophanic descent in the first place: the stronger the apophasis, the more clearly enunciated kataphasis will be.15 In this sense, Louth suggests, even “the Divine Names, then, is a treatise of cataphatic theology, a discussion of the affirmations with which we can praise God.”16 To discover the full meaning of kataphasis in Dionysius, we must learn to read Dionysius’s writings as an authentic whole by clarifying the role of the Hierarchies.17 We must be able to distinguish Plotinian apophasis from Dionysian apophasis. Most of all, we have to appreciate the gap between eros (ἔρως) in Plato, Plotinus, or Proclus, and the wild, uncanny, troubling depth of eros in Dionysius’s account. Then we will be able to give kataphasis a positive meaning. In this chapter, reading the Mystical Theology, Celestial Hierarchy, and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, I first explain how Dionysius’s Christian Neoplatonism both elevates apophasis and places limits on it, without contradiction. That boundary is imposed by the

12 Louth, “Apophatic and Cataphatic Theology,” 140. 13 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. II: Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles, trans. Andrew Louth et al. (Ignatius Press, 1984), 191. 14 René Roques, “De l’implication des méthodes théologiques chez le Pseudo-​ Denys,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 30 (1954): 270. 15 Roques, “De l’implication des méthodes théologiques,” 272–​273. 16 Louth, Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 167. 17 Dionysius alludes to several other books: Theological Outlines, On the Properties and Ranks of the Angels, On the Soul, On Righteous and Divine Judgment, Symbolic Theology, On the Divine Hymns, and The Intelligible and the Sensible. Whether they are lost works or merely fictive continues to be debated. See Louth, Denys the Areopagite, 19.

The Limits of Negation  91 cosmic vision of figuration that Dionysius calls hierarchy (ἱεραρχία), a term that he invents to express “sacred origin” or “sacred order.”18 Then in Chapter 5, turning to his greatest work, Divine Names, I examine his radical revisions to Plotinian and Proclian eros and measure its consequences for the status of both geometry and kataphasis in Dionysian theology. As we will see, Dionysian eros undermines one of Plotinus’s pillars of the aneidetic One and makes possible a new harmony of figure and form.

Divine figures “Pseudo-​Dionysius” presents himself as an early disciple of the apostle Paul, converted by his sermon at the Acropolis in Acts 17. Given contemporary practices of pseudonymity, it makes little sense to call him a forger, nor does it seem likely that many of his learned contemporaries were fooled.19 Beate Regina Suchla explains that we are dealing with a case of “implicit authorship,” not forgery. Dionysius is a “literary character” whose persona becomes the protagonist speaking across the four texts, writing letters to perhaps fictionalized recipients in imitation of Paul himself.20 Some imagine Dionysius as a zealous young convert fresh from the pagan philosophical schools, who happily loots the Egyptian spoils of Neoplatonism to enrich his Christian brethren.21 Others paint a portrait of reticent withdrawal: “an aging monk-​bishop sitting before his writing table in the quiet of his residence, perhaps a monastery, putting the impressions of his long study together with the fruits of his ascetical and (yes) mystical experience . . . and, since the glitter of worldly fame and influence no longer attracts him, [focusing] as little as possible on himself.”22 Charles Stang proposes that the pseudonymity of the author is deliberately apophatic: an intentional diremption of his identity in order to assume the identity of Paul’s philosophical disciple Dionysius, an apprentice pointing to the master. Just as Paul said that he is “no longer I, but Christ in me” (Gal 2:20), “Dionysius” assumes the name to testify to ecstatic love beyond selfhood.23 Alexander Golitzin suspects that Dionysius penned pseudepigrapha 18 The term does not appear as noun and adjective until Dionysius, but the concept can be traced back to Plotinus and Plato. See Dominic O’Meara, Structures hiérarchiques dans la pensée de Plotin: Étude historique et interprétative (Brill, 1975). 19 See Alexander Golitzin, Mystagogy: A Monastic Reading of Dionysius Areopagita, trans. Bogdan G. Bucur (Liturgical Press, 2013), 365–​366. 20 Beate Regina Suchla, “The Dionysian Corpus,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite, eds. Mark Edwards, Dimitrios Pallis, and Georgios Steiris (Oxford University Press, 2022), 17. 21 Sarah Klitenic Wear and John Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite and the Neoplatonist Tradition: Despoiling the Hellenes (Ashgate, 2007), 131–​132. 22 Golitzin, Mystagogy, 400. 23 See Charles M. Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite (Oxford University Press, 2012), 153–​205.

92  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation to counteract anti-​philosophical Messalian contemporaries, cleverly choosing a name that “invokes the authority of the Apostle and sustains the legitimacy of deploying the wisdom of the pagans.”24 For centuries, the writings of Dionysius were venerated as practically apostolic: just one generation after Paul, here was a philosophical genius who appeared to anticipate the great Neoplatonists of the third to fifth centuries. By the fifteenth century, Christian intellectuals like Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus began to doubt his identity, especially as Latin Proclian traditions like the Liber de causis and new translations of Proclus himself familiarized philosophers with ideas found in Dionysius. By 1895, Hugo Koch and Josef Stiglmayer proved Dionysius’s textual dependence on Proclus’s De malo, and today we are still uncovering clues. Scholars have proposed well over twenty possible authors, but at least internal references allow us to date the texts confidently to the decades between 482 and 528 within the patriarchate of Antioch, where Dionysius’s Syriac liturgy was celebrated, perhaps with ties to the school of Caesarea near Jerusalem.25 Such intellectual debts—​philosophical as well as liturgical—​are not only a matter of dating Dionysius in historical sequence. It also tells us that he participates in the historic turn away from Plotinian interiority and toward the exteriority of theurgy, cosmos, and figuration championed by late Hellenic Neoplatonists, albeit in his own Syrian Christian idiom. To that end, before taking up Dionysius himself, we need to consider briefly why Proclus found geometrical space to be so indispensable for contemplating the divine One. If Proclus differs from Plotinus on this point, Dionysius does even more so. This comparison will then inform how we assemble and appraise the different elements of Dionysian contemplation, beginning with apophasis and hierarchy. Platonists from the Old Academy to the Athenian School searched for the gods within the curves and angles of geometry. Proclus was intrigued by the way that earlier Pythagoreans consecrated particular shapes or vertices. He studied what he took to be the geometrizing theology of Philolaus of Croton (470–​385 BCE), a pre-​Platonic Pythagorean, who applies the spatial order of polygonal shapes to diagram the interrelations among different ranks of deities. In Proclus’s exegesis, some gods are associated with the divine Triangle (Kronos and Dionysos, the moist; Hades and Ares, the dry; and Athena between) and others with the divine Square (water of Aphrodite; earth of Demeter; fire of Hestia; air of Hera). Only Zeus manifests the perfect twelve-​sided Dodecagon: the triangle multiplied by square, the reconciliation of odd and even, or the conjunction of the six principal 24 See Golitzin, Mystagogy, 11–​12. 25 Suchla, “The Dionysian Corpus,” 18–​20. One illustrative contemporary hypothesis is found in Rosemary A. Arthur, Pseudo-​Dionysius as Polemicist: The Development and Purpose of the Angelic Hierarchy in Sixth Century Syria (Ashgate, 2008). Arthur concurs with those who consider the author to be Sergius of Reshaina, a Syrian Monophysite writing a polemic against rebellious monks ca. 520 CE.

The Limits of Negation  93 marriages. Typhon, the serpent monster birthed by the Titans, is the terrible manifestation of a fifty-​six-​sided polygon.26 In the generation after Plato, Speusippus of Athens (410–​339 BCE) and Xenocrates of Chalcedon (396–​314 BCE) tested out neo-​P ythagoreanizing interpretations of his dialogues by identifying the forms with mathematical entities. Xenocrates came to conclude that the mind of the divine One was filled with geometrical objects like points, lines, and planes.27 Equilateral triangles manifested the gods (full equality), scalene triangles the humans (full inequality), and isosceles triangles the demigods (partial equality).28 Nicomachus handed a similar notion down to Boethius, that God used the sacred Decad to give the cosmos harmony and intelligibility.29 Xenocrates—​the likely source of Proclus’s Philolaus excerpts—​is also the inventor of the “derivations of magnitudes” theory that pops up in Moderatus, Nicomachus, Plotinus, Augustine, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Euclid himself. The One-​monad is reflected spatially in the point; the indefinite Dyad in the line; the Triad in the surface; the Tetrad in solid bodies; and these four (1 +​2 +​3 +​4) unfold the Decad that cascades into orders of 10, 100, 1,000, and beyond.30 For Xenocrates, the monadic point is the male King of heaven, while the dyadic line is the female Mother of the gods, so that point and line are eternally coupled together.31 For Nicomachus and Iamblichus, the point “flowed” (ῥύσις) into the line through motion, as the line flowed into the plane. For Damascius, the point “limits” the line and thus contains the entire line within itself. “Limit is always outside what is limited,” he explains: bodies reside inside their surfaces, surfaces inside lines, lines within points.32 Xenocrates’s “positive monadology” paved the way for the Neopythagoreanism of Eudorus and Moderatus, who influenced Plotinus and his Gnostic friends.33 After Plotinus and Porphyry, Neoplatonism underwent a ritual turn. Drawing 26 Wolfgang Hübner, “Die geometrische Theologie des Philolaos,” Philologus 124, no. 1 (1980): 18–​ 32. Cf. Plato, Timaeus 47 BC. 27 John M. Dillon, The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy (347–​274 B.C.) (Oxford University Press, 2003), 101–​108, 120–​122, 153–​154. 28 Carlos Steel, “Proclus on Divine Figures: An Essay on Pythagorean-​Platonic Theology,” in A Platonic Pythagoras: Platonism and Pythagoreanism in the Imperial Age, eds. Mauro Bonazzi, Carlos Lévy, and Carlos Steel (Brepols, 2007), 221. 29 See, e.g., Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introductio arithmetica, I.4.2, I.6.1, ed. Richard Gottfried Hoche (Teubner, 1866), 9, 12; and Nicomachus of Gerasa, Theologoumena arithmeticae, IX, ed. Victor de Falco (Teubner, 1922; rev. ed. 1975), 78–​79. 30 See Krämer, Ursprung der Geistmetaphysik, 46–​ 47, 56; Theiler, “Einheit und unbegrenzte Zweiheit von Plato bis Plotin,” 98–​105; and J. A. Philip, “The ‘Pythagorean’ Theory of the Derivation of Magnitudes,” Phoenix 20, no. 1 (1966): 32–​50. 31 See Matthias Baltes, “Zur Theologie des Xenocrates,” in Knowledge of God in the Graeco-​Roman World, eds. Roelof Van den Broek, Tjitza Baarda, and Jaap Mansfeld (Brill, 1988), 43–​68; and Detlef Thiel, Die Philosophie des Xenocrates im Kontext der Alten Akademie (K. G. Saur, 2006), 265–​285. 32 Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, 2nd ed. (Angelico Press, 2014), 238–​239. 33 Thiel, Philosophie des Xenocrates, 421. Cf. Krämer, Ursprung der Geistmetaphysik, 45–​62. For an overview of developments from Xenocrates to Nicomachus, see John Dillon, “Pythagoreanism in the Academic Tradition: the Early Academy to Numenius,” in A History of Pythagoreanism, ed. Carl A. Huffman (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 250–​273.

94  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation on the same Neopythagorean sources, Iamblichus outlined a philosophical theurgy whose rites were consummated in the practice of geometry.34 According to Iamblichus, the soul is completely embodied in matter and must start its return to the One through material tokens (συνθήματα). Material rites like plant offerings, animal sacrifices, stone figures, or perfumed incense liberate the soul from matter and place it in communion with the lowest, encosmic gods. Next, intermediate theurgies raise the soul to the “liberated” class of gods, transforming its moral character through chanting divine names. Finally, noetic theurgies fully divinize the soul (ἀποθέωσις) by uniting it with the hypercosmic gods and completing its return to the One.35 For Iamblichus, such noetic theurgies work primarily upon mathematical objects—​just as Plotinus’s contemplation on the sphere (V.8.9) had ritually subtracted dimensions in order to summon the gods.36 “The soul’s embodiment,” writes Gregory Shaw, is a “pivotal moment in the erotic circulation of the One . . . an altar through which the ἀριθμοί sacrifice themselves into generated life and then—​in ritual reciprocity—​return to their divine origin.”37 The soul itself, moreover, is a mathematical being: a self-​moving number (ἀριθμός), harmony (ἀναλογία), or figure (σχῆμα). Mathematical procedures are psychic operations that propel the soul from “emptiness” (κένωσις) toward “fullness” (πλήρωσις) and from being “unlimited” (ἄπειρον) toward being “defined” (πέρας).38 The purpose of human life is to attain “friendship” (φιλία) with the gods, and this proximity can only be achieved through “eternal measures” (μέτρα αἴδια) of the cosmos.39 As Shaw explains, “noetic souls had the rare capacity to perform an entirely immaterial form of theurgy,” namely a “theurgy of numbers . . . ‘geometrically equivalent’ to material and intermediate theurgies.” Iamblichus calls these “mathematical mysteries” (μαθηματικοὶ ὀργιασμοί), and he imagines that ancient Pythagoreans carved their statues of the gods in the form of spheres, cubes, and pyramids.40 In his famous commentary on Euclid’s Elements, Proclus converts Iamblichus’s noetic theurgy into an epistemology of mathematical cognition.41 In doing so, he outlines a “conceptual structure for a theology of figures,” or what we might

34 On ritual in Iamblichus, see Iamblichus. On the Mysteries, trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell (Society of Biblical Literature, 2003). 35 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 171–​182. 36 Robert Goulding, “Geometry and the Gods: Theurgy in Proclus’s Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements,” Perspectives on Science 30, no. 3 (2022): 381–​382. 37 Shaw, “Eros and Arithmos,” 141. 38 Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 215–​219. 39 Shaw, “Eros and Arithmos,” 129–​131. On Iamblichean mathematics, see O’Meara, Pythagoras Revived. 40 Shaw, “Eros and Arithmos,” 133. 41 On Proclian mathematics, two major treatments are O’Meara, Pythagoras Revived, 156–​209; and Charles-​Saget, L’Architecture du divin, 187–​299. For a shorter conspectus, see Dominic O’Meara, “Mathematics and the Sciences,” in All From One: A Guide to Proclus, eds. Pieter d’Hoine and Marije Martijn (Oxford University Press, 2017), 167–​182.

The Limits of Negation  95 call a “geometrical theology,” by linking geometrical “figures” (σχήματα) to the gods themselves.42 Aristotle had taught that mathematical objects were abstracted from matter, but Proclus rejects this view.43 Instead, he holds that the soul generates mathematical beings out of itself and casts them like images onto a screen in order to see itself thinking. These imagined spatial constructions are not unreal, but the most precise and certain mode of knowledge. Soul generates mathematicals as “projections” (προβολαί) or “manifestations” (ἐκφανεῖς) composed from the eternal “patterns” (παραδείγματα) abiding within it.44 Soul is the “fullness” (πλήρωμα) of figuration, like a writing tablet never empty but always self-​inscribing, or a “second world” (δίακοσμος ἄλλος) populated by “living figures” (ζωδιακὰ σχήματα). The faculty that “writes” (γραφόμενον) these figures in the mind is “imagination” (φαντασία) in between sense perception and intellect.45 Discursive reason cannot fully grasp its own thoughts (λόγοι) until it converts them into visible geometrical diagrams (διαγράμματα). That is, out of their desire to behold the hidden λόγος, contemplatives must turn to graphic figuration.46 As we will see in Chapters 6 and 7, the defenders of Byzantine icons will pursue this very project. For Proclus, imagination thinks of everything as a “representation or shape” (τύπος καὶ μορφή) in the medium of “division, extension, and figure” (μερισμός, διάστασις, σχῆμα).47 In the intellect, a circle is invisible and unextended without magnitude; but in imagination, the circle extends into space and appears on the screen of mental visibility. In this way, intellect “exposes and unfolds” (προάγει καὶ . . . ἀνελίττει) ideas to the imagination so that they can be fully perceived. By inscribing figures (ἀναγράφειν σχήματα) in the mind’s eye, imagination provides a virtual sensory experience of imaginative matter, which assists the intellect as it tries to grasp invisible forms.48 This explains how the imagination leads the soul to know itself: . . . the soul, exercising her capacity to know, projects on the imagination as on a mirror, the ideas of the figures [τοὺς τῶν σχημάτων λόγους]; and the imagination, receiving in pictorial form these impressions of the ideas within the soul, by their means afford the soul an opportunity to turn inward from the pictures and attend to herself. . . . When the soul is looking outside herself at the

42 Steel, “Proclus on Divine Figures,” 242, 218. 43 Proclus, In Primum Euclidis Elementorum librum commentarii, ed. Gottfried Friedlein (Teubner, 1873), 49–​50; trans. Glenn R. Morrow, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements (Princeton University Press, 1970), 39. 44 Proclus, In Euclidis, ed. Friedlein, 13; trans. Morrow, 11–​12. 45 Proclus, In Euclidis, ed. Friedlein, 16–​17; trans. Morrow, 15. 46 Dmitri Nikulin, “Imagination and Mathematics in Proclus,” Ancient Philosophy 28, no. 1 (2008): 153–​172. 47 Proclus, In Euclidis, ed. Friedlein, 52; trans. Morrow, 42. 48 Proclus, In Euclidis, ed. Friedlein, 54–​56, trans. Morrow, 44–​45.

96  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation imagination, seeing the figures depicted there and being struck by their beauty and orderedness, she is admiring her own ideas from which they are derived . . . .49

The imaginative process of visualization generates self-​knowledge. But for Proclus, it is also an occasion for theological speculation. Since the gods possess the highest knowledge of figures, shapes projected by the imagination orient the viewer toward the divine: As these ideas within us unfold, they reveal the forms of the gods [τὰς μορφὰς τῶν θεῶν] and the uniform boundaries of the universe by which the gods, without command, bring all things back to themselves and enclose them. The gods have a wondrous knowledge of the universe of figures [τῶν ὅλων σχημάτων] and a potency capable of generating and supporting all secondary things . . . .50

According to Proclus, then, imagining new architectures of geometrical space leads the soul to deeper self-​knowledge and deeper divine communion. Figures arise in the arts, in natural forms, in heavenly motions, in the soul’s creativity, and in the “intelligible figures,” namely forms. They begin from the gods and then decline in dissemination throughout the entire cosmos. But highest of all are the perfect and uniform “figures of the gods” (σχήματα τῶν θεῶν), which limit and unify the horizons of every other species of figure.51 For Proclus, this entails that geometry has special theological duties. Geometry “teach[es] us through images [δι᾽ εἰκόνων] the special properties of the divine orders [θείων διακόσμων]” and “shows us what figures are appropriate [τὰ θεοῖς ὡς προσήκοντα σχήματα] to the gods.”52 Proclus notes that theurgical rites navigate the space of divine figures in different ways. Some work negatively and mantically through “inexpressible marks” (διὰ τῶν χαρακτήρων ἀρρήτως), and others work positively in “shapes and figures” (διὰ τῶν μορφωμάτων καὶ τῶν τύπων).53 Every shape is composed of curved lines (Limit) and straight lines (Unlimit). Circles possess the greatest unity (self-​perfected curvature), followed by semi-​circles (curved bounded by straight), triangles (simple straight lines), and quadrilaterals (equal straight lines).54 According to Robert Goulding, Proclus’s Euclid commentary is less a treatise in the philosophy of mathematics than an esoteric handbook for inner theurgy of the very kind commended by Iamblichus. Proclus proposes, in short, that the proofs found in Euclid’s Elements are the highest rites of all. According to Goulding, “the 49 Proclus, In Euclidis, ed. Friedlein, 141; trans. Morrow, 113. 50 Proclus, In Euclidis, ed. Friedlein, 140; trans. Morrow, 112. 51 Proclus, In Euclidis, ed. Friedlein, 137–​138; trans. Morrow, 110. On “unfigured figures,” see Enneads VI.6.17. 52 Proclus, In Euclidis, ed. Friedlein, 62; trans. Morrow, 50. 53 Proclus, In Euclidis, ed. Friedlein, 138; trans. Morrow, 111. 54 See Dominic J. O’Meara, “Geometry and the Divine in Proclus,” in Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study, eds. Luc Bergmans and Teun Koetsier (Elsevier, 2005), 139–​141.

The Limits of Negation  97 practice of geometry was not merely preparatory or an analogue for the higher theurgy, but that geometry itself, practiced in a certain way, constituted for Proclus the core of the higher theurgy.”55 The ritual proceeds through several steps: studying the proposition in Euclid, executing the instructions to reproduce the demonstration, arriving at the truth it illustrates, and inscribing the diagram in the imagination. Proclus articulates these as movements of enunciation, exposition, specification, construction, proof, and conclusion. The inscription of the diagram is the pivotal moment where the soul’s descent into multiplicity turns toward integration and ascent.56 Geometry is not a neutral, abstract science for Iamblichus or Proclus, but rather a kind of prayer that revealed the interrelations of divine beings.57 Reviel Netz has suggested that the distinctive character of Greek mathematics—​“the ability to imagine a virtual presence, and to refer to this virtual presence as if it were on equal footing with the real”—​resembles the nature of theology.58 In his other works as well, Proclus seeks to expand the role of space and figuration in Neoplatonism. The more he elevates the status of geometry, the more he modifies the particular character of Plotinian henology. In his commentary on the Republic, Proclus approaches Plato’s divided line as a “genuine Pythagorean theology . . . a powerful geometrical image of the procession of all beings from the One.”59 In the Platonic Theology, Proclus states that “the Pythagoreans have discovered the mathematical objects to recollect the divine beings and they endeavored to pass over to the divine through these as likenesses. In fact, they devoted both numbers and figures to the gods.”60 In his commentary on Parmenides, Proclus outlines a complex hierarchy of figures descending from those that are “entirely unknowable and inexpressible” in the One, down through the henadic figures united in intellect, then to lower figures corresponding with different gods, demiurgic intellects, and encosmic intellects.61 Proclus seeks to amplify Plato’s theology with the Chaldean Oracles, in order to bolster Hellenic tradition against increasing Christian dominance.62 Alongside their well-​known Gnostic

55 Goulding, “Geometry and the Gods,” 367. 56 Goulding, “Geometry and the Gods,” 383–​384. 57 Goulding, “Geometry and the Gods,” 400. 58 Reviel Netz, “Imagination and Layered Ontology in Greek Mathematics,” Configurations 17, no. 1–​2 (2009): 19. Consider Netz’s account of geometrical method in Proclus, which might as well describe a religious experience: “A moment of more explicit imagination projects an extra layer of reality. Immediately following that, however, the projected, more imaginary reality is absorbed into the context of ordinary reality, its imaginary origins forgotten. It is as if the Greek mathematical text was a rare isotope, imagino-​active: it keeps emitting a certain radiation of the imaginary, pulses of the verb noein, of the possible, the conditional, the third-​person imperative.” Netz, “Imagination and Layered Ontology,” 42. 59 Pieter d’Hoine, “The Metaphysics of the ‘Divided Line’ in Proclus: A Sample of Pythagorean Theology,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 56, no. 4 (2018): 598. 60 Cited in Steel, “Proclus on Divine Figures,” 216. 61 Steel, “Proclus on Divine Figures,” 234–​235. 62 See Luc Brisson, “Proclus’ Theology,” in All From One: A Guide to Proclus, eds. Pieter d’Hoine and Marije Martijn (Oxford University Press, 2017), 207–​222.

98  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation tendencies, some Oracles continue the geometrical impulse of the Valentinians or Iamblichus. The monad “extends” [ταναὴ] into the dyad and triad.63 The divine Triad “connect[s]‌the All while measuring [μετροῦσα] all things,” and in the “womb of this triad all things are sown.”64 Neither monad nor dyad can “measure” [μετρεῖται] the intelligibles, but only the triad.65 The Intelligible can only be perceived “with the flame of mind completely extended [ταναῇ] which measures [μετροῦσῃ] all things.”66 Finally, in the Elements of Theology, Proclus makes several alterations to Plotinian henology that share a common geometrizing effect. First, he systematizes the triad of remaining, procession, and return, whose “cyclical activity” (κυκλικὴν . . . ἐνέργειαν) is the ontological foundation of thought.67 The geometrical circle becomes a metaphysical pattern, and thinking itself becomes circular.68 Second, the crucial middle term allows a given cause to “remain in itself ” (μένει ἐν αὐτῷ) even as it flows into effects.69 That interiority, Proclus adds, is neither spatial (ἐν τόπῳ) nor causal (ἐν ὑποκειμένῳ) in a physical sense, and yet it is a primordial self-​location (ἱδρῦσθαι) and self-​containment (συνεκτικὸν).70 That is, the moment of “remaining” can be understood analogously with interior space, but only as a limit that is entirely self-​asserted, a measure not itself measured. In the words of Jean Trouillard, remaining is an “indissoluble point of coincidence” of procession and return, and as such sustains the “inadmissible presence of the origin” by which all beings are both other and same.71 Third, between Being and Form, Proclus inserts a mediating level of the “Whole” (τὸ ὅλον). Every form is a whole, but not every whole is a specific form.72 Such wholes are ontological, not mathematical, and yet they denote a level of being at least analogous to geometrical space. Fourth, Proclus invents a constellated network of monistic “henads” that organize the cosmos, tantamount to a pantheon of gods, where each god is a “measure” (μέτρον).73 The henads structure tiers of mediation running upward and downward at fixed intervals that are activated by the emanative cycle. “The measure 63 Oracles, Fr. 12, ed. Ruth Majercik, The Chaldean Oracles (Brill, 1989), 52. 64 Oracles, Fr. 23, 28, ed. Majercik, 56–​58. 65 Oracles, Fr. 31, ed. Majercik, 58. 66 Oracles, Fr. 1, ed. Majercik, 48. 67 See Proclus, The Elements of Theology, 2nd ed., Prop. 30–​39, ed. and trans. E. R. Dodds (Clarendon Press, 1963), 35–​43; citing here Prop. 33, ed. Dodds, 36. On the history of this triad, see Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-​Dionysian Tradition (Brill, 1978). 68 See the section on “Kreis” in Werner Beierwaltes, Proklos. Grundzüge seiner Metaphysik (Vittorio Klostermann, 1965), 165–​239. 69 Proclus, Elements, Prop. 30, ed. Dodds, 34. 70 Proclus, Elements, Prop. 41, ed. Dodds, 44. 71 Jean Trouillard, “La μονή selon Proclos,” in Le Neoplatonisme (Royaumont, 9–​13 juin 1969). Colloques internationaux du CNRS, ed. Pierre-​Maxime Schuhl and Pierre Hadot (Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1971), 233. 72 Proclus, Elements, Prop. 74, ed. Dodds, 70. 73 Proclus, Elements, Prop. 113–​119, ed. Dodds, 101–​105.

The Limits of Negation  99 [μέτρα] of its reversion,” Proclus can say, “is determined by the measure [μέτροις] of its procession.”74 Not only does Proclus break with Plotinus over the role of geometry and the centrality of measure. He also directly alters Plotinian henology by critiquing the Good’s “self-​sufficiency” (τὸ αὔταρκες)—​that is, the second postulate of the aneidetic condition discussed in Chapter 3. According to Proclus, to possess goodness within oneself without dependency is an optimal participation in the Good. But the Good itself “is not self-​sufficient,” since it neither “desires” (ἐφίεται) good nor is “fulfilled” (πλῆρες) with goodness; it already is the Good itself.75 For the same reason, while being “self-​constituted” (τὸ αὐθυπόστατον) is good, the Good is not self-​constituted, lest it compromise its unity when it proceeds into others.76 As much as Proclus qualifies the aneidetic condition of Plotinian henology, he nevertheless remains fundamentally within it. Despite these tensions between them, the fact remains that for Proclus as much as for Plotinus, the One does not love, as we already saw in Chapter 3. The thought of Dionysius the Areopagite is inconceivable without Proclus. Not only does Dionysius repeat some of his basic concepts, but more importantly, Dionysius continues the same pivot away from Plotinus initiated by Iamblichus and Proclus.77 Moreover, once Dionysius, already working inside that Proclian model, lifts the stubborn prohibitions on eros that even Proclus could not challenge, he suddenly accelerates the transition away from Plotinus even more rapidly than his predecessors, liberated from their constraints. If Dionysius learned anything from Iamblichus and Proclus, we should expect his theology to be marked by similar geometrizing figures and measures that we see in them. In Dionysius, the Proclian henads become angels, which originated in the monadic numbers of Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Iamblichus. The Dionysian hierarchies are geometrical formal structures emanating from unity into difference.78 The centrality of liturgy in Dionysius’s theology continues the theurgical practice of Iamblichus and Proclus.79 The more we understand the Corpus Dionysiacum to be steeped in liturgical mysteries, the more we ought to expect to find architectures of space and measure ordering his thought.

74 Proclus, Elements, Prop. 39, ed. Dodds, 42. 75 Proclus, Elements, Prop. 9–​10, ed. Dodds, 10–​12. 76 Proclus, Elements, Prop. 40, ed. Dodds, 42. 77 On the state of the question, see Ernesto Sergio Mainoldi, “The Transfiguration of Proclus’ Legacy: Pseudo-​Dionysius and the Late Neoplatonic School of Athens,” in Proclus and His Legacy, eds. David D. Butorac and Danielle A. Layne (De Gruyter, 2017), 199–​217. 78 See I. P. Sheldon-​Williams, “Henads and Angels: Proclus and the ps.-​Dionysius,” Studia Patristica 11, no. 2 (1972): 65–​71. 79 See Gregory Shaw, “Neoplatonic Theurgy and Dionysius the Areopagite,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7, no. 4 (1999): 573–​599; Sarah Klitenic, “Theurgy in Proclus and Pseudo-​Dionysius,” Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society 90 (2001): 85–​95; and Dylan Burns, “Proclus and the Theurgic Liturgy of Pseudo-​Dionysius,” Dionysius 22 (2004): 111–​132.

100  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation

A ray in the darkness Dionysius was most familiar with Iamblichus and Proclus, but occasionally reveals direct influences from Plotinus himself, possibly mediated by the Cappadocians through Evagrius of Pontus.80 In Mystical Theology, Dionysius alludes to the renowned Ennead I.6, “On Beauty.” There Plotinus counseled contemplatives “not to look” (μὴ βλέπειν) externally, but to withdraw into the self (I.6.8). Search within for inner beauty, he says, like the master sculptor “making a statue” (ποιητὴς ἀγάλματος), who in sculpting a beautiful face “cuts away excess” (ἀφαίρει), carving off the soul’s imperfections until divine glory (θεοειδὴς ἀγλαία) shines through (I.6.9). Echoing the same words, Dionysius prays that his disciple Timothy might come to true sight through “unseeing and unknowing” (ἀβλεψίας καὶ ἀγνωσίας) by praising God through “denial” (ἀφαίρεσις).81 “We would be like sculptors who set out to carve a statue [ἄγαλμα ποιοῦντες],” writes Dionysius. “They remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image, and simply by this act of clearing aside [ἀφαιρέσει], they show up the beauty which is hidden.”82 Dionysius takes on Plotinian unseeing as his own program and agrees that “the less one sees, the more one sees” (V.5.7). On a few occasions in Divine Names that we will examine in Chapter 5, Dionysius even adopts the term ἀνειδέον.83 At first glance, the two masters of negation seem in perfect agreement, especially given the uncompromising denials of Mystical Theology. That dense essay still stands today as the authoritative formulation of Christian apophaticism—​and the source of the term “mystical” (μυστική) itself. Dionysius enjoins contemplatives to reject every trace of divine form, every whisper of sensible or conceptual experience, as inadequate to the infinite mystery of God, and rather to embrace darkness and silence as the mind’s uncomprehending tribute. Every name is heaped onto the altar, and divine fire consumes the whole. If this were Dionysius’s last testament, Plotinus could only concur. Modern readers often view Mystical Theology through this Plotinian lens and hope that this sober treatise governs unruly works like Celestial Hierarchy and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which take up particular affirmations rather than universal negation. Perhaps, they quietly wonder, Dionysius 80 See István Perczel, “Pseudo-​Dionysius and Palestinian Origenism,” in The Sabaite Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present, ed. Joseph Patrich (Peeters, 2001), 261–​282. On the influence of the Cappadocian Fathers, see Ernesto Sergio Mainoldi, “Reassessing the Historico-​ Doctrinal Background of Pseudo-​Dionysius’ Image Theory,” in Pseudo-​Dionysius and Christian Visual Culture, c. 500–​900, eds. Francesca Dell’Acqua and Ernesto Sergio Mainoldi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 1–​39; and especially Anca Vasiliu, EIKÔN. L’image dans le discours des trois Cappadociens (Presses Universitaires de France, 2010). 81 MT II (1025A). 82 MT II (1025B), trans. Luibheid, 138. In Dionysius, the Plotinian metaphor of sculpture underscores “the positivity of this negative theology”—​the large mass of marble untouched by the chisel and indeed revealed and preserved by its blows. See John N. Jones, “Sculpting God: The Logic of Dionysian Negative Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 89, no. 4 (1996): 357. 83 See DN II.10 (648C).

The Limits of Negation  101 only reaches his full critical powers in Mystical Theology, where he seemingly qualifies earlier ideas about angels and sacraments, balancing theurgical speculation with philosophical reserve. They might even suspect a subtle tension between his works, as if Mystical Theology was meant to supersede the two Hierarchies, like Penelope unweaving in the darkness of night what she wove in the light of day. Golitzin has persuasively argued that the reception of Dionysius over the last millennium has done no favors to his mystical theology. It “fractures” the Corpus Dionysiacum into more and less favored books, “assimilates” Dionysian teachings piecemeal into preexisting systems, or reads him through alien, Augustinian (read: Plotinian) lenses. Caught within categories not his own, Dionysius is forced to appear secretly Platonist, or secretly Christian—​in Jan Vanneste’s phrase, like a “lonely meteorite” across an otherwise dark Byzantine sky.84 Golitzin has done more than anyone else to return Dionysius to his proper Syrian monastic contexts.85 This paradigm shift urges us to take the Hierarchies seriously and to resist detaching apophasis in Mystical Theology from the organic whole. When Dionysius is too quickly assimilated into an abstract “apophatic” tradition, the integrity of the Corpus Dionysiacum is lost.86 But reconciling apophasis and kataphasis in Dionysius requires us to find the first principles organizing his four works.87 One unsatisfactory possibility advocated by Vanneste in 1959 is to prioritize apophasis by explicitly ranking the “theology” of Mystical Theology and Divine Names above the “theurgy” of the two Hierarchies.88 Today, this view is rarely defended explicitly, but it continues to inform contemporary interpretations that foreground Neoplatonism and pursue “philosophical” readings of Dionysius. Eric Perl, for instance, seeks to harmonize the Dionysian works not through hierarchy but through the concept of “symbol.”89 It is true that σύμβολον is used in Divine Names and Celestial Hierarchy alike, but here the term denotes nothing like “symbol” in modern hermeneutics, but rather a theurgical power that summons deities and initiates one into mysteries.90 As Golitzin explains, σύμβολον in Dionysius means “not merely a sign—​a ‘symbol’ in the weak, modern sense—​ but a shaping force . . . a kind of incarnation, a ‘real presence’ of God and heaven coming to us . . . a transforming force molding the soul from within.” When we read “symbol” in Dionysius, we should hear something like “icon”: a place where two 84 See Golitzin, Mystagogy, xxii–​x xvii, 53–​54. 85 For a good overview, see Alexander Golitzin, “Dionysius Areopagita: A Christian Mysticism?” Pro Ecclesia 12, no. 2 (2003): 161–​212. 86 Golitzin, Mystagogy, 373. 87 Based on internal evidence of Dionysius’s self-​references, the accepted sequence of his extant works is Divine Names, Mystical Theology, Celestial Hierarchy, and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. The place of the ten letters is more contested. See René Roques, “Denys l’Aréopagite,” Dictionnaire de Spiritualité 3 (1957): 257–​264. 88 Jan Vanneste, Le Mystère de Dieu (Desclée de Brouwer, 1959). 89 See Eric D. Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (State University of New York Press, 2007), 101–​109. 90 See Wear and Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite, 85–​97.

102  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation different realities meet and join (συμ-​βολή), a divine hierarchy engaged through liturgy.91 Paul Rorem proposes that biblical exegesis is Dionysius’s central project.92 But then he describes Mystical Theology as little more than a “methodological prologue” for the other works, threatening to reduce Mystical Theology, in Golitzin’s words, to a “solvent burning away the outward Christian trappings” of the Hierarchies.93 In fact, Mystical Theology is a deeply liturgical and hierarchical work: we follow Moses up to Mt. Sinai, undergo purifications, gather the people, light lamps, sound trumpets, and assemble the priests (Exod 19–​24).94 Andrew Louth calls Mystical Theology a “celebrant’s handbook” that unlocks the inner meaning of the liturgical symbols, fulfilled in silence and union beyond comprehension. To celebrate, one has to know how to read Scripture, sing God’s names, and harmonize with angelic choirs.95 Denys Turner warns that such modern readings of Dionysius tend to “deracinate” apophasis by removing it from the hierarchies of liturgy and Scripture. Turner blames an “unbalanced” medieval reception of Dionysius in the West governed by what he calls “Plotinian individual ascent, as ‘the flight of the alone to the alone.’ ”96 His diagnosis deserves careful consideration: There is an hierarchical differentiation and structure within negativity, and so within “otherness,” an hierarchy which is intrinsic to the statement of his apophaticism. . . . To dislodge any one element in this complex structure of differentiated difference is to cause the whole edifice to collapse. What, of course, it collapses into if we remove from it that articulation of differentiated difference is precisely what we get in Derrida: a univocity of difference for which every difference is reduced to but one logical type, a type which is, moreover, logically impossible: total difference.97

As Turner explains, the complex structures of Dionysian hierarchy sustain a negation that is not a totalizing alterity, but differentiated alterity. What Turner calls a “univocity of difference” is precisely the aneidetic condition, and he is right to trace its genesis to Plotinus.

91 See Golitzin, Mystagogy, 16, 18, 23, 294. 92 See the discussion in Paul Rorem, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols within the Pseudo-​Dionysian Synthesis (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), 3–​10, 126–​131. 93 Golitzin, Mystagogy, xxxiii; citing Rorem, Commentary, 207–​209. “The Mystical Theology is a methodological parenthesis in the overall flow of the Pseudo-​Dionysian corpus, summarizing the preceding material and pointing the way to the anagogical treatises and spiritual uplifting yet to come.” Paul Rorem, “The Place of The Mystical Theology in the Pseudo-​Dionysian Corpus,” Dionysius 4 (1980): 96. 94 Golitzin, Mystagogy, 227–​238. 95 See Louth, Denys the Areopagite, 30–​31, 73–​74, 104–​105. 96 Denys Turner, “How to Read the pseudo-​Denys Today?,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 7, no. 4 (2005): 429–​430. 97 Turner, “Atheism, Apophaticism, and ‘Différance’,” 229–​230.

The Limits of Negation  103 Nevertheless, some contemporary interpreters continue to maintain that Dionysian theology is pure negation and that such negation repeats Plotinus.98 This temptation to read Dionysius through the lens of Plotinus is widespread but mistaken. Influenced as we are by the ideal of the formless Absolute, Plotinus’s views can sound almost incontestable after the gradual naturalization of Tradition A. As I described in Chapter 1, today the long apophatic tradition from Plotinus to Dionysius enjoys a newfound prestige. But despite its thundering negations, Mystical Theology belongs to a Dionysian corpus full of determinate structures of order and measure. The treatise deliberately abstracts from the author’s usual focus on hierarchy and theonymy in order to mark out the furthest boundary of mystical speech, but for that same reason, it cannot be the core of his thought. Readers of Dionysius’s four extant works must do justice to all of the elements of his mystical theology. Neither apophaticism, nor symbols, nor exegesis provides an adequate hermeneutical principle to integrate the Dionysian corpus, but hierarchy (ἱεραρχία) does. As Roques states, “hierarchy does not appear as a simple element in the Dionysian synthesis. It is the Dionysian universe itself.”99 Once this is clearly stated, however, we still must explain how radical negation and the positivity of hierarchy can be harmonized. In Mystical Theology, Dionysius exalts negation as the highest mode of praise, and his account of apophasis excels Plotinus in clarity and consistency. But if he begins with Plotinus, he does not end there. Dionysius does not simply repeat Plotinian formlessness, for where Plotinus universalizes the discursive power of negation, Dionysius localizes its function among other priorities. Where Plotinus commends an unceasing ἀφαίρεσις as an end in itself, Dionysius sets out principles for its use, equipping contemplatives with techniques for the proper handling of that potent acid. Dionysius concentrates his theory of negation into the pages of Mystical Theology precisely because it is only one moment in his contemplative project, not the sole aesthetic principle. Rather, Dionysius situates the methods of negation within the vast economy of the One’s generous, erotic self-​donation. Precisely at that moment—​the self-​giving of the One in ecstatic desire for us—​ Dionysius’s Christian Neoplatonism will overturn the second pillar of Plotinian formlessness, its proscription of eros, and thus begins to loosen the strictures of 98 “All the basic elements found in the Areopagite’s short work [Mystical Theology] are already present in the Enneads.” “The process of aphairesis . . . is expanded and developed by Dionysius in a most Plotinian fashion.” “I would suggest that there is little in Dionysius which cannot be found already in his Christian and Neoplatonic predecessors.” Carabine, The Unknown God, 152, 294, 299. “Dionysius’s God, like the One of Plotinus, is transcendent, not in a vague, unspecified sense, but in the very precise metaphysical sense that he is not at all included within the whole of reality, of things that are, as any member of it.” “We may pass directly from Plotinus to Dionysius, because . . . the philosophical argumentation by which these doctrines are reached is already fully present in Plotinus.” Perl, Theophany, 13, 119. 99 René Roques, L’Univers Dionysien. Structure hiérarchique du monde selon pseudo-​Denys (Aubier, 1954), 131.

104  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation the aneidetic condition. As we saw in Chapter 3, Plotinus stated this hypothetical rule: If the One were to love, it could not remain formless. Plotinus concludes that the One can be loved, but does not love. Dionysius takes up the contrary possibility: the One not only possesses eros par excellence, but because of its unparalleled loving, the One is uniquely Form (θεοειδὴς) and form-​giving (εἰδοποιεῖν). Hence, even as apophasis remains absolutely central to Dionysian theology, the discourse of negation is bounded and defined by an exterior, a limit, which is the positivity of hierarchy. The measures of hierarchy are the visible expression of the One’s ecstatic eros. In Dionysius’s own words, “the limit [πέρας] of hierarchy is loving [ἀγάπησις].”100 What does it mean, as Dionysius writes in Mystical Theology, to “slip backwards into the darkness” (εἰς τὸν γνόφον)? Before it becomes an epistemic principle, the darkness of negation is an experience to enter, perhaps unwittingly, drifting toward a shadow that suddenly slips over one like a cloak. Darkness means “abandoning” and “renouncing” every light or voice of orientation.101 Released from the limits of identity (ἐκστάσις), one is “neither oneself nor someone else.”102 Fundamentally, then, Dionysian apophasis is a contemplative discipline, a practice worked by and upon the stable self, which consists in three moments of praise (ὑμνεῖν). The first is an affirmative naming, using the vocabulary of created beings (καταφάσκειν). The second moment surpasses those creaturely names by negating them (ἀποφάσκειν), raising a song to God beyond the compass of beings. At this stage, Dionysius negates whole theonymic categories in ways that Plotinus would applaud. Much as we read in Ennead I.6, here the One is “neither figure nor form [οὔτε σχῆμα οὔτε εἶδος], neither quality nor quantity [οὔτε ποσότητα].”103 Dionysius joins Plotinus in rejecting geometrical forms in particular: “neither number nor order, neither greatness [οὔτε μέγεθος] nor smallness, neither equality nor inequality.”104 Dionysius even negates the divine One insofar as it is “divine” and “One” (οὔτε ἓν, οὔτε ἑνότης, οὔτε θεότης).105 But there is a third moment in Dionysian negation that does not simply repeat the second, but goes beyond it and thus beyond Plotinus. If negations were denials of predications in the sense of Aristotelian στέρησις, then the first and second moments would cancel each other out, following the logic of the excluded middle. Instead, Dionysius’s third moment asks the contemplative to exit the enterprise of affirming and denying altogether and instead to stand “beyond all predication and all negation” (ὑπὲρ πᾶσαν καὶ ἀφαίρεσιν καὶ θέσιν).106 In the second moment 100 EH I.3 (376A). 101 MT I.3 (1000C, 1001A). 102 MT I.1 (1000A); MT I.3 (1001A). 103 MT IV (1040D). Golitzin suggests that these negations of μορφή and εἶδος have in mind contemporary Messalians and other anthropomorphites. See Golitzin, Mystagogy, 36. 104 MT V (1045D–​1048A). 105 MT V (1048A). 106 MT I.2 (1000B). Cf. MT V (1048B): “οὔτε θέσις οὔτε ἀφαίρεσις.”

The Limits of Negation  105 of negation, Dionysius denied creaturely names because God is the transcendent Creator. But in the third moment, he undoes every limit, negating even the limits imposed by negation itself on the grounds that the divine One is the superabundant Good, the supreme Giver of gifts. The final task of the contemplative, then, is to abandon the relatively sure standpoint granted by apophatic practice, and instead to lose oneself in deeper layers of darkness. Dionysius names this the “unveiled knowing of veiled unknowledge” (ἀπερικαλύπτως γνῶμεν . . . ἀγνωσίαν . . . περικεκαλυμμένην).107 We might call it a ceaseless alternation of form and formlessness, without compass, without axis, without rest, less an undoing of predication than an undoing of negation. It should not even be defined as dialectical negation, lest that suggest even a modicum of recovery or resolution—​either a subtle ricochet from unknowing back into the coordinates of knowing or a subtle mastery over negation by heroically converting it into a methodological principle. This third apophatic moment is not a method or a program, but a response offered in fidelity to an experience—​an experience of the abundant gifts of the One. It is the acceleration and intensification of the first moment’s original negation in a desperate attempt to clear away space for the torrential excess of divine Good. In Divine Names, Dionysius will call this “denial on account of abundance” (ἀφαιρέσεως . . . τῆς ὑπεροχικῆς).108 Hence, it is just as negation reaches its highest degree that it finds its terminus. The gift of the Good, received by means of negation, sets a boundary to that negation. This is why Dionysian apophasis is not a “philosophical technique,” as Golitzin beautifully explains: Ἀφαίρεσις is a fundamental aspect of the creature’s appropriation of the divine from the very beginnings of its ascent. . . . [A]‌n ever-​deepening penetration into the realities undergirding the creation . . . requires a continuous negation, which is the same as to say a progressive abandonment of each successive level of understanding at which it finds itself. . . . Far from being a purely logical peeling-​away of forms from the transcendently formless, ἀφαίρεσις becomes rather a declaration of praise, the affirmation of a state in process of realization . . . the discovery and declaration of a presence surpassing speech.109

The surplus of divine self-​Gift compels contemplatives to accelerate their negations in order to clear away what is not God and, so to speak, keep pace with the overwhelming magnitude of the donation. This donation is the subject of Dionysius’s three other works. From this perspective, we can hear something greater than apophasis in the opening notes of Mystical Theology. Dionysius begins not in darkness, but from a 107 MT II (1025B). 108 DN II.3 (640B). 109 Golitzin, Mystagogy, 152, 154–​155.

106  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation divine presence encountered in that darkness, like Moses on the cloud-​shrouded mountain. He names God not the One but the “Three” (Τριὰς), whose mysteries flood phenomena with light and fill minds with beauty. In the darkness, but pointing out of the darkness, radiates a beam of light, “the transcendent ray of the divine shadow” (τὸν ὑπερούσιον τοῦ θείου σκότους ἀκτῖνα).110 Dionysian apophasis leads the wandering contemplatives, lost among veils within veils, into the depths of formlessness, where suddenly they recognize a definite presence, a particular character, a given form: the singular ray. Dionysius certainly cautions Timothy about the perils of form in Mystical Theology, warning him of the uninitiated masses who confuse God with the “godless, multiformed shapes [πολυειδῶν μορφωμάτων] of their own fashioning.”111 Yet he also warns against elites who think their secret knowledge peeks behind the divine shadows.112 The danger here is twofold: not only those who fail to negate but those who imagine that their negations deliver them straightaway to the One. The first group fails to move from stage one to stage two; the second never progresses to stage three. But the greater the darkness, the more evident the ray. As Vladimir Lossky has observed, for Plotinus God is unknown because the One is “absolute simplicity,” but for Dionysius the One is “incomprehensible by nature.”113 Plotinus absolutized negation. But Dionysius, by radicalizing it, paradoxically relativizes it, turning it back upon itself and dissolving it as an absolute. Unlike his predecessor, Dionysius does not leave the priority of apophasis untouched; he refuses to leave contemplatives with their apophatic instruments securely in hand. Instead, he demands a greater renunciation that strips away even this philosophical guarantee, opening their hands for another reception, and invites them further into the darkness bereft of their infallible principle of formlessness. Plotinus had taught that apophasis eventually denies the eros of the One. An even more radical apophasis, as we will see, leads Dionysius to discover the horizon of eros buried in its depths. The disjunction between Plotinus and Dionysius on negation and other topics calls into question whether one can approach Mystical Theology as the key to the Dionysian corpus. Mystical Theology is nothing more or less than an essay on the utility of negation within contemplation. Since apophasis does not exhaust the duty of the mystagogue, it never amounts to an end in itself, but belongs within an economy of praise subject to the superseding, indubitable presence of divine gift. Dionysius’s short treatise belongs within that economy, not beyond it or against it. 110 MT I.1 (1000A). 111 MT I.2 (1000B). 112 MT I.2 (1001A). In Letter 9, Dionysius states that images of God give shape to One without shape (πολύμορφα τῶν ἀμορφώτων). Yet such images only refer to God because their forms authentically reflect divine light (θεοειδῆ . . . τοῦ θεολογικοῦ φωτὸς). Ep IX (1105C). 113 Vladimir Lossky, Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1957), 29–​31.

The Limits of Negation  107

The shape of hierarchy In Mystical Theology, Dionysius’s first counsel to his disciple Timothy is to seek union with God (ἕνωσις) through ascent.114 In doing so, he not only invokes the anagogical schema of the two Hierarchies but makes it the premise of that apophatic summa. Descent from God to the world plurifies our words about God; ascent into darkness un-​words us and strips them away (ἀλογίαν). But note how Dionysius arranges that schema. The greater the “quantity of descent” (τὸ ποσὸν τῆς καθόδου) into multiplicity, he says, the greater the multiplication of divine names. But the greater the “measure of ascent” (τὸ μέτρον τῆς ἀνόδου) toward God, the greater the contraction into silence.115 Together, descent and ascent function as relative measures along a quantified spectrum of negation. That is, Dionysian apophasis operates within coordinates that first unfold and become intelligible through measure, magnitude, and space. As we gaze at the architecture of the Dionysian cosmos, we first see apophasis in the foreground, the denunciations of predications and denials, and the empty spaces where names once stood, especially in Mystical Theology and parts of Divine Names. But look a minute longer, and the background apparatus comes into view: the reticulated axes spanning up and down and across, the glowing tiers of imprinted figures, the cyclical flywheel of procession and return, all of which allow predication to tick stepwise toward negation in the first place. This indispensable internal machinery, like the workings of an elaborate grandfather clock, is exposed in Celestial Hierarchy and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. They are precisely the components that apophasis cleans and repairs, and hence they are what give apophasis its function.116 For Dionysius, divine revelation shows itself in discernible ligatures of difference, proportion, harmony, and figuration. All abide, in a word, through measure—​definite orders that sustain and constrain the rhythms of ascent and descent, multiplication and subtraction—​the living organism of the total divine economy, namely, hierarchy. According to Ronald Hathaway, the metaphysics of hierarchy in Dionysius stands on three pillars: the unwritten divine law inscribed in nature (θεσμός); the symmetry and proportionality of transcendent ratios (λόγος); and the beauty and desire that binds different elements into a dynamic communion (ἔρως).117 I suggest 114 MT I.1 (997B–​1000A). 115 MT III (1033BC). 116 As Timothy Knepper argues, negation is not a technique for surpassing liturgy but a means of performing it well. “[T]‌he Dionysian corpus gives no indication that such hierarchical order or hierurgical ritual should be subjected to negation but instead suggests that the aphairetical removal of divine names functions as both theological preparation for and theurgical component of the liturgical rites. . . . Negative theology is not the means by which hierarchical ranks and hierurgical rituals are negated or abandoned; they are a means by which they are affirmed and accomplished.” Knepper, Negating Negation, xiii, 70. 117 See Ronald F. Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order in the Letters of Pseudo–​Dionysius (Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 37–​60.

108  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation three slightly different dimensions of the hierarchies found in Celestial Hierarchy and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. First, hierarchy is a creative labor of form achieved by God, who as deiform (θεοειδὴς) is the Maker of form (εἰδοποιεῖν). Second, hierarchy establishes a nexus between divine and human, and with it the possibility of anagogy, solely by virtue of reciprocal love (φιλανθρωπία and ἀγάπησις). Forms are love signs donated within this encounter and only properly affirmed or denied within that context. Finally, prior to the cycle of emanation and return, hierarchy installs an original ordering (τάξις). That structure connects the divine impression of form (ἀποτύπωσις) and the deployment of forms as signs (εἰκονογραφία). Forms and images are types impressed, as it were, by an intimate touch, shaped into determinate figures as the negative traces left by an excess of presence. Once these three dimensions of hierarchy are established, we can take up in Chapter 5 the more challenging question posed by Divine Names: how apophasis operates within that structure without dissolving it, and how figures and measures find their destiny therein. (1) Form-​giving (εἰδοποίησις). Dionysius provides a threefold definition of hierarchy (ἱεραρχία) early in Celestial Hierarchy. Every hierarchy is an ordering (τάξις), a mode of knowing (ἐπιστήμη), and a dynamic activity (ἐνέργεια). Dionysius follows Proclus in his use of τάξις as a vertical order, rank, or series.118 Hierarchies are differential structures stemming immediately from God, which are ordered toward anagogy; they “assimilate” contemplatives to God by making them increasingly “deiform” (θεοειδὴς). They initiate them into the “imitation of God” (τὸ θεομίμητον) in proportion to illuminations received. God imparts divine beauty to each being, sharing his Form for imitation. Because God is uniquely generous, the order of hierarchy can mediate divine form and draw one upward toward unity.119 The “proper order” (εὐταξίας) of hierarchies derives from the “deiform order” (θεοειδοῦς εὐκοσμίας) that instilled it.120 Every creature is potentially deiform if actualized through hierarchical analogies.121 Hierarchical order is objective and immediate, given directly by God.122 In Divine Names, Dionysius suggests the image of radial lines running from the center of a circle (God) out toward its perimeter (world).123 Theophanic lights and divine rays (θεαρχικὴν ἀκτῖνα) proceed downward from the Father’s primal generosity and draw contemplatives upward even while remaining veiled.124 Each hierarchy is a totality that stretches from its common origin in the Trinity, the “source of life,”

118 On the history of the term τάξις, see Roques, L’Univers Dionysien, 36–​40; and Wear and Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite, 58. 119 CH III.1–​2 (164D–​165A). Cf. EH I.3 (376A); EH II.1 (392A). 120 CH VIII.2 (241C). 121 See Golitzin, Mystagogy, 135–​137, 157, 174. 122 Roques, L’Univers Dionysien, 81–​88. 123 See DN V.6 (820D–​21A). 124 CH I.1 (120B); CH I.3 (121BC).

The Limits of Negation  109 all the way to its outer measure (πέρας), namely, the response of love that initiates the movement of return. Dionysius’s well-​known cycle of procession (πρόοδος) from God and return (ἐπιστροφή) to God runs along the same rails.125 Each hierarchy internally recapitulates all of its parts in a necessarily beautiful arrangement (διακόσμησις) that attracts participants to feast with God and share in God (μέθεξις).126 They are “vehicles of revelation” and “vehicles of theophany.”127 Since God gives hierarchical figuration as means for returning to God, Dionysius rarely calls scriptural symbols “forms” (εἶδος) to be negated, but rather “shapes” (μορφή) or “figures” (σχῆμα).128 Likewise, he almost never names God’s transcendence as a bare formlessness.129 In fact, formlessness is precisely what God seeks to remedy through the sacraments. In Divine Names, God’s first “gift” (δωρεὰν) is God’s own being (εἶναι), that is, divine Form.130 Throughout Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, God fills his creatures with beauty by imbuing them with form. In baptism, for example, the Christian overcomes death through the power of the Resurrection. The cold waters of death separate soul from body, rendering the soul formless (ἀειδῆ), but the Resurrection clothes the soul and restores its beauty. In baptism, according to Dionysius, God creates form for the formless (τὸ ἀνείδεον εἰδοποιεῖται).131 When Christians recite the Nicene Creed to celebrate the glorious history of salvation, all of God’s deeds share a common character: God’s beauty gives form, shaping them into divine Form (τὸ θεοειδὲς ἡμῶν μορφώσασα).132 When the priest prays over the Eucharist, he recounts the Incarnation as the pivot point of human history, when God’s infinitely generosity adorned human formlessness with the beauties of divine form (τοῖς θεοειδέσιν . . . τὸ ἀνείδεον κάλλεσι). By becoming one with humanity, God gave the gift (ἐδωρήσατο) of participating in God’s Beauty (οἰκείων . . . καλῶν).133 In eucharistic communion, God unites the sacramental community through God’s own Form (θεοειδεῖ συμπτύξει), removing division and drawing everyone into a singular divinization (εἰς ἑνοειδῆ 125 CH IX.2 (260B). 126 EH I.3 (373C–​376A). 127 Louth, Denys the Areopagite, 39. 128 See the semantics of spatial metaphors for God at DN IV.5 (913AB). 129 In Celestial Hierarchy, Dionysius explains that even the saints’ visions of God, rightly called “theophanies,” never abrogate divine hiddenness. Rather, they are a “likening through shapes of things without shapes [ἐν μορφώσει τῶν ἀμορφώτων ὁμοίωσιν], leading upwards [ἀναγωγῆς] from visible things toward the divine” (CH IV.3 [180C]). This could be an allusion to Iamblichus’s De mysteriis I.15: “the unutterable is voiced by means of ineffable symbols, the shapeless is captured in shapes, things superior to every image are represented through images . . . .” See Paul Rorem, “Iamblichus and the Anagogical Method in Pseudo-​Dionysian Liturgical Theology,” Studia Patristica, vol. 18, ed. E. A. Livingstone (Pergamon Press, 1982), 454. Luibheid’s translation unfortunately shifts into a modern register of symbolic representation of the formless Absolute: “This kind of vision, that is to say, where the formless God is represented in forms, is rightly described by theological discourse as a theophany. The recipients of such visions are lifted up to the divine” (157; my emphasis). 130 DN V.6 (820C). 131 EH II.7 (404BC). 132 EH III.7 (436C). 133 EH III.11 (441AB).

110  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation θέωσιν).134 At the end of Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Dionysius promises Timothy that the liturgy reveals even greater divine beauties (φανερώτερα . . . θεοειδέστερα) than he can describe.135 (2) Loving (ἀγάπησις). For Dionysius, then, every hierarchy is a structured interface between the initiative of divine generosity and its reception. The descending manifestation from above meets our ascending efforts from below through layers and layers of veils. But what appears at first to be two distinct, if coordinated, movements are in fact two aspects of the same integrated nexus. Two reciprocal loves meet in one union of loves, God for humanity and humanity for God. The Trinity is the origin of hierarchies, and their furthest extent is love for God. It opens a space that reverts dynamically, bending the manifestation upon itself into a bounded circle (πέρας). This singular “loving” (ἀγάπησις) activates anagogical effects. The force of desire folds differences together into one (συμπτύσσει . . . εἰς ἑνοειδῆ) and perfects one’s participation in the singular divine Form (ἑνοειδοῦς).136 All acts of love, from obeying divine commands to liturgical gestures to deeds of holiness, are signs within this integrated economy, inseparable from the erotic nexus that founded the hierarchies in the first place. All of the figurations they contain are suspended within this ἀγάπησις, and they only exist to intensify greater and greater erotic union.137 Out of eternity God labors to pour out goodness, “giving away God’s very own self ” (τῶν οἰκείων μετάδοσιν ὄντος ἑτοιμοτάτου).138 God donates (ἐδωρήσατο) hierarchies in order to welcome the beloved onto the path of divinization. Rays of illumination stir human intellects from within, stimulating reason to comprehend signs of love through a code of written scriptures and nonverbal rites transmitted orally. Both Scripture and mysteries, however, function within the governing erotic economy.139 Naming God is not an end in itself, still less a philosophical exercise, but in the first place an act of desire. Hierarchy is not an abstract impersonal model but the living anatomy of the ecclesial community’s ordered return of love. Those who respond to God’s burning love for humankind step into the portal of hierarchy by requesting baptism and catechetical training.140 The same love entrains the priestly hierarchs to share the sacramental gifts, as they find themselves “burning with desire like gods” (ἐρῶντες ὡς θεῖοι) to inspire others to anagogy.141 The infinite divine self-​gift instills a human desire to give, again and again, in signs and images, using the whole world as a treasury, until the network of mysteries becomes “pluralized [πληθύνηται] into a sacred diversity of symbols out of love

134 EH III.1 (424C). 135 EH VII.3.11 (568D). 136 EH I.1 (372B); EH. I.3 (376A). 137 EH II.1 (392AB). 138 EH II.3 (400A). 139 EH I.4 (376BC). 140 EH II.1 (393AB). 141 EH I.5 (376D).

The Limits of Negation  111 for humanity.”142 Dionysius parses three such semiotic regimes: the angelic or celestial hierarchy, the liturgical or ecclesial hierarchy, and the scriptural or legal hierarchy.143 (3) Imprinting (ἀποτύπωσις). For Dionysius, hierarchy is not only a harmonious order, a cosmic circuit of emanation and return, a cascade of theophanies unfolding a pathway to God, nor even the secret exchange of love for love hiding at the heart of each of these. Each of these notions could still remain abstract. Crucially, they also leave behind concrete traces as immediate “imprints” (τύποι) of the generous descent. The divine “touch” fully lands on earth.144 The excessive gift of divine presence stamps hierarchies directly with its divine Form, inscribing figures along the trajectory of its withdrawal that remain as testimonies to divine presence. That contact with God abides and the hierarchical connection leaves a discernible mark, even if as a figure of absence, like a stamp. As Dionysius is fond of repeating, we need such material aids both to strengthen our reason and to conceal sacred truths from the unwise.145 The patterns that fill hierarchies are “impressed signs” (ἐν τυπωτικοῖς συμβόλοις) clothed in material figures and shapes that reveal God even while “veiling” and “concealing” divine transcendence.146 They are “types of what has no type and figures of the unfigurable” (τῶν ἀτυπώτων οἱ τύποι καὶ τὰ σχήματα τῶν ἀσχηματίστων).147 Creatures are “tokens” (ἀπεικονίσματα), “seals” (ἐκτυπώματα), and “images” (εἰκόνα) of God.148 Dionysius uses the metaphor of a mirror to convey how hierarchies bear the marks of God. Having been “imprinted” by God (ἀποτυπούμενος), elements of a given hierarchy shine as “divine images” (ἀγάλματα θεῖα). Like “spotless mirrors,” they receive the light of the divine ray and become so filled that they deliver reflections to others. The architecture of the hierarchy reveals in its reflection an “image of divine loveliness” (εἰκόνα τῆς θεαρχικῆς ὡραιότητος).149 Other times, he appeals to the technology of the seal (τύπος).150 Like the image-​ transfer of a stamp, divine formations (θεοειδέσι . . . διακοσμήσεσιν) are certainly conveyed through lesser shapes (αἰσχρὰ μορφώματα), but that imprint retains the 142 EH III.3 (429A). 143 CH I.3 (124A). 144 Walther Völker counts several terms for mystical contact or divine touch: “attaining” (ἐπιβάλλω) union with God (DN I.4 [592CD]; DN IV.11 [708D]); “being joined to” (συνάπτομαι) God (DN I.1 [588A]; DN VII.1 [865C]; DN XI.2 [949C]; DN XIII.3 [981B]); or, most frequently, “touch” (ἐπαφή), whether positive (DN I.5 [593B]) or negative (MT IV [1040D]; MT V [1048A]). See Walther Völker, Kontemplation und Ekstase bei Pseudo-​Dionysius Areopagita (Franz Steiner, 1958), 207–​208. 145 CH I.3 (121C); CH II.1 (137B); CH II.2 (140AB). 146 CH I.2 (121B). 147 CH II.2 (140A); EH IV.3.4 (480A). Cf. Chaldean Oracles, Fr. 144, ed. Majercik, 102. 148 CH I.3 (121CD); CH II.1 (136D–​137A). 149 CH III.2 (165AB). 150 See Herbert L. Kessler, “Configuring the Invisible by Copying the Holy Face,” in Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 64–​87; and Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 57–​96. I discuss this further in Chapters 6 and 7.

112  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation original character. Every impression is a moment of inscription or “image-​writing” (εἰκονογραφία).151 Every seal figures a line into a determinate pattern, and so necessarily takes up space. That spatial extension makes room for the formation of structure (διακόσμησις) and the preservation of a given order (τάξις). As Stang explains, hierarchy intensifies God’s immanence within creation: “Such movement presumes space, and so creation, as an ordered ‘theophany,’ a series of interlocking hierarchies, is the arrangement of that distance that makes possible proximity.”152 Such divine imprints penetrate down to the lowest levels of the system of celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Even a lower member of the nine angelic triads can be fully impressed (ἀποτυποῦσθαι) by God’s touch and in its own small way “manifest primal order” (ἀναφαίνειν . . . ταξιαρχίαν).153 And once it has been impressed like an image, each hierarchy reaches all the way back up through that same order.154 Divine impressions include, above all, the revealed signs of Scripture and liturgy. In Letter 9, Dionysius tells Titus he should revere the Scriptures because they are given as “figures of the unfigurable and manifold shapes of the shapeless” (τυπωτικὰ καὶ πολύμορφα τῶν ἀμορφώτων καὶ ἀτυπώτων). Hidden within them are the beautiful mysteries of divine form itself (μυστικὰ καὶ θεοειδῆ πάντα).155 Dionysius seems to envision hierarchies as multidimensional realities that need to be entered and spatially navigated. He compares the sacramental mysteries to “statues” (ἀγάλματα); to understand them, we must enter “within” (ἐντὸς) and behold their deiform beauty (τὸ θεοειδὲς αὐτοῦ κάλλος).156 Hierarchies sustain God’s invisible order through proportionate figural differences. More than flat surfaces, their real dimensions give solidity to the truths they communicate.157 This is why liturgies proceed through defined patterns and measured sequences. Likewise, reading sacred Scripture means “passing into” (εἴσω . . . διαβαίνειν) the inner core of the signs that “bear the mark of the divine stamps” (χαρακτήρων . . . ἀποτυπώματα).158 The figures effected by hierarchies are by no means merely symbols that represent the divine. This is far too distant and cold of a formulation. They originate from the touch of divine Love, like a thumb depressed into flesh, and only function within that erotic nexus; there is no gap between caress and sign. 151 CH II.3 (140B); cf. EH IV.3.10 (481D). Marilena Vlad suggests that “image” has three senses in Dionysius corresponding to the cycle of procession and return. Image as πρόοδος is σύμβολον; image as μονή is τύπος; image as ἐπιστροφή is ἄγαλμα. See Marilena Vlad, “Denys l’Aréopagite et l’image divine: symbole, empreinte, statue,” in L’icône dans la pensée et dans l’art, eds. Kristina Mitalaite and Anca Vasiliu (Brepols, 2017), 67–​92. 152 Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity, 115. 153 CH IX.1 (257B). On Celestial Hierarchy and ancient angelology, see Arthur, Pseudo-​Dionysius as Polemicist, 43–​69. 154 CH VIII.2 (241C). 155 Ep IX.1 (1105C). 156 EH III.3 (428D). 157 EH II.2 (397C). 158 Ep IX (1108C); trans. Luibheid, 284 (modified).

The Limits of Negation  113 Hierarchies are intrinsically theophanic and anagogical because they manifest the pathway back to the One who first touched them into being. The vector of anagogy simply reverses the vector of impression. This is why despite the prevalence of the term σύμβολον, Dionysius cannot be read in terms of the modern hermeneutics of “symbolic” representation. Rather, his semiotics proceeds from the action of imprinting (ἀποτύπωσις) and the resulting inscription (εἰκονογραφία): the haptic figural residues of God that carve out a path back to the Form. Likewise, the prominence of apophasis in Dionysian theology originates in the inherently negative character of the stamp (τύπος). It bears witness to the absence of the imprinting agent, whose excess is phenomenalized through its withdrawal, more unknown than known. Unless that imprint first arrived as a written sign, there would be no negation. In the cosmos, in the liturgy, in divine names, what hierarchy yields is inscriptions. All of Dionysian mysticism, both apophatic and kataphatic, hangs on the discernibility of that engraved figure, the visibility of the line. The line is the atomic unit of hierarchical figuration, which unfolds the primordial space in which apophasis can both operate and be properly bounded. As we saw in Mystical Theology, deep within the veiled folds of negation, a single ray of light (ἀκτίνα) beams out a line that cannot be suppressed, a sovereign initiative that out of the formlessness of darkness begins to measure a world. That opening, that clearing, is maintained by apophatic negation, so that God’s generous figuration in the structures of hierarchy can refer us without impediment back to divine Form. “Negation clears away and highlights a silhouette, far from opening onto a void,” writes Jean-​ Luc Marion about Mystical Theology. “When, therefore, negation plays with affirmation, its superiority comes from the fact that it does not destroy it but, in a sense, restores it.”159

159 Marion, The Idol and Distance, 148–​149. Throughout his various comments, Marion consistently contrasts Dionysius with Plotinus: on negation (146), on prayer (161), on emanation (165), and on Trinity (173).

5

The Extension of Desire Circling the perimeter In Chapter 2, we watched Plotinus station a rank of statues (ἀγάλματα) around the perimeter of the temple. One must pass by them on the way into the inner sanctuary (ἄδυτον) and again on the way out. For the one who seeks the gods within, those figures are the last things seen. But despite their proximity to the sacred, precisely as the penultimate vision, their geometrical figuration must be disavowed in order to progress further into union with the One itself (VI.9.11). Like Plotinus, Dionysius also stations figures at the doors of the inner sanctuary (αἱ πύλαι τῶν ἀδύτων) in Letter 8.1 But in his telling, they are not statues: they are living monks, like Dionysius himself. These monks, he states explicitly, are not there to “guard” the sanctuary (οὐ πρὸς φυλακὴν) of the One.2 Rather, their presence preserves the order of hierarchy, situated between the priests and the people. Given their proximity to the public, the only thing they defend is the generosity of the hierarchy itself. They are stationed there to keep the sanctuary near, not far. The priests alone approach the altar, but when they exit the sanctuary, they leave behind their privileged space, move toward the monks, and “generously [ἀγαθοειδῶς] come out to those outside of the divine veils.”3 Dionysius is the first Christian author to insert monks into the hierarchy, precisely in this mediating role.4 Note how Dionysius changes the Plotinian scene. As in Plotinus’s topology, the space of Dionysian hierarchy has degrees of proximity, rankings of figuration, and mediation through veils. But for Dionysius, the perimeter of the sanctuary, namely, its sacred signs (ἱερὰ σύμβολα), has an exoteric, not esoteric function.5 In a striking reversal of the Plotinian model, the monks bring divine communion out of the temple to the people. The penultimate figures before the temple are not statues memorializing the failures of figuration, but intermediaries who convert spatial difference into personal encounter, a living and breathing hierarchy. The 1 Ep VIII (1088D). On Letter 8, see Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order, 85–​104, and his translation at 140–​150. According to Hathaway, Letter 8 reflects language from Plato and Proclus. 2 Ep VIII (1088D). 3 Ep VIII (1089A); trans. Luibheid, 273. 4 See Golitzin, Mystagogy, 6–​10, 210–​216, 282–​284; Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order, 64–​66; and especially Evgenios Iverites, “The Relation of Monks to Clergy in the Dionysian Hierarchy and Its Byzantine Reception,” in Pseudo-​Dionysius and Christian Visual Culture, c. 500–​900, eds. Francesca Dell’Acqua and Ernesto Sergio Mainoldi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 89–​131. 5 Ep VIII (1088D).

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0007

The E xtension of Desire  115 outermost circle does not guard the center but gathers others toward it. In short, Dionysius does not condemn figuration as a threat to the One, but embraces it as a means of ushering the Many back to the One through an act of generous giving. We also watched Plotinus hold up the geometer as an exemplar of the act of contemplation. As the geometer draws his lines, he produces that which he contemplates, since the ideation and the inscription are one; so too, the contemplative unites with the object contemplated. Yet soon enough Plotinus washes his hands of his own illustration since it elevates the graphic lines of geometrical form to a status his henology cannot tolerate (III.8.4). Dionysius proposes a different craftsman as the model contemplative: not the geometer, but the painter (γραφεύς).6 The painter labors to copy divine form in his painting. But because his contemplation works within an economy of hierarchical figuration, it takes place within a nexus of reciprocal love leading to divinization. As the painter comes to desire God (ἐρῶσιν), he finds himself transformed into a “divine statue” (ἀγάλματα θεῖα), a work of art that imitates God.7 The contemplative attains “deiform virtue” insofar as he is molded to the shape of the divine exemplar, becoming its “imprint” (τύπος) or “replica” (μίμημα). The painter ends up as the painting, the sculptor as the statue. This is only achieved by gazing unwaveringly upon God with a focused eye that never veers away (ἀπαράγραπτον) from the figure he depicts, drawing the divine Form point by point and line by line.8 As Dionysius writes: The artist keeps an eye constantly on the original form [ἀρχέτυπον εἶδος] and never allows himself to be sidetracked or to have his attention divided by any other visible object. . . . It is thus with those artists who love beauty in the mind. They make an image of it with their minds. The concentration and the persistence of their contemplation of this fragrant, secret beauty enables them to produce an exact image of God [θεοειδέστατον ἴνδαλμα]. And so these divine artists never cease to give form [εἰδοποιοῦντες] to transcendent beauty in their own minds . . . .9

According to Dionysius, the contemplative renders the divine Form with maximal precision by forming his mind in conformity to it. To contemplate is to receive the divine impression. But Dionysius views this not as a negative process of erasure, but a positive process of inscription, a graphic figuration in the mind. Contrary

6 EH IV.3.1 (473C). 7 EH IV.3.1 (476A). 8 EH IV.3.1 (473B). The metaphor of mimetic painting goes back to Proclus’s commentary on the Republic. See Angelo Tavolaro, “Eikon and Symbolon in the Corpus Dionysiacum: Scriptures and Sacraments as Aesthetic Categories,” in Pseudo-​Dionysius and Christian Visual Culture, c. 500–​900, ed. Francesca Dell’Acqua and Ernesto Sergio Mainoldi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 41–​75. 9 EH IV.3.1 (473C); trans. Luibheid, 225–​226 (modified).

116  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation to Plotinus, Dionysius holds up contemplative vision as not only “theomimetic” (θεομιμήτος) but actually “theographic” (θεογράπτος): capable of incising the divine name.10 Plotinus stations inert figures along the temple’s perimeter, neither within nor without; Dionysius stations monks who bring the inside out. Plotinus studies the inscriptions of geometers but suspects them to be simulacra; Dionysius lauds theographic painters. In both cases, the uncertainty of Plotinus stems from the ambivalent role of geometry in his theological aesthetics of formlessness. If Plotinus subjugates theonymy to absolute negation, Dionysius suspends theonymy within an erotic exchange—​a caress of divine Form that structures the order of hierarchy, and a withdrawal of that same touch that sets in motion the apophatic economy of veils. It should be clear by now that the two masters of apophasis do not speak with one voice. If anything, Dionysius’s attitude toward figuration contradicts that of Plotinus. It is important today to stage the confrontation between them, not only to measure Dionysius’s distance from Plotinus on apophasis but to remember the importance of his Christian identity. In one of his letters, Dionysius denies the charge that he is overly disputatious with pagan Greek philosophers. His immediate interlocutor in this case was a certain Apollophanes who was skeptical of Christian miracles.11 Yet given Dionysius’s profound engagement with Hellenic Neoplatonism, one can imagine that others like Plotinus or Proclus might not be far from his mind.12 I have never wished to embark on controversies with Greeks or with any others. . . . But [some] charge me with making unholy use of things Greek to attack the Greeks. It would be more correct to say . . . that it is the Greeks who make unholy use of godly things to attack God. . . . As soon as anything has been manifested for what it assuredly is by the norm of truth and has been spotlessly established, anything else, anything even with the semblance of truth, will be refuted as alien to and unlike reality, as specious rather than authentic. It is therefore superfluous for someone expounding the truth to enter into dispute with this one or that one . . . when in fact what [that one] has may be a counterfeit copy [εἴδωλον] of some morsel of the truth.13

10 EH IV.3.1 (473D). 11 On Apollophanes, see Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order, 71–​74, 136–​139. 12 Wear and Dillon read this passage in light of Dionysius’s unrivalled “chutzpah” of posing at Paul’s first Athenian convert and claiming the entire Neoplatonist heritage for Christian orthodoxy. In Letter 7, he tries “to turn the tables on his possible critics” yet betrays “a certain degree of concern as to whether his great enterprise would succeed in evading detection.” Wear and Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite, 131–​132. István Perczel suggests that when Dionysius critiques “Apollophanes” he intends Proclus himself. See István Perczel, “Pseudo-​Dionysius and the Platonic Theology,” in Proclus et la Théologie Platonicienne, ed. Alain Philippe Segonds and Carlos Steel (Leuven University Press, 2000), 527–​530. 13 Ep VII.1–​2 (1077C–​1080B); trans. Luibheid, 266–​267 (modified).

The E xtension of Desire  117 According to Dionysius, he doesn’t quarrel with Greek intellectuals for the sake of doing so, but aims at the truth alone. But when he hits upon divine truth, this inevitably exposes the incompleteness of prior philosophies, rendering formerly plausible views inadequate. This is not a bad account of what Dionysius does to Plotinian negation in Mystical Theology, and it reminds us to consider the major differences between them. For Plotinus, geometrical figures played an ambivalent role and apophasis was always infinite. Can Dionysius explain a different function for figuration, and yet somehow retain radical apophasis? To answer these questions, we must turn to Dionysius’s longest extant work, Divine Names. Only in Divine Names does he address the apparent tension between the negations of Mystical Theology and the figurations of the Hierarchies, and in the course of doing so, his vocabulary shifts slightly. The term ἱεραρχία appears only a handful of times in Divine Names; now Dionysius prefers “analogy” (ἀναλογία), a term favored across his writings.14 Analogy literally denotes “proportion,” a concept of balanced measure, when the parts are held in harmony with the whole. For Iamblichus the word meant the state of psychic attunement to the gods, and for Proclus relative degrees of participation. By contrast, Dionysius uses ἀναλογία to describe “the proportion between God and created things which allows the created things to have some form of contact with God.”15 It is the fundamental correlation that makes possible reciprocal ἀγάπησις, by which creaturely differences only increase their proximity to God.16 Analogy integrates the proportions of similarity and dissimilarity and therefore neatly binds figuration and negation in a single term. In the various hierarchies, God gives shape to the shapeless (μεμορφωμένοις . . . ἀμορφία), but now they also “measure things beyond measure” (ἐν μέτρῳ τὴν ἀμετρίαν).17 God’s love arrives in harmonies, and human love responds in kind. Christians receive theophanies “veiled proportionately [ἀναλόγως] by divine love” and respond in symmetry with their own “proportionate desires” (συμμέτρῳ . . . ἔρωτι).18 In this chapter on Divine Names, we will see Dionysius expose the limitations of three different Plotinian views. First, by prioritizing eros, he overturns Plotinus’s first axiom of divine self-​sufficiency. Second, by linking hierarchical imprint (τύπος) to measurement (μέτρον), he formulates a positive theological function for geometrical form. Finally, by locating formlessness (ἀνείδεον) as a moment within creation, he relativizes it as a divine name. Autarchy is interrupted by love, shapelessness by measure, and formlessness by form-​giving. Together, they mark 14 See, e.g., DN IV.1 (696B); DN I.4 (592B); and DN I.7 (597B). 15 Wear and Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite, 66. 16 “A creature’s ἀναλογία is thus the ‘measure’ of its share in the Creator—​literally, according to its λόγος (ἀνα +​λόγον).” Golitzin, Mystagogy, 118. See further Vladimir Lossky, “La notion des analogies chez Denys le pseudo-​Aréopagite,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 5 (1930): 279–​309. 17 DN I.1 (588AB). 18 DN I.4 (592B); DN I.2 (589A).

118  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation a momentous shift from Hellenic Neoplatonism to Christian Neoplatonism and from one aesthetics of contemplation to another.

The erotic singularity Of the many divine titles he considers, Dionysius invests tremendous energy contemplating the names “Love” (ἀγάπη) and “Beloved” (ἀγαπητόν). His entire discussion is confined to one compact passage more intensively argued than neighboring pages on other intelligible names.19 Dionysius approaches love mainly under the aspect of “desire” (ἔρως, ἐράω, ἐραστής, ἐραστός; and occasionally the verb ἐφίεμαι).20 Following the example of Origen of Alexandria in his Song of Songs commentary, he rejects out of hand any controversies over the terms ἔρως and ἀγάπη.21 It would be absurd (ἄλογον) to focus more on words than on the substantive inquiry at hand, he remarks, but not because divine names are arbitrary symbols imposed upon a bare Absolute. All signifiers are material concessions to our embodied senses; once we pass from body to soul, “intellectual energies” take over and lead the soul unknowingly to God.22 But naming still matters, because done well it accelerates anagogy. Moreover, there is ample precedent in Scripture and tradition to name God not only as charitable Love but as a yearning Desire. Hence, Dionysius concludes that in Scripture, ἔρως and ἀγάπη indicate the same divine Love, although eros is the “more divine” name. If God is true Desire, then our bodily yearnings are derivative “simulacra” (εἴδωλα) reflecting that singular divine passion.23 Dionysius first discusses how divine love activates hierarchies. God’s beauty stirs all things into longing and embraces them as their limit.24 The universal desire for the universal Beloved (ἐφετόν, ἐραστόν, ἀγαπητόν) is the force that integrates them together. As the final end of desire, God anchors their relative degrees of order: superiors provide for subordinates (προνοητικῶς), subordinates turn toward superiors (ἐπιστρεπτικῶς), and equals accompany equals (κοινωνικῶς). Each level desires (ἐρῶσι) the other, shares the same passions (ἐφιέμενα), and connects itself to the other (συνεκτικῶς). Inequities of capacity are secondary to their fundamental harmony in loving God.25 Dionysius learned this triad of providence, communion, and return from Proclus, and he never hesitates to repeat it.26 19 DN IV.10–​17 (708A–​713B). 20 DN IV.7 (701C). 21 DN IV.11 (708B). On mystical eros from Philo and Origen forward, see Bernard McGinn, “The Language of Love in Christian and Jewish Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Language, ed. Steven T. Katz (Oxford University Press, 1992), 202–​235. 22 DN IV.11 (708CD). 23 DN IV.12 (709BC). 24 DN IV.7 (704A). 25 DN IV.10 (708A). 26 See, e.g., DN IV.12 (709D); DN IV.13 (712A); and DN IV.15 (713B).

The E xtension of Desire  119 Given the centrality of eros in Platonist traditions, it is unsurprising that our monk alludes to Symposium and Phaedrus or borrows from Plotinus and Proclus. But the Dionysian difference is more conspicuous here than elsewhere. The question is not whether or how much Dionysius adopts from Hellenic Neoplatonism regarding the role of eros in contemplation. Rather, we should study the moments when the resources of the biblical Scriptures exceed what the Platonists teach about love. As we have seen, both Plotinus and Proclus taught that the One can be and must be loved. For them too, the world in all its variegation naturally desires God, and this love for God unifies cosmic differences. Yet, having concurred with this Platonist teaching, Dionysius takes further steps on his own, motivated by Pauline and Johannine scriptures. Despite appearances, the universal flow of love from the world toward God is but a secondary aftereffect of a more primary desire. The same goes for the hierarchical structure of superordination and subordination as such. In distinction from Hellenic Neoplatonism, Dionysius grants priority instead to a singular, divine Desire beyond being that out of its mysterious depths proceeds not from the world but towards the world. To name God in this way, Dionysius has to reverse some basic coordinates of Plotinian henology. Dionysius begins with the case of the apostle Paul in the New Testament, whom he takes to be an exemplary lover of God (ἀληθὴς ἐραστὴς). Paul, he says, is “possessed” by divine Eros, partakes of its sacred power, and in his “enthusiasm” (ἐνθέῳ) utters the oracle: “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”27 Dionysius offers the following diagnosis: Paul has loved so violently that he ends up displacing himself into his beloved. For when desire becomes sufficiently intense, the lover grows incapacitated and loses his independence. He can no longer be alone but finds it impossible to continue as himself without the Beloved. Dionysian hierarchy and analogy, Alexander Golitzin notes, represent a “departure from the loneliness and self-​completeness of Plotinus’ microcosmos.”28 It no longer suffices to be alone with the Alone. As Charles Stang puts it, eros “stretches language to the point that it breaks, stretches the lover to the point that he splits.”29 In such intensity of eros, the boundaries of autonomous selves dissolve, lovers (ἐραστάς) pass into beloveds (ἐρωμένων), and their mutual desire becomes “ecstatic” (ἐκστατικός), paradoxically taking them outside of themselves.30 Dionysius contends that such ecstatic desire is absolutely required to love God or speak of God. Each divine name must be embraced by the Beloved and pass into the Beloved lest it touch nothing of the One named. The one who loves God, he contends, has no choice but to pass out of oneself: “we should be taken wholly out of ourselves and become wholly of God” (ὅλους ἑαυτοὺς ὅλων ἑαυτῶν ἐξισταμένους καὶ ὅλους θεοῦ γιγνομένους).31

27 DN IV.13 (712A). Cf. Gal 2:20. 28 Golitzin, Mystagogy, 160, 221. 29 Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity, 169–​170. 30 DN IV.13 (712A). 31 DN VII.1 (865D–​868A); trans. Luibheid, 106.

120  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Desire is the only way to know God because to know God we must become God, and we only enter the Beloved through ecstatic desire. But then Dionysius takes a more daring step.32 For in fact, the ecstatic desire revealed in Paul’s words is no more than a dim echo of the unique divine reality distinct from both human love and the world’s attraction to God. Dionysius contends that the signature of God’s desire is precisely this subjective displacement of ecstasy. It is only because God’s love has always been and will always be ecstatic that Paul’s love could once become ecstatic. The Creator of the universe somehow “comes to be outside of himself ” (ἔξω ἑαυτοῦ γίνεται) due to his overwhelming “excess of erotic loving” (δι᾽ ὑπερβολὴν τῆς ἐρωτικῆς ἀγαθότητος).33 God is “charmed” or “enchanted” (θέλγεται) by the world and falls in love (καὶ ἀγαπήσει καὶ ἔρωτι). Stirred by violent desire, the divine Lover finds he can no longer remain exalted beyond the world and above the fray. Given such desire, God does not remain autonomous in perfect transcendence. Having been seduced, God cannot resist descending all the way down to the beloved, passing out of himself and into the beloved ecstatically, settling into the fabric of the world (ἐν πᾶσι κατάγεται). God chooses to live in the beloved rather than in himself—​this preemptive, impossible exteriorization in search of union is precisely what God is.34 Kevin Corrigan notes that this remarkable passage is “couched consciously in the words of Agathon from Plato’s Symposium.”35 The pivotal verb, θέλγω, means “to stroke or touch with magic power; to charm, enchant, spell-​bind.” Homer uses it to describe Hermes’s magical wand and Circe’s sorcery over Odysseus and his sailors.36 It occurs only once in Plato, at the close of Agathon’s longwinded speech in the Symposium. Love is the fairest leader whom all must follow, whose delightful song “enchants the thought of everyone” (θέλγων πάντων τε καὶ ἀνθρώπων νόημα).37 In sum, the verb denotes being affected by another in a surprising and inexplicable way. A charm that elicits love, an enchantment that alters the mind, unaccountably instills an urge where none had been before. This is already an arresting account of divine love that exceeds what Dionysius could find in Hellenic Neoplatonism about the One. But the monk draws two further conclusions that take him definitively beyond the aesthetics of the formless 32 Here is the critical passage in the Jones translation: “We must dare to say this beyond truth: the cause itself of all beings—​by the beautiful and good eros of all and through the throwing forth of erotic goodness—​comes to be outside of itself and into all beings through its providences and is, as it were, charmed by goodness, eros, and agapé. In an ecstatic power beyond being, it is brought down out of a separation from all and beyond all, to what is in all, yet does not wander out of itself.” DN IV.13 (712AB), trans. Jones, 145. 33 DN IV.13 (712A). Cf. DN IV.10 (708A): “δι᾽ ἀγαθότητος ὑπερβολὴν πάντων ἐρᾷ.” 34 DN IV.13 (712B). 35 Kevin Corrigan, “ ‘Solitary’ Mysticism in Plotinus, Proclus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-​ Dionysius,” Journal of Religion 76, no. 1 (1996): 41. 36 See θέλγω in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, eds., A Greek-​English Lexicon, revised and augmented by Henry Stuart Jones (Clarendon Press, 1940). 37 Plato, Symposium 197E.

The E xtension of Desire  121 One. First, such is God’s burning desire for the world, that God “could not remain barren within” (οὐκ εἴασεν αὐτὸν ἄγονον ἐν ἑαυτῷ μένειν) but had to become fruitful. Hence, God “was stirred to accomplish, through that abundance, the engendering of all things [κατὰ τὴν ἁπάντων γενητικὴν ὑπερβολήν].”38 Recognizing the gravity if not scandal of his statement, Dionysius calls it an awesome truth (ἀληθὴς λόγος) that takes boldness (παῤῥησιάσεται) to speak aloud.39 God is not only ἀγάπη but also ἔρως, a “more divine” name. But God’s eros must be ecstatic, and if ecstatic, necessarily the original Ecstasy, the maximally self-​ displaced One. As Denys Turner writes, “Creation is itself an explosion of erotic energy, the ecstasy of a God who, in his act of creating, stands outside himself, perhaps literally ‘beside himself ’ with love.”40 God is none other than the eternal erotic relation that first establishes the poles of Lover and Beloved. The divine Lover is displaced by the Beloved, passes into the Beloved, and is found in the Beloved. Yet the same human Beloved, birthed into existence by the same Lover, in a timeless mystery draws out and seduces that same Lover in advance and becomes their dwelling. It is a paradox of eternal alterity without priority—​a “symmetry of ecstasies,” in René Roques’s pregnant phrase.41 Or as Turner writes: “There is just one eros, a single, homogeneous stream in contrasting movements of ebb and flow.”42 This divine fecundity is Dionysius’s first dramatic conclusion, but he adds a second. In the Phaedrus, Socrates teaches that love is only divine when it passes into madness (μανία), possession, prophecy, and inspired song.43 Frustrated lovers like Alcibiades show signs of madness, intoxicated with desperation for the beloved. Plato insinuates that Socrates’s oddities are signs of ecstatic preoccupation with loving the Good. Yet according to Dionysius, God’s erotic madness takes place without any loss of identity: in this sole instance, ecstatic displacement into the beloved is achieved without “roaming” (ἐκ-​φοιτάω) beyond the self. Only God can manage to maintain “an ecstatic, transcendent capacity to remain Godself ” (κατ᾽ἐκστατικὴν ὑπερούσιον δύναμιν ἀνεκφοίτητον ἑαυτοῦ).44 God leaves Godself, becoming all things (πάντα ἐν πᾶσι . . . γίγνεται). But miraculously, throughout this self-​emptying into the world, God nevertheless “remains” God (μένων ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ), without departing Godself (ἀνεκφοιτήτως) and without 38 DN IV.10 (708B). 39 DN IV.10 (708A). On παρρησία, see Phil 1:20, 2 Cor 3:12, 2 Cor 7:4, inter alia. Dionysius recognizes elsewhere that Scripture refers to the womb of God, the breasts of God, and “passionate longings fit only for prostitutes” (ἑταιρικὰς πολυπαθείας). Ep IX.1 (1104C–​1105B); trans. Luibheid, 282. 40 Turner, Eros and Allegory, 47. 41 René Roques, “Symbolisme et théologie negative chez le Pseudo-​Denys,” Bulletin de l’A ssociation de Guillaume Bude 1 (1957): 112. 42 Turner, Eros and Allegory, 49–​50. Turner continues: “erotic discourse is the language in which those polarities [of unity and difference] find their natural mode of expression . . . . Within erotic love I am both more me and more than me. The search for erotic mutuality is the search for a union which does not conflict with differentiation and for a differentiation which is not set at odds with union” (58). 43 Plato, Phaedrus 245BC and 249D. 44 DN IV.13 (712B).

122  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation losing God’s inmost identity (οἰκείας ταὐτότητος).45 The same language recurs vividly in Letter 9.46 “Remaining” (μένειν or μονή) has a rich conceptual history, both Christian and Neoplatonist. Jesus commands his disciples to “remain” (μένειν) in him through obedience and the Eucharist (John 6:56, 15:4–​7), and God “remains” in Christians through communal love and the Spirit (1 John 4:12–​16). The Neopythagorean Middle Platonist, Theon of Smryna (70–​135 CE), wrote a popular handbook that links remaining to the unity of the monad: “The monad, insofar as it is number, is indivisible. It is called monad because it remains [μένειν] unchangeable . . . . However much it is multiplied, the monad remains [μένει μόνας].”47 In Plotinus, the One “remains by itself ” (ἑαυτοῦ δὲ μένον), and we must “remain” in contemplation (μένων ἐν τῇ θέᾳ) (I.6.7). The Good “remains” (μείνασα μὲν αὐτὴ) (VI.7.36) so that Intellect can also “remain” (VI.6.18). Proclus uses μένειν to describe the reserve of causal self-​inherence that withstands outflow into effects. Every cause possesses “remaining” (μονή) during its procession (πρόοδος) out of itself, thanks to which effects complete their return (ἐπιστροφή).48 Remaining is what enables the Proclian emanative cycle so important for Dionysius and many later Christian Neoplatonists. Dionysius’s account of ecstatic divine remaining echoes the famous moment in Plato’s Symposium when Diotima chides Socrates for misunderstanding eros. At first, he thinks the truth of love is found in the beautiful Beloved who elicits one’s desire (τὸ ἐρώμενον). But Diotima teaches him that the deeper secrets of love are concealed in the action of the one loving (τὸ ἐρῶν)—​not the qualities of one who is loved, but the adventure of one making the erotic attempt.49 In a parallel manner, contradicting Plotinus, Dionysius envisions God no longer as a distant Beloved, passively receiving the love of every being in the cosmos, yet unable to reciprocate, but rather as the primal Lover. For Plotinus, the autarchic One never exceeds the bounds of self-​sufficiency, even though that means not loving; otherwise, the One would no longer be One. But Dionysius sees the One’s transcendence in a different perspective. The One’s self-​composure is not static, but a dynamic and unique capacity to remain One even while suffering the throes of erotic displacement into the beloved. For Dionysius, to be God means to be the One least limited by autarchy and thus maximally exposed to the othering of desire—​not a fragile autarchy to 45 See DN IX.5 (912D). 46 Even as God proceeds outward into the cosmos, God remains entirely himself (μένει ἐν ἑαυτῇ) without the slightest instability or alienation (παντελῶς ἀνεκφοιτήτῳ). Ep IX.3 (1109B). Even in God’s providential intimacy with creatures, God is always “remaining” (μένων) in God without leaving himself, capable of actively “dwelling” (μονὴν) in all things precisely because God eternally “dwells in himself ” (μένων ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ). Ep IX.3 (1109CD). 47 Theon of Smyrna, Exposition des connaissances mathématiques utiles pour la lecture de Platon, ed. and trans. Jean Dupuis ( Hachette, 1892), 28; cf. Enneads V.5.4–​5. 48 Proclus, Elements, Prop. 26, 30, 33, 35, ed. Dodds, passim. 49 Plato, Symposium 204C.

The E xtension of Desire  123 be defended, but an eros so strong, so perfected, that it can infinitely expend itself with a profligacy without peer. It is already difficult, with Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, to imagine how infinite particles across the universe could be drawn into one symphony of desire for the One. It is even more challenging to grasp, as Dionysius suggests, that the same Beloved is in fact the first Lover, seduced into ecstatic desire for the world and now indissociable from it. Or how this roaring, primal Desire, despite a self-​rupture cleft across the greatest chasm of alterity conceivable, never suffers any alienation, never so much as a ripple on its windless surface. Now Dionysius proposes a final consideration: to think of the world’s yearning for God and God’s yearning for the world not as two events but one singularity. “To many, the unity of the one divine desire [τὸ ἑνιαῖον τοῦ θείου καὶ ἑνὸς ἔρωτος] is far from clear,” writes Dionysius. “For this reason, many find the name ἔρως troubling.”50 Some authorities name God “love” (ἔρωτα καὶ ἀγάπην) and others “beloved” (ἐραστὸν καὶ ἀγαπητόν).51 But in truth there is no separation: both beloved and lover (τὸ ἐραστὸν καὶ ὁ ἔρως) emerge without difference from the depths of the Good.52 That singular eros “preexisted within the Good by way of excess [καθ᾽ ὑπερβολὴν].”53 Dimitrios Vasilakis calls this the “interchangeability between lover and beloved.” “As soon as the loving ‘ecstasy’ takes place the roles cannot be distinguished anymore,” he explains. “Dionysius becomes the paradigm of ecstasy which does not have determinate (upwards or downwards) direction.”54 God is the universal Beloved and universal Lover, both procession and return. Yet at the summit of his erotic summa, Dionysius turns abruptly to geometrical figuration: “divine Desire is manifested distinctly as a kind of everlasting circle” (ὁ θεῖος ἔρως ἐνδείκνυται διαφερόντως ὥσπερ τις ἀΐδιος κύκλος), one that revolves around a central axis without beginning or end (ἐν ἀπλανεῖ συνελίξει περιπορευόμενος).55 Perl translates this passage beautifully: “Herein the divine love eminently shows its endlessness and beginninglessness, as an eternal circle, whirling around through the Good, from the Good, and in the Good and to the Good in unerring coiling-​up.”56 Of course, Dionysius is not alone in taking philosophical cues from geometry. For Proclus, as we saw above, figures hold transcendental meaning. Limit is expressed by the circle, and Unlimit by the straight line; and since Limit and Unlimit govern all beings, these Ur-​shapes are woven into the fabric of the universe. The remaining of the One is a point, its procession a line, 50 DN IV.12 (709C). 51 DN IV.14 (712C). 52 DN IV.13 (712B). 53 DN IV.10 (708B). 54 See Dimitrios A. Vasilakis, Eros in Neoplatonism and its Reception in Christian Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2021), 153. 55 DN IV.14 (712C–​713A). On the circularity of eros, see Gabriel Horn, “Amour et extase d’après Denys l’Aréopagite,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 6 (1925): 278–​289. 56 Perl, Theophany, 48.

124  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation and its reversion a circle.57 Dionysius adopts the circle from Proclus, but infuses it with a Cappadocian sense of infinity. “Compared with the Neoplatonists, it is a circle with a difference, infinite at both its ‘ends’,” Golitzin explains. “The cycle is still there, . . . but one can no longer describe it as ‘closed.’ ”58 The dynamic movement of Dionysius’s circle should not keep us from perceiving that it is necessarily figural, linear, and spatial. At an elemental level, the singularity of divine Desire can only be construed as the unity of a differentiated space, which of necessity is not a point, line, or polygon, but a circle. Dionysius’s figure is not a sacred symbol, diagram, or illustration. Rather, the circle is the necessary minimal figuration by which the notion of erotic singularity is “shown” (ἐνδείκνυται), that is, phenomenalized. If the ecstatic lover and ecstatic beloved are obverse faces of the same erotic movement, a circle is the simplest graph of their symmetry. It unites all into one, moving out of itself, through itself, and back to itself (ἐξ ἑαυτῆς καὶ δι᾽ ἑαυτῆς καὶ ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτῆς). As such, divine Eros can only “unfold” (ἀνελιττομένη), precisely as Dionysius states, as the space of an “eternal circularity” (ἀνακυκλοῦσα . . . ἀεὶ ταὐτῶς).59 The impossible simplicity of eros is expressed in the idiolect of line, a silent line before a word or image, bearing apophatic force. Hathaway makes the important observation that already in Proclus the term “ecstatic” (ἐκστατικός) is nearly equivalent to “extensive” (ἐκτακτικός). “Eros ex-​tends each thing beyond itself,” he explains. “To the extent that each being possesses Eros it imitates the ‘stretching forth’ (ἐκτείνω) of the first and highest principle from unity to plurality. . . . But since Eros is movement, it ex-​tends each thing in every possible direction.”60 This verbal link in Proclus helps us articulate an important dimension of Dionysian theology borne out in his discussions of hierarchy, measure, and magnitude. The ecstasy of divine Eros leads ineluctably to an extension beyond the self, an exteriorizing that marks out a new space. The very curvature of the cosmos expanding into space is a positive trace of divine Eros in its unfolding. Ordered geometrical figures within that extensive field—​points, lines, layers, folds, arcs, and planes—​would not be alien to God, and never in need of erasure, because they indicate in their very natures the divine Origin of their figural space as such. In this world, measure and magnitude become iconological, because they bear immediate witness to divine Eros in its ecstatic expansion. As Hans Urs von Balthasar notes, if Gregory of Nyssa taught that eros exceeds every limit, Dionysius considers eros perfected through limit. Compared to the Cappadocian Fathers, Dionysius is a veritable theologian of measure, celebrating orders, ranks, wholes, symmetries, gradations, and harmonies.61

57 Wear and Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite, 30, 55. 58 Golitzin, Mystagogy, 159. 59 DN IV.17 (713D). 60 Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order, 52. 61 See Balthasar, Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. II, 170, 194.

The E xtension of Desire  125 These startling passages on eros in Book IV of Divine Names have long drawn the attention of Dionysius interpreters sorting out Christian and Hellenic ingredients in Neoplatonism. As Hugo Koch asks: “Where do these thoughts come from, probably unique in the whole of Christian literature? How does the Christian teacher arrive at this little love nest [Erotennestern]? Plato leaves us completely in the lurch on this point.”62 Where some see a recapitulation of Athenian Neoplatonism, others find a daring attempt by a Christian monk to move beyond its boundaries. According to Andrew Louth, the notion of the divine One in erotic ecstasy is “something inconceivable in Plotinus or in any neo-​Platonist.”63 John Rist argues that while Plotinus calls the One ἔρως (VI.8.15) and describes the contemplative’s union with the One as ἔκστασις (VI.9.11), he would never dream of combining these. “In Plotinus the One loves itself both in itself and in other things,” Rist states, “but it does not pass outside itself.” If Dionysius is the first to unite ἔρως and ἔκστασις, the “direct cause” of his achievement is Christianity.64 Corrigan calls the discourse on eros “one of the most remarkable passages in the whole of ancient thought. . . . No one in the pagan tradition, before Dionysius, could have said such a thing.”65 For Lisa Marie Esposito Buckley, the essential question is whether Plotinus links the One as Good to the One as Eros.66 She concludes that he does, but that Plotinian eros is exclusively the One’s self-​love (ἔρως αὐτοῦ, VI.8.15). The One’s love is not “procreative” but “wholly self-​intent.”67 According to Esposito Buckley, the crucial difference between Plotinus and Dionysius is not eros but ecstasy: nonecstatic Plotinian eros versus ecstatic Dionysian eros. The Plotinian One desires itself, remains within itself, and remains unaffected by those who love it. The Dionysian One desires all beings; both remains within itself and moves beyond itself; and radically cares for each being in the Incarnation.68 Vasilakis summarizes the stepwise shift from Hellenic to Christian Neoplatonism as follows. Plotinus allows for ascending eros but considers descending eros beneath the One; yet in the usual passages identified by his admirers, Plotinus seems to imply descending eros, even if his henology forbids it. Proclus allows for descending eros, making explicit what Plotinus formally disavows. But neither allows for descending and ecstatic eros by

62 Hugo Koch, Pseudo-​Dionysius in seinen Beziehungen zum Neuplatonismus und Mysterienwesen (Franz Kirchheim, 1900), 69. 63 Louth, Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 176. 64 John M. Rist, “A Note on Eros and Agape in Pseudo-​Dionysius,” Vigiliae Christianae 20, no. 4 (1966): 239. 65 Corrigan, Love, Friendship, Beauty, and the Good, 112, 113 n. 88. 66 Lisa Marie Esposito Buckley, “Ecstatic and Emanating, Providential and Unifying: A Study of the Pseudo-​Dionysian and Plotinian Concepts of Eros,” The Journal of Neoplatonic Studies 1, no. 1 (1992): 42. 67 Esposito Buckley, “Ecstatic and Emanating,” 44–​45. 68 Esposito Buckley, “Ecstatic and Emanating,” 55–​58.

126  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation the One. This is Dionysius’s radical step forward, formulated on the basis of his Christianity.69 Other commentators claim to find passages in Plotinus equivalent to the Dionysian doctrine of ecstatic eros. Eric Perl contends that the Dionysian account “differs only in expression, and not in philosophical content, from that of Plotinus and Proclus.”70 As evidence Perl points back to Enneads about the One “overflowing” (ὑπερερρύη) with “abundance” (ὑπερπλῆρες) (V.2.1) or the Good “giving” (δόντος) (VI.9.9). We have already examined these in Chapter 3. In neither case can the One be permitted to give to another, much less give itself, still less pass beyond itself in passionate desire for another. Indeed, in the first passage, the One “seeks nothing, has nothing, and needs nothing,” Plotinus writes, since it abides in perfect self-​sufficiency (V.2.1). Yet Perl insists that Plotinus and Proclus have already formulated “exactly what Dionysius refers to as productive divine love,” except for the small matter that “they do not use this term [viz. ἔρως].” And when Dionysius does explain his unprecedented account of divine Eros, Perl judges this merely a “terminological innovation . . . inspired by his Christianity.”71 Such is the pressure faced by some interpreters to ensure that Plotinus has already said everything and that Dionysius’s Christianity does not add anything new, in order to preserve the hermeneutical hegemony of Tradition A. Dionysius himself recognizes that some philosophical readers will be “troubled by” (φορυβείτω) and even “fear” (φοβηθῶμεν) eros as a divine name—​not because it connotes lust but because it introduces “parts, embodiment, or division” into God. It might seem “absurd,” he grants, to compare God’s love to David’s trembling lament for Jonathan, when desire fell upon David “like love of women.”72 What is feared in eros is the loss of autarchy, the loss of self-​control, the experience of passivity, the finitude of loving a particular other, tied to another, being conditioned by another. Ecstatic eros interrupts self-​sufficiency and self-​possession, and for this reason, threatens the Plotinian principle of autarchy. Dionysius’s theology of eros, far from being a resumé of Neoplatonism, directly contravenes Plotinian henology. His account of ecstatic love perfectly undoes the third requirement of Plotinus’s aneidetic condition. Plotinus had held that “the One does not desire us [ἡμῶν οὐκ ἐφίεται], so as to be around us, but we desire it [ἡμεῖς δὲ ἐκείνου], that we might be around it” (VI.9.8). The Plotinian One can inspire love passively like a magnet, but cannot suffer the longing of love, lest it incur dependency on the beloved (VI.9.6, VI.7.31–​33). Dionysius turns this on its 69 Vasilakis, Eros in Neoplatonism, 67–​68. Golitzin agrees: Dionysius shares ἔκστασις with Hellenic Neoplatonists, yet his “fundamental adjustment” to their concepts is “inspired” by his Christianity. For only Dionysius depicts ἔκστασις as “double” and “reciprocal.” Golitzin, Mystagogy, 62–​64, 89–​91. 70 Perl, Theophany, 44. “The One’s productive ‘overflow’ in Plotinus is precisely equivalent to Dionysius’s ‘ecstasy.’ ” Eric Perl, “The Metaphysics of Love in Dionysius the Areopagite,” Journal of Neoplatonic Studies 6, no. 1 (1997): 66. 71 Perl, Theophany, 44–​46. 72 DN IV.12 (709BC). Cf. 1 Sam 1:26.

The E xtension of Desire  127 head: the One is seduced “outside itself,” eternally yielding its self-​sufficiency, and its ecstasy is the contrary of autarchy. Yet according to Dionysius, the One still “remains” One. If God can indeed abandon self-​sufficiency and still remain God, this undermines the entire rationale for formlessness. God as the Form of forms is able to be lost in communion with those lesser beauties that charmed him. Divine Form impresses itself into the world (ἀποτύπωσις), leaving it full of formal structures (ἱεραρχία) and iconic figures (εἰκονογραφία). If the One can love, contemplatives do not need to absolutely negate measure, shape, and quantity. For Plotinus, the One measures, but cannot be measured, lest it lose its autarchy (VI.7.32–​33). But if the One loves—​if the One has already poured out its self-​sufficiency in ecstasy—​ would it not accept measure as yet another gift of love?

The source of measure The unfathomable priority of divine Desire upends the usual order of our thinking about the One. As Dionysius says, we think we are in control, pulling heaven down by a chain, when suddenly we discover that God has been pulling us up all along.73 What appears to be the world’s desire for God is actually God’s desire for the world. What appears a prudent effort to purify the best divine names apophatically is only possible because God has already drawn us within and we are swimming in his depths. And while to every appearance we inscribe images, trace lines, and measure figures in contemplation, like good geometers, in fact, it is we who have already been embraced, circumscribed, and measured in advance, drawn into the extensive space of divine ecstasy. Like the angels who dwell in God’s presence, we are “imprinted by that for which we yearn” (ὡς ἐφικτὸν ἀποτυπούμεναι).74 We have already seen that for Dionysius ecstatic love is indissociable from determinate measure. The circuit of erotic donation between Creator and creature is intrinsically circular. Revolving around this singular axis, erotic reciprocity expands outward to embrace ever-​ greater magnitudes. As Dionysius writes, the greater the desire for God, the greater God’s self-​giving (μᾶλλον ἐφιεμένων μᾶλλον ἑαυτὴν ἐνδιδόναι), which always flows through measure (μέτρια) and proportion (ἀναλογία).75 If divine Love arrives in this manner, then by the same token measure and proportion have a conservative function. They manifest divine Desire and preserve access to it, safeguarding the intelligibility of divine Form against the aneidetic condition. The supreme Form, loving without autarchic reservation, marks the world with figures in hierarchical order. As the erotic cycle reverts, the same figures orient us analogically and impel us anagogically back 73 DN III.1 (680C). 74 DN IV.1 (696A). 75 DN IV.5 (700D–​701A).

128  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation toward divine Form. Through measured figuration—​geometry in the broadest sense—​divine Desire becomes visible. Roques was one of the first to underscore the surprising prominence of geometrical language in Dionysius: Order and beautiful order are only possible through measure. But what kind of measure will Dionysius adopt? Will it be a material measure? A mathematical unity, as the Pythagoreans and Platonists have done? To engage in such interpretations would be a misunderstanding. Dionysius does not cease repeating that God alone is the measure of all beings. . . . God is the transcendent measure of each thing, just as he is the ordering principle.76

According to Roques, ἀναλογία and συμμετρία are “two aspects of one fairly complex notion.” “Dionysius never employs the term μέτρον to attribute it to any of the beings,” he observes. “He applies to them the compound word συμμετρία, which implies reduction to a common measure. This means that all measurement in beings must be referred to Measure itself, which is God.”77 As Stephen Gersh notes, even if Dionysius repeats the geometrical shapes used by prior Neoplatonists, he gives them a “new and deeper meaning,” by applying them not only to the world but “in a strictly analogical sense to God.”78 Sarah Klitenic Wear and John Dillon add that for Dionysius God is not only the creator of hierarchies, but “acts as the metron, or measure, of all beings in the hierarchy to maintain the order of the universe. Whereas God is the source of measure in the universe, creation is not said to contain this measure, but rather to be a kind of symmetry . . . .”79 As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, Plotinus often retracts or qualifies his geometrical imagery, but Dionysius has no such qualms about spatial extension and visible graphs. He never questions the suitability and adequacy of his geometrical figures. Is this a symptom of philosophical indifference or monastic naiveté? Or does the Dionysian restoration of geometrical images in Christian Neoplatonism reflect an alternative theological aesthetic? Having beheld the ecstasy of divine Eros, unfolding into the space of circularity, Dionysius welcomes lines and shapes as positive traces of God’s self-​giving that sustain the imprint of divine Form in hierarchical inscription. In their definite measures and precise proportions, in the sharp edges of their lines, they bear silent witness to the singularity of Form; the figure becomes an icon. Plotinus compares Intellect to a transparent “sphere” (V.8.9) and a “circle unfolding itself ” (κύκλος ἐξελίξας αὐτὸν) (III.8.8). In another passage, he uses the



76 Roques, L’Univers Dionysien, 59–​60. 77 Roques, L’Univers Dionysien, 60–​61. 78 See Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, 72–​76, 251–​253. 79 Wear and Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite, 57.

The E xtension of Desire  129 image of circumference to explain the One’s relation to Intellect (VI.8.18). Out of a central point, countless radial lines (γραμμαί) emerge that map a centriform (κεντροειδής) space. The endpoints (σημεῖα) of those lines mark a perimeter that forms the circle, such that the center becomes the limit (πέρας) of the lines. Those radii are “traces” (ἴχνη) of the center, and the center is “revealed” (ἐμφαίνεται) in the points of circumference. In this illustration, the central point is the One, and the radial lines are the Intellect (VI.8.18). Plotinus constructs this “image” (ἴνδαλμα) of the One to show how Intellect emerges without disturbing the One’s unity. The inscription of the circle in space, whether on the page or in the mind’s eye, does real work to bridge Intellect and One, representing the formless reality in a visible way. Yet even as he graphs the lines, Plotinus cautions that in truth they are “spread without being spread” (ἐξελιχθὲν οὐκ ἐξεληλιγμένον) and unfold without real unfolding (VI.8.18). The shapes are not icons, but symbols that have to be disavowed; otherwise, the One would depend on geometrical figures, and their lines would run all the way back to touch it. Dionysius draws on the same collection of geometrical figures—​points, lines, circles, and spheres. For instance, the first problem of naming God in Divine Names is the division between “unification” (ἕνωσις) of names and “differentiation” (διάκρισις) of names, or the One and the Many.80 To integrate both species of naming, Dionysius like Plotinus appeals to circular geometry. Just as many gifts flow from one God, many straight lines radiate from the center of a circle (περικειμένων εὐθειῶν). By participating in the central point of the circle (σημεῖον ἐν μέσῷ κύκλου), they remain connected to their origin.81 Just as Plotinus uses circularity to connect One to Intellect, Dionysius uses it to connect unity to difference. But then Dionysius adds a second geometrical image: the linear figuration of a “seal” or impressed stamp (σφραγίς). This is not a new term, even if he gives it a new meaning. Plotinus compares the impression of ideal forms in matter to an imprinted seal (οἷον ἐνσφραγιζόμενον): one original appears many times (VI.5.6). For Iamblichus and Proclus, σφραγίς denotes a divine trace in the cosmos that philosophers evoke through ritual.82 In a passage from Proclus’s Parmenides commentary that Dionysius may have in mind, participation in the One is compared to a seal pressed into wax. As a Christian monk, Dionysius also knows σφραγίς as the “seal” of the Holy Spirit. The word appears a handful of times in Paul’s letters and the Apocalypse of John and is applied to the Holy Spirit by Athanasius of Alexandria, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Basil the Great.83 In the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, for example, the hierarch gives each postulant for baptism a “seal” (σφραγίς).84 The “seal 80 DN II.4 (640D–​641C). 81 DN II.5 (644A). 82 See Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul; and Shaw, “Neoplatonic Theurgy and Dionysius the Areopagite,” 573–​599. 83 See Wear and Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite, 108–​110. 84 EH II.3.3–​4 (400D).

130  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation of the sign of the cross” (ἡ σταυροειδής . . . σφραγίς) is traced on the heads of consecrated priests and monks.85 As Dionysius explains, a seal stamped into a given material leaves behind “impressions” (ἐκτυπώματα). Although the impressions are multiple, the whole stamp is present in each imprint, since each derives from the same original (ἀρχέτυπον).86 Normally, different impressions might represent the original to a better or worse degree, depending on the force of the stamping motion and the quality of the material. But Dionysius says that God’s stamping remains entirely the same across multiple impressions. For God is the “sole, entire, identical archetype” (μιᾶς καὶ ὅλης καὶ ταὐτῆς ἀρχετυπίας), whose Form never changes. Dionysius describes the impressions of the divine seal less like a mold pressed into pliable wax or clay (ἐκμαγεῖον, from the verb μάσσω, to knead dough by hand). Instead, he says, the divine seal is more like tracing ephemeral lines that are quickly erased and redrawn (τὰ ἀπομόργματα, from the verb ὀμόργνυμι, to wipe off or dry up).87 That is, Dionysius compares the divine σφραγίς to a two-​dimensional print, not a three-​ dimensional imprint. If the circle mediates the One and the Many by the extension of its lines from the center point, the seal mediates them by the reliability of its lines, reinscribed again and again. What the circle and seal share in common is the circuit of lines, whose crisp definition preserves the divine archetype, figures of divine Form. We should not be surprised to find that Dionysius, an avid reader of Athenian Neoplatonism, uses geometrical images and concepts frequently throughout his works. In Divine Names, the monad unifies number into one form (ἑνοειδῶς) just as a central point (κέντρον or σημεῖον) unifies straight lines (γραμμαί or εὐθεία).88 Souls and angels move in a circle (κυκλικῶς) when they are unified around their principle, but in a straight line (κατ᾽ εὐθεῖαν) when they proceed into difference; they move in spirals (ἑλικοειδῶς) when both motions are combined.89 In the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, the sequence from baptism to Eucharist to chrism resembles that of line to helix to circle.90 Dionysius considers apophatic theology a circular line and kataphatic theology a straight line.91 We have already seen that divine Eros is manifested as an “eternal circle traveling in an unfaltering rotation.”92 These geometrical figures are not alien symbols imposed on God, because

85 See, respectively, EH V.3.1 (509BC) and EH VI.3.3 (536A). 86 DN II.5 (644A). 87 DN II.6 (644B). On the Holy Face as ἐκμαγεῖον, see Kessler, “Configuring the Invisible by Copying the Holy Face,” 71–​78. 88 DN V.6 (820D–​821A). 89 DN IV.8 (704D–​705B). 90 See Golitzin, Mystagogy, 252. 91 On this point see Roques, L’Univers dionysien, 85ff, 203ff. Cf. Charles-​André Bernard, “Les formes de la théologie chez Denys l’Aréopagite,” Gregorianum 59, no. 1 (1978): 39–​69; and Koch, Pseudo-​ Dionysius Areopagita, 83ff. 92 DN IV.14 (712D–​713A).

The E xtension of Desire  131 in his expanding ecstasy, God has inscribed spatial extension into existence in the first place. The figure is an icon sustained by what it indicates. Beyond particular shapes, Dionysius also includes “measure” (μέτρον) itself as a name of God in Divine Names. God is not only the cause and end of all but also their measure (μέτρον), number (ἀριθμός), and order (τάξις), who “measures and defines” (μετρεῖται καὶ ὁρίζεται) the equality of things.93 God is the “measure and number” of time: not only the measure of the ages (μέτρον αἰώνων) but the becoming (γένεσις) that temporalizes being.94 God can measure all things because God is both their positive Limit (πέρας) and their negative Unlimitedness (ἀπειρία).95 As Wear and Dillon note, with these divine names, Dionysius “differs sharply” from past Neoplatonists.96 For Iamblichus, Limit arises only after the procession of the second One; for Syrianus, Limit is a monad after the One; and for Proclus, Limit and Unlimit belong to the henads, not the One. For all three philosophers, Limit comes after the One as the source of number, plurality, and multiplicity. By contrast, Dionysius places Limit and Unlimit within God. In the words of Wear and Dillon, “the pervasive qualities which mark the henadic realm are now the business of God, who directly pervades the universe, something which had been in Neoplatonism the job of the Forms (located in the Intellect).”97 In other words, once God becomes the Forms of forms, God can bound and measure creatures immediately. God’s ecstatic incursion into the world, which opened up the very space of the world, means that God is the Measure of all things, their limit and their unlimit, a measure without measure. In Book IV, just before turning to eros and its ecstasies, Dionysius first takes up measure as a divine name. Interestingly enough, he grounds divine Measure on the same theological foundation that will make ecstasy possible: God’s unique capacity to remain in ecstasy.98 Through its stable remaining (μονῶν καὶ στάσεων), the Good holds everything in being.99 In the Proclian triad, remaining (μονή or μένειν) precedes and unifies the procession of all things and their return to God. Remaining, Dionysius now adds, also makes possible the categories of being (εἴδη, οὐσία, δύναμις, ἐνέργεια) and the categories of knowing (ἕξις, αἴσθησις, λόγος, νόησις, ἐπαφή, ἐπιστήμη). The same remaining also sustains the geometrical categories that quantify the world. So at this juncture, Dionysius decides that he will outline a total matrix of measurement—​mathesis universalis—​spanning every possible dimension of numerical and spatial order. He arranges the geometrical vocabulary as follows, stacked into five successive triads. The Good makes possible 93 DN IV.4 (697C); DN VIII.9 (897B). 94 DN IV.4 (700A); DN V.4 (817C). 95 DN V.10 (825B). On ἀπειρία, see Salvatore Lilla, “The Notion of Infinitude in Ps.-​Dionysius,” Journal of Theological Studies 31, no. 1 (1980): 93–​103. 96 Wear and Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite, 22–​23. 97 Wear and Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite, 24. 98 DN IV.13 (712B). 99 DN IV.10 (705B).

132  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation all of the measures of magnitude (σμικρότης, ἰσότης, μεγαλειότης), proportion (μέτρον, ἀναλογία, ἁρμονία), quantity (ποιόν, ποσόν, πηλικόν), unity (σύνδεση, ἕνωσις, τελειότης), and order (ὅρος, τάξις, στοιχεῖα).100 It is curious to find a catalogue of geometrical terms in the pages of an ancient Christian text, and in one of the most influential handbooks of mystical theology, no less. Then again, even though the divine remaining undergirds this metric matrix, Dionysius does not simply predicate all of these terms as positive names of God. But we probably have enough evidence to connect some of the dots on our own. Here in Book IV of Divine Names, Dionysius connects remaining to measure and then remaining to love. Measure is therefore a mode of abiding. God loves ecstatically as One who can singularly abide, and the same divine remaining grounds the measures of hierarchy. Those figures, magnitudes, and quantities are traces of the ecstatic divine gift and lead contemplatives squarely back to the Lover who remains. That much we can hazard as a reasonable surmise. But for a more definite answer about God’s geometrical names, we have to look to the conclusion of Divine Names. Dionysius devotes his entire Books IX and X to divine names regarding measure. Why turn to metric theonyms here? The question of the structure of Divine Names is complicated and has bedeviled modern scholars for decades. Books I to IV take up the greatest Platonic names (One, Good, Light, Love, and Beauty); the final Books XII and XIII conclude with biblical names (Holy of Holies, King of Kings, and Perfection). As Endre von Ivánka has shown, Dionysius uses the middle books of Divine Names to connect two triads, one from Proclus (Being, Life, Wisdom) in Books V–​VIII, and one from Gregory of Nyssa (Wisdom, Power, Peace) in Book XI.101 So the riddle is how to account for the remaining Books IX and X. Many modern interpreters view them as a disordered miscellany.102 Christian Schäfer has recently proposed a solution: these books are full of names of measure, broadly speaking, whether spatial measure in Book IX (Greatness, Smallness) or temporal measure in Book X (Ancient of Days, Youth). As such, Schäfer explains, they represent the exact hinge of the emanation sequence that structures Divine Names, from the procession out of God in the first books to the return to God in the last books. Surprisingly, these apparently minor Books IX and X on measure turn out to be the still point of the turning world, the moment of “halt” or remaining (μονή), when the long journey of the procession (πρόοδος) pauses at its furthest extent and swings back toward return (ἐπιστροφή).103 Schäfer defines μονή as “dynamic steadying,” an activity distinct from rest that provides 100 DN IV.10 (705CD). 101 See Ivánka, Plato Christianus, 228–​242. 102 See Christian Schäfer, The Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Brill, 2006), 89–​94. 103 Schäfer, Philosophy of Dionysius, 59–​65, as well as the diagram at 179. “Dionysius re-​interprets the Neoplatonic standard terminology and canonical place of μονή, which is now used for the image of God in creation . . .” (74).

The E xtension of Desire  133 fundamental ontic stability from which both rest and motion emerge. Remaining is what halts the flux of being and guarantees the possibility of order. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, this role is typically played by number in Platonist traditions.104 But in Dionysius, remaining is expressed through the primal order of hierarchy, which allows difference to remain analogical with God. This overview of the structure of Divine Names tells us that Dionysius saw a profound connection between concepts of measure and the divine remaining—​the same remaining that, as we have seen, fuels his revolutionary theology of eros. When we open Book IX on divine measure, Dionysius presents four sets of what he calls “theonymic images” (θεωνυμικῶν ἀγαλμάτων). He devotes a chapter to each: small (σμικρόν) and great (μέγας) (IX.2–​3); same (ταὐτόν) and different (ἕτερον) (IX.4–​5); like (ὅμοιον) and unlike (ἀνόμοιον) (IX.6–​7); and rest (στάσις) and motion (κίνησις) (IX.8–​9).105 Eugenio Corsini has found parallels in Proclus’s Parmenides commentary for most of the conceptual oppositions that we find in Books IX and X; Dionysius clearly knew the text well and used it to orient his own speculations. Six of these eight terms are well-​known categories of being from Plato’s Sophist, but intriguingly Dionysius adds σμικρόν and μέγας by himself, following traditions of Plato’s unwritten doctrines. There are no parallels in Proclus for Dionysius’s account of the Small and the Great.106 Neoplatonists from Porphyry to Iamblichus to Proclus located these genera at different ontological levels, but all agreed that they must be denied of the One itself. Yet according to Wear and Dillon, Dionysius makes “an innovation in the Platonic tradition by applying the categories of being to God himself.”107 Unlike his forebearers who sustained the aneidetic condition, Dionysius is in a new situation. He finds it necessary to pronounce that the One is both Great and Small and that the One exerts measure as part of its office of remaining. God is “small” in the sense that God does not belong within the play of relative distances (διάστημα), but instead passes through everything freely, without limit (ἄπειρον, ἀόριστον) and without quantity (ἄποσον, ἀπήλικον).108 But if God does not belong within the continuum of greater and lesser, why does Dionysius attribute “greatness” to God? He answers that God is μέγας in only one sense: an analogical spatiality that 104 See Plato, Philebus 16D–​17A; cf. Enneads VI.2.13, VI.6.9–​11. See further Huffman, “The Philolaic Method,” 67–​85. 105 DN IX.1 (909B). See H. D. Saffrey, “Nouveaux liens objectifs entre le pseudo-​ Denys et Proclus,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 63, no. 1 (1979): 6–​11; and Koch, Pseudo-​ Dionysius, 224ff. 106 See Eugenio Corsini, Il Trattato De divinis nominibus dello Pseudo-​Dionigi e i commenti neoplatonici al Parmenide (G. Giappichelli Editore, 1962), 77–​111. On the unwritten doctrines, see Konrad Gaiser, Platons ungeschriebene Lehre: Studien zur systematischen und geschichtlichen Begründung der Wissenschaften in der Platonischen Schule (Ernst Klett, 1963). A good overview in English can be found in Konrad Gaiser, “Plato’s Enigmatic Lecture ‘On the Good’,” Phronesis 25, no. 1 (1980): 5–​37. 107 Wear and Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite, 27–​28. 108 DN IX.3 (912AB).

134  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation is singularly divine and absolutely unique (τὸ ἰδίως αὑτοῦ μέγα) and that flows from God’s irrepressible generosity (μεταδιδὸν). Dionysius calls this God’s unique “magnitude” (μέγεθος).109 Divine Magnitude, Dionysius explains, arises from God’s ecstatic self-​giving. God “hyper-​exhausts” (ὑπερχεόμενον) and “hyper-​extends” (ὑπερεκτεινόμενον) himself into an exteriority “beyond” (ἔξωθεν) himself. Such self-​giving, ever expanding the spatial field, is precisely the spreading into figural space that Plotinus erased from circularity so that his lines “spread without being spread” (VI.8.18). Dionysius embraces that figural space as a consequence of the erotic nexus. According to Dionysius, divine Magnitude “encompasses every space, exceeds every number, and transgresses every infinity.”110 God’s magnitude opens space, a clearing given by the Gift to expand its own giving. Like a leaping fountain (πηγαίας αὑτοῦ δωρεάς), its “infinite gifts flood out endlessly” (κατὰ ἀπειρόδωρον χύσιν), “bubbling over” (ὑπερβλύζουσιν) all the more rapidly the more they are received. By flooding the spatial field, God violates the aneidetic condition and surpasses mere limitlessness (ἀπειρίαν διαβαῖνον). God is greater than formlessness. God, in effect, exerts a Limit that measures the immensity of the Absolute. God is a “Magnitude [μεγαλειότητος], unlimited, unquantified, and unnumbered,” Dionysius writes, “an excessive Flood released in the most extreme way possible into its own unrestrained Grandeur [μέγεθος].”111 This sovereign Form, unconstrained (ἀπεριλήπτου) by autarchy, creates its own space through ecstatic remaining, and thus has the strength to remain a Magnitude.

An indelible name As he contemplates God’s ecstatic desire, Dionysius finds he must break free of the presuppositions that govern Plotinian eros. If he disagrees with Plotinus about the One’s own loving, it stands to reason that he will need to make other alterations to his predecessor’s henology. We have already seen how Dionysius challenges the principle of autarchy and questions Plotinus’s habitual caution about geometrical figures. But a still greater issue remains at the heart of their debate: how exactly Dionysius will modify Plotinus’s approach to negation. As we saw in Chapter 4, the iconographic force of hierarchy means that Dionysius sets limits on apophasis where Plotinus does not. But what is Dionysius’s answer to the aneidetic condition, the doctrine of the formless One, especially in his greatest work, Divine Names? Here we must be precise, for the particular ratio of form and formlessness 109 DN IX.2 (909C). 110 DN IX.2 (909C): “πάντα τόπον περιέχον, πάντα ἀριθμὸν ὑπερβάλλον, πᾶσαν ἀπειρίαν διαβαῖνον.” 111 DN IX.2 (909C): “Τὸ μέγεθος τοῦτο καὶ ἄπειρόν ἐστι καὶ ἄποσον καὶ ἀνάριθμον, καὶ τοῦτο ἔστιν ἡ ὑπεροχὴ κατὰ τὴν ἀπόλυτον καὶ ὑπερτεταμένην τῆς ἀπεριλήπτου μεγαλειότητος χύσιν.”

The E xtension of Desire  135 in Dionysius will also calibrate the relation between the Hierarchies and Mystical Theology and even between kataphasis and apophasis as such. To begin with, there is abundant evidence that for Dionysius God is sovereign Form, not absolute formlessness. To all the examples reviewed above, we can add another. Toward the end of Divine Names, Dionysius finally considers the classic Plotinian name of “the One.” He explains that God is One not simply because God precedes numbers or precontains opposites.112 More fundamentally, God is One insofar as God is the “preconceived form” (προεπινοούμενον εἶδος) underlying each individual being. The One “precontains and encompasses” each form through its own singular Form (τὸ ἓν ἑνοειδῶς προείληφέ τε καὶ περιείληφεν). Indeed, it is through that sovereign Form that God “defines the One” itself (τὸ ἓν ὂν ὁρίζον).113 God is therefore not identical with the One (οὔτε ἕν), nor simply beyond the One (ὑπὲρ τὸ ἕν). Rather, Dionysius names God as the “originating One God beyond God and beyond being” (ὁ ἀρχίθεος καὶ ὑπέρθεος ὑπερουσίως εἷς θέος).114 Indeed, Dionysius teaches that God is precisely the one who remediates the state of formlessness. As we saw in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, baptism brings order to disorder and form to the formless (τὸ ἄκοσμον κοσμεῖται καὶ τὸ ἀνείδεον εἰδοποιεῖται), enlightening initiates and conforming them to God’s Form (θεοειδεῖ).115 In his tract on evil following Proclus, Dionysius calls the Good the “form-​giver among the unformed” (τὸ εἰδοποιὸν καὶ τῶν ἀνειδέων).116 Matter itself cannot be wholly formless, and despite its deprivations, even evil is never wholly divested of form.117 The Good embraces all beings and “gives form” to those without being (ὡς εἰδοποιὸν τῶν οὐκ ὄντων).118 God is shapeless (ἄμορφος), says Dionysius, but God cannot be not formless, since God is the “All-​Form” (πανείδεος) and the “All-​Figure” (πανσχήμος).119 Dionysius only admits one sense in which God might be called formless, and that is by virtue of excess, what Todd Ohara calls an “excess of determinacy.”120 Just as in the case of apophasis, and then eros, Dionysius once again steps beyond his predecessor on the strength of Christian experience. A Plotinian doctrine that once seemed self-​evident—​a

112 DN XIII.2 (977C–​980A). 113 DN XIII.3 (980BC). 114 DN II.11 (649C). 115 EH II.8 (404C). 116 DN IV.18 (716A). 117 DN IV.28 (729A); DN IV.32 (732D). 118 DN IV.35 (736B). Cf. Rom 4:17. 119 DN V.8 (824B). Where Proclus denies σχήματα of the One, Dionysius calls God πανσχήμος. See Corsini, Il Trattato De divinis nominibus dello Pseudo-​Dionigi, 77–​111. 120 Ohara, Radical Apophasis, 158; on Form, see 219. In the words of Cyril O’Regan, Ohara’s important book explicates two “paradigmatic . . . grammars of unsaying” in Christian traditions (vii, xiii). Despite our different methods, Ohara and I come to strikingly similar conclusions: that in Dionysius the theology of the Incarnation and metaphysics of ecstatic remaining decisively alter Plotinian apophasis and clear the way for a henology built on an excess of Form.

136  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation necessarily aneidetic condition—​proves to be merely relative, a temporary condition to be overturned. Dionysius names God as ἀνείδεον in two key passages on being (Book IV ) and on the Incarnation (Book II). In Book IV, Dionysius notes that in the Good, and in it alone, “nonbeing is actually excess of being” (καὶ τὸ ἀνούσιον οὐσίας ὑπερβολὴ).121 If we say that God is without being (ἀνούσιον), it is not because God resides safely beyond the touch of beings, free from their compromising influence, but because God’s being is so uniquely superabundant as to be without comparison. God is outside the class of ordinary beings, as if a non-​being. The same goes for other predicates. If we say that God is lifeless (ἄζωον) or mindless (ἄνουν), this is not to indicate a deficit but superabundant Life and superabundant Wisdom. So too, when Dionysius calls God “formless” (ἀνείδεον), we should take that to mean an excess of form since God is superabundant Form itself, just as God is superabundant Being, Life, and Mind. The Good is beyond being, but grants being, and in the same manner, “the formless is form-​producing.”122 Dionysius reiterates the point in a construction difficult to translate: “whatever belongs to the Good belongs to that which superabundantly gives form to the formless.”123 That is, God as the Good is the preeminent Form-​giver. By virtue of excess, God is more Life than life, more Wisdom than mind, and more Form than form. In this restricted sense, the divine Form is outside the class of ordinary forms, as if a non-​form. We see the same pattern of reasoning in the second key passage on ἀνείδεον (Book II). Dionysius first states the premise that “the Incarnation of Jesus [Ἰησοῦ θεοπλαστία] for us is the most manifest phenomenon [ἐκφανέστατον] in all theology.”124 Then he defines how that body of Jesus relates to all other created beings as God’s presence to the world. The Incarnation, he states, is “perfection [τελεία] among the imperfect as the source of perfection [ὡς τελετάρχις]; but imperfection [ἀτελὴς] among the perfect as beyond and before perfection [ὡς ὑπερτελὴς].”125 This is the typical dialectic that we find throughout Divine Names: dynamic, comparative, and apophatic by virtue of excess.126 God either perfects the creature or 121 DN IV.3 (697A). 122 DN IV.3 (697A). “Εἰ δὲ καὶ ὑπὲρ πάντα τὰ ὄντα ἐστίν, ὥσπερ οῦν ἐστι, τἀγαθόν, καὶ τὸν ἀνείδεον εἰδοποιεῖ . . . .” “Given that the Good transcends everything, as indeed it does, its nature, unconfined by form, is the creator of all form” (Luibheid). “But if the good is beyond all being, as it is, and the formless is form-​producing, then in it alone is non-​being thrust beyond being . . .” (Jones). 123 DN IV.3 (697A). “. . . ὅσα ἐν τἀγαθῷ τῆς τῶν ἀνειδέων ἐστὶν ὑπεροχικῆς εἰδοποιίας.” “Whatever partakes of the Good partakes of what preeminently gives form to the formless” (Luibheid). “Whatever is in the good is of the pre-​eminent form-​production of what is formless” (Jones). 124 DN II.9 (648A). 125 DN II.10 (648C). “τελεία μέν ἐστιν ἐν τοῖς ἀτελέσιν ὡς τελετάρχις, ἀτελὴς δὲ ἐν τοῖς τελείοις ὡς ὑπερτελὴς καὶ προτέλειος.” “A completion to the non-​complete as source of completion, non-​complete to the complete as beyond completion and before completion” (Jones). “This perfection is found in the imperfect as the source of their perfection. But it also transcends perfection, and in the perfect it is manifest as transcending and anticipating their perfection” (Luibheid). 126 In the same passage: God is “fullness among those who are lacking, but hyper-​f ullness among those who are full” (πλήρης ἐν τοῖς ἐνδεέσιν, ὑπερπλήρης ἐν τοῖς πλήρεσιν). DN II.10 (648C).

The E xtension of Desire  137 supersedes all creaturely perfection, depending on one’s relative position in the anagogical hierarchy. In both moments, it is the same God and the same action, but through dialectical negation, God measures the proportion from both sides, so to speak, exceeding its finite terms bilaterally. The Incarnation is obviously not “imperfect” in any way, but rather superabundantly perfect, yet to such a degree that can only be expressed by reciprocal negation (ἀ-​τελὴς /​ὑπερ-​τελὴς) along the axis of hierarchical order. I have emphasized the logic of this first statement on the Incarnation so that we can properly hear what Dionysius means when he repeats the dialectic but transposes it into a new key. In the next phrase that follows, he shifts from creaturely perfection (τέλος) to creaturely form (εἶδος). The Incarnation, he states again, is “form [εἶδος] giving form among those without form as the source of form [ὡς εἰδεάρχις]; but formless [ἀνείδεος] among the formed as beyond form [ὡς ὑπὲρ εἶδος].”127 In these lines, Dionysius calls God ἀνείδεος. Is this a moment of Plotinian henology creeping in? Is Dionysius wavering from his aesthetics of Form and negating his way to God as formless Absolute? Absolutely not. First of all, he repeats the identical suffix, privative, and preposition from his previous phrase. As he did there, so he does here, applying reciprocal negation (ἀν-​είδεος /​ὑπὲρ-​εἶδος) to express the eminence of divine form bilaterally along the axis of hierarchical order. Second, note that the subject of the sentence is not even the Good or One generally, but the one named “Jesus” (περὶ τοῦ Ἰησοῦ φησιν).128 Obviously, the Incarnation is not “formless” but on the contrary infinitely “manifest” (ἐκφανέστατον). The “formlessness” of Jesus can only mean a sheer excess of Form, a Form whose sovereign self-​manifestation floods even those already formed with ever more generous self-​ giving, as if they had not even received form yet. For Plotinus, the One is known exclusively through formlessness, such that infinite negation is the only path to the One. The One gives form only because it is formless; it gives what it does not have, as we saw in Chapter 3. But for Dionysius, the One is Form, and it gives form because it gives itself through ecstatic remaining. As Form, the One does exhibit a secondary formlessness, a negation that denotes the separation marking it off as the supreme Form of forms. The One is distanced from—​and to this extent is legitimately “without”—​the lesser forms that participate in its singularity. The proper work of apophasis is to clear this space in order to preserve the open structures of hierarchical participation that make kataphasis possible and necessary. In other words, divine formlessness emerges in Dionysius only as a side effect resulting from God’s excessively generous εἰδοποίησις. Since the Dionysian God gives immediately from what he does have, God’s self-​giving 127 DN II.10 (648C). “εἶδος εἰδοποιὸν ἐν τοῖς ἀνειδέοις ὡς εἰδεάρχις, ἀνείδεος ἐν τοῖς εἴδεσιν ὡς ὑπὲρ εἶδος.” “Form producing form in those without form as source of form, non-​form in those which are formed as beyond form” (Jones). “It is the form which is the source of form for the formless. But it also transcends form among the formed” (Luibheid). 128 DN II.10 (648AB).

138  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation form-​giving necessarily includes a phase of negation, when lesser beings are given forms that are not-​God, and God the form-​giver appears momentarily, by analogy, form-​less. God makes Godself ἀνείδεον as a means of ever-​greater generosity, clearing a space for forms to participate in Form.129 Higher than the formless Absolute is one singular Form: this is the ultimate conclusion of our nameless monk Dionysius. To us moderns, perhaps the very notion sounds implausible on its face, as if it were a conceptual error or ill-​advised hyperbole. Yet the philosophical shock of sovereign Form is not unfamiliar to premodern Christian intellectuals. Its scandal simply repeats the scandal of the Incarnation at the level of henology. It invites the same hesitation that afflicted the new class of Christian literati in the second and third centuries when they had to explain to Celsus or Porphyry how the One had recently assumed the body of an itinerant rabbi during the reign of Tiberius. Or when medieval theologians acknowledged that while chronologically the creation of the world occurred aeons before Incarnation of the Word in Jesus, theologically speaking the Incarnation precedes Creation and mystically foreshadows the human body to come—​an outlandish teaching, but one shared by doctors of the church like Maximus Confessor, Hildegard of Bingen, and John Duns Scotus. In both instances, the singularity of the Incarnation, lodged awkwardly among the neat tables of philosophical concepts, occasions scandal. For Dionysius, the One itself has received a singular, indelible name, a name above other names, permanently impressed in the tissue of a face and even inscribed into wood: Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum.130 Dionysius surprises us by consistently foregrounding the particularity of Ἰησοῦς even more than Χριστός and by connecting the sacred name to hierarchical revelations of divine Form.131 As Stang notes, “neither of the two treatises on hierarchies, it seems, can begin without explicit appeal to Jesus. . . . The hierarchies communicate light and love, and this light . . . is none other than Jesus.”132 In Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Dionysius grounds the “source, being, and power” of hierarchies in “Jesus himself ” (αὐτὸς Ἰησοῦς)—​not the One, Creator, or Christ-​concept, but the personal name.133 129 Jean-​Luc Marion reached similar conclusions about Dionysius when he first sketched out the link between apophasis and Deconstruction. Marion glosses the Absolute as “anterior distance,” and apophasis as “revering distance as distance”; but participation in the Absolute means the “traversal of distance” achieved by embracing distance as gift. Marion, The Idol and Distance, 153–​154, 158–​160. “The unthinkable calls to participation beings that have no common measure with it—​no common measure other than a reciprocal disappropriation in distance. Participation therefore never jumps over distance in claiming to abolish it, but traverses it as the sole field for union” (156). 130 DN VII.1 (868A). 131 Χριστός (19 instances) vs. Ἰησοῦς (35 instances). Wear and Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite, 49. Cf. Roques, L’Univers Dionysien, 320. 132 Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity, 98, 94. According to István Perczel, Dionysius may have believed that the name Ἰησοῦς holds triadic power, since it appears in the prologues of Divine Names, Celestial Hierarchy, and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy as Word (One), Intellect (light), and Soul (monad). See István Perczel, “Une théologie de la lumière: Denys l’Aréopagite et Évagre le Pontique,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 45, no. 1 (1999): 79–​120. 133 EH I.1 (372A, 373B). See Roques, L’Univers Dionysien, 319–​329.

The E xtension of Desire  139 As the beginning and end of hierarchies, the specificity of Ἰησοῦς bounds their structures and “defines” them as their ultimate limit (ἀποπεραιουμένην).134 In the Eucharistic liturgy, the hierarch recites the deeds of Jesus, confesses sins before Jesus, and multiplies the bread that manifests Jesus.135 “It is on Jesus himself, our most divine altar [τὸ θειότατον ἡμῶν θυσιαστήριον Ἰησοῦς],” writes Dionysius, “that there is achieved the divine consecration of intelligent beings.”136 Despite the Areopagite’s renowned enthusiasm for apophasis, the name of Jesus seems fixed beyond the reach of negation. It is almost as if the Form written indelibly in the Incarnation has undermined, or rather overwhelmed, the aneidetic condition. Dionysius does not hesitate to bind that personal name to henological predication without mediation, speaking of a “simple and hidden One of Jesus the divine Word” (τὸ γὰρ ἓν καὶ ἁπλοῦν καὶ κρύφιον Ἰησοῦ τοῦ θεαρχικωτάτου λόγου).137 In the Incarnation that “One of Jesus” receives the visible figuration (θεοπλαστία) of the human body. To be perfectly precise: “becoming human, like us” (καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς ἐνανθρωπήσει) means “becoming form, for us” (ἐξ ἡμῶν εἰδοποιούμενον).138 Now, the form-​giving event of the Incarnation does not alter the essence of Oneness, so to speak, but it does compel us to change how we think of the One. And the only way to conceive of the One taking on form, yet still remaining One, is to realize that the One has always remained Form, eternally, before the succession of time. After the Incarnation (but also before), the One has become (and eternally is) supreme Form. In other words, the Dionysian aesthetics of Form allows Christian authors to take seriously the full metaphysical consequences of the Incarnation. Put simply: the Incarnation reveals God as Form. The question we confront here is how language ought to handle the phenomenon of the “hidden One of Jesus.” Clearly, apophasis has an indispensable role to play. Dionysius himself insists that the full mystery of Ἰησοῦς remains hidden, even “after” the Incarnation is revealed (μετὰ τὴν ἔκφανσιν) and indeed “within” that revelation itself (ἐν τῇ ἐκφάνσει).139 The “Incarnation of Jesus” (Ἰησοῦ θεοπλαστία) is unspeakable (ἄῤῥητὸς), unknowable (ἄγνωστος), and hidden (μυστικῶς).140 This plain name remains beyond knowledge; this particular form remains an unspeakably divine Form. However, if the Incarnation is the maximally manifest phenomenon (ἐκφανέστατον) facing the theologian, there must be countless words to speak and serious kataphatic duties at least equal to the apophatic ones. This is why Dionysius maintains that defining, determining, or

134 EH V.1.5 (505B). On this point, see the account of the “Christic determination of hierarchy” in Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 170–​175. 135 EH VII.2 (553C). Cf. DN I.4 (592C). 136 EH IV.3 (484D); trans. Luibheid, 232. 137 EH III.3.12 (444A). 138 EH III.3.13 (444C). 139 Ep III (1069B). 140 DN II.10 (648A).

140  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation delimiting Jesus—​tracing the outline of his figure—​is not a task for apophasis or kataphasis alone. He explains his method in Letter 4: We do not define Jesus in human terms [ἀνθρωπικῶς ἀφορίζομεν]. For He is not a human only (He would not be above being if He were a human only), but [we define Him] as being truly beyond human beings in His paramount love of humanity [διαφερόντως φιλάνθρωπος], a being beyond being made substance according to human being out of the substance of human beings. . . . By seeing in a divine way, one will come to know, through these things, affirmative statements above [one’s] mind about Jesus’s love of human being [ἐπὶ τῇ φιλανθρωπίᾳ τοῦ Ἰησοῦ καταφασκόμενα], statements having the force of a superior negation [δύναμιν ὑπεροχικῆς ἀποφάσεως].141

What is most inexpressible about Jesus is the divine φιλανθρωπία that he embodies. Dionysius modifies that term with διαφερόντως, an adverb denoting difference in the extreme, or radical novelty.142 The apophatic element of naming Jesus is specifically the inability, try as one might, to express the utter novelty that is legible in him: namely, the ecstatic self-​donation of divine Eros. Negation is needed to clear the field for a greater reception of the unstoppable stream of divine gifts. As Dionysius writes, the countless kataphatic affirmations to be made about Jesus are “beyond mind” (ὑπὲρ νοῦν). Therefore—​and Dionysius formulates this quite precisely—​when it comes to Jesus, kataphasis carries apophatic force, a negation by virtue of excess. If the One did not love, if the One were the formless Absolute, then apophasis should be maximized and kataphasis should remain secondary. But when it comes to pronouncing an indelible Name, a Form of forms, apophasis does not suffice. Simply naming Jesus positively already casts other names into the shadows, provided one adequately articulates the radicality of his eros. For Dionysius, the pure difference of divine Form, its heterological self-​assertion, transfigures the aneidetic condition and elevates kataphasis above apophasis. Thanks to the unsurpassable novelty of divine Eros, thanks to the divine Flood whose touch continuously impresses and holds open the figural space of hierarchy, kataphasis manages to un-​say more in its positivity than an apophasis without eros ever could. Dionysius names the One as Form, the Form-​giver, Eros in ecstasy, and even Magnitude. Ultimately, he names the One Jesus. Unless we distort the corpus of his writings to suit our modern predilections or fail to attend to all of the words he writes, it is impossible to equate the henology of Dionysius with that of Plotinus, 141 Ep IV (1072AB); trans. Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order, 133–​134 (modified). Cf. DN II.3 (640B). 142 The name of Jesus is the “newest of all new things” (τὸ πάντων καινῶν καινότατον). DN II.10 (649A). Cf. the controversial phrase ending Letter 4: “καινήν τινα τὴν θεανδρικὴν ἐνέργειαν.” Ep IV (1072C).

The E xtension of Desire  141 not only because of our Syrian monk’s Christian beliefs (that too) but even at the level of Neoplatonist philosophy. It strains credulity to view them as identical in all essentials. One can only make that suggestion so long as Plotinus’s version of Neoplatonism is assumed as an invisible hermeneutical platform—​infallible, unchanging, and self-​evident. In fact, Dionysius does not repeat Plotinus; he overturns Plotinus. If we can perceive this achievement clearly, the Areopagite can still disrupt the Plotinian hegemony that continues to govern how we read ancient philosophy and Christian contemplation alike.

Interlude: Size When Christians seek to contemplate God, what are they striving to see? What is the terminus of their mental vision? After all their labors of negation, where can the eye come to rest? Like Plotinus and his Neoplatonist successors, Christians might name God (θεός) as the One (τὸ ἕν) or as the Father (πατήρ) of all. But Christians also strive to see Jesus (Ἰησοῦς), a definite man and not a concept, a body covered in skin and hair, whose face and eyes gazed on his Judaean neighbors and who somehow brought his head, torso, and limbs back to the One in the Ascension. For Christians, Jesus is the final image of God, a material and plastic image, and one that cannot be unseen. There is a tension here, not easily relaxed, between two ways of seeing. On the one hand, seeing God as the One means seeing through or behind every finite image, or else using images to catapult the imagination beyond itself, in fact beyond everything imaginable. On the other hand, seeing Jesus ends with Jesus, an end in itself. Christians recall his image narratively, pictorially, and ritually, but in whatever medium, that definite human figure, that fixed shape, brings the contemplative gaze to its rest, a relief from the burdens of negation. Christians only ever progress beyond that image in the sense of entering further inside it, repeating it, desiring it, eating it, inhabiting it, in the hope of having their own bodies changed into it. That opposition—​seeing the abstract, invisible, intangible One versus seeing the concrete, visible, tangible Jesus—​is so fundamental that it can seem endemic to the contemplative imaginary of ancient Christianity, as if it were a natural dialectical structure. But that is not quite right. For that opposition assumes a Plotinian problematic in which the formlessness of the One is taken for granted. That was simply not always the case in the first several centuries of Christianity. Once we come to appreciate that, we can perceive the true opposition endemic to ancient Christian contemplation up through at least the fourth century. That larger opposition is between this first tensive axis as a whole—​the formless One versus a formed Jesus—​versus a very different second axis, a second framework for contemplation altogether, an alternative model of figuration. That second axis begins from a premise more difficult for us as late moderns to think without ironic distance, unlike the easier first axis I outlined above—​an ease and a difficulty, by the way, that speaks volumes about the longevity of Plotinian aesthetics. In this second early Christian framework for contemplation, God has always had a body, but one too distant or titanically large to perceive, and the body of Jesus simply manifested and brought into visibility that eternal, colossal divine body. The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0008

Interlude: Size  143 Here God is not at all formless, but has real dimensions, even if they remain in occultation. The enormous hidden God is measurable, and Jesus is also measurable. The grace of Jesus is that his human body proportionalizes the colossal magnitude of the God-​body into tractable, tangible, thinkable terms. Thanks to the revelation of Jesus, the divine hand, the size of galaxies can now be measured in a few brief inches and can even be touched, held, or pierced. The act of figuration takes on different meanings in these two frameworks. In the first, the tension is visual: the invisible One versus the visible Jesus. The body of Jesus figures the formless One as a sign, extrinsically and therefore contingently. The distance between sign and reality is immeasurable, but it can serve as a useful provisional symbol. Of course, despite that relativity, one might still want to insist on its permanent validity. In the second framework, the tension is not visual at all, but metric. Seeing Jesus is still vital, but what one notices in gazing upon his body is not only its stubborn particularity, colors, and textures, but its scale, contoured phenomenality, and calculable size. The body of Jesus figures the One who already has a body of some kind and becomes visible relative to that shared embodied nature. Only a human body could disclose the divine body that created the human body in the bodily image of God, arm for arm, leg for leg, nose for nose. In this case, the distance between sign and reality is not immeasurable, but altogether measurable, because it is amenable to proportionate extension.1 Scholars have recently rediscovered the ineradicable presence of anthropomorphism in the Hebrew Bible, post-​biblical Judaism, the New Testament, and early Christianity.2 As we are learning, the notion that the Creator might have a body is not unsophisticated and naive, but an alternative operation of analogical thinking. Anthropomorphism occurs on a spectrum, and even modern philosophers might invoke divine “providence” or divine “will,” even if they blanch at divine “feet” or divine “breasts.”3 In fact, it was often non-​biblical ancient traditions that were the most aniconic.4 By contrast, Genesis 18 (Abraham’s visitors at Mamre) or Genesis 32 (Jacob wrestling at Jabbok), for example, represent ish theophanies, when Yahweh manifested himself in human form. As Esther Hamori 1 Gilles Quispel describes this as the choice between Christian Seinsmystik with Greek roots and Christian Gestaltmystik with Jewish roots. See Gilles Quispel, “Sein und Gestalt,” in Studies in Mysticism and Religion: Presented to Gershom G. Scholem on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Efraim Elimelek Urbach (Hebrew University, 1967), 191–​195. 2 Two excellent overviews are Christoph Markschies, God’s Body: Jewish, Christian, and Pagan Images of God, trans. Alexander Johannes Edmonds (Baylor University Press, 2019); and Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022). 3 See, e.g., Elliot R. Wolfson, “Images of God’s Feet: Some Observations on the Divine Body in Judaism,” in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-​ Schwartz (State University of New York Press, 1992), 143–​181; and David Biale, “The God with Breasts: El Shaddai in the Bible,” History of Religions 21, no. 3 (1982): 240–​256. 4 See, e.g., Gaifman, Aniconism in Greek Antiquity; and Brian R. Doak, Phoenician Aniconism in Its Mediterranean and Ancient Near Eastern Contexts (Society of Biblical Literature, 2015).

144 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation has shown, such episodes of anthropomorphic realism are even more radical than contemporary Hittite and Ugaritic literature. Rather than the human body being recognized as an anthropomorphic avatar of the deity, in the ish theophanies, the human form is so authentic as to pass initially unnoticed.5 Along similar lines, Benjamin Sommer claims to have found a lost controversy encoded within the Hebrew Bible over the “material anthropomorphism” of God’s body, echoes of which are still felt in post-​biblical Judaism and early Christianity. According to Sommer, “God’s body and self have a mysterious fluidity and multiplicity,” since God has access to multiple bodies around his creation. In Mesopotamian and Canaanite religious discourses, gods are those who have access to more than one body, unlike humans. The theological task for ancient Israel, then, was to reconcile monotheism with this polymorphic divine power and to map the spaces where Yahweh might dwell.6 As Andreas Wagner notes, recent gender theory has argued similarly for the relativity of the “body” across space and time. Wagner collates references to the “external form” of the human body in ancient Near Eastern iconography and the erotic Song of Songs as a “language” that needs to be “deciphered.”7 Anne Knafl rejects the modern habit of dividing up anthropomorphic appearances into abstract and concrete, or immanent and transcendent, since these are non-​biblical philosophical distinctions. The Pentateuch describes God’s body as free to move between earthly and heavenly spaces in events of appearance, mobility, or sustained presence.8 According to Mark Smith, Yahweh has not one but three bodies: the natural human body of Genesis; a superhuman liturgical body in Exodus and Isaiah; and a mystical body in Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and 1–​2 Enoch.9 The Hellenized Judaism that shaped early Christianity included mystical accounts of God’s gigantic, measurable body called Shi’ur Qomah (“measurement of the body”) traditions.10 Jewish Gnosticism and Jewish Merkavah (divine throne) mysticism attributed form, shape, and measure to God. Gershom Scholem asks: “Is this God, who may not be worshipped in the image of ‘anything that is in heaven or on the earth,’ Himself without image or form? . . . Does God, the source of all shape, 5 See Esther J. Hamori, ‘When Gods Were Men’: The Embodied God in Biblical and Near Eastern Literature. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 384 (De Gruyter, 2008). 6 See Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 7 See Andreas Wagner, God’s Body: The Anthropomorphic God in the Old Testament, trans. Marion Salzmann (T&T Clark, 2019). 8 See Anne K. Knafl, Forming God: Divine Anthropomorphism in the Pentateuch (Eisenbrauns, 2014). 9 See Mark S. Smith, Where the Gods Are: Spatial Dimensions of Anthropomorphism in the Biblical World (Yale University Press, 2016). 10 For the Hebrew text, see Martin Samuel Cohen, The Shi’ur Qomah: Texts and Recensions. Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum 9 (Mohr Siebeck, 1985). A compact English translation can be found in Pieter Willem van der Horst, “The Measurement of the Body. A Chapter in the History of Ancient Jewish Mysticism,” in Essays on the Jewish World of Early Christianity. Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus 14 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 123–​135.

Interlude: Size  145 Himself have a shape?”11 Biblical exegesis involves calculating the magnitude of the divine limbs, often with gematria, but also resorting to opaque formulae that express both the desire to measure and the impossibility of success. God shows his back to Moses but not his face (Ex 33:18–​23), and God appears seated on the throne to the elders of Israel (Ex 24:10–​11). The revelation of the bridegroom’s masculine beauty in Song of Songs 5:10–​16 is a theophany of the hidden divine body.12 Reciting the dimensions of the divine body is not only a hymn to the massive Beloved but also cosmological speculation and even theurgical practice.13 Scholem dates Shi’ur Qomah mysticism to the first century CE, and its themes are found across Kabbalistic literature from the Sefer Yetzirah to the Zohar.14 But its sources extend back to the Neopythagorean underground that we explored in Chapter 2. For example, Markos, a disciple of the Gnostic Valentinus, combines Jewish mysticism and Neopythagorean arithmology. For him, the alphabet is a theophany of the “body of truth,” which manifests itself as a cosmically large, and naked, female figure (the male would be too powerful to behold, says Markos). The universe arose once the formless God took form in this embodied Truth. To measure each inch from head to toe is to compute every possible combination of letters and numbers; the organs of the body are the divisions of the divine names.15 In later Kabbalah, the geometrical figuration of the Sefirotic tree is a map of the limbs of a hidden divine body, each shape linking one branch to the next like organs in a system.16 Geometrical diagrams become a mystical necessity. Over a hundred instances have been found in manuscript traditions mapping cosmogonic and symbolic structures in branching lines, wheels, concentric circles, cubes, and other shapes.17

11 Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Schocken Books, 1991), 15–​16. 12 Scholem, Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 20–​24. 13 Naomi Janowitz, “God’s Body: Theological and Ritual Roles of Shi’ur Komah,” in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-​Schwartz (State University of New York Press, 1992), 183–​201. 14 Scholem, Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 29–​30. “Ten Sefirot like the number of ten fingers, five opposite five. The singular covenant is directly in the middle, like the circumcision of the tongue in the mouth, and like the circumcision of the membrum.” Sefer Yetzirah, I.2 (long version), trans. in Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation (Jason Aronson, 1995), 271. After Scholem, others have dated Shi’ur Qomah traditions to several centuries later. For a survey of recent literature, see Howard M. Jackson, “The Origins and Development of Shi’Ur Qomah Revelation in Jewish Mysticism,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 31, no. 4 (2000): 373–​415. 15 See Scholem, Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 26–​28; and Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, “Form(s) of God: Some Notes on Metatron and Christ,” Harvard Theological Review 76, no. 3 (1983): 280–​281. In the Acts of John, Jesus’s Transfiguration means losing his clothes and expanding into an enormous, towering body. See Jarl E. Fossum, “Partes Posteriores Dei: The ‘Transfiguration’ of Jesus in the Acts of John,” in The Image of the Invisible God: Essay on the Influence of Jewish Mysticism on Early Christology (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 95–​108. 16 Scholem, Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 43–​46. 17 See further Marla Segol, Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah: The Texts, Commentaries, and Diagrams of the Sefer Yetsirah (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

146 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Jewish Christians in Elchaisaite communities produced the Pseudo-​Clementine homilies in the late third or early fourth century. These draw substantively from both the Sefer Yetzirah and Shi’ur Qomah traditions. I cite the following passage from Shlomo Pines’s translation of Homily 17 at length because of its remarkable resonances with Tradition B: For He has a Form (morphê) for the sake of [His] first and unique beauty, and all the limbs, not for use. For He does not have eyes for the purpose of seeing with them—​for He sees from every side; [for] He, as far as His body is concerned, is brighter beyond compare than the visual spirit in us and more brilliant than any light . . . . He has the most beautiful Form for the sake of man, in order that the pure of heart shall be able to see Him [cf. Mt 5:8] . . . . For He has stamped man as it were with the greatest seal, with His own Form . . . . But someone may say: If He has a Form, He has also a shape and is also in space; but if He is in space and encompassed by it, as though lesser [than it], how [can] He be greater than all things? [Again], how can He be omnipresent, if He has a figure? . . . Space is the non-​existent, whereas God is the Existent, [and] the non-​existent [cannot] be compared with the Existent. . . . That [which proceeds] from Him must necessarily be infinite on all sides, having as its heart Him who in reality is in [His] shape above all things; wherever He may be, He is, as it were, in the infinite as [its] midmost [point], being the limit of the All.18

Here God not only has Form, but bodily Form, Figure, and Shape, yet also a Form of such sovereign power that it gives rise to Space from within, like a point overflowing into extension that limits the exterior. Now, Gedaliahu Stroumsa argues that such “Jewish macrocosmic anthropomorphism” was an attempt to deal with biblical appearances of God in human form without the resources of Middle Platonism after Philo. In Merkavah mysticism, God has an “archangelic hypostasis” named Yahoel-​Metatron, a mystical reconfiguration of the name Yahweh, who embodies the cosmic First Adam as the image of the invisible God.19 This Jewish current of imagining the “form of God” (μορφὴ θεοῦ) prefigures the radical Christian anthropomorphism of the divine Incarnation into the human body of Jesus of Nazareth. In Philippians 2:6–​11, Paul echoes these traditions when he describes the shifting “forms of God” and the “name above every name” that Jesus received as the representative of Yahweh. 18 Shlomo Pines, Points of Similarity between the Exposition of the Doctrine of the Sefirot in the Sefer Yezira and a Text of the Pseudo-​Clementine Homilies: The Implications of this Resemblance. Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 7, no. 2 (Academia Scientiarum Israelitica, 1989), 64–​ 67. The Greek text can be found in Die Pseudoklementinen I. Homilien, ed. Bernhard Rehm (Akademie Verlag, 1992), 229–​234. 19 See Stroumsa, “Form(s) of God.” On rabbinic midrash concerning the cosmic Adam-​body, see Alon Goshen Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” Harvard Theological Review 87, no. 2 (1994): 171–​195.

Interlude: Size  147 Against the background of Jewish macro-​anthropomorphism, the Christology of Philippians 2, or for that matter Colossians 1, would signify that “incarnation implies for Christ giving up the greatness of his previous gigantic dimensions.”20 Even the title “Messiah” (mashiach) could represent a wordplay about the act of divine measuring since the Hebrew and Aramaic root msh can mean “to anoint” or “to measure.” Likewise, the title of the proto-​Christic Metatron seems to derive from μέτρον in Greek plus metator (“the one who measures”) in Latin. These synchronies cast new light on phrases like “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (εἰς μέτρον ἡλικίας τοῦ πληρώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ) (Eph 4:13) or Irenaeus’s report of Gnostic titles for the divine Son like the “measure of the unmeasured Father” (immensum Patrem in Filio mensuratum) or the “unknown magnitude” of God (τὸ μέγεθος ἄγνωστος).21 As Markus Bockmuehl argues, Paul’s μορφὴ θεοῦ in Philippians 2:6 probably does not refer to the invisibility of God prior to the Incarnation, as modern interpreters prefer, but rather “to the visible divine beauty and appearance which Christ had in his pre–​incarnate state.”22 The Incarnation would then be a passage of the concealed Christ-​body into full disclosure. In this Christian midrash, “the ‘measured One’ was believed to be none other than the ‘messiah’ himself.”23 The same possibilities exist in the canonical Gospels themselves. To take one example, Brittany Wilson has shown that the Lukan discourse on idolatry does not condemn images on the grounds that God is invisible or disembodied. Upon closer examination, Luke rejects their fabrication because God certainly does have a visible form, but humans are unable to measure it or replicate it, and should give up trying.24 Wilson finds that the anthropomorphism described by Knafl in the Pentateuch is found equally in the Gospel of Luke. God has body parts, bodily functions, and bodily encounters, and “God fills space both on earth and in heaven in concrete ways that sometimes presume bodily comportment (proximate anthropomorphism).”25 This tension between two competing early Christian frameworks for contemplation—​invisible/​visible versus immeasurable/​measurable—​lingered well into the fourth century, breaking out in the year 399 CE in Egypt in a confrontation 20 Stroumsa, “Form(s) of God,” 283. See also Jarl E. Fossum, “Image of the Invisible God: Colossians 1.15–​18a in the Light of Jewish Mysticism and Gnosticism,” in The Image of the Invisible God, 14–​39. 21 Stroumsa, “Form(s) of God,” 285–​287. 22 Markus Bockmuehl, “ ‘The Form of God’ (Phil. 2:6): Variations on a Theme of Jewish Mysticism,” Journal of Theological Studies 48, no. 1 (1997): 15, 23. 23 Michael Fishbane, “The Measures of God’s Glory in Ancient Midrash,” in Messiah and Christos: Studies in the Jewish Origins of Christianity, eds. Ithamar Gruenwald, Shaul Shaked, and Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa (Mohr Siebeck, 1992), 70–​72. 24 Brittany E. Wilson, “Imaging the Divine: Idolatry and God’s Body in the Book of Acts,” New Testament Studies 65, no. 3 (2019): 360, 366, 369. See further Brittany E. Wilson, The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke-​A cts and the Early Church (Oxford University Press, 2021). 25 Brittany E. Wilson, “Forming God: Divine Anthropomorphism in Luke-​Acts,” Journal of Biblical Literature 140, no. 4 (2021): 795.

148 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation known as the Anthropomorphite Controversy.26 Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria read a festal letter discussing whether God had a bodily form and concluded that God was incorporeal, presumably under the intellectual influence of “Origenism” of the sort promoted by Evagrius of Pontus. Hearing this, the monks in the vicinity rioted and forced Theophilus to recant. His olive branch to the monks—​“In seeing you, I behold the face of God”—​saved face and preserved sufficient theological ambiguity. Not yet content, the monks demanded he anathematize the books of Origen responsible for his former views, and Theophilus complied. In the ensuing power struggle among the monks, Theophilus sided with the anthropomorphites he had originally offended. As he hands down Evagrius’s doctrine of pure prayer, John Cassian recounts how an elderly monk Sarapion wept as he lost faith in his former anthropomorphite piety.27 In some ways, this episode was a prelude to the Byzantine controversy over images, as the Anthropomorphites accused their opponents of un-​biblical iconoclasm and the anti-​Anthropomorphites charged them with unreformed paganism in return.28 But Alexander Golitzin also takes it as evidence of the enduring influence of Merkavah mysticism and Shi’ur Qomah traditions, not to mention the new metaphysical pressures on anthropomorphism following the Council of Nicaea.29 Other scholars have noticed a burgeoning consolidation among Christian Neoplatonists influenced in one way or another by Plotinian ideals of contemplation. To a person, they reject the anthropomorphite complex of body, form, measure, and size, and they argue instead for a different framework for Christian contemplation, not based on analogical measure but on dialectics of invisibility. This is not the place to investigate the details, but the incorporeality of God was vociferously asserted by Origen, Basil, Evagrius, and Augustine. In so doing, they elevated the influence of Plotinus (Seinsmystik) over the influence of Jewish mysticism (Gestaltmystik) in their day, and perhaps tested the first Christian strains of Tradition A versus Tradition B.30 Stroumsa draws a straight line from the Platonism 26 See Clark, Origenist Controversy, 43–​84. 27 “When he realized that the anthropomorphic image of the Godhead which he had always pictured to himself while praying had been banished from his heart, . . . he suddenly broke into the bitterest tears and heavy sobbing and, throwing himself to the ground with a loud groan, cried out: ‘Woe is me, wretch that I am! They have taken my God from me, and I have no one to lay hold of, nor do I know whom I should adore or address. . . .’ ” Mark Delcogliano, “Situating Arapion’s Sorrow: The Anthromorphite Controversy as Historical and Theological Context of Cassian’s Tenth Conference on Pure Prayer,” Cistercian Studies 38, no. 4 (2003): 379. 28 On the Anthropomorphite Controversy as part of a long-​term Christian debate over aniconism, see Robin M. Jensen, From Idols to Icons: The Emergence of Christian Devotional Images in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2022), 29–​52. 29 See Alexander Golitzin, “ ‘The Demons Suggest an Illusion of God’s Glory in a Form’: Controversy over the Divine Body and Vision of Glory in Some Late Fourth, Early Fifth Century Monastic Literature,” Studia Monastica 44, no. 1 (2002): 13–​43; and Alexander Golitzin, “The Vision of God and the Form of Glory: More Reflections on the Anthropomorphite Controversy of AD 399,” in Abba: The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West. Festschrift for Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia, eds. John Behr, Andrew Louth, and Dimitri E. Conomos (Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 273–​297. 30 See David L. Paulsen, “Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity: Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses,” Harvard Theological Review 83, no. 2 (1990): 107–​114; and Carl W. Griffin

Interlude: Size  149 of Origen and Augustine to their “aniconic conception of the Deity,” and from there to Byzantine iconoclasm.31 Graham Gould adds the imageless prayer of Evagrius, which aims, he notes, at “formless knowledge” (ἀνείδιος γνῶσις).32 The leading Christian Neoplatonists of the fourth century might not have liked it, but for several centuries and for many ancient Christians, God did have a measurable size.

and David L. Paulsen, “Augustine and the Corporeality of God,” Harvard Theological Review 95, no. 1 (2002): 97–​118. 31 Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, “The Incorporeality of God: Context and Implications of Origen’s Position,” Religion 13, no. 4 (1983): 353. 32 Graham Gould, “The Image of God and the Anthropomorphite Controversy in Fourth Century Monasticism,” in Origeniana Quinta, ed. Robert J. Daly (Leuven University Press, 1992), 549–​557.

6

Kenosis into Magnitude Return of the icon Plotinus distanced himself from geometry to protect the formlessness of the One. Over the following centuries, many Christians followed his strategy to varying degrees, from Gregory of Nyssa to Evagrius of Pontus to Augustine of Hippo. Yet their belief that the divine Word became flesh in the body of Jesus—​a measurable figure in space and time, whose name cannot be negated—​made that difficult to sustain without some adjustments. With Dionysius, the fate of the figure suddenly shifts. God is the measure of all things, and cosmic measures quiver with theophanic power. Dionysius embraces apophasis as much as Plotinus, but he also discerns in the divine One an erotic ecstasy that remains within the world, a sovereign Form impressed into hierarchical structures. In the same moment that Dionysius violates the aneidetic condition, he liberates figures to become analogies of Form. When it comes to measure, quantity, and space, the Incarnation makes a difference in Dionysian theology—​just as our hypothesis predicts. When geometry falls under suspicion, the One is formless and negation accelerates into infinity. When geometrical figures are prized, the One is Form and negation operates within limits. Geometry circumscribes negation and guards the iconicity of form. The thoughtful reader might spy a problem looming around the corner as we turn to Christian icons. Their colorful, shimmering faces, boldly inscribed into the visual field, are unquestionably the most kataphatic moment in ancient Christian culture. My contention has been that metric figures and divine Form are linked and that geometrical order expresses the trace of God in the world. Yet here we face a quandary. The high-​water mark of kataphatic contemplation in the first millennium is the Eastern Christian defense of icon veneration. No one took more seriously the visual consequences of the Incarnation; no one spent more ink to defend figuration against aniconism. Yet, if our hypothesis is correct, this seems to suggest that monks like John of Damascus (665–​749 CE), Theodore the Studite (759–​826 CE), or even the patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople (758–​828 CE), all embraced geometrical ideas, even more so than Dionysius. And that seems difficult to believe. Byzantine iconophiles are not typically described as geometrical thinkers, but unless they were, the entire perspective I have suggested in this essay is in jeopardy. Did icon theorists like Theodore actually champion geometry? Do desert monks like John care about lines and quantities? Do they praise the Incarnation in The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0009

Kenosis into Magnitude  151 one breath and discuss shapes and measurement in the next? It may come as a surprise, but that is just what they did. “The icon, silent for centuries, has begun to speak to us.”1 The rediscovery of the Byzantine icon in the West, long forgotten or misunderstood, has transformed art history and Christian theology alike.2 The visual authority of icons and their priority over text resonate in uncanny ways with the ubiquitous streams of digital images that govern contemporary culture. As Leonid Ouspensky already saw in the 1960s, the icon has begun “infiltrating . . . our markedly visual epoch.”3 The return of the icon in art history anticipated the “visual turn” in the humanities and made possible the topic of “iconicity” in continental philosophy of religion.4 The protracted controversy over icons of Christ was one of the greatest political events in Byzantine Christianity of the first millennium. It took well over a century to resolve. There is arguably no episode of greater consequence for the history of art in Europe or the future of contemporary visual culture. According to Marie-​José Mondzain, like it or not, we still inhabit an epoch organized by the Byzantine iconophiles. “Today, there is no alternative system of thought concerning the image capable of competing with the theoretical and political power of the one that the church developed during its first ten centuries,” she writes.5 “More than ten centuries ago, Christian thinkers were the first in the Western world to turn the image into something of real philosophical and political importance. . . . Only the image can incarnate; this is the principal contribution of Christian thought.”6 At the same time, the novelty of Byzantine Christian icons and their apparent geometrical abstraction have confused art historians for decades. Ernst Kitzinger rued the appearance of icons in Christian antiquity and considered the victory of 1 See Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon. Volume 2, trans. Anthony Gythiel and Elizabeth Meyendorff (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992), 463, quoting Eugene Trubetskoi. 2 The literature on Byzantine icons and iconoclasm is immense. See especially Andrew Louth, Greek East and Latin West: The Church, AD 681–​1071 (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007); Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era c. 680–​850: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Mike Humphreys, ed., A Companion to Byzantine Iconoclasm (Brill, 2021). For a luminous introduction to the theology of the icon, see Maximos Constas, The Art of Seeing: Paradox and Perception in Orthodox Iconography (Sebastian Press, 2014). 3 Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, 465–​466, quoting Ernst Benz. 4 On visual studies, see Keith Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2008): 131–​146; Adi Efal, “Iconology and Iconicity: Toward an Iconic History of Figures,” Naharaim. Zeitschrift für deutsch-​jüdische Literatur und Kulturgeschichte 2, no. 1 (2008): 81–​105; Marie-​José Mondzain, “What Does Seeing an Image Mean?,” Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 3 (2010): 307–​315; and Emmanuel Alloa, “Visual Studies in Byzantium: A Pictorial Turn avant la lettre,” Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 1 (2013): 3–​29. On philosophy of religion, see the account of idol and icon in Jean-​Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 7–​24; and Jean-​Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K. A. Smith (Stanford University Press, 2004). See further Stephanie Rumpza, Phenomenology of the Icon: Mediating God Through the Image (Cambridge University Press, 2023). 5 Marie-​José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford University Press, 2005), 173. 6 Marie-​José Mondzain, “Can Images Kill?,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 1 (2009): 23, 28.

152 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation the iconophiles a decadent decline following the iconoclasts’ attempts to revive what Kitzinger claimed was an “uniconic phase of early Christianity.”7 Through the 1980s, many historians still believed the earliest Christians to be aniconic if not resolutely iconoclastic. But following suggestions by Sister Charles Murray, Paul Finney has exposed how much this view relies on mistaken assumptions. The myth of original iconoclasm is a stubborn side effect of nineteenth-​century Protestant historiography that led historians to fundamentally misconstrue early Christian apologist texts and early catacomb frescoes.8 In fact, as Robin Jensen has shown, early Christians embraced iconic figuration from the beginning, well before the icon, and interpreted the meaning of Jesus graphically through “visual exegesis.”9 In a seminal 1950 article, Georges Florovsky argued that in fact the textbook understanding of Byzantine iconoclasm had been precisely backward. In the older view, the common-​sense iconoclasts, like enlightened Protestants, saw through the overinflated image worship of Hellenized Christians and urged a pious return to a putative original aniconism. But Florovsky suggests that Greek philosophy, not Jewish roots, was responsible for such trends. “We must reverse the current interpretation,” he concludes. “It was Iconoclasm that was a return to the pre-​Christian Hellenism,” or rather an internecine battle, when “two Hellenisms, as several times before, met again in a heated fight.”10 Since both sides of the debate were influenced by Neoplatonism, Florovsky attempts to distinguish different currents, from Origen to Porphyry to Eusebius. As I will show, what we see in the iconophiles is the influence of Dionysius slowly overwhelming the aneidetic constraints of Plotinus.11 Hans Belting’s influential Likeness and Presence taught art historians how to approach icons as “images before the era of art.” Yet the spatiality of icons has remained a puzzle for modern readers. Otto Demus situated the “spatial icon” or “icon in space” within the coordinates of liturgy, architecture, and iconostases in which they appeared.12 Belting describes icons as “akinetic forms” whose “abstract 7 Ernst Kitzinger, “The Cult of Images in the Age Before Iconoclasm,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954): 85. 8 See Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (Oxford University Press, 1994). For a summary of the historiographical revolution, see Robin M. Jensen, “Figural Images in Christian Thought and Practice before ca. 500,” in A Companion to Byzantine Iconoclasm, ed. Mike Humphreys (Brill, 2021), 109–​143. 9 See Robin M. Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (Routledge, 2000); and Jensen, From Idols to Icons. 10 George Florovsky, “Origen, Eusebius and the Iconoclastic Controversy,” Church History 19, no. 2 (1950): 96. 11 Stephen Gero finds the Florovsky thesis “prima facie attractive,” but seeks more “detailed documentation” and “conceptual rigor,” which I hope to begin to provide. See Stephen Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm During the Reign of Constantine V. Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 384 (Secrétariat du Corpus SCO, 1977), 104. 12 Otto Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration: Aspects of Monumental Art in Byzantium (Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1948), 13–​14.

Kenosis into Magnitude  153 style,” he guesses, was a ploy by artists to facilitate reproduction of their works.13 Pavel Florensky, an Orthodox theologian and working mathematician, raised another possibility, along with others like Oscar Wulff and Lev Zhegin. The flat geometrical style of icons is not a failure of Renaissance-​era perspective, but rather a deliberately constructed “reverse perspective” extruding toward the viewer and fragmenting space, defying Leon Battista Alberti’s Renaissance aesthetics much as the Cubists would.14 Most recently, Alexei Lidov suggests that “spatial icons” are one instance of “hierotopy,” or the creation of sacred spaces in any medium, a hallmark of Byzantine Christian cultural production.15 In all of these views, geometry is something that happens extrinsically: a placement in space, a matter of style, a visual projection, or a generic topology. I would like to ask a more preliminary question. How does the icon emerge through its own geometry in the first place? How do measure and quantity intrinsically establish the aesthetics of an icon and its distinctive linear grammar? John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite both rely directly on geometrical concepts to explain the proper operation of icons of Christ and the saints. Before we can approach the Byzantine iconophiles, we need to understand what icons are, but what icons are (their matter, form, and space) and when they are (their transformations across the Byzantine controversy) are closely interrelated. Over the last twenty years, Byzantine art historians like Robert Nelson, Charles Barber, and Bissera Pentcheva have finally listened to icons speaking on their own terms.16 One paradoxical discovery has been that recovering icons is inextricable from recovering complicated iconophile texts. The virulence of the conflict between Byzantine iconoclasts and iconophiles disrupted our access to sources, and today we can only partially reconstruct the silenced views of the iconoclasts; even 13 See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 129–​133, 173–​174. 14 See Pavel Florensky, “Reverse Perspective,” in Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy R. Salmond (Reaktion Books, 2002), 197–​272. In recent years, the genealogy of Florensky’s proposal and his non-​Euclidean hermeneutic have been explained by Clemena Antonova in several works: “On the Problem of ‘Reverse Perspective’: Definitions East and West,” Leonardo 43, no. 5 (2010): 464–​469; “Non-​Euclidean Geometry in Russian Art History: On a Little-​ Known Application of a Scientific Theory,” Leonardo 53, no. 3 (2020): 293–​298; and Visual Thought in Russian Religious Philosophy: Pavel Florensky’s Theory of the Icon (Routledge, 2020). See also Charles Lock, “What Is Reverse Perspective and Who Was Oskar Wulff ?,” Sobornost 33, no. 1 (2011): 60–​89; and Oleg Tarasov, “Florenskii, Metaphysics and Reverse Perspective,” in How Divine Images Became Art, trans. Stella Rock (Open Book, 2024), 117–​170. 15 See Alexei Lidov, “Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces as a Form of Creativity and Subject of Cultural History,” in Hierotopy. Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, ed. Alexei Lidov (Progress-​Tradition, 2006), 32–​58; and Alexei Lidov, “The Temple Veil as a Spatial Icon: Revealing an Image-​Paradigm of Medieval Iconography and Hierotopy,” IKON: Journal of Iconographic Studies 7 (2014): 97–​108. 16 See inter alia Robert S. Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Kristen M. Collins and Robert S. Nelson, eds., Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai (Getty Publications, 2006); Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton University Press, 2002); and Pentcheva, Sensual Icon.

154 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation iconophile image theory has not been studied as closely as one might expect. But recently, art historians have come to realize that in this peculiar case, the pursuit of the visual object leads one right back to the text. The contested phenomenon of the “icon” does not appear at all unless we understand the discourse surrounding it. As Barber explains, “the icon, prior to becoming a theological and spiritual tool, must first defend itself by resolving its status as a work of art, an artifact.”17 The extant iconophile texts in our possession include minor voices like Germanos, patriarch of Constantinople (634–​ca. 740 CE), deposed by emperor Leo III in the first iconoclastic wave, or Theodore Abû Qurrah, bishop of Harrân (ca. 755–​830 CE) and a monk of Mar Saba like John.18 But the major iconophile authors are only three: John of Damascus, Theodore the Studite, and Nicephorus of Constantinople. Each devoted several treatises to explaining how certain images of Jesus truly but visually name God and thus merit special reverence. When we read John, Theodore, and Nicephorus, we see that while they all defend Christ icons in light of the Incarnation, they operated in different circumstances. John responds to the period historians call the First Iconoclasm (726–​787 CE) and leans on scriptural and patristic authority. Theodore and Nicephorus responded to a resurgent Second Iconoclasm (814–​842 CE) and confronted new questions with philosophical sophistication. Mapping the uneven terrain of continuities and discontinuities among them is a difficult but necessary task. The evolution of icon theory can be explained with different models. Paul Alexander posits three moments: the traditional phase, lasting until imperial iconoclasm in the 740s; the Christological phase up through the Second Council of Nicaea (Nicaea II) in 787; and the scholastic phase when Theodore and Nicephorus turned to Aristotelian logic.19 For Kenneth Parry, John of Damascus made a strong start with his materialist theory, but Nicaea II did not fully accept it. Since they failed to “plug all the theological loopholes,” iconoclasm reemerged in the Synod of Hiereia in 754, forcing Theodore into a strained response.20 Thomas Cattoi claims that many of Theodore’s arguments “had already been deployed” by John, despite the curious fact that Theodore never cites them.21 Yet Theodore adds plenty of new insights, especially his “dialectic of circumscribability and uncircumscribability.”22 17 Barber, Figure and Likeness, 11. 18 See Sidney H. Griffith, A Treatise on the Veneration of the Holy Icons Written in Arabic by Theodore Abû Qurrah, Bishop of Harrân (c. 755–​c . 830 A.D.) (Peeters, 1997). A good exposition can be found in Ken Parry, “The Theological Argument About Images in the 9th Century,” in A Companion to Byzantine Iconoclasm, ed. Mike Humphreys (Brill, 2021), 425–​463. 19 See Paul J. Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image Worship in the Byzantine Empire (Clarendon Press, 1958), 189–​198. 20 See Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries (Brill, 1996), 138–​140. 21 Thomas Cattoi, “Introduction,” in Theodore the Studite: Writings on Iconoclasm. Ancient Christian Writers 69, trans. Thomas Cattoi (Newman Press, 2015), 5–​6. 22 Cattoi, “Introduction,” 42–​43.

Kenosis into Magnitude  155 The most important leap forward in our understanding of icon theory is Bissera Pentcheva’s three-​ phase account. Despite Belting’s achievements, Pentcheva shows that he relied exclusively on tempera-​painted icons from Egypt. She expands the archives to include mixed-​media icons from Constantinople, especially relief icons carved in stone and ivory, glazed with enamel, or cut into metal, shimmering with opalescence. This allows her to theorize multimedia icons not as flat visual surfaces but as animated, synesthetic objects, which unfold historically in three discrete phases.23 (1) In the “essentialist” or “materialist” phase through the eighth century, icons are material vehicles filled with divine presence, like the bodies of the saints. The written mark (γραφή) of the icon now means “painting,” since these icons are mostly painted on wood. (2) In the ninth century during the Second Iconoclasm, iconophiles turn to a “non-​essentialist” or “formalist” theory. They redefine the icon as absence, a negative intaglio of the divine impression into matter. This theory responds to iconoclastic critiques: God is not “in” the icon, yet the imprinted surface reproduces the trace of God. The γραφή of the icon now means “imprint” (τύπος) or “seal” (σφραγίς), as in metal bas-​relief icons. (3) By the tenth and eleventh centuries, iconographers used iridescent luxury materials like enamel and gold that glitter in an illusion of animation. Their spectacular radiance (ποικιλία) supersedes the formalist account based on absence.24 The heuristic power of Pentcheva’s schema is tremendously valuable to students of iconicity, not only in art history but also in visual studies and philosophy of religion. It accounts for an expanded material archive as well as the gradual evolution of iconophile texts. It is less fruitful, however, to apply that same abstract model back upon the iconophile writings to sharpen the textual differences between John and Theodore unduly. Pentcheva tends to emphasize discontinuities outside their texts, whether church politics or artistic technologies, and ignore continuities found inside their texts due to common sources and common concepts. For example, the critical change from essentialism to nonessentialism occurs, Pentcheva suggests, when Theodore redefines the icon as τύπος and σφραγίς, and she attributes this insight to his “visceral engagement with mechanical-​production practices” arising in the ninth century.25 Byzantine icon theory certainly took shape against the background of technical advances in artistic production. Herbert Kessler has shown that the theology of icons echoes the vocabulary of artists. By the fifth century, manuscript illuminators were using models (σχήματα) to scale up line drawings (σκιαγραφία) while keeping reproductions intact; such “unseen delineations” were later painted over to conceal their origins. Soon intaglio seals and coin dies 23 Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (2006): 631; cf. Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, 1–​15. See further Bissera V. Pentcheva, Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium (Penn State University Press, 2017). 24 See Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, 56, 96, 102, 121, 209–​210. 25 Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, 83–​87.

156 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation mechanized the transfer process. “Reversed and recessed, the outlines in the matrices were virtually unreadable,” Kessler writes, but “they became visible only when pressed into matter.” The name for this imprint—​this “delineation engraved in the matrix of a seal”—​is “circumscription” (περιγραφή), the most hotly contested term of the icon controversy.26 At the same time, we should not overlook the continuities between John the monk and Theodore the monk, given the patristic traditions they shared in common. As we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, the aesthetics of the engraved seal are already fully present in Dionysius, another monk. Like Iamblichus and Proclus, Dionysius called divine images τύποι and compared divine impressions (ἐκτυπώματα) in the world to seals (σφραγίδια); and Plotinus already understood geometry as circumscription (περιγραφή). As Averil Cameron and others have shown, the Corpus Dionysiacum was foundational for the entire Byzantine discursive formation, and surely Theodore the theologian is at least as intellectually close to the Areopagite as to ninth-​century die craftsmen.27 So if there are discrete phases in the evolution of icon theory, there are also telling continuities running between them. Since it seems unlikely that Theodore and Nicephorus knew John’s writings, the common momentum of their arguments is all the more striking and hints at a larger discursive frame in which they participate. To triangulate the center of John’s theory, the innovations introduced by Theodore, and the ideas they share, we have to read the Orations and Refutations with an eye to monastic and philosophical traditions. John, as we will see in this chapter, begins with the writings of Dionysius, and discovers there the germ of an insight about the connection between eros and measure. In Chapter 7, I will turn to Theodore, who while writing in a very different situation, nevertheless develops the same idea further and gives it a geometrical name: circumscription.

Speaking in Dionysian Yanah Mansur ibn Sarjun was born in Damascus fifty years after the beginning of Arab rule.28 One biographer called him the “golden river” (χρυσορρόας) in tribute to the streams running through his native city and the radiant beauty of his words. John’s father and grandfather had served in the treasury of the Umayyad caliphate, 26 Kessler, “Configuring the Invisible by Copying the Holy Face,” 66–​69. 27 See Averil Cameron, “The Language of Images: The Rise of Icons and Christian Representation,” Studies in Church History 28 (1992): 24–​29; and George Arabatzis, “Theodore the Studite and Dionysius,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite, eds. Mark Edwards, Dimitrios Pallis, and Georgios Steiris (Oxford University Press, 2022), 256–​268. 28 My synopsis draws on Andrew Louth, St. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–​28. See also Chase’s still valuable introduction in Saint John of Damascus: Writings. Fathers of the Church, Vol. 37, trans. Frederic H. Chase, Jr. (The Catholic University of America Press, 1958).

Kenosis into Magnitude  157 and he followed in their footsteps, receiving an excellent Greek education. Once the civil administration transitioned to Arabic in the early 700s, John joined the well-​established Mar Saba monastery in the desert outside Jerusalem, a Palestine hub for Chalcedonian orthodoxy since the 500s. There he adopted an ascetic life, served as a priest in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and engaged from afar the controversies roiling Constantinople. Although Jerusalem’s Christian shrines remained popular destinations for pilgrims after its defeat by Muslim forces in 638, times had changed. The new mosques at the Dome of the Rock were built just years before John arrived at Mar Saba. His community was acutely aware of their minority status, wary of Jewish-​Christian tensions, and alarmed at the power struggles dividing Byzantium, rattled by a new southern rival. Over the last forty years of his life, John made tremendous contributions to Christian literature beyond his Orations against the Calumniators of Images. As Andrew Louth notes, all of John’s works, “fashioned in the crucible of defeat,” defend Christian belief through systematization and consolidation.29 His major work, Fount of Knowledge, is a magisterial synthesis of ancient Christian orthodoxy in three volumes: Dialectic, on logic; On Heresies, on Greek philosophy, Christian dissent, and other religions; and the four books of The Orthodox Faith, the first summa of its kind and a major influence on Thomas Aquinas. Beyond these, John penned sermons and liturgical poetry; a dialogue between a Muslim and a Christian; and tracts on fasting, dragons, and witches. After his death around 750, the iconoclastic Synod of Hiereia in 754 condemned him using his Syrian name Mansur, and mocking him as an idolater, forger, “Saracen-​minded,” and in a terrific inside joke, “the wood-​worshipper.”30 The long dispute over image veneration reflected larger social trends: the centralization of imperial influence following the sieges of Constantinople in 674 and 713 and the gradual transfer of holy power from independent monks to imperially aligned bishops.31 The immediate cause of the controversy was Emperor Leo III’s order in 724 to remove icons from Christian churches. John responded early, writing his three Orations over the decade that followed. Beginning in 741, shortly before John’s death, Leo’s son Constantine V intensified the policy, convening the notorious Synod of Hiereia and writing a learned iconoclastic manifesto himself. Monks like John and Theodore defended icons by appealing to tradition; like the icon, monastic spiritual authority stood beyond the reach of the bishop. On the other side were the imperial court and bishops seeking to maintain sacred power within regulated channels. In place of icons, they favored the Eucharist celebrated in their churches or the bare insignia of the Holy Cross, by then a military standard. Constantine V

29 Louth, St. John Damascene, 14. 30 See Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 94–​95. 31 See Peter Brown, “A Dark-​Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy,” The English Historical Review 88, no. 346 (1973): 1–​34; and Cameron, “Language of Images.”

158 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation attacked the monks directly, confiscating their property, restricting their novices, and publicly burning the Apophthegmata of the Desert Fathers.32 If the iconophiles sought the authority of the theological past, the iconoclasts began from ecclesial power in the present. The iconoclasts wanted to purify worship and find certainty in the Eucharist or Cross. But the iconophile monks, as John McGuckin observes, “stood for untidiness. . . . The monks, the most untidy members of Byzantine society in every sense, were the perfect agents to effect this protest.”33 John’s three Orations against the iconoclasts are anything but tidy; his attention shifts and his arguments evolve as he writes and rewrites each treatise.34 According to Pentcheva, John conceives of γραφή as painting in Oration I and II, before the Synod of Hiereia in 754; by contrast, John’s Oration III, as well as Theodore and Nicephorus, all think γραφή as τύπος after 754.35 In short, according to Pentcheva, we find “materialist” arguments in John’s Orations I and II, and “formalist” arguments in Oration III, Theodore, and Nicephorus. Pentcheva concludes that Oration III is “a forgery with a post-​Damascene date” closer to Theodore.36 There are several reasons to reject this conclusion.37 Yet the discontinuities that concern Pentcheva can actually help us identify a deeper continuity, which is directly related to geometry. The iconoclast Synod of Hiereia that falls between John and Theodore does not simply attack iconophiles for painting the likeness of Jesus. In its final Definition, it specifically condemns those who attempt “to circumscribe [περιγράφειν] in icons by means of material colors [δι᾽ ὑλικῶν χρωμάτων], in a human form [ἀνθρωπομόρφως], the uncircumscribable [ἀπερίγραφον] substance and hypostasis of God the Logos, alleging as the reason the Incarnation.”38 That is, the Synod 32 Brown, “A Dark-​Age Crisis,” 12, 31, 30. 33 John A. McGuckin, “The Theology of Images and the Legitimation of Power in Eighth Century Byzantium,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1993): 57. 34 Andrew Louth compares the distinct methods and achievements of each of John’s Orations in “The Theological Argument about Images in the 8th Century,” in A Companion to Byzantine Iconoclasm, ed. Mike Humphreys (Brill, 2021), 401–​424. 35 Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, 66–​71. 36 Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, 72–​77. 37 Pentcheva endorses Paul Speck’s hypothesis that Oration III was composed after 754, both because the Synod of Hiereia contradicts John’s materialist argument for icons, while Oration III offers nonmaterialist arguments; and because certain features of Oration III are not shared by Orations I and II. Cf. Paul Speck, “Eine Interpolation in den Bilderreden des Johannes von Damaskos,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 82, no. 1 (1989): 114–​117. Andrew Louth considers Speck’s proposals “far-​fetched, and to raise more problems than they begin to solve.” Louth, St. John Damascene, 208. Bonifatius Kotter, the editor of John of Damascus’s works, acknowledges the idiosyncrasies of Oration III, but judges none to be sufficient to reject unified authorship. Kotter concludes that the author of Oration III worked closely with I and II to critically develop certain elements, but then removed those references to fashion the final treatise. See Bonifatius Kotter, “Einführung,” in Contra imaginum calumniatores orationes tres, ed. Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, Bd. III (De Gruyter, 1975), 5–​7, 23–​33, 48, 56. Noble considers the more systematic Oration III to belong to a late period when John was consolidating his other writings as well. See Thomas F. X. Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 89–​93. 38 Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, 65; trans. in Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 89–​90.

Kenosis into Magnitude  159 did not only condemn the materiality of painting but also the power of circumscription (περιγράφειν). If Theodore and Nicephorus were indeed reacting to the Synod by finding a new polemical approach, as Pentcheva argues, we would expect them to avoid not only John’s materialist arguments but especially notions of circumscription. In fact, they double down on circumscription. Crucially, John himself had already used the term περιγράφειν in Oration I, and in Oration III he returns to the same passage to amplify it further.39 This means that the concept of circumscription establishes a terminological continuity between Oration I, the Synod of Hiereia, Oration III, and the writings of both Theodore and Nicephorus. In this period of Byzantine iconoclasm, as we will see in Chapter 7, the debate over images was a debate over circumscription. In Oration I, John is scrambling to gather arguments amid a polemical emergency, and he admittedly mixes together different reasons for venerating icons. First, he offers commonplace explanations of Christian images that we can classify as pre-​iconic. Images function to record past events and bring holy things to mind, like the lives of the saints. Images are shadows that prefigure future realities, as Noah’s Ark symbolizes the Virgin Mary.40 Sight, chief among senses, is hallowed by contact with sacred images. What the literate possess in books, the illiterate access through images.41 Painted images provide illustrations of texts, silently imitating what the writers first said aloud.42 Christians worship God alone, but venerate images as one venerates a cherished elder or just ruler.43 These ideas predate the Byzantine controversies and go back to Lactantius and Gregory the Great. However, beyond these nostrums, John adds two of his own ideas. The first is his famous celebration of materiality (hence the sobriquet “wood-​worshipper”). Nearly every study of John of Damascus reviews these passages, so they need not detain us long.44 John states that those who venerate material images do not worship matter, but the Creator of matter, on account of God’s Incarnation into matter. For when the Word of God assumed human flesh, he did not wear it “like a purple robe” or mere “garment.” Rather, God became phenomenally perceptible within the physical conditions of matter, and iconographers are right to harness its transformed capacities in order to depict God in a new way.45 As John writes, the God who “became matter for my sake” in Jesus is rightly venerated through material media: the wood of the cross, stone of the tomb, ink of the gospels, or bread of the Eucharist.46 As Barber puts it, icons are a kind of “secondary relic” that translates 39 CI I.15, ed. Kotter, 88–​89; and CI III.24–​25, ed. Kotter, 130–​131. 40 CI I.12–​13, ed. Kotter, 86. 41 CI I.17, ed. Kotter, 93. 42 CI I.46, ed. Kotter, 151. 43 CI I.14, ed. Kotter, 87. 44 Two good accounts are Parry, Depicting the Word, 70–​74; and Christoph Schönborn, God’s Human Face: The Christ-​Icon, trans. Lothar Krauth (Ignatius Press, 1994), 192–​199. 45 CI I.4 (=​III.6), ed. Kotter, 77–​78; trans. Louth, 22. 46 CI I.16 (=​II.14), ed. Kotter, 89–​90; trans. Louth, 29. Cf. I.36 (=​II.32), ed. Kotter, 148.

160 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation the materiality of saintly bodies into material visual traces.47 This is John’s first and most famous innovation. Yet John sees far more in icons than mere matter. Despite his praise of wood, John says that whenever he reverences a cross, what he really venerates is its figural pattern (ἐκτύπωμα), regardless of material; if the two beams of a wooden cross came undone, he would toss the sticks in the fire without hesitation. What matters is not the matter but the figure.48 We should be unsurprised that John, a student of Dionysian theology, offers more than a rough-​hewn defense of icons on the grounds of their wood, gold, and paint. Even if he makes his case forcefully about materiality, let us not identify his intellectual achievement with that single claim. Pentcheva is right that John praises matter in Orations I and II, but then skips the materialist argument in Oration III. Of course, he also skips all of the traditional pre-​iconic arguments listed above as well.49 Yet his second innovation on figurality can be found across Orations I, II, and III with impressive clarity and consistency. That second innovation is this: the icon is valid because it sustains not only the materiality but also the geometry of the body of Jesus in the Incarnation. We do not have to wait for Theodore and Nicephorus to encounter a “formalist” theory of icons. While his successors will evolve more complex theories of circumscription, John of Damascus already has all of the necessary elements in hand. And significantly, he first discovers this argument through a close reading of none other than Dionysius, as his florilegium commentaries make clear. As we will see, “circumscription” is first and foremost a geometrical concept about line and space. Once we grasp its meaning, we can detect a geometrical basso profundo running continuously from John’s Orations I and II, through Oration III, all the way to Theodore’s Refutations: the kenotic emptying of the Word into quantity and the geometrical delineation of the Christ image. The central axis of the iconophile defense of images turns out to be the geometry of figuration. As we saw in Chapter 4, Dionysius teaches that God impressed (ἀποτυποῦσθαι) the created order to the greatest extent possible, filling it with bountiful figures (τύποι) and making every creature an imprint (ἐκτυπώματα). God arranges the cosmic hierarchies to distribute countless “figures of the unfigurable” (σχήματα τῶν ἀσχηματίστων). To defend the veneration of icons, John and Theodore naturally turn to Dionysius. They pick up his theology of impression, which culminates, as we saw, in the inscription of holy images (εἰκονογραφία). In continuity with the eastern reception of Dionysius exemplified in Maximus the Confessor (d. 662 CE), 47 Barber, Figure and Likeness, 34–​36. Although John of Damascus compared icons to relics, Theodore the Studite believed this to be a mistake. See G. W. A. Thorne, “The Ascending Prayer to Christ: Theodore Stoudite’s Defence of the Christ-​eikón against Ninth-​Century Iconoclasm” (PhD diss., University of Durham, 2003), 195–​200. 48 CI II.19, ed. Kotter, 118. In CI III.86, ed. Kotter, 179, John cites excerpts from Leontius of Neapolis that express the same view and may have been his original source. 49 The only vestige in Oration III of John’s earlier pre-​iconic arguments is the analysis of veneration. See CI III.27–​40, ed. Kotter, 135–​141; cf. CI I.14, ed. Kotter, 87.

Kenosis into Magnitude  161 John and Theodore link the Dionysian cosmos to Chalcedonian Christology and in particular to the kenosis or total self-​emptying of Jesus.50 And it is no accident that as they articulate a theology of icons, they also imitate the Areopagite’s embrace of measure. Both the body of Jesus and the icons of that body are signs of divine love that can conduct the eye back to God. But to perceive Jesus in the first place, the contemplative eye needs to measure, and to measure it needs the power of quantity and line. What we saw nascently in Dionysius we now see patently in John and Theodore: to contest Plotinian formlessness means to contest its strictures on geometrical figuration, as if by necessity. The shadow of Dionysius loomed over the entire icon controversy. The politics of the Corpus Dionysiacum remained complicated in Constantinople well into the ninth century, as it was unclear which party most benefited from his views. Dionysius was not cited as an authority at Nicaea II in 787 and was perhaps better known in Palestine.51 So it is difficult to confirm exactly how much of the Areopagite that John and Theodore read.52 Surprisingly, it was not the iconoclasts who appealed to the apophatic Areopagite, but the iconophiles. Dionysius appears in John’s Orthodox Faith and is unusually prominent in the florilegia to his Orations, as we will see.53 Theodore had access to more of Dionysius than the standard selections available in iconophile anthologies.54 In one letter, Theodore casually remarks that he is “speaking in a Dionysian way” (Διονυσαϊκῶς εἰπεῖν), and other letters allude to every Dionysian work.55 When an opponent questions his authority, Theodore quotes Ecclesiastical Hierarchy back at him.56 We know that a copy of Dionysius’s works was made in Constantinople in 827 as a gift for the emperor Louis the Pious, and there is tantalizing evidence that Theodore might

50 See Andrew Louth, “The Reception of Dionysius in the Byzantine World: Maximus to Palamas,” in Re-​Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite, eds. Sarah Coakley and Charles M. Stang (Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), 55–​69. On the iconophiles as a development of post-​Chalcedonian Christology, see John Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975), 173–​192. 51 See Christophe Erismann, “On the Significance of the Manuscript Parisinus graecus 437. The Corpus Dionysiacum, Iconoclasm, and Byzantine-​Carolingian Relations,” in Menschen, Bilder, Sprache, Dinge. Wege der Kommunikation zwischen Byzanz und dem Westen, eds. Falko Daim, Christian Gastgeber, Dominik Heher, and Claudia Rapp (Verlag des Römisch-​Germanischen Zentralmuseums, 2018), 95–​101. 52 See Andrew Louth, “St. Denys the Areopagite and the Iconoclast Controversy,” in Denys L’Aréopagite et sa Postérité en Orient et en Occident, ed. Ysabel de Andia (Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1997), 329–​339; and Andrew Louth, “ ‘Truly Visible Things Are Manifest Images of Invisible Things’: Dionysios the Areopagite on Knowing the Invisible,” in Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Giselle de Nie, Karl F. Morrison, and Marco Mostert (Brepols, 2005), 15–​24. 53 See Mark Edwards and Dimitrios Pallis, “Dionysius and John of Damascus,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite, eds. Mark Edwards, Dimitrios Pallis, and Georgios Steiris (Oxford University Press, 2022), 241–​255. 54 Roman Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness (Oxford University Press, 2002), 22–​24, 153–​164. 55 Erismann, “Parisinus graecus 437,” 98; Louth, “Iconoclast Controversy,” 333–​334. 56 AR II.11 (358BC).

162 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation have helped oversee the copying at Stoudios. Theodore and Nicephorus cite from similar passages in Dionysius.57 With this background in mind, let us examine how John of Damascus reads Dionysius. At the outset of Oration I, John locates the practice of venerating images within the unwritten traditions (ἄγραφα) that adorn the church.58 To discard any of them will mar her beauty, he says. Icons might not seem the most important issue, but even a single mislaid “point” (στιγμήν) can ruin the beauty of a painted face, no matter how “minimal” (ἀπόσῳ) the asymmetry might be. “For what is small is not small,” he says, “if it produces something big [μέγα].”59 To preserve tradition, like other ancient authors, John closes each treatise with an anthology of patristic authorities. Such florilegia became a common feature of conciliar procedure in the fifth-​and sixth-​century Christological controversies after the Council of Chalcedon. They center John’s works in the tradition and suggest the sources of his thinking, not unlike modern footnotes; by one estimate, he cites 258 works by forty-​eight authors on 738 occasions.60 Though appended at the end, those citations and commentaries indicate what he read and considered before composing his own contributions and map out for us the textual bases for his innovations. Since John reacted so quickly to Leo III’s iconoclastic policies, he must have relied upon well-​established patristic authorities like Dionysius to formulate his theological response.61 In Oration I, John cites Dionysius, several different works by Basil of Caesarea, as well as Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, and Leontius of Neapolis. Oration II repeats the same but adds Ambrose of Milan and Maximus Confessor. In Oration III, John adds Theodoret, Cyril of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Clement of Alexandria. While the florilegia of John, Theodore, and Nicephorus all favor Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus equally, only John foregrounds Dionysius.62 Why did John read Dionysius more carefully, and what did he learn from him? Over his three treatises, we find passages from Divine Names, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and Epistles 9 and 10. Dionysius is always given pride of place, since John took the Syrian monk to be the second-​century bishop of Athens. But perhaps that is not the only reason. Of all the patristic authorities named in the florilegia, John 57 See Thorne, “Ascending Prayer,” 215–​217. On the Carolingian response to Byzantine iconoclasm in the Opus Caroli, see Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians. 58 CI I.23, ed. Kotter, 111–​113. 59 CI I.2, ed. Kotter, 66–​67; trans. Louth, 20. 60 Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, 93. 61 See Louth, St. John Damascene, 213–​219. 62 See Parry, Depicting the Word, 145–​155. Some texts cited in Oration III resemble authorities listed at Nicaea II in the generation after John’s death, raising the question of whether they are later interpolations. See Louth, St. John Damascene, 209–​213. Alexander Alexakis has identified several eighth-​ century florilegia from which John and Nicaea II might have drawn. See Alexander Alexakis, Codex Parisinus Graecus 1115 and Its Archetype (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1996), 37–​40 and 254–​257.

Kenosis into Magnitude  163 mentions only a handful in the body of his treatises. He mentions the Cappadocian Fathers on occasion, but his icon theory relies the most on Dionysius, whom he cites several times by name. We can trace John’s debts to Dionysius by examining the three passages which he cited and glossed in his florilegia and by watching as John weaves those Dionysian elements into his Orations. John is first drawn to a few lines in Dionysius’s Letter 9 to Titus. Here Dionysius teaches that divine Wisdom is both solid and liquid food, for elites and the masses, clothing one truth with different figures. This dual identity, he explains, does not compromise but rather elevates the dignity of scriptural signs. Here John begins his first florilegium citation. Dionysius states that contrary to popular prejudice against “sacred symbols” (ἱερῶν συμβόλων), we should never “dishonor” them, but pass “into” them (εἴσω διαβαίνειν). For such outward symbols are “offspring and impressions of divine tokens” (τῶν θείων ὄντα χαρακτήρων ἔκγονα καὶ ἀποτυπώματα) and “manifest images of ineffable visions beyond nature” (εἰκόνας ἐμφανεῖς τῶν ἀπορρήτων καὶ ὑπερφυῶν θεαμάτων).63 John comments here: “Look how [Dionysius] says that we are not to dishonor the images of what is honorable.”64 Figural images (ἀποτυπώματα) might seem to diverge from God’s invisible truth, but in fact they manifest it. John’s second florilegium comes from Book I of Divine Names, where Dionysius explains how God can be named at all. The Scriptures name God as One, Trinity, and universal Cause, but in the Incarnation, God is “love of humanity” (φιλάνθρωπον).65 Here John begins to quote Dionysius. This divine love, says Dionysius, is the source of all revealed names, and the symbols in Scripture are “divine veils” given by God. Dionysius writes: That love of humankind [φιλανθρωπίας] covers intelligible things by that which can be perceived by the senses and things beyond being by the things that are, and provides forms and figures for what is formless and without figure [μορφὰς καὶ τύπους τοῖς ἀμορφώτοις τε καὶ ἀτυπώτοις περιτιθείσης], and makes manifold and gives form to simplicity that is beyond nature and shape in a multitude of separate symbols.66

In his gloss on this passage, John connects God’s love to the gift of figuration: “If it belongs to [God’s] love for human kind [φιλανθρωπία] to provide forms and figures for what is formless and without figure [ἀτυπώτοις καὶ ἀμορφώτοις] and for what is simple and without shape in accordance with our analogy, how then 63 CI I.28 (=​II.24), ed. Kotter, 144; trans. Louth, 40. Cf. Ep IX.2 (1108C). 64 CI I.29 (=​II.25), ed. Kotter, 144; trans. Louth, 40 (modified). This passage resembles a sentence on ἐμφανεῖς εἰκόνες that John adds to his florilegium in Oration III, a fourth Dionysian excerpt. See CI III.43, ed. Kotter, 144. Cf. Ep X (1117B). 65 DN I.4 (592A). 66 CI I.30 (=​II.26), ed. Kotter, 144; trans. Louth, 40. Cf. DN I.4 (592B).

164 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation should we not form images analogous to us [ἀναλόγως ἡμῖν εἰκονίσομεν] of what we see in forms and shapes . . .?”67 That is, if God’s love is the source of figuration, what is there to fear from crafting images? Images are patently analogies, but they are analogous to us, who are the objects of God’s love and the intended recipients of figuration. The yawning gap between the shapeless divine reality and imposed figural shapes is bridged by God’s preemptive love. Visible forms are gifts from God to humanity; they should be trusted, not unmasked or destroyed. John’s third florilegium comes from Book I of Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, drawing our attention to the Dionysian theology of ascent. In that book, Dionysius has just repeated the term ἱεραρχία from Celestial Hierarchy and linked it to the bishops and their liturgies.68 Now he connects hierarchy to the economy of revelation through figures. John cites Dionysius as follows: Let us see our hierarchy, in a way that bears analogy with us [ἀναλόγως ἡμῖν], made manifold by a multitude of symbols of things perceived by the senses, by which we ascend hierarchically, according to our measure [συμμετρίᾳ], to the single-​formed deification, to God and to divine virtue . . . . We ascend by means of images perceived through the senses [αἰσθηταῖς εἰκόσιν] to the divine contemplations.69

This passage represents Dionysius’s first mention of “images” in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Ascending images of God symmetrically reflect God’s descending love for humanity: human figurations of God and God befigured as human. Dionysius uses the phrase “analogous to us” (ἀναλόγως ἡμῖν) that John had already applied in his gloss on Divine Names above. John’s commentary on this excerpt is his longest yet and recapitulates all that he has learned from reading Dionysius: figuration as a gift of divine love, sensible images as ways to God, and the principle of analogical reference to humanity. John writes: If, in a way that bears analogy with us [ἀναλόγως ἡμῖν], we are led by images perceived through the senses to divine and immaterial contemplation and, out of love for human kind, the divine providence provides figures and shapes [τύπους καὶ σχήματα] of what is without shape or figure, to guide us by hand, so to say, why is it unfitting, in a way that bears analogy with us, to make an image [εἰκονίζειν ἀναλόγως ἡμῖν] of one who submitted to shape and form [σχήματι καὶ μορφῇ ὑποκύψαντα] and out of love for human kind was seen naturally as a man [φύσει ὁραθέντα ὡς ἄνθρωπον φιλανθρώπως]?70



67 CI I.31 (=​II.27), ed. Kotter, 145; trans. Louth, 40. 68 EH I.1–​2 (372A–​372D). Cf. CH III.1–​2 (164D–​165B). 69 CI I.32 (=​II.28, III.44), ed. Kotter, 145; trans. Louth, 41. Cf. EH I.2 (373A). 70 CI I.33 (=​II.29, III.45), ed. Kotter, 145; trans. Louth, 41.

Kenosis into Magnitude  165 Here John conspicuously ties the “analogy with us” to figuration both in descent and again in ascent. If God gave figures and shapes out of love, why not answer that love by making images? His point is consummately Dionysian: the hierarchical ladder runs in both directions, emanating from God and returning to God. As Dionysius taught, the basis of hierarchies is the Incarnation, when the Word submitted to visible form to become a physical, sensible “analogy with us.” John includes this key principle in all three Orations. John’s term “submission” (ὑποκύπτω, intensifying κύπτω) means to bend or stoop, like an animal bending to accept a yoke or to be sacrificed; or to shoulder a heavy burden; or to bow so low as to prostrate oneself. The word is not commonly found in John of Damascus, Dionysius, or the New Testament.71 John the Baptist is unfit to “stoop” to tie Jesus’s sandals (Mk 1:7), for example. When confronted with the woman caught in adultery, Jesus “stooped” to write on the ground (Jn 8:6). But most of all, John’s word vividly evokes the free self-​emptying (ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν) of God in Jesus (Phil 2:7), the kenosis. We will have more to say about the centrality of kenosis for both John and Theodore. But for now, note how John’s third gloss on Dionysius concludes by connecting the self-​giving of the Incarnation, on the one hand, and the metric conditions that allowed God to be seen in Jesus, on the other. Jesus “submitted to shape and form” (σχήματι καὶ μορφῇ ὑποκύψαντα), he writes. God loves humanity to the extent that God has committed himself to a definite geometry.

Longing for figures As I suggested above, the materiality of the icon is neither John’s first nor most important claim in Oration I. A survey of the treatise’s structure makes this clear. After a prologue on the integrity of tradition (I.1–​3), John sets forth a nonmaterialist case for the legitimacy of icons, his major argument, which we will explore shortly (I.4–​8). Then follow two discussions that clarify important concepts: on the meanings of “image” (I.9–​13) and on the practices of “veneration” (I.14–​22).72 John concludes by praising unwritten traditions (I.23–​27) and then appends the excerpts of written authorities that comprise his florilegia (I.28–​68). We can see right away that John’s notorious praise of the materiality of icons (I.16) is only an ad hoc remark within a larger discussion of veneration. Well before then, John actually begins Oration I with a nonmaterialist account of iconic visuality (I.8), which he explicitly justifies in terms of a Dionysian theology of image (I.10–​11). This not only means that John is the first iconophile thinker to elaborate the nonmaterialist 71 See ὑποκύπτω in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-​English Lexicon. 72 On the different kinds of images, see Moshe Barasch, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea (New York University Press, 1992), 185–​253.

166 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation iconology later found in Theodore and Nicephorus. It also means that he locates the requisite conceptual resources in the writings of Dionysius. Like sketches for a painting, John’s florilegia from the Corpus Dionysiacum hint at the shape his iconology will take in Orations, where he once again thanks Dionysius by name. Following in the footsteps of his Syrian predecessor, John will turn to divine eros as the ground of figuration. John learns two lessons from Dionysius about proper images of God.73 First, images are not foreign to God’s innermost nature. John explains that God is an active image-​maker who eternally possesses “images and exemplars” (εἰκόνες καὶ παραδείγματα). Before anything comes into being, it must be “iconized” (εἰκονίζει) and “stamped” (ἐχαρακτηρίζετο or ἀνατυποῖ) in the divine Mind.74 God’s interior images legitimate the use of images in theology. John attributes this idea to “Saint Dionysius” and alludes to a passage in Divine Names on παραδείγματα and others like it in the Hierarchies. There Dionysius writes that since God is beyond being, God lacks shape and beauty (ἄμορφος, ἀκαλλής). But because he possesses exemplars, God eternally contains every figure and every form (πάνσχημος, πανείδεος).75 Notably, Dionysius never discusses εἰκόνες per se in that chapter; the iconological interpretation belongs entirely to John. The second lesson concerns the specific, colorful figures (τύποι) that Scripture assigns to God who is invisible (ἀόρατος). Again, John returns to his favorite excerpts from Divine Names and Celestial Hierarchy. Echoing Iamblichus, Dionysius taught that God deliberately consents to being clothed in material figures, recognizing our bodily limitations and our need for perceptible analogies. But unlike Hellenic Neoplatonists, including Proclus, Dionysius understands the economy of hierarchical veiling to be powered by a prior economy of erotic exchange. Before the cycle of descending figure and ascending analogy is the cycle of descending and ascending loves. In both of John’s chosen excerpts, divine φιλανθρωπία donates figures and shapes (μορφαί, τύποι, σχήματα).76 John summarizes this Dionysian doctrine in his own words: If then the divine Word, foreknowing our need for analogies and providing us everywhere with something to help us ascend, applies certain forms [τύπους] to those things that are simple and formless [ἁπλοῖς καὶ ἀτυπώτοις], how may not those things be depicted [εἰκονίσει] which are formed in shapes [σχήμασι μεμορφωμένα] in accordance with our nature, and longed for [ποθούμενα], even though they cannot be seen owing to their absence?77 73 John seems pleased with the results because he constructs a more systematic version of his image theory in Oration III, still centered around the same Dionysian passages from Oration I. See CI III.19–​ 21, ed. Kotter, 127–​129. 74 CI I.10 (=​III.19), ed. Kotter, 84. 75 See DN V.8 (824C). 76 See DN I.4 (592B); and CH I.3 (121C–​124A). 77 CI I.11 (=​III.21), ed. Kotter, 85; trans. Louth, 26.

Kenosis into Magnitude  167 John’s words here recall his interest in φιλανθρωπία in the Dionysius florilegia discussed above. In those passages, John traced the descending love of God to its culmination in Jesus “seen naturally” as a human being. The Incarnation perfects φιλανθρωπία: when Jesus “submits” to shape and form, God’s loving gift of self-​ figuration becomes exhaustive and irrevocable. But now John completes the circle by taking up the ascending love of humankind, once Jesus is no longer “seen naturally” with physical eyes. This is after all the ordinary circumstance of Christians. John proposes that the proper response to the withdrawal of Jesus’s phenomenal presence is ardent longing (ποθούμενα). If God gives himself to be imaged (εἰκονίζω) out of love, the proper response is to yearn (ποθέω) to see. Icon-​making is a symptom of erotic longing. John’s intriguing choice of ποθέω has classical but also biblical roots. Plotinus uses it frequently when discussing eros.78 Paul often longs (ἐπιποθέω) for the distant communities he addresses in his letters (Rom 1:11, Phil 1:8, 1 Thes 3:6). The Christian longs for heaven (2 Cor 5:2) and yearns like an infant for the milk of the Word (1 Pt 2:2). John finds the term in several patristic authors in his florilegia. Commenting on Basil, he asks: “How should I not long to see [ποθήσω ἰδεῖν] what the angels long to see?”79 In a famous homily, John Chrysostom praises a martyred bishop and describes how the faithful yearned for the presence of their saint: “You experience such a longing [ἐπάθετε πόθον], not only for his name but for the figure of his body [τοῦ σώματος τὸν τύπον].”80 When John defines veneration, he says that Christian worship responds to God’s unique glory with wonder, praise, and “yearning” (ποθεῖσθαι).81 Icons of Jesus, Mary, and the saints arise from the Christian’s “divine longing and zeal” (ἐκ θείου πόθου καὶ ζήλου) to memorialize and glorify the one depicted.82 In another comment on Basil, John even links his defense of materiality to the experience of longing. Christian worship is not only spiritual, because humans have a “double nature” of bodies and souls; instruments of the Passion, sacramental elements, and painted icons are all stubbornly material. But John’s championing of materiality, he now confesses, is less a metaphysical principle than a symptom of desire. The materiality of icons, he says, incites longing and brings to mind the materiality of his own body, his own flesh. The apostles saw and touched Jesus’s body, and John thirsts after the same privilege. “Since I am a human being and wear a body, I long [ποθῶ] to have communion in a bodily way with what is holy and to see it,” he writes. When Jesus appears in the sacrament or icon, John takes it as an affirmative, embodied response: “Christ accepted my longing [πόθον] for him.”83



78 See Arnou, Le désir de Dieu dans la philosophie de Plotin, 59–​64. 79 CI I.48, ed. Kotter, 153; trans. Louth, 47. 80 CI II.62, ed. Kotter, 163; trans. Louth, 79. 81 CI III.29, ed. Kotter, 136; trans. Louth, 104–​105. 82 CI II.11 (=​III.10), ed. Kotter, 101; trans. Louth, 68. 83 CI I.36 (=​II.32), ed. Kotter, 148; trans. Louth, 43.

168 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation As John notes, Jesus applied a similar word to himself when he told his disciples that the prophets “longed to see” (ἐπεθύμησαν ἰδεῖν) what they were now seeing, the presence of Jesus (Mt 13:17). Commenting on this verse in Oration II, John adds: “We also therefore long to see [ἐπιποθοῦμεν . . . ἰδεῖν] what it is possible to see.”84 In Oration III, he returns to the same pericope and expands his comments as follows: The apostles saw Christ bodily [εἶδον . . . σωματικῶς] and what he endured and his miracles and they heard his words; we also long [ἐπιθυμοῦμεν] to see and to hear and to be blessed. They saw face to face, since he was present to them bodily; in our case, however, since he is not present bodily, . . . so also through the depiction of images [διὰ γραφῆς εἰκόνων] we behold the form of his bodily character [θεωροῦμεν τὸ ἐκτύπωμα τοῦ σωματικοῦ χαρακτῆρος αὐτοῦ] and the miracles and all he endured, and we are sanctified and assured, and we rejoice and are blessed, and we revere and honor and venerate his bodily character. Beholding his bodily form [χαρακτῆρα], we understand the glory of his divinity as powerful.85

Through icons, John suggests, Christians enter the experience of the disciples, who saw Jesus face to face. They hear his words through the Scriptures, but beyond these they still “long to see.” Jesus was bodily present to his friends, and as they gazed at him, they marveled at his glory. He is absent today, but by seeing the figure of his bodily form (ἐκτύπωμα χαρακτῆρος), Christians can still gaze, rejoice, and behold his glory. Everything hangs on the preservation and transmission of that figuration through the act of inscription (διὰ γραφῆς): not only writing letters in the Gospels about Jesus but drawing the linear patterns of Jesus’s body itself. The object of desire is not an invisible concept of Jesus, nor an exact reproduction, but the minimal delineation of his character in space, just enough to convey presence. As Charles Barber observes, “the icon is the origin of the visual economy of imitation that is central to the continuity of a historically situated Christian narrative.”86 The icon is that linear continuation in time. For this reason, John sees a strong connection between yearning for the absent Jesus and figuring his body in images. Like those who mourned the bishop in John Chrysostom’s sermon, Christians long not only for the name of Jesus but for the shape of his body or face. Jesus has always been visible through figure. Even before the Incarnation, John says, the “figure” (τύπον) of the body of Jesus was seen in the feet of God walking in Eden, the back of God shown to Moses, or the standing man revealed to Daniel. God generated an “imprint” (χαρακτῆρα) of himself in the human body and then created humanity to match that image.87 However, as

84 CI II.20, ed. Kotter, 119; trans. Louth, 75. 85 CI III.12, ed. Kotter, 123; trans. Louth, 93. 86 Barber, Figure and Likeness, 135. 87 CI III.26, ed. Kotter, 132–​133; trans. Louth, 101–​102.

Kenosis into Magnitude  169 John explains in Oration II, it is “impossible to depict [εἰκονισθῆναι] one who is incorporeal and formless [ἀσχημάτιστον], invisible and uncircumscribable [ἀπερίγραπτον].” To attempt to paint God’s form would be sacrilege, like painting human beings to resemble gods. But once the body of Jesus has appeared to the human eye, John notes, we have in fact seen his “nature [φύσιν] and density [πάχος] and form [σχῆμα] and color [χρῶμα].”88 Depiction may proceed if it hews strictly to these dimensions. The body of Jesus is available to the senses through the spectrum of colored light, through the tactile density of its mass, and crucially, through the contours of lines measuring his body’s boundaries—​which more than sheer color or density can manifest his particular character. We need these dimensions dearly, John writes, “for we long to see his form” (ποθοῦμεν γὰρ αὐτοῦ ἰδεῖν τὸν χαρακτῆρα). As John acknowledges, such figures would only permit a reduced vision, like Paul’s “mirror and enigma” (1 Cor 13:12), but even that would suffice for our bodily condition.89 We are not “naked souls” but souls folded into bodies. Baptism comes in water and spirit, communion in bread and body, and prayer in incense and song. So too we only reach “spiritual vision” (πνευματικὴν θεωρίαν) through “bodily vision” (σωματικῆς θεωρίας).90 And for something to be visible in a bodily way, John underscores, it must at a minimum have a figural shape (σχῆμα). “We can make images of everything with a shape [σχημάτων] that we can see,” he states in Oration III. “We understand these things just insofar as they are seen [καθὼς ὡράθη].”91 So that we can have some understanding of souls, angels, and God himself, God accordingly “bestows figures and shapes [τύπους καὶ σχήματα] upon beings that are incorporeal and without figure or any bodily shape.” John calls God’s bestowal of shape and figure a “trans-​figuration” (μετασχηματισμός).92 In his florilegia to Oration II, John quotes another Chrysostom homily that compares the Incarnation to painting: “Just as painters also outline [γραμμὰς περιέχουσι] and sketch lines [σκιογραφοῦσι] on a drawing tablet and add the truth of colors, so also does Christ.”93 In this parable, the Incarnation is the completed portrait of what had been sketched previously in a line drawing. When Jesus is bodily present, he is the finished painting full of color.94 By choosing this excerpt, John seems to suggest that when the fleshly Jesus is absent, the sketch of his contours can persist

88 CI II.5 (=​III.2), ed. Kotter, 71–​72; trans. Louth, 61–​62. 89 CI II.5 (=​III.2), ed. Kotter, 72; trans. Louth, 62. 90 CI III.12, ed. Kotter, 123–​124. On this theme, see CI III.17, ed. Kotter, 126; and CI III.26, ed. Kotter, 134. 91 CI III.24, ed. Kotter, 131; trans. Louth, 100 (modified). 92 CI III.25, ed. Kotter, 131; trans. Louth, 101. The “Transfiguration” of Jesus in the Synoptic gospels (Mk 9:2, Mt 17:2) is the related term μεταμόρφωσις. 93 CI II.63, ed. Kotter, 164; trans. Louth, 79. 94 Iconoclasts and iconophiles agreed that color connotes the substantiality of Jesus’s body. As Nicephorus said, those who are “persecutors of color” (χρωματόμαχος) are “persecutors of Christ” (Χριστόμαχος). See Liz James, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art (Clarendon Press, 1996), 125–​138.

170 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation in outline. Those lines (γραμμαί) maintain the phenomenality of Jesus in the realm of the visible, like a compass orienting those who yearn for the missing body.

Reduction to quantity We first needed to understand John’s approach to Dionysius, both in his florilegia commentaries and in his own citations over three Orations. We saw that John’s logic of figuration rests on the erotic exchange of divine love and human longing, which sets up the Dionysian cycle of hierarchy and analogy. In Chapter 5, it was Dionysius’s bold attribution of eros to the One that allowed for a different approach to negation and figuration. God’s ecstatic self-​gift impresses the world with figures, culminating in the Incarnation. John now takes the next step, as a superlative reader of Dionysius stimulated by the controversy over images. Liberated from the aneidetic condition, it is not only verbal names or colorful images or material signs that indicate the body of Jesus. Prior to these, according to John, it is the measurable, linear shape of his body that renders Jesus recognizably present, so that Christians full of longing can greet and worship him. We long to see his form, says John, by virtue of his figure. Formlessness does not sate the longing of the eyes, but shape does. In this way, the geometrization of vision, once banished by Plotinian henology, is restored and deepened by Christian iconicity. In Oration I, John’s minor argument on the materiality of icons (I.16) is preempted by his major argument about their nonmateriality (I.4–​8 =​III.6–​8). Let us turn to that passage now. Before he begins, John admits the challenge of defending icons by emphasizing the transcendence of the God who cannot be depicted. The negations that he lists in I.4 to I.7 belong to the apophatic legacy of Dionysian theology. Across his three Orations, John repeats the same alpha privatives: God is invisible (ἀόρατον), incorporeal (ἀσώματον), immaterial (ἄϋλον), and inconceivable (ἀκατάληπτον). On occasion, John adds patently Dionysian language: God is even beyond being (ὑπερούσιον οὐσίαν) and beyond divinity (ὑπέρθεον θεότητα).95 Besides these, John adds three geometrical negations, as if imitating Plotinus: God is without figure (ἀσχημάτιστον), without circumscription (ἀπερίγραπτον), and without quantitative measure (ἄποσον).96 His point in compiling this list is that they are all overcome in the event of the Incarnation. Even if one applies the full apophatic pressure of Plotinus and Dionysius combined, each denial must be revolutionized once the Word becomes flesh. The Creator becomes the creature (I.4), the invisible becomes visible (I.4),

95 CI I.4, ed. Kotter, 76. 96 See CI I.4 (=​III.6), ed. Kotter, 76 (ἀπερίγραπτον, ἀσχημάτιστον); CI I.7 (=​II.8, III.7), ed. Kotter, 80 (ἄποσον καὶ ἀπερίγραπτον); CI II.5 (=​III.2), ed. Kotter, 71–​72 (ἀσχημάτιστον . . . καὶ ἀπερίγραπτον); and CI II.7 (=​III.4), ed. Kotter, 74 (μήτε σχῆμα μήτε περιγραφήν).

Kenosis into Magnitude  171 the incorporeal becomes materialized (I.16), and what used to be idolatry becomes true veneration (I.5–​7). None of these reversals, however, speaks to the heart of John’s intervention. John is less interested in the generic visibility of God, or the sheer materiality of Jesus’s body, as important as those are. Instead, he focuses on the specific images (τύποι), shapes (μορφαί), figures (σχήματα), impressions (ἐκτυπώματα), and characters (χαρακτῆρες) that allow one to recognize the Jesus yearned for within the erotic economy. In chapter I.8, John reveals his fundamental interests in figuration and measure. It is one thing to ask: “How could the invisible [ἀόρατον] be depicted [εἰκονισθήσεται]?” But, he says, the more challenging question is: “How could one without measure or size or limit [ἄποσον καὶ ἀμέγεθες καὶ ἀόριστον] be drawn [γραφήσεται]? How could the formless [ἀνείδεον] be made [ποιωθήσεται]?”97 This is the crux of John’s insight. The body of Jesus appears not only as visible, or material, but also as measurable. In the apophatic negations that he lists in chapter I.4, John goes out of his way to add, unusually, that God is without figure (σχῆμα), quantity (ποσός), or circumscription (περιγράφειν). By doing so, he trains our gaze on the dimensions of Incarnation that most conspicuously overthrow the apophatic status quo. In Jesus, God is not only suddenly visible and tangible, but even more strangely, suddenly measurable, traceable, and quantifiable. The new possibility of the Incarnation is not only to “image” Jesus (εἰκονισθήσεται) or to “color in” Jesus (χρωματουργηθήσεται), both of which might have been done within the imagination. Beyond these, one must now “graph” (γραφήσεται) the figure of Jesus in the exterior space of the world, out in front of us, in three dimensions.98 John starts from the total transcendence of God in order to lift out into relief the radical change wrought by the Incarnation. Beyond the customary Dionysian negations, John adds peculiar denials of figure, measure, and circumscription, topics that remind us of his florilegial commentaries on Dionysius. Now, John takes a final step: he links the Incarnation directly to the categories of measure and magnitude. He defines with exquisite precision how the conditions of representation have been altered. Most accounts of Damascene iconology focus on materiality, but in fact John is thinking about geometry:

97 CI I.8 (=​III.8), ed. Kotter, 81; trans. Louth, 24. John commonly negates visibility, figure, shape, matter, body, being, and divinity. He rarely negates form (εἶδος), but this passage and a similar aside (CI III.24, ed. Kotter, 131) are two exceptions that prove the rule. Context suggests that he is not defining the One as formless, as in Plotinus. He states that drawing (γράφειν) manifests quantity (ποσός, μέγεθος), just as color (χρῶμα) manifests embodiment (σῶμα). Similarly, he says, making (ποιεῖν) manifests form (εἶδος). But craft production does not in itself create ontological εἶδος; the form manifested in the process of craft production is rather visible shape, which John customarily names σχῆμα or μορφή. The point being made is that God does not have a visible shape, not that God is the formless One. In CI III.24, the case is even clearer. What John negates of God (ἀνείδεος) he predicates of cherubim, angels, and demons; by ἀνείδεος, he clearly means ἀμόρφωτος or ἀτύπωτος, as in CI I.30 (=​ II.26) or CI I.31 (=​II.27) above. 98 CI I.8 (=​III.8), ed. Kotter, 81.

172 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation When you see the bodiless become human for your sake, then you may accomplish the figure of a human form [ἀνθρωπίνης μορφῆς τὸ ἐκτύπωμα]; when the invisible becomes visible in the flesh, then you may depict the likeness of something seen; when one who, by transcending his own nature, is bodiless, formless [ἀσχημάτιστος], incommensurable, without magnitude or size [ἄποσός τε καὶ ἀπήλικος καὶ ἀμεγέθης], that is, one who is in the form of God, taking the form of a slave, by this reduction to quantity and magnitude [ταύτῃ συσταλῇ πρὸς ποσότητά τε καὶ πηλικότητα] puts on the characteristics [χαρακτῆρα] of a body, then depict him on a board and set up to view the One who has accepted to be seen.99

This remarkable sentence recapitulates the key elements of John’s iconology while placing them on an unexpected new foundation. Again, he explains that the icons are licensed by the Incarnation. Once the invisible makes itself seen, and once the bodiless takes a material body, that visible body can be drawn on a board, reducing flesh to likeness. But here for the first time we learn exactly how that reduction to figuration operates. As we saw above, John comments in his third Dionysius florilegium that God “submits to shape and form” (σχήματι καὶ μορφῇ ὑποκύψαντα) in the Incarnation in order to be seen naturally as a human being.100 In that passage, John used the verb “to stoop low” (ὑποκύπτειν), alluding tacitly to Pauline kenosis. Both sides of the debate over icons realized that everything hangs on the meaning of kenosis. For example, iconoclasts were fond of citing Eusebius of Caesarea’s Letter to Constantia, as they did at the iconoclast Synod of Hiereia when anathematizing John of Damascus.101 Writing to Constantia, the sister of Constantine I, Eusebius opposed making icons, for the only true image is the body of Jesus himself. To prove his point, Eusebius cites Philippians 2:7. The Incarnation, in Paul’s terms, is the moment when the “form of God” (μορφὴ θεοῦ) becomes the “form of a slave” (μορφὴ δούλου). Eusebius reasons that since human and divine natures are now “intermingled,” the divinity subsumes the humanity, and any painting of Christ would only portray the “form of a servant,” the mere humanity.102 Here in Oration I, John himself cites Philippians 2:7 and adds his own gloss in contradiction of Eusebius. Instead of the sacrificial metaphor of the stooping animal, John opts for the technical term “reduction” or “contraction.” The verb συστέλλειν means compressing or shortening something into more limited form. For example, Paul exhorts the Corinthians to change their ways because eschatological time has been

99 CI I.8 (=​III.8), ed. Kotter, 82; trans. Louth, 24. My emphasis. 100 CI I.33 (=​II.29, III.45), ed. Kotter, 145; trans. Louth, 41. 101 See Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 85–​86. 102 See Schönborn, God’s Human Face, 57–​60; cf. Florovsky, “Origen, Eusebius and the Iconoclastic Controversy.”

Kenosis into Magnitude  173 “reduced” (συνεσταλμένος) (1 Cor 7:29). We hear the same word in the “systolic” contractions of a beating heart. The Incarnation is not simply a reduction of God to visibility. The primary reduction, which enables that visibility to be seen in the first place, is the “reduction to quantity and magnitude” (συσταλῇ πρὸς ποσότητά τε καὶ πηλικότητα). John invokes technical terms for mathematical measurement that date back to Plato and Aristotle. We know he is familiar with these from geometrical discussions in his other works.103 Plato defines the πηλίκον of lines, and Aristotle applies ποσόν to count number and time. The two terms are famously yoked together in the works of the Alexandrian Neopythagorean, Nicomachus of Gerasa (70–​150 CE). From Nicomachus up through Descartes, πηλίκον denotes continuous quantity (how much) while ποσόν denotes discontinuous quantity (how many). Together, they constitute magnitude (μέγεθος), whose dimensions structure all that can be seen, known, or measured in the physical world. In the century after Nicomachus, for instance, Plotinus uses ποσόν and μέγεθος liberally whenever he discusses geometry. So John has picked his terms quite carefully. The invisible God, he states, is ἄποσος, ἀπήλικος, and ἀμεγέθης. But after the kenosis of the Incarnation, taking on visible flesh, God has given himself exhaustively into ποσόν and πηλίκον, the latitude and longitude of geometrical space. God, the measure of all, can now be measured in Jesus. For John, this means that visual representation has been irrevocably changed, and painting itself enjoys new powers. The lines and figures of Christian art bear a new responsibility. As Parry writes, “unless there are images of Christ, the Incarnation might as well not have taken place,” for “the Incarnation cannot remain merely conceptual.”104 The essence of humanity has been changed, its members touched by divine life from the inside. Worship has changed, and the rules of veneration have to be rewritten. But John sees something more: the conditions of measurement have also been permanently changed. Magnitude itself has been reinscribed with divine self-​measuring.105 103 For example, in an early work, John discusses quantity (ποσότητος) and discrete and continuous quanta (ποσά) in detail. His sources are Aristotle’s Categories, Porphyry’s Isagoge on the Categories, and Ammonius’s commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge. Continuous quantities share a common limit (κοινὸν ὅρον); discrete quantities have distinct limits. The five species of continuous quanta are solid, surface, line, space, and time. The three things without quantity are point, unit, and instant. Since the point is without quantity, the line (γραμμή) is the first measurable continuous quantum. See John of Damascus, Institutio elementaris. Capita philosophica (Dialectica), 49, ed. Bonifatius Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, Bd. I (De Gruyter, 1969), 114–​117; trans. Chase, 73–​77. 104 Parry, Depicting the Word, 70, 78. Catherine Osborne puts it well: “The point is not then that we can copy the once-​upon-​a-​time incarnate Christ but that Christ is now in a position of being currently Incarnationable. A picture of Christ is the currently incarnate Christ, not a copy of an old no-​longer-​ existent man. Christ exists incarnate in art . . . and he depends on art . . . for his current Incarnation.” Catherine Osborne, “The Repudiation of Representation in Plato’s Republic and its Repercussions,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) 33 (1987): 68; cited in Thorne, “Ascending Prayer,” 202. 105 Translated into a modern idiom: “There is no sign without matter, and no figure without ground. Above all, after the Incarnation, there can be no matter without sign, no ground without figure, because all matter is a figure of the Incarnation, as all ground is a sign.” Charles Lock, “Iconic Space and the Materiality of the Sign,” Religion and the Arts 1, no. 4 (1997): 17.

174 The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Like painting, geometry assumes a new theophanic status after the Incarnation. Divine φιλανθρωπία gives the body of Jesus to be seen in the graphic field of human vision, and Christians respond with desire (πόθος) to see, expressed in figuration. But where they meet—​the gift and its reception—​is in the interface of magnitude. As John writes above, God has willed to be seen, to assume the shape of a body, to be inscribed into representation, all by being reduced to measure. What allows the body of Jesus to be seen by the longing eye is linear figuration. Ultimately, it is not color or texture but geometrical measure, the bare line, that preserves the phenomenality of Jesus. If the appearance of God in Jesus is an act of love inviting a response of love, and if geometrical measure safeguards the visibility of Jesus, then strange as it sounds, quantity and magnitude, in their enduring extension and inscription, are the expression and the guarantee of divine Love. Despite the originality of John’s geometrizing doctrine of kenosis, to some extent he misunderstands his own insights. Early in Oration I, John frames his image theory in anti-​Jewish terms. Before the Incarnation, he explains, God could be neither “imaged” (εἰκονιζόμενον) nor “delineated” (περιγραφόμενον). The Second Commandment against graven images, he says, forbade depictions of God on account of the immaturity of the Jews. Like children, they could not be trusted, given their innate propensity to idolatry, so God subjected them to the stern tutor of the Mosaic law. But with the advent of Jesus, God can lift the sanction, dismiss the tutor, and permit figuration by the mature Christian people. Freed of Jewish superstition, John concludes that Christians can discern what can and cannot be depicted.106 This metaphor of Christian maturation beyond Jewish idolatry dates back to Paul and is only one chapter in the lengthy compendium of Christian anti-​Semitic writings contra Iudaeos.107 John of Damascus lamentably repeats ideas that have fomented real violence for centuries, but in attacking Judaism, he also misconstrued the significance of his own icon theory. Rightly understood, it stands opposed not to Jews and Judaism at all, but rather to pre-​Christian Greek philosophy. John is willing to countenance a radical caesura in the history of theology, given the event of God’s self-​revelation in the Incarnation. But he puts the break in the wrong place. What the Incarnation disrupts and overrides is not the Mosaic law, but the One of Hellenic Neoplatonism. The formless One is no longer formless in the same way. If the conditions of visuality have been irrevocably altered, then the aesthetics of form must change with them. In this event, the ordinary continuity of Platonist henology suffers an “epistemic rupture,” as Charles Barber writes of iconophile Christology: “the Incarnation has opened an era wherein human 106 CI I.8 (=​III.8), ed. Kotter, 81. See also CI I.21 (=​II.15), II.8 (=​III.5), II.9 (=​III.9), II.20, III.8, and III.34, not counting anti-​Semitic passages in florilegial excerpts. 107 John would have used Adversus Judaeos literature from Leontius of Neapolis and Stephen of Bostra. On John’s comments on Jews and Judaism, see Parry, Depicting the Word, 6–​49; and Louth, St. John Damascene, 210–​212. See further Averil Cameron, “Byzantines and Jews: Some Recent Work on Early Byzantium,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 20, no. 1 (1996): 249–​274.

Kenosis into Magnitude  175 knowledge has added to the apophatic descriptions of a limitless Godhead the paradoxical description of a deity who is necessarily and in a continuing manner both limited and limitless.”108 The One used to be formless—​and now that formlessness finds itself superseded and negated. What John sketches in his Orations is the germ of a post-​Plotinian theological aesthetics. If the One is no longer purely invisible but now is rendered visible (εἰκονίζειν), then the One is no longer beyond measurement but can be traced with line (περιγράφειν). John’s iconology undoes the aneidetic condition to a new degree. Plotinus had said that the One cannot love because the One is autarchic. Dionysius overturned the first of the three postulates and returned eros to the One. Plotinus had said that the One must be autarchic, lest it lose its integrity as One. After studying Dionysius, John of Damascus has now overturned this second postulate as well. John describes the consequences of the One’s complete outpouring into geometrical figuration—​its kenosis into magnitude—​precisely what Plotinus had always sought to prevent, given the ugliness of its repulsive bulk. What has now become obsolete is not the Mosaic law, whose prohibition on arbitrary figuration is still incumbent upon Christians as well as Jews. Rather, from the perspective of Dionysius and John, what has been suddenly rendered obsolete, what finds itself in need of a new tutor, what might seem in retrospect elementary or ingenuous, is the notion of an absolute formless One, which in its purity and self-​sufficiency can neither love nor give itself to be seen.

108 Barber, Figure and Likeness, 69. “The Iconoclast wanted the world to be intelligible in its own terms once again. The Iconophile claimed that even logic itself had been irreversibly altered by the divine oikonomia. . . . Once the Word became flesh he did not subsequently become non-​flesh. The heart of the Iconophile argument against the Iconoclast Christological dilemma is the insistence that the paradox of the Incarnation cannot be relegated to a period of thirty-​three years several centuries ago.” Patrick Henry, “What Was the Iconoclastic Controversy About?” Church History 45, no. 1 (1976): 23; cited in Thorne, “Ascending Prayer,” 202.

7

The Icon as Figure Line in exile In the judgment of Christoph Schönborn, Theodore the Studite is “the most important and also the last of the great defenders of images.”1 Theodore wrote two generations after John of Damascus, and although remarkably unaware of his predecessor, he followed a similar path. Both men were inspired by the Dionysian vision of analogical figuration, and both are unthinkable apart from their monastic identity. Theodore would end up spending a third of his vocation in exile, and much like John he would die without seeing his views vindicated. In this chapter, I lay out Theodore’s remarkable icon theory in detail, with special attention to the geometrical imagination that fires it. Like John, but in a more focused and rigorous way, Theodore elevates the formal aspect of icons above their physical materiality. But what John only grasped in fragments and momentary insights, Theodore was able to weld into an impressive, durable whole. Theodore was born in Constantinople in 759, during the height of the iconoclastic policies of Constantine V (emperor 741–​775 CE) and just after the Synod of Hiereia that he convened to promote them.2 Theodore’s father was an imperial treasurer with aristocratic connections, so his family had resources to provide a tutor for their eldest son.3 When he was twenty-​two, his parents decided to pursue their own monastic vocations. His uncle Plato, the abbot of the Symbola monastery in Bithynia who would serve as adviser to Nicaea II in 787, joined the family venture at Sakkoudion and led their new community alongside his protégé, Theodore. As a monk, Theodore studied the Cappadocian Fathers, John Chrysostom, and works on asceticism and Aristotelian philosophy. Given the lexicon on display in his writings, his education must have included elements of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, harmonics, and astronomy). Whether directly or through a schoolbook compilation, Theodore seems to have acquired some familiarity with Euclidean principles.4

1 Schönborn, God’s Human Face, 218–​235; cf. Thorne, “Ascending Prayer,” 57–​59. 2 On Theodore’s life, see Thomas Pratsch, Theodoros Studites (759–​826)—​zwischen Dogma und Pragma: der Abt des Studiosklosters in Konstantinopel im Spannungsfeld von Patriarch, Kaiser und eigenem Anspruch (Peter Lang, 1998); but especially, Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 3–​78. 3 See Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 67–​69. 4 See Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 19–​24, 153–​164.

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0010

The Icon as Figure  177 In 795, Theodore publicly opposed the remarriage of Constantine VI and was rewarded with a few years of exile in Thessaloniki. Once court politics shifted, the iconophile Empress Irene offered him the old Stoudios monastery in the city of Constantinople.5 By the age of forty, Theodore had moved his community there, attracting hundreds more monks, and began his life’s project of reforming the monastic rule. Theodore’s monastic and administrative reforms were highly influential and spread to other affiliated “Studite” communities. But in 814, Leo V reintroduced imperial iconoclasm by removing the Christ icon from the palace gate and urged churches to do likewise. After years of conflict with the emperor, Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople abdicated and went into exile. His successor invalidated Nicaea II and instituted a loyalty oath for monks. Now a revered abbot, Theodore decided to respond by conspicuously processing the monastery’s icons on Palm Sunday. As the leader of the resistance, he was imprisoned, whipped, and starved. The next emperor granted a qualified amnesty, but also banned iconophiles from the city of Constantinople, and Theodore had to relocate his community to rural Bithynia where he died in exile in 826. Only after the final Triumph of Orthodoxy in 843 were his remains transferred back to Stoudios. It was during that final exile, provoked by another iconoclastic council in 815, that Theodore wrote his three-​volume Refutation of the Iconoclasts. Beyond this work, he wrote over 500 letters on doctrine, monastic reform, and church affairs, as well as some 300 sermons and an influential handbook for abbots, earning his reputation as the leading Byzantine author of the ninth century. As G. W. A. Thorne has shown, each of Theodore’s Refutations adopts a different method. Refutation I appeals to tradition against the harsh iconoclasm of Constantine V and the Synod of Hiereia by compiling florilegia. Refutation II responds to the moderate iconoclasm of the Council of 815 by focusing more on lex orandi than lex credendi. By the time of Refutation III, Theodore faces a pastoral emergency as some of his contemporaries had begun to compromise with moderate iconoclasts. So he steps out on his own and uses Aristotelian philosophy to define the Christ image systematically.6 Despite these different approaches, Theodore focuses consistently on circumscription across his three treatises. Yet that theme is rarely studied in detail; those who recognize the importance of circumscription usually favor Nicephorus instead.7 Far more than John of Damascus, Theodore formulates a sophisticated theory of univocal, geometrical circumscription. To understand his achievement, 5 For a fuller account of this dramatic period, see Leslie Brubaker, Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm (Bristol Classical Press, 2012), 32–​55; and Alexey Stambolov, “Monks vs. the State: The Stoudites and Their Relations with the State and Ecclesiastical Authorities in Late Eighth-​and Early Ninth-​Century Byzantium,” in Annual of Medieval Studies, Vol. 21, eds. Judith A. Rasson and Katalin Szende (Central European University, 2015), 193–​205. 6 See Thorne, “The Ascending Prayer to Christ.” 7 See, e.g., Belting, Likeness and Presence, 149–​154. Cholij claims that Theodore’s iconology does not “evidence any original creative thinking” (Theodore the Stoudite, 25). Barber’s account of circumscription excludes Theodore almost entirely. See Barber, Figure and Likeness, 78–​79, 116–​119.

178  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation we can compare his distinctive approach to those of his contemporaries. Theodore saw something that they did not about the potency of lines, and until his intervention, the line remained, like him, in exile. John of Damascus was already using the term “circumscription” in Orations I and III in the 720s and 730s, although never systematically.8 The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 would address the topic in passing.9 But it was really emperor Constantine V and the Synod of 754 that put circumscription at the center of the debate over images. In his iconoclastic summa, Constantine posed a clever dilemma in the hopes of checkmating the iconophile monks.10 Since the Council of Chalcedon, the name “Christ” had come to denote the unity of human and divine natures against the error of Nestorius. Constantine reasons that when an icon attempts to depict “Christ,” either it co-​circumscribes human and divine natures together (συμπεριγραφήσεσθαι) or it circumscribes only the human nature. If the former, the icon falsely circumscribes God along with the human (the Eutychian heresy). Constantine writes: “since that which is rendered is but one face, circumscribing the face in that way would clearly be to circumscribe the divine nature as well, which however is uncircumscribable.”11 On the other hand, if the icon only circumscribes human nature, it only renders a mere man, separates the divinity and humanity, and merits no special veneration (the Nestorian heresy).12 Hence, no icon can possibly be legitimate. Constantine’s “theological radicalism” even led him to reject the intercession of the saints, the invocation of the Theotokos, and the possession of relics.13 Both Theodore and Nicephorus, then Patriarch of Constantinople—​writing independently but simultaneously—​faced Constantine’s circumscription theory head on. Theodore penned his Refutations from exile in the last decade before his death in 826; between 818 and 820, Nicephorus composed his own refutation, also from exile. Both men contended that the iconoclastic arguments about περιγράφειν actually vindicated the icon, and both benefited from Byzantine philosophical traditions that gave them access to Aristotle’s Categories, Physics, and Metaphysics.14 But they did so in quite different ways, and it is fair to consider 8 See Parry, Depicting the Word, 99. 9 Nicaea II addressed the iconoclasts’ charge that a circumscribed icon of God is idolatrous and divides the two natures, but failed to do justice to the seriousness of the problem. Later volumes add a citation from Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy, but the final Definition fails to mention circumscription at all. The conciliar text is translated in Daniel J. Sahas, Icon and Logos: Sources in Eighth-​Century Iconoclasm (University of Toronto Press, 1986), 77 (244BC); 86–​87 (253E–​256A); and 154–​156 (336E–​340B). 10 The Definition of Hiereia resembles Constantine on this point. See Sahas, Icon and Logos, 83 (252AB) and 154–​158 (337C–​341C). 11 “. . .. . . ἐπειδὴ καὶ τὸ χαρακτηριζόμενον ἓν πρόσωπόν ἐστι, καὶ ὁ περιγράφων τὸ πρόσωπον ἐκεῖνο, δῆλον ὅτι καὶ τὴν θείαν φύσιν περιέγραψεν, ἥτις ἐστὶν ἀπερίγραπτος.” Peuseis, Fragment 13 =​PG 100: 301C. Cited in Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 43. 12 Peuseis, Fragment 5 =​PG 100: 236 CD. Cited in Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 41. 13 Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 151, 164. 14 See Alexander, Patriarch Nicephorus, 198–​204. Alexander posits a “scholastic” predecessor that mediates Aristotelian terminology to both authors; common source notwithstanding, it is only Theodore who uses Aristotle to thoroughly geometrize circumscription.

The Icon as Figure  179 Theodore’s as the true breakthrough. Before Theodore, “circumscription” typically appears in three overlapping ways in ancient Greek literature. Either it had a simple geometrical meaning, namely the inscription of circular perimeter containing an interior space. Or if used in a theological sense, circumscription was denied of God apophatically; just as God is un-​limited and un-​contained, God is un-​circumscribed. Or it was used to describe the graphic effect of any representational depiction: a portrait circumscribes the face of its subject by containing it visually on a surface, whether through painting or drawing. Theodore combined all three traditions in a new way. Let us briefly review them so that we can understand Theodore’s audacious proposal. Plotinus uses περιγραφή in the Enneads in the geometrical sense, but not as frequently as his preferred cognates, περιέχειν and περιλαμβάνω.15 Natural elements arise once their outline (περιγραφή) is impressed into matter (II.9.12). Matter lacks extension, but form circumscribes (περιγράφουσα) it, yielding magnitude (μέγεθος) (II.4.11; VI.4.7). Intellect delineates the natures of things, like a “figure akin to circumscription” (σχήματι νοῦ οἷον περιγραφῇ) containing within itself many “circumscriptions and figures” (περιγραφάς . . . καὶ σχηματισμούς) (VI.7.14). The One generates numbers indirectly by halting its self-​procession and “drawing a line” (περιγράψασα) (VI.6.11). But more often in Plotinus, περιγραφή is a target for negation. Something circumscribed is always penultimate but proximate to something else more valuable, and so denotes a false limitation or an admonitory failure. For instance, when Plotinus defines contemplation as a kind of ideal writing, circumscription serves as a foil. Geometers have to draw lines (γράφουσιν . . . γραμμαί) around bodies, but contemplatives face no such limits, since the soul is not “circumscribed by quantity” (περιγέγραπται μεγέθει) (III.8.4–​ 5). Seeking union with the One means suspending merely relative distinctions and limits, or “ceasing to circumscribe oneself off from all being” (αφεὶς περιγράφειν) (VI.5.7; cf. IV.8.6). In his essay “On Beauty,” the divine Light is neither “circumscribed by figure” (σχήματι . . . περιγραφέν) nor unbounded in magnitude (I.6.9). Circumscription draws a sketch of the One for contemplatives to study, but then to studiously erase. Before the iconoclastic controversy, circumscription also enjoyed a brief tenure as a negative name for God. Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr use περιγραφή to distinguish the uncircumscribed Father from the circumscribed Son.16 Gregory of Nyssa calls all created beings “circumscribed” insofar as they are confined to finite spatiotemporal magnitudes. If circumscription means “bodily appearance and bulk, in place and in difference of figure and color,” then only God

15 See J. H. Sleeman and Gilbert Pollet, eds., Lexicon Plotinianum (Brill, 1980), 835–​836. On theological uses of περιέχειν in the second to fourth centuries, see Schoedel, “ ‘Topological’ Theology and Some Monistic Tendencies in Gnosticism,” 88–​108. 16 Cited in Parry, Depicting the Word, 99.

180  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation is uncircumscribed.17 Gregory of Nazianzus doubts whether God could be both holy and circumscribed.18 John of Damascus himself discusses circumscription in Fount of Knowledge, the first of four books of The Orthodox Faith, under the heading, “On the place of God, and that only the Divinity is uncircumscribed.” Physical place (τόπος) is the “limits of a containing thing” (πέρας τοῦ περιέχοντος). God is absolutely “uncircumscribed” (ἀπερίγραπτος), yet also makes his “own place” (ἑαυτοῦ τόπος); the “places of God” (τόποι θεοῦ) are wherever God operates—​in heaven, on earth, in Jesus, in the church.19 In his Orations, John tends to use circumscription apophatically. In Oration I, God is invisible (ἀόρατον), unfigurable (ἀσχημάτιστον), and therefore uncircumscribable (ἀπερίγραπτον).20 Yet John does carve out one significant exception. He notes that the Mosaic law requires that circumscribed representations (ὡς περιγραπτῶν)—​two cherubim sculpted in gold—​be placed at the heart of the temple of the uncircumscribed God (ὡς ἀπεριγράπτου).21 At first, John makes sense of this by recalling that the entire temple is figural. It is an image (εἰκών) and a shadow (σκιά) of the divine reality (Heb 10:1). As prophecy of Christ and the church, the temple is the “figure of a figure” (τύπου τύπος).22 But in Oration III, John returns to the cherubim case. All angels, souls, and demons lack materiality, but given their intellectual activity, they do possess form. For this reason, he posits, such creatures can be legitimately circumscribed: they can be “reasonably depicted [εἰκονίζονται] as having shape [σχήματα] and bodily outline [περιγραφήν] and color”—​presumably because the figuration is knowingly nonrepresentational. Even God is “figured” (σχηματίζονται) in Scripture in this way, and under this limited provision God is indeed “circumscribed” (περιγράφονται).23 Nicephorus sought to redefine “circumscription” in order to turn it against the iconoclasts.24 As he untangles Constantine’s theological riddle, he distinguishes three types of representation: verbal description (ὑπογραφή), painting (γραφή),

17 See Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Ablabium 3.1 and Contra Eunomius 3.1; cited in Torstein Theodor Tollefsen, St. Theodore the Studite’s Defence of the Icons: Theology and Philosophy in Ninth-​Century Byzantium (Oxford University Press, 2018), 62. 18 Cited in Thorne, “Ascending Prayer,” 46. 19 See John of Damascus, Expositio fidei, ed. Bonifatius Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, Bd. II (De Gruyter, 1973), 37–​38; trans. Chase, 197–​199. 20 See CI I.4, ed. Kotter, 76; CI I.8, ed. Kotter, 81. 21 CI I.15, ed. Kotter, 88. See Exod 25:17–​22. 22 CI I.15, ed. Kotter, 88–​89. 23 CI III.24–​25, ed. Kotter, 130–​131; trans. Louth, 100. 24 On Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople, see Alexander, Patriarch Nicephorus; John Travis, In Defense of the Faith: The Theology of Patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople (Hellenic College Press, 1984); Marie-​José Mondzain-​Baudinet, Nicéphore. Discours contre les Iconoclastes (Éditions Klincksieck, 1989); and especially Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, which translates excerpts from Nicephorus’s Antirrheticus. On circumscription, see especially Alexander, Patriarch Nicephorus, 198–​ 213; Parry, Depicting the Word, 99–​113; and Thorne, “Ascending Prayer,” 214–​229.

The Icon as Figure  181 and circumscription (περιγραφή).25 Constantine’s dilemma conflates painting and circumscription, so to combat this, Nicephorus offers a narrower definition. All circumscription pertains to either space, time, or knowledge: either “the comprehending and limiting [περίσχεσιν καὶ ὃρον] of the thing comprehended and limited, or termination [ἀποπεράτωσιν] of what is begun or moved, or apprehension [κατάληψιν] of what is thought and known.”26 Obviously, Jesus’s humanity is spatially located, began at a point in time, and can be apprehended. So in all three ways, his humanity is circumscribable. Every human body, writes Nicephorus, is “shaped [ἐσχηματισμένον], tridimensional [τριχῆ διαστατὸν], tangible [ἁπτὸν], provided with organs,” and therefore necessarily “circumscribable.”27 There is no such thing as an uncircumscribable body. “For place [τόπος] circumscribes and contains the body,” he argues, quoting Aristotle, “if it is true that ‘space [τόπος] is the limiting surface of the body continent, in which it contains the body contained.’ ”28 Constantine assumed that the act of painting effects circumscription. But as Nicephorus points out, painting (γραφή) and circumscription (περιγραφή) have two distinct definitions (λόγοι).29 Painting a portrait does not enclose the subject in space, time, or apprehension. A holy person depicted, say, in mosaic stones might be absent from the room or even deceased. The saint is represented (γραφή); the physical mosaic itself is circumscribed (περιγραφή). The saint can walk around unhindered, but the mosaic is fixed to the wall. Icons are legitimate because their graphic images do not circumscribe God; they merely represent Jesus’s humanity and circumscribe neither human nor divine natures. According to Nicephorus, the figural line in the icon stands in no relationship with the linear contours of the body of Jesus: one is γραφή and the other περιγραφή. For example, the shape (σχῆμα) of the Cross derives from the figure (τύπος) of Jesus’s outstretched arms as they are extended laterally in the crucifixion, he says. The flesh is the essence; the lines are an accident.30 The geometrical line of description (διαγράφειν, ὑπογράφειν) is not intrinsic to the icon, in his view. For all of its clarity, Nicephorus’s account of icons seems to depreciate their holy power. Why would one venerate a painted portrait of Jesus that merely represents his humanity? Icons promise something more: to manifest in some way the divine person.31

25 See Alexander, Patriarch Nicephorus, 199. 26 Nicephorus, Antirrheticus, II.12 (357A), cited in Alexander, Patriarch Nicephorus, 207. 27 Nicephorus, Antirrheticus, I.20 (244B), cited in Alexander, Patriarch Nicephorus, 198–​199. 28 Nicephorus, Antirrheticus, I.20 (241A), cited in Alexander, Patriarch Nicephorus, 206. Cf. Aristotle, Physics IV.4 (212a7). 29 Alexander, Patriarch Nicephorus, 208–​209. 30 See Barber’s translation of Nicephorus, Antirrheticus, III.35 (428C–​433A), in Figure and Likeness, 99–​101. Compare Franses’s translation in Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 241–​244. 31 On Nicephorus’s Christology, see Schönborn, God’s Human Face, 213–​219.

182  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation

The geometry of circumscription The magnitude of Theodore’s achievement becomes clear against the background of these competing icon theories. John of Damascus grounded the veneration of icons in the geometricity of the body of Jesus. The Incarnation becomes figurable due to God’s kenosis into the conditions of quantitative measure. Yet John never saw the connection between geometry and the practice of linear circumscription. On the other hand, Constantine V began from his own abstract theory of circumscription and used it to justify radical iconoclasm.32 In his rebuttal, Nicephorus likewise starts with generic principles about visual representation, separating the natural circumscription of physical bodies from their technical circumscription in art. Nicephorus deploys circumscription equivocally: it means one thing for the humanity of Jesus and another for the icon, one thing in geometrical space and another in aesthetic space. Theodore triangulates his own position as follows. He begins from John’s starting point by focusing on the metric conditions of Jesus’s body, but then directly connects linear measurement with circumscription. Unlike Constantine V and Nicephorus alike, Theodore attempts to theorize circumscription on the basis of the Incarnation, out of the categories of Chalcedonian Christology, and not the other way around. But in a departure from Nicephorus’s strategy, Theodore harmonizes natural circumscription and technical circumscription, for reasons that are ultimately Christological, as we will see. This is his most important innovation. Because Theodore interprets circumscription as geometrical, he can deploy circumscription univocally, not equivocally. The line of the body is the line of the icon, full stop, and that line is defined geometrically. For Theodore, therefore, circumscription is no longer a property to be negated apophatically, as it was in John of Damascus and patristic theology before him, like being contained or being limited. For Theodore, rather, the line of circumscription inscribes a new mark into the world, a line that measures God, and thus one that speaks kataphatically. Theodore’s approach to circumscription in Refutation I holds together both aspects of the term περί-​γραφή that make it geometrical: both the graphic (γραφή) and the spatial (περί). On the one hand, as γραφή, circumscription denotes a written mark, a character stamped or inscribed in a manner sufficient to perdure legibly and secure visibility. Just as the evangelists marked (χαράττεσθαι) the Word in paper and ink, so the icon marks the Word in line and colors.33 As Theodore observes, we naturally inscribe (ἀναγράφειν) everything perceived by the senses or contemplated with the mind. While God alone is uncircumscribable, all other things are circumscribed (περιγράφεται): they can be touched, seen, or heard, or otherwise noetically encircled (καταλαμβανόμενα).34 The mark of 32 See Thorne, “Ascending Prayer,” 261–​263. 33 AR I.10 (340D). 34 AR I.10 (341A).

The Icon as Figure  183 γραφή is ontically indifferent: if something can be known, it has ipso facto received a circumscriptive mark. This leads us to Theodore’s definition of “image” (εἰκών) as circumscribed space. Every image, he says, is an impression (ἐκτύπωσις) or seal (σφραγίς): that is, a tracing in space that figures the solid as line.35 For Theodore, as for Dionysius, the logic of the impressed seal removes the tension between a multitude of figures and a singular archetype, or many impressions and one form (πολλοὺς τύπους εἰς ἓν εἶδος).36 But where for Dionysius the paradigmatic “seal” is hierarchy, for Theodore it is line. On the other hand, as περί-​, circumscription denotes figuration in space. Lines unfold into extension and move through three dimensions to trace a body and project its measure. The spatial measurement of περιγραφή establishes definition (ὅρος), limit (πέρας), and figure (σχῆμα).37 This geometrical sense is reinforced, above all, in Theodore’s shadow theory, broached in Refutation I, but fully developed in Refutation III, as we will see. The icon is “shadow” (σκιά) of Jesus’s living body.38 The icon maps his flesh by tracing out the very same “circumscription of the bodily form” (περιγραφὴν τῆς σωματοειδοῦς). The reduction from corporeal body to circumscribed body subtracts one dimension, declining from solid to plane, as an isometric “shadow” of his “deified flesh” (σκιᾷ τῆς ἐνωθείσης αὐτῇ σαρκός).39 We see Jesus through linear circumscription, and the icon repeats that essential circumscription. What guarantees the icon’s relation (σχέσις) to the body of Jesus, and in turn to his divinity, is the geometrical projection itself.40 At the same time, Theodore’s account of circumscription in Refutation I is Christological from beginning to end. His point of departure is always the concrete phenomenality of the body of Jesus. According to his opponents, icons cannot represent God because God is uncircumscribed (ἀπερίγραπτον).41 To them, the sheer variety of icons smells of paganism. In response, Theodore doubles down on his opponents’ negations—​quite like John of Damascus did in Oration I.4. In fact, God is not only uncircumscribable but invisible, unlimited, and unfigurable (ἀσχημάτιστον). One must intensify negation (διὰ τῆς ἀφαιρέσεως) since we do not even know that or what God is. Yet, Theodore adds, beyond the boldest apophasis possible, Christians also say that Jesus truly manifests God in his human body out of divine generosity (ἀγαθότητα).42 This fact compels us to go beyond apophasis. Like John, Theodore views the Incarnation as God’s kenotic self-​gift into the metric conditions of the body. But he goes beyond John by positing that

35 AR I.8 (337C). 36 AR I.9 (340A). 37 AR I.2 (332A). 38 AR I.12 (344A). 39 AR I.12 (344AB). The key phrase is repeated in Theodore’s anathemas at AR I.20 (349CD). 40 AR I.12 (344BC). 41 AR I.2 (329B). 42 AR I.2 (329CD).

184  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation circumscription is the primary way that this donation becomes visible. As Theodore puts it, Jesus willingly “accepts the circumscription natural to his body” (φυσικὴν περιγραφὴν καταδέχεται τοῦ σφετέρου σώματος).43 What the Word assumes in becoming flesh is the manner in which bodies exist in spatial extension. Jesus retains the glory of God, but adds the honor of freely accepting creaturely limits. Jesus is “materially circumscribed [ἔνυλος περιγραφία] in his own body because of his sublime condescension toward us,” writes Theodore. For Jesus “did not refuse to become and to be called what he had received, and it is characteristic of matter to be circumscribed materially [ὑλικῶς περιγράφεσθαι].”44 Jesus shares the most familiar, self-​evident definition of human bodies. He wakes and sleeps, eats and drinks, hungers and thirsts, weeps and sweats, enduring human limits up to the very edge (πάσχων ὁ καθ᾽ ἕκαστα). By doing human activities with a human body, Jesus remains figurable (σχηματίζεται) as a human being and therefore is circumscribed (περιγράφεται) by the human form.45 That is, the kenosis of God in Jesus is first discerned and defined through circumscription. Theodore warns that unless one affirmatively “accepts that circumscription” (δέξαι τὸ περίγραπτον), every sensible quality of Jesus will be lost—​what we have seen, touched, and held (1 Jn 1:1).46 Circumscription secures access to the phenomenality of Jesus’s body in space. Or viewed the other way around: even after radical apophasis, the perigraphic line still manifests Jesus. John of Damascus already saw that the moment of Incarnation overthrows the theological negations of the visible (ἀόρατον) and the limited (ἄπειρον). God was invisible and unlimited, but now God is not invisible and not unlimited in the same way as before. But Theodore seems to grasp that the Incarnation conditions the operation of negation (ἀφαίρεσις) as such.47 The axis of negation that used to indicate divinity apophatically is now permanently fused with the inscribed line. Divine names are no longer free to drift into absolute formlessness. When Jesus is seen to be circumscribed within a finite limit, drafted with specific lines in space among other shapes, fully committed to the constraints of measure, eternally lost to the particularity of fixed dimensions, inked into the page—​only then is God irreversibly tethered to creation, beyond apophatic reversal. The mark of that line cannot be erased. Theodore calls this a “paradox” (παράδοξον) in the specific sense of an insuperable contradiction of terms that overwhelms the mind’s concepts. Jesus is a compound (μίξις) of things absolutely not combinable, both negations and affirmations: the unlimited is limited (πεπερασμένον), the indefinite is defined (διωρισμένον), the figureless is figured (εὐσχηματισμένον)—​above all,

43 AR I.2 (332A); trans. Roth, 21. 44 AR I.7 (336C); trans. Roth, 26. 45 AR I.4 (333A). 46 AR I.3 (332C). 47 AR I.2 (329C).

The Icon as Figure  185 the uncircumscribed is circumscribed (περιγεγραμμένον).48 The negations no longer stand alone; apophasis itself has received a fixed boundary which it did not possess before. God remains invisible, even as God is seen; God remains uncircumscribable, even as God is now traced with a perimeter of line. Neither pole is invalidated by the other; but neither can ever be freed of the other, nor even isolated temporarily or hypothetically, as if the Incarnation had not happened. There can be no return to infinite, unbounded apophasis. In another work, Theodore examines the relationship between circumscription and apophasis more closely. In a key sentence, he explains: “Circumscribing is an affirmation [κατάφασις δὲ τὸ περιγράφεσθαι . . .], while not circumscribing is a negation [. . . ἀπόφασις δὲ τὸ μὴ περιγράφεσθαι]; . . . and from these, Christ can be known to us, and called circumscribed and not circumscribed.”49 That is, circumscription is the essence of kataphasis, manifesting human nature; uncircumscription is the essence of apophasis, manifesting divine nature. Hence, the opposite of the regime of circumscription and uncircumscription is not plain apophasis, Theodore says, but a different regime of pure unrepresentability (ἀγραφία) as such, that is, formlessness. In fact, after the Incarnation, negation has become qualified: it can no longer be ἀγραφία, but only an apophasis properly bound to kataphasis. The line of circumscription inscribes the human and the divine together, the visible and the invisible. After the Incarnation, the line that crosses into manifestation has been permanently fused with the invisibility of the divine. Pure formlessness (ἀγραφία) finds itself contained and circumscribed. This is why Theodore contends that only the icon secures the truth of the Incarnation against Gnostic hermeneutics. The line of circumscription is the ultimate confession of the fleshly reality of Jesus: Circumscription asserts affirmatively [καταφατικῶς] all the things that are denied [ἀποφανθέντα]; likewise, unrepresentability [ἀγραφία] eliminates negatively [ἀποφατικῶς] all the things in Christ that are claimed of him [καταφανθέντα]. Thus everything becomes appearance and imagination, and Marcion again triumphs and so do Manes, and Valentinos, and Ignatios, who belong to the same school.50

Theodore is suggesting that without circumscription, apophasis would operate without any limits and the formless Absolute would erase every mark. If Jesus cannot be painted in the icon, he maintains, “the absence of representation

48 AR I.2 (332A). 49 Theodore the Studite, Some Questions Posed by Theodore to the Iconoclasts, 9–​10 (PG 99: 481CD); trans. Cattoi, 132 (modified). 50 Theodore the Studite, Refutation and Subversion of the Impious Poems, 8 (PG 99: 452C); trans. Cattoi, 152 (modified).

186  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation [ἀγραφία] could be construed as a negation [ἄρνησις] of the Incarnation.”51 Were it not for the line, the Incarnation could not be seen.

The shape of the body Now that we have the basics of circumscription before us from Refutation I, we can follow Theodore’s thinking as it extends in two directions in Refutation II and III: on Christology in this section and then on geometry itself in the next. Theodore’s opponents say that to circumscribe Jesus in an icon compromises both his humanity and his divinity. But according to Theodore, the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus only become more comprehensible in light of linear circumscription. In the first place, all of the written testimonies of Jesus observe him with the senses, and with sight first of all, and seeing Jesus starts with the measure of circumscription.52 We know bodies through lines, and we know lines in an immediate and certain way. Even if geometrical lines themselves are invisible, they manifest embodiment first and last. This is why Jesus is both a figure and a body, a linear measurement that never diverts attention from his corporeal form. A good illustration of how John and Theodore think about the figuration of the body is the case of the bronze serpent. God did not ban all images in the Bible, and on a few occasions, even commanded Moses to fashion them, like the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant or the crucial instance of the bronze serpent. In Oration I, John called such prophetic images in Scripture “shadowy enigmas” (αἰνιγματωδῶς σκιαγραφοῦσα) or sketches that remain to be filled in. The Ark of the Covenant, he says, is an outline of the Virgin Mary, just as the parting of the Red Sea is a figure of baptism. And, according to John, the bronze serpent is an outline of the Crucifixion waiting to be filled in.53 Theodore adds that what God sanctioned was neither the materiality of the images nor the representations themselves. Rather, God commanded Moses to depict precisely the “figure” (τύπος) of the serpent, that is, its “shape” (χαρακτὴρ) that “obscurely” (αἰνιγματωδῶς) points toward Jesus.54 When the snakes bit the Israelites, the antidote was visual: they gazed (ἰδὼν) upon the figure (σημεῖον), and they lived (Nm 21:8). Moses taught them to fight the serpent’s venom by confronting its form—​not the living snake that had poisoned them, but its simulacrum, frozen into its exterior contours, manifesting its pure shape. The arcs of bronze replicated every fold of the animal, yet without the wet eyes and cool skin. Salvation came through gazing upon the figure alone, whose shape gave back the life the living one had taken. Early Christians quickly 51 Theodore the Studite, Refutation and Subversion of the Impious Poems, 15 (PG 99: 461C); trans. Cattoi, 159. 52 AR IIIA.2 (391A). 53 CI I.12, ed. Kotter, 86; trans. Louth, 27. 54 AR I.5 (333D–​336A); trans. Roth, 25.

The Icon as Figure  187 grasped that the crucifixion of Jesus revealed the full meaning of the bronze serpent and that Jesus was the living reality of the figure. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is “exalted” (ὕψωσεν) in his Passion, raised into relief onto the cross, so that gazing upon him one may live (Jn 3:14). Just as the Mosaic antidote was not the fleshly serpent but its bronze figuration, something is manifested in the body of Jesus that is irreducible to color, texture, or brilliance. Punctured and perforated, his body opens onto a new space perceptible beyond the flesh (2 Cor 5:16). Following Gregory of Nazianzus, Theodore calls the bronze serpent less a type of Jesus than an “antitype” (ἀντίτυπος). The serpent saves by remaining dead; Jesus saves by being alive. The serpent was cast in cold bronze; Jesus is elevated in warm flesh. For the bronze serpent was not one biblical figure among others, but the figure of the power of figuration (σχῆμα) as such.55 By fulfilling this figure, Jesus fulfills the power of figuration to the point of overwhelming its ordinary mimetic canons. The bronze serpent healed by means of enhanced visibility, arresting the writhing serpent into a pure shape clearly beheld. But Jesus’s figuration works through an increasing egress into invisibility, from the holes punctuating his resurrected body to his vanishing at Emmaus or the Ascension. Turning to the Gospel narratives, Theodore notes that perhaps the best proof of Jesus’s measurable contours is the body of the Virgin Mary, for “he who comes from a circumscribed mother is circumscribed.”56 Jesus’s full humanity is perceived from Mary’s circumscribed nature.57 In another work, Theodore links Mary’s maternity to Jesus’s circumscription even more directly: “the mother is depicted in her nature according to the form of her body [σώματος χαρακτῆρι], because she is circumscribed; the same applies, then, to Christ, because Christ is a circumscribed issue of the mother.”58 Mary’s bodily outline transfers to Jesus’s body. The index of her visibility as human is the same as his: “he is circumscribed according to the form of the body [σώματος ἰδέαν]; and . . . remains uncircumscribed according to the essence of the divinity [θεότητος οὐσίαν].”59 John and Theodore both participate in the Byzantine tradition of describing the Virgin Mary as a fundamentally spatial being, the χώρα of God or what Thomas Arentzen has called the “uterine deep.”60 55 AR II.39 (380C). 56 AR IIIA.39 (408C); trans. Roth, 92. Cf. AR IIIB.1–​2 (417AB). 57 AR IIIA.54 (413C). On the importance of Mary for Theodore’s Christology, see Alexis Torrance, Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology: Attaining the Fullness of Christ (Oxford University Press, 2020), 92–​97. 58 Theodore the Studite, Refutation and Subversion of the Impious Poems, 30 (PG 99: 472CD); trans. Cattoi, 165–​166. 59 Theodore the Studite, Seven Chapters Against the Iconoclasts, 1 (PG 99: 488C); trans. Cattoi, 121. Cf. AR IIIA.51 (413A). On the role of the Theotokos in the iconoclastic controversy, see Bissera V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (Penn State University Press, 2006). 60 Thomas Arentzen, “The Chora of God: Approaching the Outskirts of Mariology in the Akathistos,” Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies 4, no. 2 (2022): 127–​149. On χῶρα, see Plato, Timaeus 48E–​ 53C. On the particular spatiality of Marian icons, see Alexei Lidov, “Icon as Chora: Spatial Aspects of Iconicity in Byzantium and Russia,” in L’icône dans la pensée et dans l’art, eds. Kristina Mitalaite and Anca Vasiliu (Brepols, 2017), 423–​447; and Maria Lidova, “Virgin Mary and the Adoration of

188  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Cyril of Alexandria calls Mary the “place [χωρίον] for the spaceless [ἀχωρήτου]” and Theodore the “place [χωρίον] of God” who “contained in the womb the uncontainable [χωρήσασα . . . ἀχώρητον].”61 Theodore points out several other features of Jesus’s bodily presence in space. First, all human bodies appear not through matter but through measure; even angelic bodies lacking material density are defined by circumscription, being “bounded in space” (τόπῳ περιόριστος).62 Jesus has a male body with a different σχῆμα than a female body; sexual difference itself only becomes visible through circumscription.63 If the infant Jesus could be circum-​cised, he could be circum-​ scribed (εἰ δὲ περιετμήθη, καὶ περιγραπτὸς ἄρα).64 Likewise, when John the Baptist pointed to Jesus and declared him the Lamb of God, that ostension required a spatial location that could be “marked” (ἐκτυπούμενον).65 As Maximos Constas beautifully writes: “God consents to circumscription within time and space, to live in a world of shared objectification. To consent to have a body means to be framed by the narrow edges of the manger, confined to the lap of the mother, fixed to the arms of the cross, and figured in a work of art.”66 But for Theodore, the greatest confirmation of Jesus’s circumscription is his body’s capacity for suffering.67 Hands and feet that can be pierced can be circumscribed; the violation of its surface confirms the body’s integrity. “These are the hallmarks [ἰδιώματα] of circumscription,” Theodore writes: “a smitten back, cheeks with the beard pulled out, a face spat upon.” If the body of Jesus were too divine to be circumscribed, how could it be beaten? he asks. In this way, the Passion reveals the body’s solidity, “characterized by three dimensions [διαστάσεσι] and a firm surface . . . naturally able to be wounded.”68 The perforation of his body’s limits demonstrates that it remains vulnerable, frangible, and penetrable. The humiliation of mortality and death is synonymous with the humiliation of being circumscribed (περιγεγράφθαι).69 Even after crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus was still “contained by circumscription” (περιγραφῇ ὑπελαμβάνετο), Theodore notes. Jesus tells his disciples to recognize his hands and feet; he shares their food and receives their probing touch. the Magi: From Iconic Space to Icon in Space,” in Icons of Space: Advances in Hierotopy, ed. Jelena Bogdanovic (Routledge, 2021), 214–​238. 61 See Cyril of Alexandria, “Homily 4 on the Virgin,” and Theodore the Studite, “Homily on the Nativity of Mary”; cited in Arentzen, “Chora of God,” 136–​137. 62 AR IIIA.47 (412B). On the case of angelic space, see Ken Parry, “Theodore the Studite: The Most ‘Original’ Iconophile?,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 68 (2018): 271–​274. 63 AR IIIA.45 (409C). 64 AR IIIA.46 (409D–​412A). 65 AR IIIA.31 (404C). 66 Constas, The Art of Seeing, 106–​107. 67 AR IIIA.6 (391D). 68 AR IIIA.27–​29 (401D–​404B); trans. Roth, 88 (modified). 69 AR IIIA.52 (413A).

The Icon as Figure  189 Theodore wonders if Jesus could modulate the solidity of his resurrected body to walk on water or pass through walls. But he rightly notes that its special powers are beside the point. What matters is its visibility: “if he is seen, he is circumscribed.”70 That figural delineation remained constant from birth to death to resurrection. Nor does the continuity of Jesus’s body end there. Theodore argues that the risen Jesus had to remain in the condition of circumscription in order to make possible the Christian’s sacramental incorporation. Were he uncircumscribed after the Resurrection, as Theodore’s opponents maintained, “concorporeality” (τὸ συσσώμους) with him would be ruined.71 The head and the members, the vine and the branches, must receive one and the same definition.72 The same line that traces the body of Jesus envelops the church as the body of Christ. We saw that John of Damascus linked the kenotic Christology of Philippians 2 to quantity and magnitude. Theodore returns to Philippians 2, but offers a new gloss centered on circumscription. Paul juxtaposes the “form of God” (μορφὴ θεοῦ) and the “form of a slave” (μορφὴ δούλου) as two species of μορφή that Jesus unifies in one human σχῆμα. In Theodore’s gloss, what unifies the glorified μορφή of God and the emptied μορφή of humanity is precisely the circumscription of Christ (περιγραπτὸς ἄρα ὁ Χριστός).73 That is, the human σχῆμα with its human properties unites the μορφή of God and the μορφή of finitude, but that σχῆμα only follows from circumscription. Circumscription is the spatial mechanism that makes kenosis visible.74 Several modern commentators have suggested that Theodore lacks a doctrine of communicatio idiomatum.75 But it is the geometry of circumscription, through the mediation of line, that performs this function in his Christology. As Theodore explains, the line of circumscription carves out an interior and an exterior space, on either side of its horizon, and this line of containment unites the human and divine natures of Jesus. That which becomes flesh is located “inside circumscription” (εἴσω περιγραφῆς), he proposes; and that which remains divine is located “outside circumscription” (ἔξω περιγραφῆς).76 The union of the two natures is achieved through the mediation of a line that cuts through extension, distinguishing inside and outside, but simultaneously holding them in conjunction. Theodore’s opponents lodge their best argument against his circumscription theory by posing a highly technical Christological objection, the late antique doctrine of enhypostasis.77 According to this post-​Chalcedonian principle, the 70 AR II.43–​46 (384A–​385B) 71 AR II.47 (385C). 72 AR IIIA.56–​57 (416C). 73 AR IIIA.48 (412BC). 74 AR IIIA.55 (416AB); cf. AR IIIA.10 (393D). 75 See, e.g., Parry, Depicting the Word, 106–​110, 204; Tollefsen, Defence of the Icons, 81; and Cattoi, “Introduction,” 29. 76 AR II.5 (356A); AR II.7 (356D). 77 See AR IIIA.15–​23 (396C–​400D). John defines ἐνυπόστασις and ἀνυπόστασις in the first part of the Fount of Knowledge: “The body of the Lord, since it never subsisted of itself, not even for an instant, is not a hypostasis, but an enhypostaton. And this is because it was assumed by the hypostasis

190  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation hypostasis (personal existence) of Jesus was entirely subsumed by the hypostasis of the divine Word. Jesus’s humanity does not stand on its own two feet as an autonomous human person. Instead, the divine Word en-​hypostasizes the human nature of Jesus; or the human nature is said to be an-​hypostatic. This proviso was intended to block definitively any Nestorian separation into human and divine persons. If the divine nature sponsors and takes up the human nature of Jesus into its divine person, then there simply is no separate human person to begin with. Consequently, what the Word assumes in Jesus is human nature as such, not just a single human person.78 Theodore’s clever opponents saw an opening here. Enhypostasis seems to frustrate Theodore’s attempt to circumscribe Jesus’s body, for Jesus is not like other bodies, they claim. If his human nature abides only within the divine Word, lacking its own personal existence, how could it possibly be circumscribed? In the unique case of Jesus Christ, how could one separate out the delineable human nature? Or delineate human nature as such? At first blush, this objection seems a serious problem for Theodore’s circumscription theory. By turning it on its head, however, Theodore demonstrates that enhypostasis actually vindicates his iconology. For him, unlike his Cappadocian predecessors, circumscription does not delimit essences, but hypostases.79 Theodore agrees that since the divine Word and Jesus’s body share one “common hypostasis” (ὑπόστασιν κοινήν), Jesus’s anhypostatic human nature is not autonomous (ἰδιοπεριγράφῳ) in the way most human bodies are. Nevertheless, the peculiar humanity of Jesus retains the properties (ἰδιωμάτων) that demarcate it from others, so that he remains recognizable as Jesus, not Andrew or Peter.80 Each of us is the natural prototype of any possible image of ourselves. The continuity between me and images of me follows from my distinctive shape, my concrete measurability—​my auto-​ circumscription, we might say, subject to the geometrical line. Jesus shares in this like any other human being.81 So while the Word did assume human nature in

of God the Word and this subsisted, and did and does have this for a hypostasis.” John of Damascus, Institutio elementaris. Capita philosophica (Dialectica), 44–​45, ed. Bonifatius Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, Bd. I (De Gruyter, 1969), 109–​110; trans. Chase, 69. On the doctrine’s origin in Leontius of Byzantium, see Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 67–​68, 155–​158. See further Benjamin Gleede, The Development of the Term ἐνυπόστατος from Origen to John of Damascus. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 113 (Brill, 2012). 78 AR IIIA.15 (396C). 79 See Christophe Erismann, “ ‘To be circumscribed belongs to the essence of man’: Theodore of Stoudios on Individuality, Circumscription, and Corporeality,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 68 (2018): 235–​238. 80 AR IIIA.22 (400CD). “Theodore was prepared to go much further than most Chalcedonian theologians of the sixth and seventh centuries in regarding the flesh as a fully-​fledged ontological entity.” Dirk Krausmüller, “On the Relation Between the Late Antique and Byzantine Christological Discourses: Observations About Theodore the Stoudite’s Third Antirrheticus,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 68 (2018): 248. 81 AR II.6 (356B); AR II.8 (357A).

The Icon as Figure  191 general, Theodore reasons, Jesus is always contemplated as a discrete individual (ἐν ἀτόμῳ θεωρουμένην).82 As Theodore suggests, enhypostasis actually reveals to us the full meaning of circumscription. For when contemplatives trace the body of Jesus, they are not simply tracing that one body, as if tracing their own. Rather, they are “circumscribing the same hypostasis” shared with the Word of God (λόγου ὑπόστασιν . . . περιγεγραμμένην). The Word’s divine nature remains unseen and uncircumscribed. But the circumscription of the human body of Jesus is a true circumscription of the single hypostasis of the Word made flesh.83 His body subsists through the Word alone, and by the same token, to measure his body is to measure, astonishingly, the Word itself. If we can pluck out the individual named Jesus in our field of vision by virtue of his well-​delineated figure, then we know, on account of enhypostasis, that we must be gazing on the divine Word. The visible line in space conducts us to the invisible divine. For Nicephorus, circumscribing the human body of Jesus was absolutely not circumscribing the divine Word, but for Theodore, this is one and the same action.84 Theodore therefore holds two theories of icon veneration in tension, a feat that later Byzantine theologians found difficult to maintain: a more modest relational theory of the Christ archetype and his image; and this more radical theory of their hypostatic union through circumscription, or what Theodore calls “the singularity of hypostatic resemblance” (κατὰ τὸ μοναδικὸν τῆς ὑποστατικῆς ὁμοιώσεως).85 Far from challenging circumscription, the doctrine of enhypostasis confirms it.86 The mechanism of circumscription does not demand much. It can refer the eye from the icon to Jesus if given only a minimal figure. The standard for representation, Theodore explains, is not identity of likeness, but merely a resemblance sufficient to trigger “recognition” (γνωρίζεσθαι): this man is Jesus.87 After the Resurrection, the disciples regularly misrecognized Jesus: as a stranger on the road, the gardener, or a ghost. But all that Theodore requires is “sufficient information for immediate identification.”88 The prototype appears within the image not 82 AR IIIA.17 (397C). Theodore often repeats this key phrase found in John of Damascus and Leontius of Byzantium; cf. AR IIIA.24 (401A) and AR IIIA.22 (400D). On its relation to the problem of universals, see Christophe Erismann, “Theodore the Studite and Photius on the Humanity of Christ: A Neglected Byzantine Discussion on Universals in the Time of Iconoclasm,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 71 (2017): 175–​192. 83 AR IIIA.22 (400CD). 84 See Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 185–​188. 85 Dirk Krausmüller, “Christ and His Representation, One or Two? The Image Theologies of Theodore of Studios, Leo of Chalcedon and Eustratius of Nicaea,” Scrinium 17 (2021): 356–​371. Cf. AR IIIC.9 (424D); cited in Krausmüller, 362. 86 On the centrality of hypostatic individuation for Theodore’s circumscription theory, see Mihaita Bratu, “Quelques aspects de la théorie de l’icône de S. Théodore Stoudite,” Revue des sciences religieuses 77, no. 3 (2003): 323–​349. 87 AR IIIA.42 (409AB). Of course, exactly which features allow one to recognize Jesus—​his skin color, hair length, or facial beauty—​are highly contested and locally variable. See Michele Bacci, The Many Faces of Christ: Portraying the Holy in the East and West, 300–​1300 (Reaktion Books, 2014). 88 Parry, Depicting the Word, 3.

192  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation through identity of essence (ἴδιον εἶναι) but similarity of hypostasis (ὑποστάσεως ὁμοιότητα). Its likeness is preserved by an identical principle of definition (λόγος τῆς διορίσεως). Through this definition, Jesus “appears” (φαίνεται) in his distinctive shape (μορφή).89 That shape is what the graph of circumscription achieves. It sustains a minimal figural definition that triggers recognition and manifests his personal presence. Pavel Florensky describes this experience of recognizing the Virgin Mary in an icon: I gaze into this icon and I say in myself: this is She Herself, not Her image, but She Herself who, with your help, iconpainter, I am contemplating. As through a window, I see the Mother of God, the Mother of God Herself ! and it is She Herself that I am now praying to face to face and not to an image. . . . [Y ]‌ou have parted the veil so that She, who was behind it, now stands as a real experience not only for me but also for you . . . .90

For similar reasons, Nicephorus compares gazing at the icon to peering into a mirror.91 The one necessary thing is the quality of the iconic mark offered to the eyes. Did I see Jesus? If his “formal properties” (χαρακτηριστικῷ ἰδιώματι) are present, then I can successfully distinguish his face from Andrew or Thomas. “He who has seen the image of Christ sees Christ in it,” writes Theodore.92 His maxim can sound tautological, but it reveals Theodore’s graphic realism. The “communion” of image and imaged means they deserve one univocal “greeting” that hails the face thus seen.93 As Parry points out, while Theodore never imposes requirements of media or style—​even sculptures could be iconic—​he could never accept works of pure fantasy or abstraction but remains rigorously grounded in the naturalism of the body.94 Theodore’s icon theory is geometrical in order to be realistic. In Theodore’s theology of images, the weakness of the line is strong enough to mediate God. If the graphed line manifests the face of Jesus, then God has appeared within the economy of the icon. Theodore can even say: “if one says that divinity is in the icon [ἐν εἰκόνι εἶναι τὴν θεότητα], he would not be wrong.”95 In

89 AR IIIC.1 (420D–​421A); AR IIIC.8 (424B). 90 Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 69. Cf. Barber, Figure and Likeness, 61–​62. 91 “The icon of Christ, primarily and immediately, and from the first look, manifests to us his visible form [εῖδος], and conveys his recollection. Indeed, we behold him who is placed in the icon [as] being reflected, as in a mirror.” Nicephorus, Antirrheticus, III.35 (428D–​429A); trans. Franses in Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 242. 92 AR IIIC.11 (425BC). 93 AR IIID.1 (428CD); AR IIID.6 (432A). 94 Parry, “Most ‘Original’ Iconophile,” 269. 95 AR I.12 (344Β); trans. Roth, 33.

The Icon as Figure  193 orthodox Christology, Jesus and the Father are one in essence (οὐσία) but two in person (ὑπόστασις). Theodore points out that now Jesus and the icon are just the inverse: one in person, but two in essence.96 The Father is one and invisible; but Jesus is twofold, human and divine, and iconically still visible. Without iconography, without circumscription, that twofold composition of Incarnation would be lost.97 Theodore implies that Jesus is, so to speak, still being incarnated in the icon—​a secondary kenosis from flesh into image. But this imaging does not occur in the medium of material flesh, nor the paints, metals, and mosaic glass of the icons, but in the geometrical medium of line, the medium of space itself. Because of circumscription, icons can name God with startling immediacy, and one naturally ought to respond to this visual invocation with reverence. The figuration of Jesus in the icon authentically references him as if he were personally present. The Eucharist is the actual presence of Jesus, not an image. But as Theodore explains, the cross and icon are both figural types that name Jesus univocally by reference to his potential image.98 When we see two lines making the sign of a cross, we call it “the Cross” with the same name we give to the historical object on Golgotha. Despite knowing that their “natures” (φύσις) are distinct, we recognize that the figuration suffices to refer us to the true Cross, to make that connection real, and so we use the same “name” (ὁμονυμία).99 The same happens with the icon, and once again line accomplishes the referral. The Incarnation means the body of Jesus is the true image of God, thanks to a relation of natural identity with God. In iconization, something parallel occurs. The material icon of Jesus is a true image of Jesus, but this relation of identity is not achieved by nature but by line, relation, and name. As Theodore explains in different ways, Jesus’s living body is always circumscribed by the line that traces his form—​down to the curling filaments of his hair, the creases of his eyelids, the arch of an eyebrow, the hollow of a pupil or a nostril.100 The line that he carries around allows recognition of Jesus as opposed to Peter or Paul. The very same line is repeated in the figuration of his body in the icon, allowing one to recognize Jesus there and name him; that line is most essentially what the icon is. The “relation” (τὸ πρός τι) between Jesus’s body and his icon is guaranteed through the identity of 96 AR IIIC.7 (424B); cf. AR IIID.7 (432B). 97 AR IIIA.44 (409C). 98 AR I.10 (339BC); AR II.23 (368C). 99 AR I.8 (337C); AR I.11 (341C). 100 Torrance cites Theodore’s remarkable Letter 359, written against those who deny circumscription. Theodore lists all of the physical features of Jesus’s body that be traced with line: first in tight focus on the mouth, tongue, eyebrow, pupil, eyelid, curling hair, two opposed nostrils, before zooming out to arms, shoulders, chest, and the rest of his figure. See Torrance, Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology, 90. Cf. Theodore the Studite, Epistula 359, ed. Georgios Fatouros, Theodori Studitae Epistulae, Vol. 1. Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 31 (De Gruyter, 1991), 493. Theodore’s theology of icons in his letters closely parallels the Refutations: see Georgios Metallidis, “Theodore of Studium Against the Iconoclasts: The Arguments of His Letters,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2002): 191–​208.

194  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation the circumscribing line. And that univocity of line—​inhering in his body, repeated in the icon—​legitimates the “identity” (ταυτότης) of naming.101 For when I gaze on the icon, I see the God-​Man and I greet him with the name “Jesus.” The line conveys my eyes from the inscribed line (shadow) to the dimensional line (body), and that body in turn is the perfect image of God (hypostasis). Peering down this continuous chain of reference, I behold the unseen God with a simple gaze, like a rock skipping all the way across a pond. Surprised by how far my gaze can travel, I respond with awe and veneration. At the same time, God is not trapped inside the icon’s matter; the icon is only the immaterial shadow of Jesus’s body projected through the outline of circumscription. Still, the icon truly makes God present: not by a “union of natures” as in the Incarnation, but by a “relative participation” (σχετικῇ μεταλήψει), a participation in God through the category of relation.102

Shadows and diagrams Theodore not only plumbs the Christological meaning of circumscription more deeply than John of Damascus had done. He also moves well beyond John’s tentative interest in the geometrical categories of magnitude. Theodore’s notion of circumscription is fully geometrized, a leap that leads him into the physics of space and measurement. For example, Theodore finds that to explain the icon he needs to define solid bodies. All bodies exist “in three dimensions and with a solid surface” (τρισὶ διαστάσεσι καὶ ἀντιτυπίᾳ), he argues, and this is why all bodies are circumscribed.103 Echoing Gregory of Nyssa, Theodore states that circumscription is a universal property of creation.104 Everything subject to touch (τὸ ψηλαφητὸν) is circumscribed, so because Jesus is tangible, Jesus must have a definite linear figure.105 Theodore analyzes circumscription in terms of eight categories of being: containment (κατάληψις), quantity (ποσότης), quality, position, place (τόπος), time, shape (σχῆμα), and body (σῶμα).106 God has none of these categories, but Jesus is “revealed within” all of them. If Jesus did not have place or location, he could not be conceived within Mary, be found by her in the Temple, or give his body to others.107 “He who is measureless [ἄποσος] became three cubits tall; He who has no quality [ἄποιος] was formed in a certain quality,” he writes.108 But as



101 AR I.11 (341BC); AR II.16 (360D). 102 AR I.12 (344B). 103 AR IIIA.27 (401D–​404A); cf. AR IIIA.1 (389C). 104 AR IIIA.9 (393BC). 105 AR IIIA.12 (393D). 106 AR IIIA.13 (396AB). 107 AR IIIA.25 (401B). 108 AR IIIA.13 (396B); trans. Roth, 82

The Icon as Figure  195 Tollefsen notes, Theodore’s categories diverge from Aristotle’s in unusual ways.109 Compared to the Stagirite, Theodore is missing “substance,” but adds “figure” and “body.” Perhaps substance is equivalent to body, which Theodore already defined as a three-​dimensional circumscription with a firm surface.110 He appears to duplicate “containment” and “place.” “Containment” means not only being somewhere but being “in” somewhere, as in the interiority of an enveloping circumscription. “Figure” seems to indicate shape (μορφή), though he does not use the term. In sum, Theodore orders his categories not by substance and accident but by the shapes and locations of bodies in space. Both John and Nicephorus list time, place, and comprehension as things that circumscribe; only Theodore adds quantity, position, and shape—​that is, geometry.111 To do justice to the icon, Theodore has to geometrize the Aristotelian categories. Theodore’s account of the Transfiguration of Jesus immediately engages geometrical measures.112 As Jesus prayed on Mount Tabor, “the appearance [εἶδος] of his face changed” (Lk 9:29). Theodore’s commentary on this passage zeroes in on the axis of metamorphosis, from before the manifestation to afterward. God is “unfigurable” (ἀσχημάτιστον) and therefore “without quantity” (ἄποσον), but in the Transfiguration, we see something different in the form unveiled in his face. The “form of the prototype” (εἶδος τοῦ πρωτοτύπου) appears in the “form of the face” (εἶδος τοῦ προσώπου). Theodore counts three degrees of transformation. The first is visibility: that which was unseen (ἀνείδεος) arrived into the field of visibility and there “took form” (εἶδος ἔσχεν) such that we can say we “see” (Ἰδοὺ) something new.113 Second, Theodore adds figuration in shapes. God who is without figuration (ἀσχημάτιστος) is now figured (ἐσχηματίσθη). Theodore chooses the geometrical term σχῆμα even though the term never appears in Synoptic accounts of the Transfiguration; Mark and Matthew use μορφή while Luke uses neither term.114 Jesus’s glory is revealed by adding more figuration to his form. Finally, in Jesus, the God beyond measure becomes measured: “he who is without quantity arrives into quantity” (ὁ ἄποσες εἴσω ποσότητος ἐγεγόνει). Jesus’s face has properties that only become visible once measured by circumscription (περιγραφόμενον).115

109 See Tollefsen, Defence of the Icons, 38–​42. 110 AR IIIA.1 (389C). 111 See Erismann, “ ‘To be circumscribed belongs to the essence of man’,” 231–​235. 112 See AR IIIA.53 (413BC). On this iconographical tradition, see Andreas Andreopoulos, Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and Iconography (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005). 113 “ Ἰδοὺ γοῦν ὁ ἀνείδεος εῖδος ἔσχεν.” AR IIIA.53 (413C). As Tollefsen notes, for Theodore, εἶδος often denotes visibility or “the outward appearance of an entity.” Tollefsen, Defence of the Icons, 95. Being seen is equivalent to being circumscribable. Since the Father is uncircumscribable, the Father is also “unseen” (ἀνείδεος, ἀσχημάτιστος). When Jesus says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), the transcendence of God appears in his body as the invisible “form of divinity” (θεότητος μορφή) (Phil 2:7). See AR IIIA.41 (408D–​409A). 114 See Mk 9:2–​8 (μετεμορφώθη); Mt 17:1–​8 (μετεμορφώθη). 115 AR IIIA.53 (413BC), reading εἴσω instead of εἵσω in PG 99.

196  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Theodore’s “shadow” theory is the culmination of the geometrical account of circumscription that he develops in Refutation III. As novel as his ideas are, they build on a tradition of shadow-​ology in Greek philosophy and ancient Christianity. John of Damascus anticipated Theodore in one passage where he compares icons to the shadows of bodies. If the shadow (σκιά) of Peter’s body had healing powers (Acts 5:15), John asks, can we not venerate the “shadow and image” of the saints in icons?116 The term σκιά can mean “shadow” or “reflection,” a two-​dimensional representation of a three-​dimensional body. In Republic, Book VI, Socrates compares the images that one draws (γράφουσιν) to shadows (σκιάς) and reflections (φαντάσματα) in water (510A–​510E). In Book VII, he contrasts mere sketching (σκιαγραφία) with the dialectical knowledge of the forms abstracted from sense experience (523A–​536A). Dio Chrysostom uses σκιαγραφία for representation of the gods through line drawing (γραμμῆς), and Athenagoras the Christian apologist traces the origins of painting to σκιαγραφία, which he says always begins with an outline (περιγράψαντος).117 In his Letter to Constantia, Eusebius called icons mere “shadow-​drawings” (σκιαγραφίαις). He rejects the idea that common lines are possibly capable of representing the face of Jesus Christ in the Transfiguration: “Who then would delineate [καταχαράξαι] as it were, the bright and flashing splendors of such dignity and glory, with dead and lifeless colors and outlines [σκιαγραφίαις], when the venerable disciples could not bear to look upon Him when He was manifested in such a manner, but rather they fell upon their faces, confessing that what was seen was beyond endurance?”118 Some contemporaries of Theodore renewed Eusebius’s charge, mocking the iconophiles as “shadow painters” [σκιογράφους]—​caricature artists—​who were unable to render the true Christ.119 Given this context, Theodore’s shadow theory appears to be yet another occasion when he cleverly turned the iconoclasts’ terms against them. He seems utterly fascinated by the way that shadows are automatic self-​tracings of bodies. “Even though Christ’s bodily shape is depicted in matter,” he writes, “it is inseparable from him, like the shadow of a body [σκιὰ τοῦ οἰκείου σώματος].”120 In other words, Theodore observes that shadows are natural instances of circumscriptive modeling. Like my shadow, the image of me inheres formally in my body; it is separable from my materiality, but crucially it is inseparable from my figural shape. In the bright sun, my body’s shadow projects an outline (χαρακτήρ) into two 116 CI I.22, ed. Kotter, 111. See further Barasch, Icon, 212–​214. 117 See Wesley Trimpi, “The Early Metaphorical Uses of ΣΚΙΑΓΡΑΦΙΑ and ΣΚΗΝΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ,” Traditio 34 (1978): 403–​413. 118 Trans. in Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 85–​86. 119 See Theodore the Studite, Refutation and Subversion of the Impious Poems, 1–​2 (PG 99: 444AB); trans. Cattoi, 146. On these poems, see Pentcheva, Sensual Icon, 77–​82; and Barber, Figure and Likeness, 91–​95. The decree of the Council of Hiereia uses the pun σκαιο-​γραφή (left-​handed, crooked drawing) to mock the iconophiles. See Horos 248E; trans. Sahas, 81. 120 AR IIIC.15 (428B); trans. Roth, 108 (modified).

The Icon as Figure  197 dimensions. But even in the dark, I can discern that linear imaging that inheres in my body and separate it intellectually through a “conceptual distinction” (ἐπινοίᾳ . . . κεχωρισμένος)—​namely, through a geometrized contemplation that reduces my phenomenal presence to a single plane.121 That natural shadow-​image preserves my χαρακτήρ, which continues to subsist in my body, the prototype.122 The shadow, in short, is a geometrical circumscription that reduces the body to a line. It is an auto-​figuration of the body sustained in every instant, an autometry. Just as he had with the terms περιγραφή and ἀνυπόστατον, Theodore subverts the iconoclastic critique by setting the same word within a different aesthetic. For Theodore, contra Eusebius, the line of shadow-​drawing can indeed bear the weight of divine presence, manifesting its invisibility through figures and not by erasing them. Theodore’s shadow theory allows him to rebut an interesting challenge from his iconoclastic opponents near the end of Refutation III. Jesus is the natural image of God, of course; it is the artificial images of icons that concern the iconoclasts. In between the living body and its graphic representation looms a tremendous gap that threatens to invalidate the image-​making process by rendering the image uncertain, fallible, and unworthy of veneration. The crux of the problem, say the iconoclasts, is the inevitable temporal delay (διείργοντός τινος χρόνου) between the body of Jesus and the “diagramming” (διαγραφεῖσα) of that body.123 The line of figuration always arrives late, so to speak, and in that interval all kinds of fallibility can arise. Hence, they conclude that icons are inherently unstable, unreliable, and unfit for veneration. To respond, Theodore would need to explain how such figurative image transfer could happen without any time elapsing, in perfect synchrony. Theodore answers that every solid body is inseparably bound to its own shadow. In the body, one already beholds the shadow that will follow; in the shadow, one already sees the body preceding it. The solid body and planar shadow are spatially distinct, but temporally indistinct: shadow and body simultaneously coexist (ἅμα). They are analytically coeval concepts, like the arithmetical proportions of the double and the half. No quantum of time (τις ἐν αὐτοῖς χρόνος) can interrupt them.124 The simultaneity of this auto-​geometry secures the unity of the visual species, overcoming the gap posited by the iconoclasts between natural image and artificial image. The natural image self-​images the artificial image through a dimensional reduction, like a body casting a shadow. Hence, there is no diagraphic delay, so long as one relies upon the circumscribing line.

121 AR IIIC.14 (428A). 122 AR IIID.2 (429A); cf. AR IIID.12 (433B). 123 AR IIID.2 (428D–​429A). 124 AR IIID.4 (429C). Nicephorus and Theodore rely on simultaneous relatives from Aristotle’s Categories, inherited from Ammonius and John Philoponus. But Theodore proposes the strongest version that locates the relation of archetype and image within the hypostasis itself. See Christophe Erismann, “Venerating Likeness: Byzantine Iconophile Thinkers on Aristotelian Relatives and Their Simultaneity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24, no. 3 (2016): 405–​425.

198  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Theodore then applies his shadow theory to the case of Jesus. Since body and shadow are “simultaneous” (ἄμφω ἅμα), whenever Jesus is seen actually, his image is seen potentially (δυνάμει). This implicit diagrammatic figure, his potential image, is activated whenever it is transferred into material media used for icons. Theodore calls this process “transfer by imprint” (μετενήνεκται . . . ἀποσφραγισθεῖσαν), and he is not afraid to draw out the radical consequences of his theory. Actual image and potential image are indissociable relative concepts. This means that for Jesus to be seen actually, he not only can but must be seen potentially as well. The actual prototype is only fully revealed (ἐμφανίζηται) once the potential image has been imprinted (διατυποῦσα) into multiple substrates.125 A seal is only activated once it has been pressed into matter at least twice and its powers of typic repetition are set in motion. Similarly, without iconization, Jesus’s body remains inactivated (ἀνενέργητος), such that the “failure to go forth into a material imprint eliminates his existence in human form.”126 The icon, therefore, is not an optional devotion but a dogmatic necessity. “Christ cannot exist,” Theodore concludes, “unless his image exists in potential [κατὰ τὸ δυνάμει].”127 The actual image is fully expressed once the potential image is multiplied. The diagrammatic line is immanent to the Incarnation, and only after it has been traced iconographically—​through the repetition of circumscription—​is the Incarnation fully perceived among the magnitudes of the world. In practice, such image transfers into multiple media would be nonsimultaneous. Yet Theodore maintains that since the circumscribed shadow-​ image “always accompanies” (ἀεὶ παρυφεστῶσαν) the body potentially, this guarantees that Jesus is “always seen” (ἀεὶ ἔστιν ὁρᾷν). Sometimes shadows are virtually present but not visibly manifest. The light can be too bright, the angle wrong, and the shadow cannot take shape. Even in those cases, the shadow lacks visible σχῆμα but remains potentially present.128 In the same way, there is a figuration that remains automatically in effect, even before any tracing or inscription takes place, an auto-​inscription, the inherent “shadow” that endures when the lights are off. What do we call the immanent figuration invisibly omnipresent in every solid body, prior to artificial figuration? The answer is obvious: geometricity. Circumscription records and reproduces the auto-​delineation of the potential images of bodies. The icon is a material, visible rendering of that figuration. We could call the icon a “perigraph,” translating literally, but what we really mean is “diagram.” For Theodore, the icon is a geometrical diagram of the

125 AR IIID.12 (433B). 126 AR IIID.9–​10 (432D–​433A); trans. Roth, 112. 127 AR IIID.5 (429C); trans. Roth, 110. This doctrine in Refutation III is “the most dramatic moment in the history of semiotics between Augustine and Locke, and it foreshadows, even overshadows Saussure.” Lock, “Iconic Space and the Materiality of the Sign,” 15. Meyendorff notes that the role of the icon here becomes “quasi-​sacramental.” Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 190. 128 AR IIID.3 (429B).

The Icon as Figure  199 potential image inherent in a body. As Nicoletta Isar writes, “for the iconophiles the line generates a continuous space, the chôra—​an idea or thought of space (he noêsis), a place which has its own extension and configuration.”129 Line turns out to be so important for Theodore’s Christology that eventually he has to study it on its own: the monk becomes a geometer. Even after we have traced the prominence of geometrical ideas in Theodore’s defense of the icons, his abrupt pivot to the principles of Euclid in Refutation III comes as a shock. In this passage, Theodore is busy depicting the Passion of Jesus’s suffering, literally in between the scourging at the pillar and John’s acclamation of the Lamb of God. But then suddenly he needs to give his readers an extemporaneous geometrical lesson: A line [γραμμή] is a length with no width, bounded by two points, from which a drawing [ἐπιγραφή] begins. A figure [σχῆμα] is that which consists of at least three lines. From it begins a body which is formed [μορφούμενον] from different figures and is bounded by a place [τόπῳ περιοριζόμενον]. But that which is uncircumscribable is unlike these, and is not bounded even by a line, much less a figure or a place or a body.130

Here Theodore outlines the progression from line to figure to body, a commonplace in Greek geometry since pre-​Socratic Pythagoreanism. Notably, he pays special attention to the specific inscriptions that enclose space. Theodore concludes that because Jesus possessed figure, place, and solidity, he must have been bounded by line. Theodore’s geometry lessons return in one of his occasional writings. As in Refutation III, he is explaining the spatial foundations of visual representation. If something is “sensible to touch,” he reasons, it must have “quantity [ποσότητι] and quality, as well as position in place [τοπικὴ θέσις] and extension in time [χρονικὴ παράτασις].” Quantity, quality, space, and time are the “properties of circumscription.”131 Such world measure, such geometry, is the basis of iconicity: Is it not the case that a line is made up of points [ἐκ στιγμῆς γραμμή]? And that lines can form triangular figures [ἐκ γραμμῶν σχῆμα] as well as others of a different shape? And is it not the case that out of the different geometrical figures [σχημάτων] one can create [μορφοῦται] a face, and if we paint a face in an image, 129 Nicoletta Isar, “The Iconic Chôra: A Kenotic Space of Presence and Void,” Transfiguration: Nordisk tidsskrift for kunst og kristendom 2, no. 2 (2000): 70. Note that Isar is commenting on Nicephorus and not Theodore. 130 AR IIIA.30 (404B); trans. Roth, 89. Cf. Euclid, Elements, I.1–​6, ed. Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Euclidis Elementa, vol. 1 (Teubner, 1883), 2. Barasch notices the strange appearance of Euclidean geometry in Theodore’s work, but believes it leads toward the secularized aesthetics of Leon Battista Alberti. See Barasch, Icon, 283–​284. 131 Theodore the Studite, Refutation and Subversion of the Impious Poems, 13 (PG 99: 460A); trans. Cattoi, 157.

200  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation this will be recognized as that of a human being, as is taught by the scriptures, which are divinely inspired? Or is Christ perhaps without form [ἀμόρφωτος]? The Apostle claims that he took the shape of a servant [μορφὴν δούλου]; perhaps you would suggest that he lacked shape [ἀμόρφωτον]? Or that as he was found in the form [σχήματι] of a man, he nonetheless lacked form [ἀσχημάτιστον]?132

In this sequence, Theodore builds on the standard Euclidean progression of dimensional extension, passing fluidly from geometry into iconography into Christology. He moves from point to line, line to figures, figures to faces, faces to images, and then from ordinary images to the Christ icon. To understand the Incarnation, Theodore has to understand lines and shapes. To defend the doctrine of kenosis, he insists that we can only “paint the face” of Jesus thanks to “geometrical figures.” For Jesus cannot be shapeless or figureless if he has form. In the struggle to comprehend the Incarnation, to defend the form of Christ, to recognize the Christ icon, what comes to the aid of Christian contemplatives is line, figure, and magnitude. To be sure, it is not the iconophiles but the iconoclasts who are usually associated with geometrical figuration. After all, the iconoclasts believed that the safest symbol was the sign of the cross, whose bare lines sacrifice form rather than profane God.133 To the iconoclasts, the only acceptable figure of God would be empty of ornament, like a letter stamped onto a page. Think of the stunning black cross in the apse of Hagia Eirene, rebuilt under Constantine V, or similar mosaics in Hagia Sophia. But this choice only makes sense for those already within an aniconic aesthetic. If figuration cannot manifest form and always leads one further away from God, then less is always more. A thin graph of the Cross as intersecting axes seems a superior image if one doubts the power of the figural line. Barber puts it perfectly: the iconoclasts viewed “figure” (τύπος) as mere “sign” (σημεῖον) because they had already decided to oppose “figure” (τύπος) to “form” (εἶδος). By the same token, John and Theodore only establish iconicity in Christian discourse to the extent that they can reverse this decision and demonstrate that the simplest line can indeed bear the weight of divine Form. If they are right, then geometrical images would undergo a transfiguration within a counter-​aesthetic, and the very same lines would not merely be a sign (σημεῖον) pointing across an indeterminate chasm, but a veritable impression (τύπος) of divine Form (εἶδος). Then one could appeal to linear figures not in order to empty out the image but to mediate the frontier of the invisible and the visible, the open and the closed, the interior and the exterior, unfolding a space for confident, affirmative markings. John of Damascus glimpsed this possibility when, precisely in the face of iconoclastic attacks, he embraced the bare cross as a model of iconic figuration. What 132 Theodore the Studite, Refutation and Subversion of the Impious Poems, 13 (PG 99: 460B); trans. Cattoi, 157. 133 On the iconoclast semiotics of the Cross, see Barber, Figure and Likeness, 83–​105.

The Icon as Figure  201 one venerates is not the two planks of wood, he says, but the “pattern” (ἐκτύπωμα) they express in conjunction—​the geometrical basis of iconicity.134 Unaware of his predecessor, Theodore chooses the same example, but makes his case by appealing directly to the power of line. The figure (τύπος) of the cross, he explains, functions as a holy image because it is a “diagram” (διαγραφή) that allows us to behold (ἰδέα) the true Cross.135 A cross can be drawn with lines of varying size or even gestured in space; its materiality could be wood, gold, or silver. All that matters to Theodore is the perdurance of the linear figure.136 A few pages later, Theodore applies this principle to all icons when he makes this statement: “The image of Christ is said to have Christ’s form [εἶδος] in its delineation [διαγραφῇ].”137 It is a deceptively simple sentence. What Theodore literally says is this: the form of Christ abides in the diagram of the icon.138 Diagrams are inscriptions (γραφή) of line (γραμμή) that extend and intersect across space (διά or περί). The visible, distributed, ordered structures that result mark that space and enable it to signify. For Theodore, the Christian icon is quite literally a diagram (δια-​γραφή) that results from a successful linear circumscription (περι-​γραφή, σκια-​γραφία) of the body of Jesus. The icon is a diagram: crafted from line, ordering space, signifying more than words. Marie-​José Mondzain explains with exceptional clarity how the power of line enables iconicity. She starts with Nicephorus rather than Theodore because she says she admires how Nicephorus separates circumscription theory from Christology.139 Yet precisely when it comes to line, Theodore takes the more radical position. Where Nicephorus distinguishes the painted line from the embodied line, Theodore makes the two univocal, such that everything Mondzain says about Nicephorus holds a fortiori for Theodore. Mondzain’s ontology of line has three aspects: kenosis, Mary, and Cross. Not only are all of them Christological, but each aligns closely with the Christian iconology of Jean-​Luc Marion. First, the line is, in Mondzain’s words, “a kenotic practice.”140 Mondzain understands that line can express kenosis because line is itself empty and negative: “as 134 CI II.19, ed. Kotter, 118. 135 AR II.13 (360B). 136 AR IIIC.5 (421CD). 137 “ἡ εἰκὼν τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐν τῇ οἰκείᾳ διαγραφῇ τὸ εἷδος Χριστοῦ.” AR IIIC.10 (424D); trans. Roth, 106. There is nothing unique about Theodore’s use of διαγράφειν in this passage; the verb is used by him elsewhere and frequently by Nicephorus. 138 On diagrams in Byzantine Christian culture, see Linda Safran, “A Prologomena to Byzantine Diagrams,” in The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds. Marcia Kupfer, Adam S. Cohen, and J. H. Chajes (Brepols, 2020), 361–​382; Divna Manolova, “Space, Place, Diagram: Cleomedes and the Visual Program of Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. gr. 482,” in The Diagram as Paradigm: Cross-​Cultural Approaches, eds. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, David J. Roxburgh, and Linda Safran (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2022), 149–​165; Linda Safran, “Diagramming Byzantine Orthodoxy,” in Diagram as Paradigm, 489–​518; and Justin Willson, “On the Aesthetic of Diagrams in Byzantine Art,” Speculum 98, no. 3 (2023): 763–​801. 139 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 7–​8. 140 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 96.

202  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation an effect of line, the incarnation operates in withdrawal. The mimetic of the line is its withdrawal.” Unlike the Eucharist, the icon expresses the presence of Jesus despite his bodily absence; it incarnates not flesh but lack: “the icon, as a memorial to the incarnation, is therefore really a memorial to the hollowing out that is brought about by the infinity of the line.”141 Likewise, according to Marion, every icon should endure a “kenosis of the image” in fidelity to the kenosis of the Incarnation: “The visible surface must, paradoxically, efface itself, or at least efface within it every opacity that would obfuscate the crossing of gazes: the icon dulls the image . . . in order to effectively render it an imperceptible transparency.” The “disfiguration” of Jesus’s face, “wiped away” by Veronica’s cloth, “allows the trace of the invisible to appear.”142 Second, the line is Mariological since it sustains a choralogical space capable of bearing the divine. The icon’s line carries the image as Mary carried Jesus, with a purity that provides an empty space. “The iconic line, as much as the Virgin’s womb,” writes Mondzain, “is therefore a threshold always overflowing with the existence of the Word.”143 The space manifested by such a line is an “immaculate womb of the invisible . . . : panel, canvas, blank page, veil, vaults, unknown lands; in a word, endless space, no stain of inscription whatsoever, the body with no border of jurisdiction, the mirror empty of specularity.” Mondzain names this a “virginal, uterine space” or “the virginal border, a uterine khôra traversed by divine breath.”144 For Marion, all visibility, hence all iconicity, begins from a “space of emptiness” (un vide de vide), which is invisible and unreal, yet places the visible into view.145 Finally, the line is not only a mark but an incision or wound: it is cruciform. “The line, this incision or marking of the medium that separates the plane in two, that cuts it, . . . is an edge where being begins, an embankment where something ends,” says Mondzain. “Does the line engender a full and differentiated space, or with its raw wound, its graphic fissure, does it mark the visible limits of the void itself ?”146 Along similar lines, Marion suggests that every τύπος bears the “mark” of the invisible, just as “the corpse of Jesus bears the marks of the living God.” The mark that God leaves is paradigmatically cruciform—​an imprint of punctured holes or “stigmata of the invisible”—​but they are wounds received as gift.147 To quote Mondzain again: “The icon attempts to present the grace of an absence within a system of graphic inscription.”148



141 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 94; emphasis in original. 142 Marion, Crossing of the Visible, 60–​62. 143 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 92. 144 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 100–​101. 145 Marion, Crossing of the Visible, 10–​11. 146 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 93. 147 Marion, Crossing of the Visible, 73–​75. 148 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 88.

The Icon as Figure  203 Can mere line mediate the presence of divine Form? Are the iconophiles right to trust it? Why is the metric figure not opposed to divine Form, but in fact the very place to look for it? John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite answer as follows. The graphic line is capable of holding and showing divine Form—​without sacrificing itself heroically in self-​erasure—​because the conditions of linear measurement have been fundamentally altered by the Incarnation. By assuming the limitations of quantity, by inhabiting the measures of the world, the Word made flesh reconstituted and transformed the figural powers of magnitude. Before the Incarnation, as Plotinus accurately set forth, the geometrical line could never bear the presence of the divine One; all that figuration could do is to make a final gesture of self-​immolation. But now the ground has shifted; now the same line has been charged with electric current. Now the form of Christ can abide in the icon since the body of Jesus dwelled within the ambit of geometrical lines—​and still dwells, per Theodore, after the Resurrection—​and those lines are the same lines traced by the diagram of the icon. Now line can indeed bear the weight of Form; the figure has been transfigured. The line of the icon is not a stripe painted onto a board or a pencil line scratched on paper, but more like a particle burrowing through space, carving into the recesses of the world, drawing its dimensional extension after itself, like the explosion of a particle accelerator. The line touches the world, presses upon it, changes it, like the impress of a stamp or the whorl of a fingerprint. In Chapter 3, we learned that the One of Plotinus does not love and may not love. This was the first pillar of Plotinus’s aneidetic condition. In Chapter 5, however, Dionysius saw that the One burns with eros, passing out of itself ecstatically in creating the world. Accordingly, as my rule predicts, we witnessed a concomitant elevation of figure and measure in Dionysian theology. The second pillar of the aneidetic condition is the autarchy of the divine One. For Plotinus, the One is essentially “self-​sufficient” (αὔταρκες), indeed by definition the most maximally self-​sufficient (αὐταρκέστατον). The One holds absolute mastery (αὐτεξούσιον) over all things with sovereign freedom; relative to the One, all beings are like slaves (δοῦλα) (VI.8.16–​21). Plotinus explains that to avoid becoming a common slave, the One must not love. In this chapter and the previous one, following the trail of two close readers of Dionysius, we have just watched this second Plotinian postulate fall of its own weight. For if the One burns with eros, then the One is no longer autarchic. The Dionysian One gives up its self-​sufficiency and is enticed by the beloved, leaving behind its identity in order to enter ecstatically into the beloved, emptying itself completely into the embodied, material, measured world of space and time. The divine Form gives up its absolute mastery and adopts, precisely, the “shape of the slave” (μορφὴ δούλου) (Phil 2:6–​7). John teaches that Jesus “submits” to shape and form and endures a “reduction” to quantity and magnitude.149 Theodore states 149 CI I.8 (=​III.8); CI I.33 (=​II.29, III.45).

204  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation that Jesus “accepts” the circumscription natural to his human body and that we know this best from his Passion; were he not three-​dimensional, his body could neither be beaten nor pierced.150 In the Transfiguration, Theodore observes, the God without measure has entered into measure (ὁ ἄποσες εἴσω ποσότητος ἐγεγόνει).151 According to the magisterial iconophiles, in the same moment that God empties himself in Jesus, God exits the confines of autarchic self-​sufficiency and willingly enters the confines of our magnitudes. That total kenosis extends not only up to the edge of the perimeter of Jesus’s body, but assumes the conditions of perimetry, or circumscription, as such, as if the Incarnation were eternally overflowing into the warp and weft of the geometrical grid itself. In the Incarnation, God has permanently taken up residence in the order of quantity and magnitude and has transformed its figures of measure, its points, lines, and shapes. For John and Theodore, kenosis is the overcoming of the aneidetic condition, but it is also the opening of a new geometrical possibility. The line can touch God—​it is God’s touch—​not by erasure, but by inscription.

150 AR I.2 (332A); AR IIIA.27–​29 (401D–​404B). 151 AR IIIA.53 (413C).

Interlude: Surface The tale of King Abgar of Edessa and the Mandylion is a favorite legend of ancient Christian literature. King Abgar hears of the fame of Jesus of Nazareth and sends his court painter Ananias to copy his appearance, as Abgar is gravely ill. John of Damascus opines that Abgar must have been “ardently burning with divine love” (πρὸς θεῖον ἐκπυρσευθέντα ἔρωτα) to see Jesus.1 But rather than sit and have his portrait painted, Jesus takes the initiative to render it himself. He washes his face and presses it onto a linen towel or kerchief (μανδύλιον), leaving the trace of an outline behind, and sends the image back to Abgar with a letter. Like that letter, the Holy Face is “a kind of a divine autograph.”2 Rather than text absorbing image, here the phenomenality of the image absorbs the text into an integrated “image-​ paradigm.”3 Then after Ananias returns home, a second miracle occurs. The cloth bearing Jesus’s face autonomously replicates itself into an adjacent storehouse full of ceramic tiles, “transferring” (μεταγράφειν) its figure onto those myriad flat planes like a printing press.4 Byzantine techniques for image printing make this mass reproduction conceivable, since indigo-​dyed linen transferred easily and accurately onto unglazed brick tiles (κεραμεῖον).5 The Abgar legend began as early as Eusebius of Caesarea and appeared among Syriac and Greek authors for centuries. The longest extant account was composed after the arrival of the treasured Mandylion cloth in Constantinople in 944 CE and seems to echo iconophile theology. The “likeness” (χαρακτήρα) of the face of Jesus is the “figure [ἐκτύπωμα] of his divine and human form . . . transferred with no artistic intervention [ἄγραφος].”6 As Herbert Kessler points out, both the cloth Mandylion and the subsequent tile Keramion are patently copies if not copies of copies. Yet despite their mechanical reproduction, pace Walter Benjamin, their aura never declines from the original. The images’ prerogative to self-​replication

1 CI I.33 (=​II.29, III.45), ed. Kotter, 145; trans. Louth, 41. 2 Alexei Lidov, “Holy Face, Holy Script, Holy Gate: Revealing the Edessa Paradigm in Christian Imagery,” in Intorno al Sacro Volto. Genova, Bizansio e il Mediterraneo (secoli XI–​X IV), eds. Anna Rosa Calderoni Masetti, Colette Bozzo Dufour, and Gerhard Wolf (Marsilio, 2007), 145. 3 Lidov, “Holy Face, Holy Script, Holy Gate,” 155–​157. 4 Mark Guscin, The Image of Edessa (Brill, 2009), 18–​22. 5 See James Trilling, “The Image Not Made by Hands and the Byzantine Way of Seeing,” in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, eds. Herbert Kessler and Gerhard Wolf (Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1998), 114–​117. On the Mandylion, see Belting, Likeness and Presence, 208–​215; and Bacci, Many Faces of Christ, 30–​47. 6 Guscin, Image of Edessa, 8.

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0011

206  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation might lessen their value as objects, but it increases the clarity of the figures they bear.7 Indeed, they are nearly simulacra in Jean Baudrillard’s technical sense, since they subvert the opposition between true and false images. In the logic of the Mandylion, there are no copies, only infinite virtual projections. “The repetitions prove that all icons, not only the direct offshoots, ultimately portray the same archetype,” Kessler observes.8 The Holy Face of Edessa is one of the paradigmatic acheiropoieta or images “made without hands” (ἀ-​χειρο-​ποίητα). These figures seem to assert themselves without the mediation of human artisans as if they were directly “delineated by the Father’s immaculate finger,” to quote the hymn sung on the feast of the Holy Face.9 The aesthetics of reproduced originality are central to the phenomenon of acheiropoieta. As Marie-​José Mondzain provocatively asks: “Is every work of art a fake acheiropoieton?”10 But it is also important to see these images as paradigms of every icon, insofar as they are linear figures. The Mandylion transmits the figure of the divine Face perfectly, like an illuminator’s delineation or a stamp’s seal. Even though it lacks the marvelous opacity of the enamel, paint, or gems adorning later icons, its stark linearity testifies to its authenticity. The abstract plane of the Mandylion or Keramion operates as a two-​dimensional shadow of the Holy Face. Jesus’s face is transmitted as a negative outline by the repeated touch of the flat linen cloth. The lines that organize its surface became an immediate revelation. Just as the Mandylion was receding from Byzantine history in the thirteenth century, the legend of the woman named Veronica (vera icona, the “true image”) arose in the Christian West, and soon thereafter the Shroud of Turin.11 Much like Ananias with his linen cloth, Veronica offers Jesus a linen kerchief, perhaps her own veil (sudarium in Latin), to wipe his brow as he carries the cross to Calvary. Now King Abgar’s royal behest has become a humble offering of mercy; now Jesus imprints not clean water from his face but blood, sweat, and dirt. He exchanges Veronica’s gift for a gift of his own, converting her love into a beautiful surface. According to Jeffrey Hamburger, the direct gaze of the Mandylion or Veronica maintains two functions across various styles and media. It engulfs the viewer in an immediate experience of being seen by God, and it bears witness to the authority of a fellow Christian who talked with Jesus face to face.12 Badges of the Veronica image were mass-​reproduced in the late Middle Ages as mementos of pilgrimage or for private devotions, not unlike the miraculous self-​multiplying 7 Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 70–​75, 82–​87. 8 Kessler, Spiritual Seeing, 84. 9 Kessler, Spiritual Seeing, 75. 10 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 208. 11 On the Shroud, see Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 192–​208. On the Veronica, see Belting, Likeness and Presence, 215–​224. 12 See Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “Vision and the Veronica,” in The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (Zone Books, 1998), 317–​320.

Interlude: Surface  207 Keramion.13 If one copy was good, multiple copies were even better. Just as Jesus imprinted his face on Veronica’s cloth, so human flesh was the wax in which God imprinted his form.14 The echoes with the Eucharist were clear enough to Veronica devotees: a flat image of Jesus, generated from an original bodily contact, self-​ reproducing without losing value and without degenerating into something else. As Veronica raises her white cloth, the priest elevates the host.15 Hans Belting defines acheiropoieta not only as “autonomous images” that authenticate themselves but more fundamentally as “relics of touch” or “relics of physical contact.” Jesus leaned against the pillar during his scourging and left a smear of blood behind; Mary is a living acheiropoieton who was imprinted in her womb by the infant Jesus. Similarly, in the cases of reproductions of the Mandylion, Keramion, or Veronica, “the contact between image and image, like the original contact between body and image, became a retrospective proof of the first image’s origin.”16 The touch of reproduction indexes the original touch that contacted the original and marked the visual plane exposed to its influence. What binds the linen of the Mandylion, the tablet of the Keramion, and the veil of Veronica is not in the first place their reproducibility or tangibility. Behind these traits, we have to appreciate that they are, essentially, surfaces. Although the acheiropoieta are planes without depth, they can still record the appearance of the face of God in the thinness of two dimensions. In Greek, in fact, these are one and the same term: the divine manifestation (ἐπιφάνεια) appears in a geometrical surface (ἐπιφάνεια). The surface is the revelation. Nothing more is needed than the point extended into line, one dimension unrolling into two, leaving invisibility behind and entering the minimal visual field of measure, the planar matrix of every figuration. The surface is a shadow; the surface is a diagram. This enigmatic class of flat acheiropoietic images exudes a certain power despite their slightness, indeed a daring confidence in possessing the most minimal extent of visibility and nothing more. Not only is the plane all that is needed, but its bare figuration, like skin stretched tight, invites another touch. The space and size of God have become a surface.



13 Hamburger, “Vision and the Veronica,” 323–​328. 14 Hamburger, “Vision and the Veronica,” 338. 15 Hamburger, “Vision and the Veronica,” 332–​336. 16 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 53, 47–​77.

8

Trinity and Form The western portal Dionysius parted ways with Plotinus and named God as ecstatic eros for the first time. God’s eros stamps the world with structures of order and theophanic imagery that both give purpose to apophasis and set limits upon it. Dionysius dissented from Plotinus a second time by locating measure within the One and naming God “magnitude.” His erotic revolution had immediate geometrical effects, and the same pattern holds for his readers, John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite. For them, the figuration of icons sustains the erotic economy of Incarnation in history. The divine Word gives up its autarchy to empty itself in the body of Jesus, a kenosis that takes on not only matter but measure. Longing for that body in return, the monks perceive Jesus in the icon by perceiving the shadow-​trace of circumscription shared by his body and his image. This means that the icon’s geometry is neither a matter of artistic style nor a perspectival technique. Rather, the geometrical line is what allows icons to become icons in the first place. Geometry precedes iconicity, and not the other way around. The Christian icon is a species of measured figure. In principle, the same underlying geometrical possibility could be activated in a parallel manner outside of the instance of Byzantine Christ portraits. Given the same aesthetics of Form, under the right conditions, the figure could acquire iconic effects. As we watched, two of Plotinus’s postulates about the divine One—​the prohibition of eros and the requirement of autarchy—​were gradually disassembled in the hands of ancient Christians. Breaking free from formlessness, the One yielded its autarchy in order to love and so entered the geometry of the world. But the aneidetic condition of Plotinus has a third postulate, still left untouched, which concerns the Logos or the Intellect as the Form of forms. As we saw in Chapter 3, Plotinus holds that it falls to Intellect to unify the forms since the One is formless and cannot touch them directly. Plotinus reasons that if the One served as the Form of forms, then the second hypostasis would collapse into the first, and both God and God’s Mind would be one God. What Plotinus intended as a reductio ad absurdum, Christians embraced as sacred doctrine after the Council of Nicaea. God and God’s Word (λόγος) were equally God with God’s Spirit, three hypostases united in one substance. Following Plotinus’s reasoning, this would entail that the divine One is itself the “Form of forms.” That hypothetical possibility is first explicitly formulated in the commentarial tradition stemming from the Roman senator The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0012

Trinit y and Form  209 and Christian philosopher, A. M. S. Boethius (ca. 477–​524 CE). It is Boethius, and especially his medieval readers, who brought to fruition the counter-​aesthetics of divine Form that emerge in Dionysius and the iconophiles. Boethius was a contemporary of Dionysius, and we might think of him as distant cousin, a counterpart writing in the Christian West with parallel aspirations. Like Dionysius, he studied Proclus carefully and spent years translating Neoplatonism into the language of Christian orthodoxy.1 Boethius inscribed in Roman stone the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Porphyry, building a monument that lasted nearly a thousand years in the medieval schools of Europe. It is no coincidence that it was also Boethius who transmitted to the Latin West the very Neopythagorean matrix that so bedeviled Plotinus.2 Boethius lightly paraphrased several volumes of number theory and harmonics from Nicomachus of Gerasa—​precisely the kind of ideas that Plotinus sought to disavow or conceal in the pages of the Enneads. These are the same Neopythagorean handbooks that inspired Iamblichus and Proclus to break with Plotinus over the role of geometry in the ascent of the soul. In effect, then, Boethius returned Christian philosophy to the scene where Plotinus first made his distinctive amendments, allowing for other possibilities. It should come as no surprise that his legacy would contribute to, and in a way complete, the turn against Plotinian formlessness and the construction of a new approach to measure and magnitude. The path not taken in western Christianity—​a veritable Latin Christian Neopythagoreanism—​passes not through Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus, or Dionysius, but through Boethius and his medieval readers. The Boethian tradition operates like a portal in history, holding open the door for the arrival of a novel theological aesthetics in the heart of western Christianity. Boethius translated and commented upon a fearsome amount of Greek philosophy before being executed in his early 40s by the Arian emperor Theodoric the Great. He covered Aristotle’s categories, hermeneutics, and logic; Porphyry’s introduction to Neoplatonism; Nicomachus of Gerasa’s textbooks on arithmetic and harmonics; manuals on rhetoric and argument; short tracts applying Aristotelian analysis to Christian doctrine; and before his arrest, he had plans to move on to Plato’s dialogues. What unifies the volumes of the Boethian library is a search for the fundamental principles of cosmic order under the providence of a triune Creator. Boethius’s major work of mathematics, Institutio arithmetica, was the standard textbook in western Europe well into the sixteenth century.

1 Boethius almost certainly learned the cycle of emanation, and probably the metaphor of enfolding and unfolding, directly from Proclus. See Stephen Gersh, “Damascius and Boethius,” in Interpreting Proclus: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Stephen Gersh (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 125–​134. 2 Against the view of Boethius as mere “conduit” of ancient thought, see John Marenbon, “Boethius’s Unparadigmatic Originality and its Implications for Medieval Philosophy,” in Boethius as a Paradigm of Late Ancient Thought, eds. Thomas Böhm, Thomas Jürgasch, and Andreas Kirchner (De Gruyter, 2014), 231–​244.

210  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation In those pages, unitas comes to be known through the fundamental dimensions of multitudo and magnitudo, and these in turn organize the disciplines of arithmetica, geometrica, musica (harmonics), and astronomica (physics).3 Number is not only found in the structures of the world but is a transcendent paradigm residing in the mind of God.4 Medieval manuscripts of Institutio arithmetica typically added lined grids that diagrammed numerical harmonies, functioning as “spaces for mathematical practice,” much like the plane of the imagination in Proclus.5 Boethius’s most popular work was the medieval bestseller Consolatio philosophiae, written during his imprisonment awaiting execution. In its alternating chapters of poetry and prose, Boethius learns how to endure suffering from Lady Philosophy, who teaches him about fate and providence, good and evil. Yet even in these dramatic dialogues, we hear hints of the philosopher’s search for the measures of things. Some have even proposed that Boethius’s path to consolation runs directly (if tacitly) through the quadrivial arts.6 In a famous hymn, Boethius sings that the cosmic Soul “has its motion gathered /​Into two circles, moves to return into itself, and the Mind deep within /​Encircles, and makes the heavens turn, in likeness to itself.”7 His verses summarize the Timaeus in light of Proclus’s commentary, and in the following chapter, Lady Philosophy will tell him to heed the arguments of “the geometers.”8 Later Boethius asks the Lady if she is trying to confuse him. “Are you playing a game with me . . . weaving an inextricable labyrinth with your arguments . . .? Or are you folding together as it were a wonderful circle of the simplicity of God?”9 This is no game, she replies, for the “form of the divine substance” (divinae forma substantiae) is a “well-​rounded sphere” (εὐκύκλου σφαίρης).10

3 Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.1.1–​12, ed. Jean-​Yves Guillaumin, Boèce. Institution arithmétique (Les Belles Lettres, 2002), 6–​11. For an accessible English translation, see Boethian Number Theory, trans. Michael Masi (Rodopi, 1983). On harmonics as a mathematical discipline, see Irene Caiazzo, “Harmonie et mathématique dans le cosmos du XIIe siècle,” Micrologus 25 (2017): 121–​147; Hicks, Composing the World; and Andrew Hicks, “Music and the Pythagorean Tradition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages,” in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Irene Caiazzo, Constantinos Macris, and Aurélien Robert (Brill, 2022), 82–​110. 4 Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.1.8, ed. Guillaumin, 8–​ 9. Cf. Nicomachus, Introductio arithmetica, I.6.1, ed. Hoche, 12; trans. D’Ooge et al., 189. 5 See Megan C. McNamee, “Grid Space in Boethius’s De Arithmetica,” in The Diagram as Paradigm: Cross-​Cultural Approaches, eds. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, David J. Roxburgh, and Linda Safran (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2022), 394, 396–​397. 6 See Michael Fournier, “Boethius and the Consolation of the Quadrivium,” Medievalia et Humanistica, N.S. 34, ed. Paul Maurice Clogan (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 1–​21. 7 Boethius, Consolatio philosophiae, 3.IX (ll. 15–​17), ed. Claudio Moreschini, Boethius. De consolation philosophiae. Opuscula theologica (K. G. Saur, 2005), 80; trans. S. J. Tester, Boethius. Loeb Classical Library 74 (Harvard University Press, 1973), 273–​275. 8 Boethius, Consolatio, 3.10.22, ed. Moreschini, 83. 9 Boethius, Consolatio, 3.12.30, ed. Moreschini, 94–​95; trans. Tester, 305. 10 Boethius, Consolatio, 3.12.37, ed. Moreschini, 95; trans. Tester, 307.

Trinit y and Form  211 Boethius’s treatise De trinitate has enjoyed more attention than the other opuscula sacra for its thoughtful discussion of theological method.11 In a few dense pages, he shows how to define the Trinity using the lexicon of Aristotle long before the early scholastics and Thomas Aquinas, who studied the treatise closely. Boethius demonstrates that the threeness of the Trinity introduces neither diversity nor number into God’s unity, but along the way, he has to distinguish form, image, and number. Given the proximity of physics, mathematics, and theology, how should these disciplines work together to name the Christian God? Physics and mathematics study embodied forms (corporum formas cum materia), the former in motion and the latter in stasis. Whether concrete or abstract, these forms are indissociable from their material conditions (separari non possunt). By contrast, the discipline of theology perceives God as form separable from matter and motion through an immediate intuition (intellectualiter).12 So far, all of this is more or less in Aristotle. But Boethius pushes the argument a step further, by identifying God with form itself. God, he says, is truly Form (vere forma), the strongest and most beautiful Form (pulcherrimum fortissimumque). God’s Form is being itself (esse ipsum) and divinity itself (divina substantia).13 In a related treatise, Boethius names God forma essendi, the Form of being.14 To defend Nicene orthodoxy about the divine Word—​while living under Arian rule—​Boethius finds himself asserting that God is not sheer formlessness beyond measure, but Form itself, rightly construed. According to Boethius, theology does not treat the same variety of form as physics and mathematics do. Instead, we ought to say that God is the sole Form and that all other embodied forms are images (imagines). The multitude of worldly forms are so many simulacra (adsimulantur) of the singular divine Form; in effect, forma is reserved for one supreme divine instance alone.15 In this passage, plainly and directly, Boethius gives voice to what I have called the aesthetics of Tradition B. Only God is Form; all others are images of that Form, participating in God’s form. In fact, forma has no other meaning apart from its original thearchic 11 On the reception history of the opuscula sacra, see Margaret Gibson, “The Opuscula Sacra in the Middle Ages,” in Boethius: His Life, Thought, and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson (Basil Blackwell, 1981), 214–​234; and Siobhan Nash-​Marshall, “Boethius’s Influence on Theology and Metaphysics to C. 1500,” in A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages, eds. Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr. and Philip Edward Phillips (Brill, 2012), 163–​191. 12 Boethius, De Sancta Trinitate, 2:68–​80, ed. Moreschini, 168–​169. 13 Boethius, De Sancta Trinitate, 2:81–​102, ed. Moreschini, 169–​170. 14 Boethius, Quomodo substantiae, Regula II:26–​28, ed. Moreschini, 187. The phrase is notoriously difficult to define without conflating Boethius’s position with pantheism or Thomism. See Fernand Brunner, “Deus forma essendi,” in Entretiens sur la Renaissance du XIIe siècle, eds. Maurice de Gandillac and Édouard Jeauneau (Mouton, 1968), 85–​116; and Pierre Hadot, “Forma Essendi. Interprétation philologique et interpretation philosophique d’une formule de Boèce,” Les Études classiques 38 (1970): 143–​156. 15 “. . . neque enim esset forma, sed imago. . . . Nam ceteras quae in corporibus sunt abutimur formas vocantes, dum imagines sint: adsimulantur enim formis his quae non sunt in materia constitutae.” Boethius, De Sancta Trinitate, 2:112–​117, ed. Moreschini, 171.

212  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation sovereignty, mirrored in the infinite analogical donations that are the embodied forms of the world in matter or number.16 Precisely because God is not an embodied form, God is necessarily without image and therefore known apophatically. Yet for Boethius, God remains nonetheless a determinate, unique original whose specific character impresses every being. God’s Form is unseen because it projects no image; it is imageless, but not formless. In a similar way, God is unity itself (unitas) beyond number, yet Trinity implies some kind of numerosity (trinitatis numerositas).17 Here Boethius turns to a Neopythagorean doctrine that defines number as a repetition of unities (repetitio unitatum).18 He concludes that the Trinity is a thrice-​counted divine One (unitatum iteratio) but not a counting of three per se (numeratio).19 Only the Trinity can be counted as a unity; all other beings are counted as pluralities. Just as God is not mere form but singular Form, God is no ordinary number, but unity or the One. Boethius’s insights are quietly wrought, and as much as they run against the grain of Plotinian aesthetics, they do not exactly leap off the page. In his stalwart eccentricity, Boethius floated through the monastic libraries like a message in a bottle, waiting to be read by those who could hold it up to the light at the right angle. Those readers did not show up until the twelfth century, in a period that Marie-​ Dominique Chenu has called the “Boethian moment” (aetas Boetiana), poised as it was between the renaissance of the quadrivium in the cathedral schools and the rediscovery of Aristotle.20 For a half-​century, a minor but robust “hidden heritage” of Boethian Christian Platonism emerged as a tradition distinct from Augustinian and Dionysian lineages, one that could be expanded to include thinkers like John Scotus Eriugena or Meister Eckhart, who share a family resemblance.21 But without a doubt the two most important masters of Christian Neopythagoreanism were Thierry of Chartres (ca. 1090–​1157 CE) and Achard of St. Victor (ca. 1110–​ 1171 CE). Both were part of an avant-​garde circle of twelfth-​century humanists whose project did not map well onto the early schools. Thierry was among the 16 Erismann considers the distinction between true form and embodied images to be pivotal for Boethian metaphysics—​“a thesis which has serious consequences”—​because it denies substantial form in individuals. Gilbert of Poitiers was among the first to exploit this Platonist moment in Boethius and teach that embodied forms are icones idearum not the ideae themselves. See Christophe Erismann, “The Medieval Fortunes of the Opuscula sacra,” in The Cambridge Companion to Boethius, ed. John Marenbon (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 166–​167. 17 Boethius, De Sancta Trinitate, 6:333–​341, ed. Moreschini, 179–​180. 18 Boethius, De Sancta Trinitate, 3:129, ed. Moreschini, 171. Cf. Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.3.1–​2, ed. Guillaumin, 12. On the Neopythagorean doctrine, see Nicomachus, Introductio arithmetica, I.7.1, ed. Hoche, 13; trans. D’Ooge et al., 190. See also Nicomachus, Theologoumena arithmeticae, II, ed. Victor de Falco (Teubner, 1922; Rev. ed. Teubner, 1975), 8–​9; trans. D’Ooge et al., 117. 19 Boethius, De Sancta Trinitate, 3:138–​143, ed. Moreschini, 172. On the difficulty, and possible incoherence, of Boethius’s analysis of number in the Trinity, see David Bradshaw, “The Opuscula sacra: Boethius and Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Boethius, ed. John Marenbon (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 110–​112. 20 Marie-​Dominique Chenu, La théologie au douzième siècle (J. Vrin, 1957), 142–​158. 21 Andreas Speer, “The Hidden Heritage: Boethian Metaphysics and Its Medieval Tradition,” Quaestio 5 (2005): 163–​181.

Trinit y and Form  213 first in the Latin West to build new components of a geometrical theology; continuing his teacher’s work, Achard arranged them into a theological aesthetics that begins with the Many, not the One. Together their exposition and expansion of the Boethian moment—​however delayed and then marginalized—​secured the temporary possibility of an authentic Latin Christian Neopythagoreanism.22 This chapter and the next one stand as something of a coda to those that preceded them, since they reach beyond the boundaries of Christian antiquity into two authors in medieval Paris. Yet Thierry and Achard still merit inclusion because only they unfurl the full consequences of Boethius’s ideas. John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite were two medieval Dionysians in the Christian East, who introduced Neopythagorean geometrical figuration into their Christologies. But as Thomas F. X. Noble has observed about Theodore and Nicephorus, “not a line from one of their texts circulated in the West. No florilegium from which they drew evidence was seen or assessed by anyone in the West.”23 Yet amid this silence, we can still hear a faint echo centuries later on the opposite rim of the Mediterranean. For in a parallel way, Thierry of Chartres and Achard of St. Victor represent two medieval Boethians in the West, who blend Neopythagorean ideas not with Christology, but with a theology of the Trinity. Thierry and Achard learned how to listen to the theological resonance of Boethius’s mathematical translations, and through this encounter, they made contact, so to speak, with the spirits of Nicomachus and Iamblichus. For Thierry and Achard, the Trinity is not a solitary One but a harmony of Many. They name the second person of the Trinity “eternal Equality” and “eternal Square.” They even propose their own theory of linearity as the unfolding of enfolded points. As we saw at the end of the last chapter, John and Theodore ultimately contemplate the icon as a kind of figure, a diagram. On the other side of the mirror, Thierry and Achard now begin to contemplate geometrical figures as if they were icons. By many accounts, Thierry of Chartres was the most distinguished arts master of his generation in Paris. Having moved from his native Brittany to the Chartres cathedral, and then to Paris around 1124, Thierry was an erudite educational reformer and brilliant if sometimes caustic teacher.24 His renown reached its high point after he became chancellor of the Chartres cathedral school in 1141, following Gilbert 22 I sketch this road not taken in David Albertson, “Latin Christian Neopythagorean Theology: A Speculative Summa,” in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, eds. Irene Caiazzo, Constantinos Macris, and Aurélien Robert (Brill, 2021), 373–​414. John Milbank suggests that when Ramus and Vieta algebracized geometry, contravening the mathematics of Nicomachus and Boethius, they collapsed magnitude into multitude, separated mathematical form from eidetic form, and lost the analogical function of inscribed geometrical shapes. See John Milbank, “Writing and the Order of Learning,” Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 4, no. 1 (2017): 46–​73. 23 Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, 252. 24 For biographical details, see J. O. Ward, “The Date of the Commentary on Cicero’s ‘De Inventione’ by Thierry of Chartres (ca. 1095–​1160?) and the Cornifician Attack on the Liberal Arts,” Viator 3 (1972): 219–​273.

214  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation of Poitiers. By 1155, he had retired to a Cistercian house, where he died a few years later. Thierry’s contemporaries describe his rare ability to read across the disciplinary lines that were beginning to emerge in the cathedral schools.25 Resisting trends toward specialization that led masters to break up the disciplines of the liberal arts, Thierry sought to hold them together. He could offer naturalistic readings of Genesis “in accord with natural science” (secundum physicam) with one hand and propose mathematical theologies of the Trinity with the other. Much of the curriculum that shaped the cathedral schools consisted of a compact library of authorities. Thierry collected the best sources for his classrooms and eventually compiled a massive anthology, the Heptateucon, which he said would “marry” the two branches of the arts and generate the philosophy of the future.26 Starting in the 1130s, Thierry worked his way through the major texts of the trivium and quadrivium. He lectured on natural philosophy by combining Genesis with Plato’s Timaeus (via Calcidius) and Boethius’s Consolatio.27 His lectures on logic and dialectic started with Boethius’s handbooks on Aristotle and Porphyry.28 But Thierry’s interests extended to the quadrivium as well, where Boethius was again the preeminent authority. Here he began with Boethius’s handbooks on Neopythagorean arithmetic (Institutio arithmetica) and harmonics (De musica), concluding with pseudonymous fragments of “Boethian” geometry.29 Finally, he worked painstakingly through Boethius’s theological opuscula—​secret reservoirs of Neoplatonism—​including works on the Trinity (De trinitate), divine being (De hebdomadibus), and Christology (Contra Eutychen). We possess many of Thierry’s commentaries today, but not all. For twelfth-​century masters, discovering new knowledge meant inventing new ways of reading the sources. While Thierry’s approach to the trivium was straightforward, his quadrivial lectures tested out a radical method that refused to leave Boethius’s mathematical and doctrinal texts sequestered into neat categories.30 25 On this period, see Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics, 1100–​1215 (Stanford University Press, 1985); and C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–​1200 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 26 See Édouard Jeauneau, “Le ‘Prologus in Eptatheucon’ de Thierry de Chartres,” Mediaeval Studies 16, no. 1 (1954): 171–​175; and Gillian R. Evans, “The Uncompleted Heptateuch of Thierry of Chartres,” History of Universities 3 (1983): 1–​13. 27 Nikolaus M. Häring, ed., Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and His School (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1971). 28 Karin M. Fredborg, ed., The Latin Rhetorical Commentaries by Thierry of Chartres (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988). 29 Irene Caiazzo, ed., Thierry of Chartres. The Commentary on the De arithmetica of Boethius (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2015). According to Irene Caiazzo, Boethius’s Institutio arithmetica is “the only truly neo-​pythagorean text available in the Latin Middle Ages,” and yet despite its many commentaries from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries, “its influence has not yet been fully explored.” See Irene Caiazzo, “Medieval Commentaries on Boethius’s De arithmetica: A Provisional Handlist,” Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale 62 (2020): 3–​4. 30 See Gillian R. Evans, “Thierry of Chartres and the Unity of Boethius’ Thought,” Studia Patristica 17 (1983): 440–​445.

Trinit y and Form  215 He searched for secret theological meanings within the quadrivium; he listened for arithmetical harmonies within the Trinity. The result was a strange variety of Christian Neopythagoreanism that set Thierry apart even from those in the loose circle of Chartres-​affiliated intellectuals interested in causation, matter, divine ideas, and cosmic wisdom.31 In his eccentric mathematical theology, Thierry stood alone with few followers.32 To our surprise, the greatest twelfth-​century inheritor of his Neopythagorean experiment is the dutiful Victorine abbot, Achard of St. Victor. Thierry is best known for his mathematized theology of the Trinity, in which the Father is unitas, the Son is aequalitas, and the Spirit is the connexio of unity and equality. The highest language for the triune God is neither gendered for paternity nor, as Peter Abelard proposed, a set of abstractions like Power, Wisdom, and Goodness. According to Thierry, the highest name is the equation 1 × 1 =​1. Thierry found the triad of unity, equality, and harmony in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana but adjusted the terms to fit Boethian arithmetic.33 This signature doctrine is essential to bringing Neopythagoreanism into Latin Christianity, but its particular focus on arithmetic overshadows what is in fact Thierry’s more geometrical orientation, as we will see. As Thierry looks back to Boethius, he has several pieces of a puzzle arranged before him. What do Boethius’s teaching on the divine Form have to do with his defense of the Trinity? What about the allusive phrase forma essendi in De hebdomadibus? What do the poems of Consolatio have to do with the long volumes on arithmetic and harmonics? Thierry hopes to arrange these fragments into an ordered, beautiful whole. That pattern only takes shape once he sees the pieces in light of geometry. What unifies Boethian thought in Thierry’s writings are leading concepts like figure (figura) and shape (quadratus, tetragona); measure (mensura) and magnitude (magnitudo); unity (unitas) and equality (aequalitas); point (punctus) and line (linea); and the extension of the fold into space (complicatio et explicatio). Thierry is obviously writing in Latin as a western Christian. But by reactivating Neopythagorean potentials preserved in Boethius, it is almost as if he is thinking in Greek alongside Plotinus, Proclus, and Dionysius. In the language of our previous chapters, Thierry’s thought circles around the familiar vocabulary of figure (σχῆμα) and shape (μορφή); measure (μέτρον) and magnitude (μέγεθος); unity (ἑνότης) and equality (ἰσότης); point (σημεῖον) and line (γραμμή); and the folds of spreading (ἐκτείνω) or unrolling (ἐξελίσσομαι). 31 See Andreas Speer, Die entdeckte Natur: Untersuchungen zu Begründungsversuchen einer “scientia naturalis” im 12. Jahrhundert (Brill, 1995). 32 On the afterlife of Thierry’s mathematical Trinity, see David Albertson, “Achard of St. Victor (d. 1171) and the Eclipse of the Arithmetic Model of the Trinity,” Traditio 67 (2012): 101–​144; and Hugh Feiss, “The Trinity in De unitate: Metaphysics and Theology,” in Achard de Saint-​Victor métaphysicien. Le De unitate Dei et pluralitate creaturarum. Ad argumenta. Quaestio Special Issues, Vol. 2, ed. Vincent Carraud, Gilles Olivo, and Pasquale Porro (Brepols, 2019), 42–​45. 33 See Albertson, Mathematical Theologies, 93–​139.

216  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation As Thierry grounds his Christian Platonism in geometry, reviving the aesthetics of supreme Form, he effectively ushers in the very henological scenario that Plotinus had rejected. As we saw in Chapter 3, for Plotinus the One is without form, Intellect is the Form of forms, and Soul functions as λόγος gathering the forms in the world for Intellect. When Plotinus makes his case for formlessness, he warns that abandoning the aneidetic One would disturb this delicate hierarchy. He makes three predictions (VI.7.14–​17). First, if the One were not formless, the One itself would have to become the transcendent Form of forms. It would have to unify the forms, and those dependents would immediately ruin its autarchy and transcendence. Second, if the One were the Form of forms, it would fall to Intellect as λόγος to gather the forms. But for Plotinus, νοῦς cannot also be λόγος, because Soul would have no way to organize φύσις immanently. Third, Plotinus keeps geometrical figures safely distant from the One, because in his schema they bridge Intellect and Soul. Were the One to be the Form of forms, those geometrical figures would brush right up against the One, bridging the distance to Intellect; as such they would be endowed with immediate analogical functions. Plotinus wants to avoid all of these messy outcomes. But in precise opposition to Plotinus, Thierry of Chartres activates all three possibilities. First, he combines Boethius’s vere forma and forma essendi to define the One as forma formarum. This is the ancient Christian tradition of the divine ideas abiding in the mind of God, but now brought to a new level of clarity. Second, he interprets the divine Verbum as aequalitas, mensura, and figura. In so many words, the divine Son gathers the forms together as a λόγος who is also μέτρον. Finally, Thierry systematically geometrizes mediation between the Many and the One. Boethius and Thierry hold that all the forms in the world are “images” of the singular divine Form, but this requires them to name a mediating principle that coordinates such analogical participation. Thierry suggests that space itself plays this role, as the “enfolding and unfolding” of the One, and his proposal takes a step beyond the Greek authors we have read. Plotinus himself had compared Intellect to a “circle unfolding itself ” (κύκλος ἐξελίξας αὐτὸν) (III.8.8), yet in the same breath he required the lines of his geometrical analogies to “spread without spreading” (ἐξελιχθὲν οὐκ ἐξεληλιγμένον) (VI.8.18), so that they would not take up space. Proclus saw that geometrical space was a noetic field for “unfolding” (ἀνελίττει) concepts in the imagination. According to Dionysius, the ecstatic eros of God truly “unfolds” (ἀνελιττομένη) as the space of an eternal circularity.34 God’s profusion of self-​giving “hyper-​extends” (ὑπερεκτεινόμενον) into a unique, divine Magnitude (μέγεθος), which opens up an ever-​expanding spatial field, clearing the way for infinite giving.35 In this context, Thierry effectively theorizes the positive spatial mediation broached by 34 DN IV.17 (713D). 35 DN IX.2 (909C).

Trinit y and Form  217 Proclus and Dionysius, but unlike them does so in the patently Neopythagorean language that he learned from Boethian arithmetic. The positivity of spatial difference—​the measuring of the world—​suspends the One in permanent union with creatures in reciprocal folds that in many ways resemble the Dionysian hierarchies. In what follows, I trace these three counter-​Plotinian moments in the thought of Thierry of Chartres: the One as Form of forms, the Son as the figure of Equality, and the genesis of methectic folding out of the power of the geometrical line. In the genetic evolution of Thierry’s works, however, they arise in the opposite sequence, enfolded in the original fold.

The fold of lines Thierry of Chartres’s primary genre is commentaries on authoritative source texts. His best-​known work is a hexaemeral commentary praising the methods (probationes) of the quadrivial arts, Tractatus de sex dierum operibus. Nikolaus Häring demonstrated that three related commentaries on Boethius’s De trinitate were all composed by Thierry, and he linked them to a handful of related reportationes by his students on other opuscula sacra.36 Those three major commentaries on De trinitate are known as Commentum, Lectiones, and Glosa for short. Tractatus was likely written just before Commentum, while Lectiones and Glosa appeared a decade later. In Commentum, Thierry tests out grand unifying theories that might encompass theology, mathematics, and physics, but by the time of Lectiones and Glosa, he settles on four universal “modes of being” arranged into a system of folding. For decades, both the genesis of Chartrian folding and the provenance of his peculiar geometrical concepts have remained unclear. In 2011, Irene Caiazzo unearthed a medieval gloss on Boethius’s Institutio arithmetica and successfully attributed it to Thierry of Chartres.37 It came as no surprise to scholars of the Chartrians that Thierry wrote a commentary on Boethian arithmetic.38 His exceptionally broad teaching facility was already becoming unusual by the end of his career, and he makes ample references to Boethian Arithmetica throughout his commentaries on Genesis and De trinitate.39 His students casually invoke the authority of the arithmetici, suggesting that Boethius’s 36 See Häring, ed., Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and His School. 37 See Caiazzo, ed., Commentary on the De arithmetica of Boethius. Caiazzo first published a partial transcription in “Il rinvenimento del commento di Teodorico di Chartres al De arithmetica di Boezio,” in Adorare caelestia, gubernare terrena: Atti del colloquio internazionale in onore di Paolo Lucentini, eds. Pasquale Arfé, Irene Caiazzo, and Antonella Sannino (Brepols, 2011), 183–​203. 38 See Caiazzo, “Introduction,” in Commentary on the De arithmetica of Boethius, 25–​33. 39 See Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus de sex dierum operibus [=​ Tractatus], 30–​39, ed. Häring, 568–​ 571; and Thierry of Chartres, Commentum super Boethii librum de Trinitate [=​ Commentum], II.28–​ 36, ed. Häring, 77–​79.

218  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation textbook featured frequently in Thierry’s lectures.40 Given the likelihood that Thierry penned such a work, historians have searched for it among anonymous Arithmetica commentaries.41 Caiazzo’s stunning find, Super Arithmeticam, fits like a missing piece in the puzzle of Chartrian texts that we possess. It shares the mathematical Trinity and theology of equality with Tractatus and the three De trinitate commentaries; reciprocal folding with Lectiones and Glosa; and a strange prophecy about an eternal Square with Commentum. Caiazzo dates Super Arithmeticam between the Tractatus on Genesis (early 1130s) and the Commentum on De trinitate (between 1130 and 1140).42 It seems to me, however, that Super Arithmeticam antedates and informs the Tractatus on Genesis, and not the other way around. Within a few short pages in his Genesis commentary, Thierry integrates the mathematical and theological dimensions of Boethian discourse and then reconciles those with Augustinian theology.43 It is difficult to imagine anyone performing this feat without arriving at the first innovation in a prior work. The sequence of Thierry’s writings might seem unimportant, but at stake is whether the Parisian master happened upon Neopythagorean ideas accidentally or whether he deliberately formulated them first and then dared to apply them to Trinitarian doctrine. If Thierry discovered folding within the Boethian Arithmetica in his earliest known commentary, that would suggest that the incorporation of Neopythagoreanism into Christian theology was central to his entire intellectual enterprise. And that, in turn, would contradict many of our assumptions about the novelty of the mathematization of method in the seventeenth century versus the twelfth.44 As Caiazzo predicts, her discovery will undoubtedly “significantly change” our understanding of Thierry of Chartres.45 40 See Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones in Boethii librum de Trinitate [=​ Lectiones], III.5, ed. Häring, 178; and Thierry of Chartres, Glosa super Boethii librum de Trinitate [=​ Glosa], I.38, ed. Häring, 267. Cf. the anonymous student works, Commentarius Victorinus, 81–​88, ed. Häring, 498–​499; and Tractatus De Trinitate, 12–​18, ed. Häring, 306–​307. 41 See, e.g., Gillian R. Evans, “A Commentary on Boethius’s Arithmetica of the Twelfth or Thirteenth Century,” Annals of Science 35, no. 2 (1978): 131–​141. Caiazzo found Thierry’s commentary in a twelfth-​century Stuttgart manuscript first described by Arno Borst and Menso Folkerts: MS Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. math. 4° 33, fols. 11ra–​34ra. See Arno Borst, “Rithmimachie und Musiktheorie,” in Geschichte der Musiktheorie, Vol. 3: Rezeption des antiken Fachs im Mittelalter, ed. Frieder Zaminer (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990), 256. The codex originated from the Benedictine abbey of Comburg and both its script and binding date to the twelfth century. Thierry’s commentary takes up the first third of the volume; the other folios are filled with astronomical works. Caiazzo shows that Thierry’s commentary drew upon a prominent tenth-​century commentary and that the anonymous Bern Arithmetica (MS Bern Bürgerbibliothek, Cod. 633, fols. 19ra–​27ra) discovered by Raymond Klibansky made use of Thierry’s Super Arithmeticam in turn. Irene Caiazzo, “Un commento altomedievale al De arithmetica di Boezio,” Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 58 (2000), 113–​150. On the Bern commentary, see Vera Rodrigues, “Creatio numerorum: Nature et rationalité chez Thierry de Chartres” (PhD diss., École Pratique des Hautes Études, 2006). 42 Caiazzo, “Introduction,” 18–​22, 40. 43 See Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 30–​47, ed. Häring 568–​575. 44 See Speer, Die entdeckte Natur, 293–​294. 45 Caiazzo, “Il rinvenimento,” 203.

Trinit y and Form  219 In the second book of Super Arithmeticam, Thierry turns to Boethius’s account of the geometrical construction of a line. Here Boethius is explaining the ancient paradox that atomistic points lack quantity when added together, even though the point is the source of all quantity in space. As Boethius states: “From this principle (i.e. from unity) arises the original length, which unfolds [explicat] from the principle of binary number into all numbers themselves, since line is the first extension.”46 The sudden transition from point to line is the leap from number to magnitude, from indivisibility to extension, from monad to indefinite dyad and from the invisible to the visible itself. As we saw in Chapter 2, this is the same uncanny frontier of geometry that Plotinus warns contemplatives to enter with caution. To explain Boethius’s text, Thierry focuses on the verb explicare. Whatever philosophical mysteries are revealed in the transition from point to line, he wagers, will be found in that term. Thierry observes: But unity takes the place of the point, and rightly so. Because just as unity is the enfolding [complicatio] of number, and number is the unfolding [explicatio] of unity, so also the point is the enfolding of every magnitude, and magnitude is the unfolding of the point. . . . Therefore, I say that the point is the limit and perfection of a given thing; it is the very totality of that thing. It delimits the entire thing wholly and perfectly, which would not exist as such save for its limitation as a single thing. But when we say “limits,” we misspeak, just as when we say “unities.” Hence the extension of its line unfolds this totality, which we name limit; for line is the unfurling [evolutio] of the point. . . . However, where is there one perfection of a thing, there is not one totality that includes its magnitude; the totality is rather the enfolding of magnitude. To unfold this totality is nothing other than to divide the whole into parts.47

This is a seminal text for the development of Thierry’s thought and the first known instance of his notion of reciprocal folding. In the first place, we should notice that Thierry defines complicatio and explicatio strictly according to the tenets of 46 “Ex hoc igitur principio, id est ex unitate, prima omnium longitudo succrescit quae a binarii numeri principio in cunctos sese numeros explicat, quoniam primum interuallum linea est.” Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, II.4.6, ed. Guillaumin, 90. 47 “Unitas vero locum obtinet puncti, et merito, quia sicut unitas est complicatio numeri, et numerus explicatio unitatis, ita quoque punctum est complicatio omnis magnitudinis, et magnitudo est explicatio puncti. . . . Dico igitur quod punctus est terminus rei ipsius et perfectio. Haec est ipsa rei totalitas, quae rem totam integre terminat et perfecte, nec est nisi unius rei proprie terminus. Cum enim terminos dicimus, abutimur, quemadmodum cum unitates dicimus. Hanc ergo totalitatem, quam terminum nominamus, explicat ipsius lineae extensio; linea namque est puncti evolutio. . . . Nec tamen est ubi una rei perfectio, una totalitas quae ipsam magnitudinem includit; ipsa enim est magnitudinis complicatio. Explicare vero totalitatem hoc nihil aliud est quam totum per partes dividere.” SA II.4 (230–​232, 236–​241, 266–​269), 163–​165. I cite by chapter, line number, and page number in the Caiazzo edition.

220  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Boethian geometry. The point enfolds the line, just as unity enfolds number. Years later, in Lectiones, he will apply folding to theology, calling God the unity that enfolds the unfolded plurality of the cosmos, but his initial definition here in Super Arithmeticam is distinctly nontheological.48 Unlike his first discovery of aequalitas in Boethius, to which we will turn next, Thierry theorizes folding as a problem of quadrivial foundations, restricting his attention to Boethius’s difficult geometrical claim. Thierry must explain how the dimensionless point is ontologically prior to the fullness of space, in the same way that unity precedes all numbers. That is, in what sense can an infinitesimal point measure the contours of a solid object with extension? To answer this question, Thierry redefines the nature of spatial delineation. Geometrical circumscription through lines, he suggests, is a derivative mode of measure. When we trace a line around a planar or solid figure, we measure in the dimension of quantitative magnitude, but only in a penultimate sense. For, according to Thierry, in fact, there are two inextricable aspects of magnitude: enfolded magnitude and unfolded magnitude. The enfolding of the point precedes the unfolding of the line. So if we want to establish the true limit (terminus) or completion (perfectio) of a given spatial whole (totalitas), what we require is not the delineated contours of the corporeal surface, but the essence of those derivative lines as they are rolled back into their primary unity, namely, as a single point. This is what Thierry means when he states that the point is the limit, perfection, and totality of every given being, regardless of its spatial magnitude. Thierry’s vision of points “enfolding” lines in geometry is modeled after unity “enfolding” numbers in arithmetic, as he states. But this train of thought leads well beyond a difficult mathematical concept in Boethius. Perhaps Thierry was also thinking of the end of Boethius’s Consolatio, where divine providence “embraces” (complectitur) cosmic differences like a point, while fate “unfolds” (explicatio) the temporal order like a rotating sphere.49 Yet Boethius never connects complicatio and explicatio dialectically. It is Thierry who finds in the geometry of the line a single mechanism for the principles of multitude and magnitude capable of unifying the bifurcated conceptual foundations of the quadrivium. In one stroke, he formulates a univocal model of reciprocal folding that can generate both quadrivial dimensions homologously: multitude as unfolded unity, and magnitude as unfolded point, producing arithmetic and music, on the one hand, and geometry and astronomy, on the other. Nicomachus and Boethius enunciated these parallel 48 See Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones, II.4–​6, ed. Häring, 155–​156. 49 See Boethius, Consolatio, 4.6.10, ed. Moreschini, 122; and Boethius, Consolatio, 5.6.40, ed. Moreschini, 160. Thierry alludes to these same lines in Commentum, II.49, ed. Häring, 84. Stephen Gersh traces three of eight critical “philosophemes” of Latin Neoplatonism back to Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae: hierarchical emanation, reciprocal folding, and the providence of the divine mind. See Stephen Gersh, “The First Principles of Latin Neoplatonism: Augustine, Macrobius, Boethius,” Vivarium 50, no. 2 (2012): 113–​138.

Trinit y and Form  221 orders and kept them correlated but distinct.50 Only after Thierry could they be united by the dynamic auto-​differentiation of folding. Folding mediates the distance between the One and the Many, between the invisible and the visible, and between indivisibility and divisibility, all by installing a continuous space—​the fold of line—​as a positive mark that preserves difference.51 The One is not other than or opposed to the Many, nor the Many to the One; rather, they are folded together. Their unity sustains their difference, and their difference enables their unity. For the next robust account of folding in Thierry’s works, we have to wait more than a decade until his Lectiones and Glosa on Boethius’s theological method. Thierry never mentions folding in the Tractatus on Genesis, and in Commentum, he experiments with the term once or twice, but it never congeals into a doctrine. Only in the later Lectiones and Glosa does Thierry return to his insight in Super Arithmeticam and systematically pair complicatio and explicatio as a reciprocal couplet.52 Folding becomes the scaffolding for his fourfold “modes of being” in Lectiones that systematizes the disciplinary relationship between theology and mathematics. As Thierry explains, theology’s subject is the first mode of being, which he calls “absolute necessity” (necessitas absoluta). When this is unfolded, it generates the second mode of being, the “necessity of enfolding” (necessitas complexionis), which is the subject of mathematics. The third mode is the “determined possibility” (possibilitas determinata), which is the unfolding of “absolute possibility” (possibilitas absoluta). These last two modes are the subject of physics.53 These four modes are constituted by two parallel orders of folding: the

50 See Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introductio arithmetica, I.2.4–​5, I.3.1–​2, ed. Hoche, 4–​6. Cf. Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.1.1–​12, ed. Guillaumin, 6–​11. On multitude and magnitude, see further Napolitano Valditara, Le idee, i numeri, l’ordine, 413–​434. 51 Gilles Deleuze was well aware that his famous discovery of “folding” in Leibniz was indebted first and foremost to Thierry of Chartres. See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (University of Minnesota Press, 1993). As Joshua Ramey has shown, Deleuze’s first allusion to “folding” arrives two decades earlier in 1964: “Certain Neoplatonists used a profound word to designate the original state that proceeds any development, any ‘explication’: complication, which envelops the many in the One and affirms the unity of the multiple.” Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 45; cited in Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (Duke University Press, 2012), 83–​84. However, the clearest attribution appears in his pivotal Spinoza book in 1968. At first, like many others, Deleuze attributes folding to Plotinus (Enneads VI.6.29, III.8.8, V.3.10, and VI.8.18). But then he provides a more careful genealogy: “Boethius applies to eternal Being the terms comprehendere and complectiri (cf. Consolation of Philosophy, Prosa VI). The nominal couple complicatio-​explicatio, or the adjectival complective-​ explicative, take on great importance in Boethius’s commentators, notably in the twelfth-​century School of Chartres.” Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (Zone Books, 1990), 376 n. 12. 52 See Thierry of Chartres, Commentum, II.49, ed. Häring, 84; and Commentum, IV.42–​43, 107. Cf. Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones, II.4–​13, ed. Häring, 155–​158. Other late texts on folding include Lectiones, II.59–​II.66, ed. Häring, 174–​176; and Glosa, II.15, ed. Häring, 271–​272. Folding also appears in an anonymous commentary on Boethius’s De hebdomadibus, stemming from Thierry’s circle or possibly Thierry himself: Abbrevatio monacensis De Hebdomadibus, II.25–​42 passim, ed. Häring, 409–​412. See further Albertson, Mathematical Theologies, 121–​131. 53 See Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones, II.14–​29, ed. Häring, 158–​164.

222  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation order of necessity (first mode, second mode) and the order of possibility (third mode, fourth mode). But crucially, the second mode is the unfolding of the first mode, just as third is the unfolding of the fourth.54 In other words, theology is enfolded mathematics, and mathematics is unfolded theology. Beyond this methodological framework in Lectiones, however, Thierry never applies enfolding and unfolding to discrete examples in the quadrivium. Notably, but unusually, Thierry never asks about the folds of number, quantity, point, line, time, or motion, across his four major commentaries on Genesis and De trinitate—​ as he clearly did in Super Arithmeticam in the original instance. The priority of the quadrivium in that initial account, in light of its subsequent theological use, suggests that as an early work Super Arithmeticam marks the true origin of his doctrine of folding.55 Thierry does not theorize folding for the first time in Lectiones, but deliberately retools this lemma of Boethian geometry for a secondary application, namely, organizing the principles of theological method in De trinitate. Yet folding retains its inalienable mathematical basis in this later appearance in Lectiones, even if Thierry’s full account of quadrivial foundations is not argued on the page but silently assumed without notice to the reader. The structure of folding that harmonizes theology and mathematics in Lectiones is not a neutral device but is already inherently geometrized. Thierry’s focus on the metric capacities of points does not discount the ontological significance of circumscription, or measuring with line, but quite the opposite. By elevating geometrical figuration to the level of arithmetic, by insisting on the strict analogy of unity and point, and by proposing folding as their common spatialized basis, Thierry removes once and for all the Plotinian suspicion of measures in space. He carves out a second way of accessing henology: one by analogy to arithmetic, as in Plotinus (V.5.5–​6), but now another by analogy to geometry. Geometrical lines can still be collapsed back into their points to express unity, but they are not under any compulsion to be erased, as was the case in Plotinus. For now, the model that binds arithmetic and geometry in the first place, reciprocal folding, is a model that is irreversibly spatial and patently geometrical. Thierry sees that the very continuities of line—​its unrolling, unfurling, spreading into extension—​also encompass a fold of difference. Henology can be geometrized, such that the realm of magnitude no longer needs to be subject to the subtle iconoclasms of the mind. Left to itself, arithmetic alone as an ontological framework can lead to formlessness, as it did in Plotinus. But arithmetic permanently bound to geometry in its foundations, as in Thierry’s Boethian revision, leads only to Form.

54 See Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones, II.10, ed. Häring, 157–​158. 55 See Caiazzo, “Introduction,” 64–​67; cf. Caiazzo, “Il rinvenimento del commento,” 201–​203.

Trinit y and Form  223

Eternal measure We have just seen how Thierry innovates folding within the Neopythagorean laboratory of the Super Arithmeticam commentary and then applies it in later theological works. The same pattern holds for the concept of divine Equality (aequalitas) or eternal measure. Of necessity, Thierry’s commentary delves into the ontology of magnitudo in Boethian mathematics (μέγεθος in Nicomachus), the foundation of geometry.56 But the true center of Thierry’s speculative geometry in this work is the frequent Boethian term aequalitas, which encompasses not only the literal sense of ἰσότης but concepts of figure (σχῆμα) and measure (μέτρον) as well. In Thierry’s later writings, the mathematical Trinity will require not only arithmetical measure (unitas) but geometrical measure (aequalitas). In so many words, the divine Word or Son is most intelligible as a concept of pure mensuration, Equality itself. Yet in the workshop of Super Arithmeticam, Thierry is still experimenting with several possible valences of aequalitas, and the range of meanings he finds there reveals how central measure and magnitude are to his evolving theology. Then in the Tractatus on Genesis, we can watch as Thierry selects elements from Super Arithmeticam that he wishes to develop further in a Trinitarian key. In the first book of Institutio arithmetica, Thierry discovers a fundamental Boethian axiom: “every inaequalitas proceeds from aequalitas.”57 He advises his students that this difficult but essential principle must be approached from multiple perspectives. According to Thierry, there are theological (ethical), mathematical (rational), and physical (natural) interpretations to explore.58 Although he never spells this out, I count six major functions of aequalitas in Super Arithmeticam, two of which seem to fit under each of Thierry’s headings. (1) The Good as equality. Thierry’s theological or ethical interpretation has several components, but the most prominent theme is the nature of divine goodness (bonitas divina). Good is always prior to evil, just as equality precedes inequality, and just as each instance of inequality is a failure of equality, evil is nothing but a perversion (transgressio) of good. God preserves goodness like an eternal mean (modus) that neither exceeds beyond nor recedes from perfect equality, imposing divine law or divine providence.59 God’s goodness is the eternal equality from which the inequality of imperfect creatures descends. The Good is perfectly self-​equal and all things of necessity proceed from it and return to it.60 While divine goodness



56 SA I.3 (174–​194), 108–​109. 57 Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.32.2, ed. Guillaumin, 67. Cf. SA I.32 (1161–​1425), 143–​154. 58 SA I.32 (1164–​1166), 144; and SA I.32 (1390–​1391), 152. 59 SA I.32 (1170–​1176), 144; and SA I.32 (1243–​1268), 147–​148. 60 SA I.32 (passim 1170–​1176, 1202–​1215, 1243–​1274), 144–​148. Cf. SA II.1 (1–​14), 155.

224  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation is incomprehensible, the goodness that we know is finite. Echoing Aristotle, Thierry adds that the exactitude of the Good entails completion and finitude, whereas the possible deformations of evil are limitless in variety.61 (2) Trinity as equality. Thierry demonstrates that Boethius’s maxim of equality grounds the Trinity as unity, equality, and connection. Unity counted once generates itself with a perfect equality that connects them (concordia et conexio). This yields the triad of unity, unity’s equality, and the second-​order equality of both.62 Equality radiates divine beauty; indeed, nothing more beautiful than equality can be thought.63 The divine Son is the equality of being of each creature, neither more nor less than what it is.64 Thierry even contemplates a kind of Neopythagorean emanationism: inequalities (matter, evil, numbers) proceed out of equality (God, goodness, unity), but ultimately revert back to divine perfection. The first book of Institutio arithmetica represents the metaphysics of procession, and the second book the return.65 (3) Ontological equality. Divine equality delimits individual beings in their unity, identity, and integrity. Thierry proposes several equivalent names for this ontological limit function: forma essendi, unitas entitatis, aequalitas entitatis, figura unitatis, and aequalitas essendi.66 Thierry defines equality as the Aristotelian “mean” of the Good, an eternal divine law from which evil deviates “beyond or beneath” (citra vel ultra).67 Thierry repeats similar language in his Tractatus on Genesis, but not in the later De trinitate commentaries. He also associates the precision of equality with the perduring integrity of things, their “equality of being” (aequalitas essendi) that excludes everything “above or below” them (ultra et infra, plus vel minus).68 Finally, Thierry contends that one makes something perfect by “subtracting or adding” to it until it “returns it to equality.”69 (4) Figural equality. When Thierry arrives at the mathematical sense of aequalitas, his interpretation concerns the four arts of the quadrivium. Equal sides construct regular polygons like squares. In this sense, the divinity of equality is expressed through the “power” of form to “square” matter into substance.70 Physics perceives the world’s inequalities, and theology 61 SA I.32 (1268–​1287), 148. Cf. Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.1.6, ed. Guillaumin, 8. 62 SA I.32 (1220–​1226), 146. 63 SA I.32 (1310–​1317), 149. Cf. Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones, II.50, ed. Häring, 174. 64 SA I.32 (1220–​1242), 146–​147. 65 SA I.32 (1211–​1215), 146; and SA II.1 (1–​14), 155. 66 SA I.32 (1226–​1242), 146–​147. 67 SA I.32 (1172–​1176), 144. Cf. Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 42–​44, ed. Häring, 572–​574. 68 SA I.32 (1228–​1232), 146. Cf. Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 41–​46, ed. Häring, 572–​575; and Thierry of Chartres, Commentum, II.31–​II.35, ed. Häring, 78–​79 69 SA I.32 (1234–​1236, 1264–​1268), 146–​148. This lengthy argument from subtraction is missing from both Tractatus and Commentum. 70 SA II.31 (814–​836), 185–​186.

Trinit y and Form  225 observes their universal destination in divine Equality. By contrast, mathematics measures inequalities and equalities together in astronomy, geometry, music, and arithmetic. Astronomy divines future events by calculating the equality or inequality of planetary courses. Geometry compares greater and lesser shapes to find the “certain reason of measuring” (certa ratio mensurandi). In the harmonic science of Boethius, music measures equal motions as equal sounds, and unequal motions as unequal sounds. For arithmetic, Thierry has nothing to add beyond his prologue on Boethius’s distinction of multitude and magnitude.71 (5) Causation and inequality. The physical interpretation of equality concerns number and causation. In their plurality and diversity, created things subsist in their natures through the monad, the principle of unity, and therefore through the priority of equality.72 The material causes of the world, such as the elements of matter or humors of the body, while originally equal, are now mixed in discordant proportions, such that natural philosophy is nothing other than knowledge of inequalities and equalities.73 God the Father is an efficient cause through cardinal numbers; God the Son is formal cause through figural numbers; God the Holy Spirit is final cause through proportionate numbers.74 (6) Difference and inequality. Across many of his writings, Thierry discusses unitas and alteritas in general.75 But rarely does he state that inequality’s deviation from divine equality is a manifestation of alteritas. Hence alterity descends from unity, inequality descends from equality, and proportionality descends from connection.76 Thierry only states this analogy in two texts, Super Arithmeticam and Commentum, although the latter is quite brief.77 But in Super Arithmeticam, Thierry defines aequalitas as the medium by which God brings order to the world. While unitas corresponds to odd numbers, form, and square figures (equilaterals), alteritas represents the even, matter, and irregular polygons (figures of unequal sides).78 Since the most equal figure is the square, divine form is rightly conceived as square-​like, Thierry concludes. Divinitas expresses itself as the square’s power to restrain the flux and disorder of alteritas, and therefore to lead inequalities back to equality. The unequal sides of irregular polygons express

71 SA I.32 (1412–​1424), 153–​154. Cf. Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.1.3–​4, ed. Guillaumin, 6–​7. 72 SA I.32 (1181–​1204), 145. 73 SA I.32 (1391–​1412), 152–​153. Cf. Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 2–​3, ed. Häring, 555–​556. 74 SA II.31 (836–​850), 186; SA II.24 (569–​570), 177; and SA I.32 (1398–​1400), 153. Cf. Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones, VII.7, ed. Häring, 225. 75 See, e.g., SA I.2 (572–​574), 123; and SA I.32 (1334–​1338), 150. Cf. Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 30, ed. Häring, 568; and Thierry of Chartres, Glosa, V.18–​19, ed. Häring, 297. 76 SA II.42 (1205–​1210), 199; and SA I.32 (1334–​1338), 150. 77 Thierry of Chartres, Commentum, II.36, ed. Häring, 79. 78 SA II.27 (666–​696), 180–​181.

226  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation the mutable alterity of matter.79 There is only one perfectly equilateral square. But by increasing or decreasing internal angles, a square can shift into every possible degree of rhombus or trapezoid.80 Thierry writes: “Since unity and odd numbers, along with squares, participate in equality and simplicity, whatever among them departs from equality into inequality must necessarily advance by greater and lesser degrees.”81 Therefore equality always precedes inequalities, just as unity precedes alterity. Now that we have examined Thierry’s sixfold exposition of aequalitas in Super Arithmeticam, let us compare how divine equality appears in the Tractatus on Genesis. What can he state about God on the strength of his geometrical analysis? First, he repeats his argument for the mathematical Trinity based on aequalitas.82 But then he shifts to the ontological function of equality, and here makes a new connection between the divine Son and the Father, mediated through notions of measure. Thierry reasons that equality is a kind of measure. The equality that is divine is also the “equality of the existence of things” (equalitatem existentie rerum).83 A moment later, he adds that equality could also be called by the names of modus or mensura, “for equality is the mean of all things,” he reasons, “and the measure of a thing comes from its mean.”84 That is, the divine Son is a kind of eternal measure. Then Thierry recalls another connection to the second person of the Trinity. In Hebrews 1:3, the divine Son is called the brightness of the Father’s glory and the image of the Father’s substance (splendor gloriae et figura substantiae). Thierry had already noted this verse in Super Arithmeticam: This is, therefore, that form of being and equality of entity from which all forms of things descend . . . which is truly and properly called the figure of unity itself. For this reason, the Apostle, subtly examining the matter, named the Son of God the figure of the Father’s substance.85

According to Thierry, the second person of the Trinity is the form of being, the equality of entity, and the figure of unity, and this is confirmed in Hebrews 1:3 79 SA II.31 (809–​839), 185–​186. 80 SA II.34 (1022–​1025), 193. 81 “Cum enim unitas et impares cum tetragonis participent aequalitate et simplicitate, quicquid ab eorum aequalitate discedit in inaequalitatem, oportet ut in maius vel in minus prodeat.” SA II.34 (1025–​ 1027), 193. 82 Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 37–​40, ed. Häring, 570–​572. 83 Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 41, ed. Häring, 572. 84 “Modus igitur omnium rerum equalitas est. At mensura rei omnis ex modo est.” Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 44, ed. Häring, 574. 85 “Haec est ergo illa essendi forma et entitatis aequalitas, a qua omnes rerum formae descendunt . . . quae vere et proprie dicitur unitatis ipsius figura. Quod Apostolus, subtilissime inspiciens, filium dei figuram substantiae patris appellat.” SA I.32 (1236–​1242), 146–​147. Cf. SA I.32 (1258), 148.

Trinit y and Form  227 when Paul calls the Son of God a figura. On the basis of this reading of Institutio arithmetica, Thierry draws the following conclusion in his hexaemeral Tractatus on Genesis: Therefore, that same equality of unity is also, as it were, the figure and splendor [Heb 1:3] of unity. Indeed, it is figure because it is the mean by which that unity operates in things. But it is splendor because it is that by which all things are distinguished from each other. . . . This mean can be nothing other than the first and eternal Wisdom. For it is by Wisdom alone that the being of any given thing is determined and beyond which it cannot be defined correctly. By it the forms and measures of all things have their existence.86

God is the mean, measure, and figure of all beings. If the Son is divine figura, he is also divine mensura. That is, the Trinity is not only the Form of forms, but the Measure of all measures, the Figure of figures. In this way, Thierry’s Tractatus fulfills the geometrical insights of Super Arithmeticam. He converts the Neopythagorean philosophy of equality into a Christian theology of figuration and turns an ontological observation about measure in one commentary into a divine name in another.

The Form of forms Thierry completes his contradiction of Plotinus’s aneidetic condition by changing the location of the Form of forms (εἶδος εἰδῶν), moving it from the second hypostasis of Intellect to the divine One itself as the Trinity. He associates forma formarum with the Son, placing the forms within the divine mind, but in the Nicene orthodoxy he shares with Boethius, Dionysius, and the Byzantines, the Son is equal to the Father and God’s mind is not a subordinate principle. On this point, Thierry again worked out his views inside the Super Arithmeticam commentary. Even though εἶδος εἰδῶν appears in Aristotle and again in Plotinus, Thierry apparently rediscovers it through his meditations on Boethius, who leads him on a detour through the mathematical ideas and the divine mind.87

86 “Est igitur ipsa unitatis equalitas eiusdem unitatis quasi quedam figura et splendor. Figura quidem quia est modus secundum quem ipsa unitas operator in rebus. Splendor uero quia est id per quod omnia discernuntur a se inuicem. . . . At iste modus nichil aliud esse potest nisi prima et eterna sapientia. Illa enim sola est secundum quam esse uniuscuiusque rei determinatum est et ultra quam citraue nequit consistere rectum. Inde forme omnium rerum et mensure habent existere.” Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 41–​42, ed. Häring, 572–​573. Cf. Commentarius Victorinus, 95, ed. Häring, 501. Achard of St. Victor will also reference figura substantiae (Heb 1:3) in the context of geometrical equality. See UD I.19, 92. 87 See Aristotle, De anima III.8 (432A); and Plotinus, Enneads VI.7.17.

228  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Like many Christian Platonists, Thierry held that the eternal forms are actually ideas in the mind of God.88 But only a small set of Neopythagoreans over the centuries, and still more rarely Christian authors, have opined that those ideas are in fact mathematical ideas or eternal arithmetical and geometrical paradigms of some sort. This notion originates with the Old Academy and Nicomachus of Gerasa, and Boethius takes care to include it within his Institutio arithmetica.89 Boethius famously taught that numbers are eternal exemplars abiding in the divine Mind and organizing the world’s creation. Together, discontinuous integers (multitudo) and continuous quantities (magnitudo) structure the mathematical sciences of the quadrivium, yet these are not merely human arts but the fundamental matrix of cosmic order itself.90 In principle, twelfth-​century philosophers could have learned about these numerical exemplars from Seneca, but Thierry approaches the doctrine in a curious way.91 He hardly ever cites Boethius’s formulation in Institutio arithmetica, even in Tractatus despite other similar allusions.92 In his later commentaries on De trinitate, he makes sure to connect the divine mind with folding and the divine mind with the four modes of being.93 But in none of those cases does Thierry link mens divina specifically to the structures of multitude and magnitude. This pattern is puzzling because Thierry’s most distinctive contributions presuppose the fact that primeval numbers abide in God’s mind. The riddle is solved once we realize that Thierry only refers to Boethius’s numerical exemplar doctrine directly within the pages of Super Arithmeticam. He cites some of Boethius’s terminology for his students, then reminds them that by 88 See John M. Dillon and Daniel J. Tolan, “The Ideas as Thoughts of God,” in Christian Platonism: A History, eds. Alexander J. B. Hampton and John Peter Kenney (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 34–​52. 89 On the divine ideas as mathematicals, see H. A. Wolfson, “Extradeical and Intradeical Interpretations of Platonic Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22, no. 1 (1961): 3–​32; and Krämer, Der Ursprung der Geistmetaphysik, 23–​26. 90 “Haec [arithmetica] enim cunctis prior est, non modo quod hanc ille huius mundanae molis conditor deus primam suae habuit ratiocinationis exemplar et ad hanc cuncta constituit quaecumque fabricante ratione per numeros adsignati ordinis inuenere concordiam . . . .” Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.1.8, ed. Guillaumin, 8–​9. “Omnia quaecumque a primaeua rerum natura constructa sunt numerorum uidentur ratione formata. Hoc enim fuit principale in animo conditoris exemplar.” Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.2.1, ed. Guillaumin, 11. 91 “Haec exemplaria rerum omnium deus intra se habet numerosque universorum, quae agenda sunt, et modos mente conplexus est: plenus his figuris est, quas Plato ideas appellat, inmortales, inmutabiles, infatigabiles.” Seneca, Ad Lucilium, 65.7, ed. Richard M. Gummere, Epistles, Volume I: Epistles 1–​65. Loeb Classical Library 75 (Harvard University Press, 1917), 448. Cf. Thierry of Chartres, Glosa, II.30, ed. Häring, 275. See further Irene Caiazzo, “Sur la distinction Sénéchienne Idea/​Idos au XIIe siècle,” Chôra: Revue d’études anciennes et médiévales 3–​4 (2005–​2006): 91–​116. 92 The one exception is a quick reference in Glosa: “Numerus enim, ut habet Arithmetice prologus, principale exemplar extitit in mente conditoris. Quod si ex accidentibus profluit numerus in substantias ergo preiacent numero accidentia. Quare exemplar conditoris precessisse uidentur.” Thierry of Chartres, Glosa, I.38, ed. Häring, 267; cf. Lectiones, I.51, ed. Häring, 149–​150. 93 On folding, see Thierry of Chartres, Commentum, II.49, ed. Häring, 84; on the second mode, see Lectiones, II.66, ed. Häring, 176. Both are combined in Abbreviatio Monacensis: De Hebdomadibus, 25–​42, ed. Häring, 409–​412.

Trinit y and Form  229 numerus Boethius intends only arithmetic, not the quadrivium. Then Thierry quotes and glosses the exemplar doctrine in full as follows: God is said to have created things according to the exemplar of number, since all things have being from difference [discretio], which comes from numbers. And note that God is said to possess arithmetic (that is, number) as the exemplar of his reasoning (that is, his ordering), because he ordered “all things” according to number (that is, according to the difference of things as foreseen in his mind). “All things,” I say, which are harmonized through number, that is, which are arranged by means of proportion, which is to say, all things which are arranged by an order in the divine mind. For it is from these [numbers] that there proceeds the order of all things.94

As Thierry explains, God’s mind possesses its own internal arithmetic, which is the matrix of created order. All things are foreseen in the reasoning of God, who arranges all creatures harmoniously, despite their differences, within the divine Mind. This providential order is, in essence, arithmetical activity, because God is dealing with the numerical essences of creatures eternally resident in his providential Wisdom. Just as before, the same pattern obtains: Thierry secures a Neopythagorean doctrine in Super Arithmeticam that he can rely upon as a background assumption in his later theological commentaries on creation or Trinity. It is only because the divine Mind eternally enumerates each creature with mathematical ideas that Thierry can state so plainly in Tractatus that “the creation of number is the creation of things.”95 Without the context of Super Arithmeticam, Thierry’s irenic embrace of high Neopythagoreanism in his Genesis commentary is startling; as an allusion to his prior quadrivium lectures, it becomes entirely comprehensible. Armed with the strong Boethian account of intradeical mathematical paradigms, Thierry develops his doctrine of divine ideas in Tractatus and the De trinitate commentaries in the ensuing years. Moreover, Thierry finds something else in Institutio arithmetica on the topic of mathematical figures in the mens divina. Late in his commentary, Thierry identifies the “divine mind” with the eternal “equality” or “mean” of the Good. God’s mind operates as what Thierry calls a praefinitio aeterna, a primordial delineation of creatures, using a New Testament phrase for God’s providential purpose (Eph 3:11).96 That is to say, 94 “Ad exemplar numeri dicitur deus res creasse, quia omnia ex discretione, quae est ex numeris, habent esse. Et nota quid deus dicitur habuisse arithmeticam, id est numerum, exemplar suae ratiocinationis, id est dispositionis, quia secundum numerum, id est secundum rerum discretionem in mente provisa, cuncta disposuit. ‘Cuncta’ dico quae concordant per numerum, id est iuxta proportionem assignantur, id est quae sunt assignatus ordo in mente divina. Ex his enim omnis rerum ordo procedit.” SA I.1 (343–​350), 114. See also SA I.1 (186–​192), 108–​109. 95 “Unitas igitur est omnipotens in creatione numerorum. Sed creatio numerorum rerum est creatio.” Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 36, ed. Häring, 570. 96 SA I.32 (1174–​1176), 144; cf. Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 42, ed. Häring, 572.

230  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation God’s mind eternally measures and defines creatures as their equalizer or metric standard. When Thierry expands upon this theme in Tractatus, he first translates the Boethian doctrine into Augustinian sapiential theology: “In eternal Wisdom are contained the notions of things, for the knowledge of a thing is always contained in its equality.”97 But then he allows the geometrical sense of “equality” to define the manner in which such notions contain and are contained. “Therefore, just as the Equality of unity contains within itself, and generates from itself, the notions of things, so too Equality contains and produces the forms of all things,” he writes. “And just as Unity engenders numbers from itself, so Equality of unity produces the proportions and inequalities of all things.”98 In other words, the forms and proportions of creatures are measured out directly from the Trinity’s own unity and equality—​not only Nicomachus’s tables of τὸ ποσόν and τὸ πηλίκον but also Augustine’s harmony of unitas and aequalitas. Then as Thierry plumbs further, he strikes upon a startling echo of Theodore the Studite’s circumscription (περιγραφή). As pure Equality, Thierry continues, the divine Word “circumscribes and delimits” (circumscribit ac terminat) each created thing. The Word encompasses and measures the total categorial location of every creature—​what, how much, what kind, in what space and time—​ensuring that its existence is neither greater nor lesser than itself.99 Instead of Jesus’s body being circumscribed, here God circumscribes every creature. In both cases, the mechanism that mediates world and God is not only the Verbum (λόγος) but the magnitudo (μέγεθος) achieved through such divine mensuration, whether by line or by equality. As we saw above, Boethius is one of the first Latin Christians to state conclusively that God alone is “true, divine Form” (vere forma or forma divina) and all other lesser forms are images thereof.100 When Thierry glosses this passage in Commentum, he calls that Form the “one and simple form.” The multitude of lesser forms arise once form is conjoined with matter, but divine Form is the “perfection, wholeness, and equality” of every being (integritas perfectio et equalitas essendi).101 With this last phrase, Thierry repeats the language he used to define the fold of points and lines in Super Arithmeticam; at this juncture in Commentum, he briefly nods toward enfolding and unfolding.102 But then Thierry 97 “Ibi [viz. prima et eterna sapientia] rerum notiones continentur. Semper enim rei notitia in ipsius equalitate continetur.” Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 42, ed. Häring, 573. 98 “Sicut igitur ipsa equalitas unitatis rerum notiones et intra se continet et ex se generat ita etiam illa eadem formas omnium rerum et intra se continet et ex se producit. Et sicut ipsa unitas omnes numeros ex se procreat ita ipsa unitatis equalitas omnes proportiones et inequalitates omnium rerum ex se producit. Et in ipsam eadem omnia resoluuntur.” Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 43, ed. Häring, 573. 99 Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 45–​46, ed. Häring, 574–​575. 100 See Boethius, De Sancta Trinitate, 2:112–​117, ed. Moreschini, 171. 101 Thierry of Chartres, Commentum, II.44–​46, ed. Häring, 82–​83. 102 “Quas igitur formas per pluralitatis diuersitatem possibilitatis i.e. materie mutabilitas explicat, easdem quodam modo in unum forma diuina conplicat et ad unius forme simplicitatem inexplicabili modo reuocat.” Thierry of Chartres, Commentum, II.49, ed. Häring, 84. Cf. SA II.4 (236–​275), 164–​165.

Trinit y and Form  231 pivots to another model of mediating Form and forms, namely, their unification in one “divine mind.” Lesser forms appear in matter, but the divine Form subsists beyond matter immutably, and only forms located there in the divine mind are rightly called forms.103 Here Thierry broaches an idea that his student Achard of St. Victor will develop further, as we will see in Chapter 9. All lesser image-​forms are eternally redeemed and suspended in the supreme Form, which reflects every wrinkle of the material cosmos in God’s eternal mind, like a lake mirroring the stars above. Toward the end of his life, in a late De trinitate commentary, Thierry finally strikes upon the divine name “Form of forms” (forma formarum). God is true form, the form of being, and as such the Form of forms; indeed, to be that Form is what it means to be divine (diuinitas).104 “Since divinity is generative of the forms,” he argues, “it is called the first Form and the Form of forms.”105 The “divine mind” is the same as the divine Word or divine Wisdom, and the lesser forms in the divine mind are its “ideas” (ydee).106 Then Thierry identifies the location (ibi) of those many ideas (plura exemplaria) as the second mode of being (necessitas complexionis). They are unified in the singular “divine mind,” which by implication is the first mode (necessitas absoluta).107 By the time of Glosa, his final Boethius commentary, Thierry develops the notion of forma formarum even further. If physics and mathematics analyze the lesser forms (or images), theology contemplates the Form of forms. Drawing on Seneca, Thierry can now state with remarkable precision that the Form of forms is εἶδος itself.108 And now he fully identifies the Form of forms with the divine mind. “If anyone considers how the mind is naturally generative and conceptive of forms and ideas,” Thierry reasons, “he would understand how God is form.” God’s mind or Word conceives, contains, and enfolds the forms within itself, since God is the Form of forms.109 The office of unifying the forms belongs to the whole of God as Triune. By weaving together Nicomachean Neopythagoreanism (via Boethius) and Trinitarian theology (via Augustine), Thierry constructs a new discourse for

103 Thierry of Chartres, Commentum, II.63–​64, ed. Häring, 88. 104 Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones, II.35–​39, ed. Häring, 166–​167. 105 “. . . quia inquam diuinitas generatiua est formarum prima forma et forma formarum dicitur.” Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones, II.46, ed. Häring, 170. 106 Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones, II.53, ed. Häring, 172. 107 Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones, II.65–​66, ed. Häring, 176. 108 “Forma enim formarum est quod neque imago est et que esse ipsum est et ex qua esse est. . . . Ideoque a philosophis ydos [εἶδος] non ydea [ἰδέα] nominatur.” Thierry of Chartres, Glosa, II.29–​30, ed. Häring, 275. 109 “Si quis uero consideret quomodo mens naturaliter genitiua sit et conceptiua formarum atque ydearum intelliget quomodo forma deus sit. Deus itaque concepit formas omnium rerum antequam copularentur materie sed tamen preiacente materia.” Thierry of Chartres, Glosa, II.32, ed. Häring, 275. Cf. Abbrevatio monacensis De Hebdomadibus, II.25, ed. Häring, 409: “Forma enim essendi omnium rerum que deus est conceptiua est omnium formarum. Mens enim diuina omnes formas omnium rerum intra se concipit conplectitur continet in simplicitate quadam.”

232  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation others to explore. It is one that maximally resists Plotinus’s aneidetic condition. The geometry of the fold and the geometry of measure culminate in the Trinitarian circumscription of the forms within God, the Form of forms. Others will experiment with these Chartrian ideas in the future to great success, but in the twelfth century their principal exponent is Achard of St. Victor.

9

The Figure as Icon A hidden heritage Through the rose window of his Boethius commentaries, like the western portal of the Chartres Cathedral, light filtering through the colorful patterns of his ideas, Thierry of Chartres glimpsed a future for Latin Christian Neopythagoreanism that would embrace the measures of the world rather than negate them. To an uncanny degree, he restates geometrical elements already uncovered among our eastern Christian authors writing in Greek: the ontological power of the line, activated in extension and able to mediate divine presence (reciprocal folding); the magnitude of God generously measuring out creation with God’s own ecstatic limit, which is therefore Triune (divine Equality); and the theological aesthetics of supreme Form, the first programmatic articulation of Tradition B in the Latin West (Form of forms). Thierry’s idiosyncratic influence at Paris was felt at first hand by students like Clarembald of Arras and Bernardus Silvestris and at arm’s length by John of Salisbury and Alan of Lille. But largely speaking, his eccentric theological agenda faded away quickly in the decade after his death.1 By 1160, an august generation had suddenly passed, from Hugh of St. Victor and William of St. Thierry to Bernard of Clairvaux and Gilbert of Poitiers, and not surprisingly the years that followed saw a flurry of activity among cadres of former students. That early scholastic consolidation, along with the controversies of 1210 and 1277 following the rediscovery of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, quickly rendered Thierry’s radical Platonism obsolete. In our own time, however, French historians have uncovered a remarkable legacy of Thierry’s thought, still in its twelfth-​century reception, one richer than Clarembald of Arras and other anonymous secretaries: the work of Achard of St. Victor, abbot and bishop, and in particular Achard’s marvelous treatise De unitate Dei et pluralitate creaturarum, “On the Unity of God and Plurality of Creatures.” To see right away what makes this work exciting, imagine its title were reversed, as it probably should be: on the Plurality of God and on the Oneness of Creation. Achard’s De unitate Dei was almost lost to history, but thankfully its hidden treasures have been retrieved.2

1 See Albertson, “Achard of St. Victor (d. 1171) and the Eclipse of the Arithmetic Model of the Trinity,” 101–​144. 2 Richard of St. Victor knew the work when he wrote De tribus appropriatis, whose terminus a quo is 1160–​1162. See Jean Ribaillier, Richard de Saint-​Victor: Opuscules théologiques (J. Vrin, 1967), 177–​178.

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0013

234  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation When Hugh died in 1141, the Victorines were beginning to take shape as an intellectual movement, as Richard and Andrew began writing scriptural commentaries and theological tracts. The Augustinian canons regular at St. Victor on the outskirts of Paris observed the masters’ debates at a certain remove. There were Victorine humanists and reformers, but no Aristotelian commentators, and unlike the Chartrians, they never studied natural philosophy for its own sake. Instead, they sought to integrate the search for knowledge and the transformation of desire—​a philosophical love of wisdom in the deepest sense. Achard left his native Yorkshire to join the abbey just before Hugh’s passing. In 1155, he became abbot of the community, and a few years later was ordained bishop of Avranches, where he served until his death in 1171.3 But Achard spent his first decade in Paris savoring the schools and may have had both Hugh of St. Victor and Thierry of Chartres as his teachers. This was a period of rapid, divergent developments when students found their bearings by adopting the parentage of different masters. Some like Peter Lombard kept in contact with Hugh’s legacy, even while embracing the dialectics of Peter Abelard.4 Gilbert of Poitier’s jargon frustrated his critics but inspired followers like Simon of Tournai. Alan of Lille was drawn to Gilbert but equally fascinated by the Neoplatonism of the avant-​garde Chartrians.5 Achard’s surviving works include fifteen sermons, three letters, and two treatises, as well as several quaestiones yet to be discovered. His sermons are classically Victorine in their imaginative scriptural meditations—​kataphatic spirituality at its best.6 More distinctively, however, Achard was deeply influenced by Thierry of Chartres. His major work, De unitate Dei, begins from Thierry’s quadrivial theology and aesthetics of divine Form. But Achard pushes them even further to Achard’s book was mentioned again by John of Cornwall in the late twelfth century and John Leland in the early sixteenth century. In 1944, André Combes identified long extracts in Jean de Ripa, but thought they belonged to Anselm of Canterbury. See André Combes, Un inédit de saint Anselme? Le traité De unitate divinae essentiae et pluralitate creaturarum d’après Jean de Ripa. Études de Philosophie Médiévale 34 (J. Vrin, 1944). A decade later, Marie-​Thérèse d’A lverny discovered a manuscript of De unitate Dei in Padua and published some extracts to prove its authenticity. See Marie-​Thérèse d’A lverny, “Achard de Saint-​Victor, De Trinitate—​De unitate et pluralitate creaturarum,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 21 (1954): 299–​306. Finally, in 1987, Emmanuel Martineau transcribed the entire manuscript and added a complete French translation: Emmanuel Martineau, ed., L’Unité de Dieu et la pluralité de créatures (Éditions du Franc Dire, 1987). Martineau’s volume has been reprinted as a facsimile: De unitate Dei et pluralitate creaturarum. L’Unité de Dieu et la pluralité de creatures, trans. Emmanuel Martineau (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2013). I use this version. 3 On Achard’s life and thought, see Jean Châtillon, Théologie, spiritualité et métaphysique dans l’oeuvre oratoire de Achard de Saint-​Victor (J. Vrin, 1969); and Hugh Feiss’s introduction in Achard of St. Victor, Works, trans. Hugh Feiss (Cistercian Publications, 2001), 20–​58. 4 Achard is spotted with Robert of Melun at a disputation over the Lombard’s theology between 1137 and 1155. Châtillon, Théologie, 74–​75. 5 On this period, see R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 2 vols. (Blackwell, 1995); and Peter Dronke, ed., A History of Twelfth-​Century Western Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998). 6 Châtillon, Théologie, 131–​133.

The Figure as Icon  235 construct a Neoplatonist account of the Trinity of his own design, centered around the beauty of divine multiplicity. Mohammad Ilkhani calls Achard’s De unitate Dei “without a doubt one of the most important works of the twelfth century.”7 While Abelard and Gilbert were striving to demonstrate the unity and simplicity of the Trinitarian God, Achard’s audacious idea was “to show not only that there is a plurality in God, but additionally, that this plurality is the true plurality and is the foundation of the plurality of creatures.”8 The book comes in two parts, each with a different name: De unitate et trinitate (Treatise I) and De unitate et pluralitate creaturarum (Treatise II). Treatise II is only partly preserved and breaks off before he finishes all of the topics promised in Treatise I. When one reads the book from start to finish, Achard’s sheer originality shines through. The English canon tries to demonstrate by reason alone that God is plurality, first as Trinity and then as the rippling harmonies of the cosmos. For Achard, God possesses all of the “quantities and numbers” of things in the divine mind.9 God knows, immediately and distinctly, an infinite number of individual forms multiplied by infinite degrees of actuality.10 The plurality in God’s mind and the plurality in creation are numerically identical, such that in God a creature is numerically both one and infinite, an actual infinity yet without succession.11 Some have compared De unitate Dei to Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion, but the ambitious treatise is closer to Plato’s Philebus or Augustine’s De ordine, if not, as Emmanuel Martineau has suggested, the first stirrings of phenomenology.12 His method may be Anselmian, but his results are a synthesis of the Latin Platonism that inspired Thierry. Achard cites the same authorities Thierry invoked across his lectures: Boethius’s De trinitate and Consolatio philosophiae, as well as Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram, De libero arbitrio, and De musica.13 Achard’s book contains a mini-​treatise on number and figure in Augustine’s De trinitate,14 and like Thierry he discusses Seneca on idos and idea.15 Yet even as Achard returned to those common sources, he found his own questions to ask.16 At the same time, Achard clearly borrows prominent doctrines from Thierry’s commentaries on Genesis and Boethius. He remains the only major twelfth-​ century author to perpetuate Thierry’s realist mathematical Trinity.17 He repeats 7 Mohammad Ilkhani, La philosophie de la création chez Achard de Saint-​Victor (Éditions Ousia, 1999), 22–​23, 26; cf. Châtillon, Théologie, 277. 8 Ilkhani, La philosophie, 107. 9 UD I.43, 114. 10 UD I.45–​46, 118. 11 UD I.48, 124–​132. 12 See Châtillon, Théologie, 123–​126; Ilkhani, La philosophie, 357; and Martineau, L’Unité de Dieu, 7, 11, 24. 13 UD II.5, 150–​152. 14 UD II.6–​11, 154–​170. 15 See UD II.12–​15, 170–​178. See further Martineau, L’Unité de Dieu, 241–​251. 16 See Ilkhani, Philosophie, 101–​108, 116–​117. 17 See Albertson, “Achard of St. Victor,” 128–​140.

236  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation Thierry’s unusual notion of an eternal divine Square and correlates the divine ideas with eternal numbers.18 He transforms Thierry’s theory of folding into his own account of “folding causes” (causae explicatrices).19 For these reasons, it seems highly likely that Achard had access to Thierry’s Super Arithmeticam commentary.20 As Achard writes, “even pagan philosophers assert that God possessed the numbers and exemplars of all things, to which Boethius, the Christian philosopher, also testifies.”21 Thierry’s project might well have inspired the young Victorine’s unusual philosophical project; after all, De unitate Dei was penned less than twenty years after Thierry’s groundbreaking lectures. Did Achard watch his teacher hunt for theological truths between the lines of a Neopythagorean handbook? Did those lectures motivate Achard to compose his own treatise on divine harmonies and divine numbers, not the usual fare of a Victorine abbot? Viewed in this light, De unitate Dei can be read as a kind of tribute to Thierry of Chartres—​not unlike the praise rendered by Clarembald of Arras, Bernardus Silvestris, or Hermann of Carinthia in their own works.22 When we dive into De unitate Dei et pluralitate creaturarum, we find an intensification of Thierry’s theological aesthetics and a paean to divine Form. Achard may have begun his reflections within the Trinitarian henology that Thierry established, but he does not end there. Instead, he travels beyond henology, indeed beyond τὸ ἕν as an indisputable starting point, something even Thierry could not see. Rather, Achard begins with τὰ πόλλα, the Many. He makes the disarmingly modern (or postmodern) argument that God is not a homogeneous identity, but a harmonious plurality, an infinite multiverse of possible forms pulsing with beauty.23 If Plotinus guarded the One, Achard seeks to guard the Many, the multitude that abides in divine Plurality itself. Where Dionysius praises God as an “eternal circle,” Achard praises the Son as an “eternal Square.”24 And if the Boethian concept of supreme Form paved the way for Thierry’s Trinitarian counter-​ aesthetics, Achard brings that vision to a new level of clarity by naming the Form of forms pure Beauty.

18 UD I.43–​II.16, 114–​183. 19 Achard distinguishes formal or exemplary causes; final causes; and “explicative” or unfolding causes (explicatrices causae)—​or forms, causes, and modes. See UD I.39–​I.42, 108–​113; and UD II.19, 191–​192. Cf. Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 3, ed. Häring, 556–​557. The meaning of Achard’s explicatrices causae remains unclear. See Martineau, L’Unité de Dieu, 212–​214; and Ilkhani, La philosophie, 285–​303. 20 See David Albertson, “Ecce Quadratura! An Early Reader of Thierry of Chartres’s Arithmetica Commentary,” in Achard de Saint-​Victor métaphysicien. Le De unitate Dei et pluralitate creaturarum. Ad argumenta. Quaestio Special Issues, Vol. 2, ed. Vincent Carraud, Gilles Olivo, and Pasquale Porro (Brepols, 2019), 107–​132. 21 UD II.5, 150; trans. Feiss, 443. 22 See Nikolaus M. Häring, “Chartres and Paris Revisited,” in Essays in Honour of Anton Charles Pegis, ed. J. Reginald O’Donnell (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), 281–​284. 23 See Ilkhani, La philosophie, 109–​160. 24 See DN IV.14 (712D–​713A).

The Figure as Icon  237

Infinite beauty At the outset of De unitate Dei, Achard seeks not the One but the Many. Where can true plurality be found? He reasons that it will not be among creatures, for creatures lack true unity. Unity and plurality will only coexist as a mutual perfection, and hence they must exist in God. But if they are in God eternally, they are God, and therefore God will be as much a divine plurality as a divine unity.25 God’s beauty is immense, without measure (pulchritudo immensa), so if God is both unity and plurality, God must be most fundamentally an infinite “harmony” (convenientia et congruentia) that has the power to reconcile the One and Many into a symphonic whole greater than themselves.26 In order to praise God’s beauty as infinite harmony, Achard finds that he must turn to the mathematical model of the Trinity: the Father as unity, the Son as equality of unity, and the Spirit as the second-​order equality of both. For Achard, this harmony of identity and difference revealed in the Trinitarian name is the greatest conceivable beauty. “It is therefore clear,” he writes, “that nothing can be or be thought which is more beautiful or greater than the beauty of the aforesaid unity [viz. of equality] and of its supreme fittingness. It is therefore necessary that it be in God—​in fact, that it be God.”27 With a few quick strokes, Achard transposes Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument into the register of Chartrian aesthetics. God is that than which nothing more beautiful can be conceived. The meta-​equality that God effects between unity and unity’s own self-​equality is the highest possible degree of mathematical harmony. In effect, Achard grounds his entire investment in Thierry’s Neopythagoreanism upon an essentially Victorine appeal to pulchritudo.28 Later in his treatise, Achard turns to the beauty of creation.29 If God’s beauty appears in the plurality of the Trinity, created beauty appears in the teeming multitudes of pure difference. Again beauty arises through the harmonious reconciliation of the infinite and the singular. But according to Achard, God alone grasps the “unfathomable magnitude” (inaestimabilem . . . magnitudinem) of every finite creature, and for that reason, only God fully experiences creation’s beauty.30 Each raw detail, every infinitesimal particle, shines with as much splendor as the entire 25 UD I.1–​2, 70. Cf. Ilkhani, La philosophie, 109–​160. 26 UD I.5, 72. 27 “Liquet igitur quia pulchritudine unitatis praefatae et summae illius convenientiae pulchrius nihil vel majus esse, sed nec excogitari potest. Ipsam itaque in Deo esse, sed et Deum esse est necesse . . . .” UD I.5, 74; trans. Feiss, 382. Achard only discusses traditional topics regarding the Trinity toward the end of his treatise. “The properly theological problem of the Trinity occupies only 1/​6th of the whole of De unitate and occurs only after the metaphysical discussion of true plurality.” Pascal Massie, “The Metaphysics of Primary Plurality in Achard of Saint Victor,” The St. Anselm Journal 5, no. 2 (2008): 2. 28 See, e.g., Lenka Karfíková, “De esse ad pulchrum esse”: Schönheit in der Theologie Hugos von St. Viktor (Brepols, 1998); and Boyd Taylor Coolman, “Pulchrum Esse: The Beauty of Scripture, the Beauty of the Soul, and the Art of Exegesis in Hugh of St. Victor,” Traditio 58 (2003): 175–​200. 29 See the concluding argument that begins “Nemo autem aestimat . . .” in UD I.48, 130–​132. 30 UD I.48, 130.

238  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation cosmos; yet at the same time, that immense whole is built out of an inconceivable infinity of beautiful parts. “As all the quantities of the parts flow together into the one quantity of the whole,” Achard imagines, “so also the beauties of all converge in the one beauty of the whole, in which . . . a single joining together in the whole is much more beautiful yet.”31 Only God is capable of seeing each creature in its native infinity and thus perceiving the full expanse of created beauty.32 As Pascal Massie has noted, Achard’s aesthetics already stands in tension with Neoplatonism. For Plotinus, plurality entails differentiated distances from the One in an emanative hierarchy; for Achard, plural differences are perfectly equidistant and coeval with each other on account of divine Equality.33 There is really no precedent in Thierry’s commentaries on Genesis or De trinitate for anything approaching Achard’s account of beauty. It seems to be wholly original. In Tractatus, Thierry makes a passing remark about the beauty of the created order.34 In Lectiones, he calls on folding to explain the power of divine beauty. God’s beauty is supreme because it “enfolds” all lesser beauties within it.35 Yet in neither case does Thierry connect divine beauty to geometry as effectively as Achard does. However, now that we possess Thierry’s Super Arithmeticam, we can locate two passages that might have inspired Achard’s theological aesthetics. Neither of them suffices on its own, and he evidently found them in separate places within Super Arithmeticam. Achard seems to have actively identified and combined the two ingredients together, catalyzing his teacher’s ideas in a reaction that generates a truly new compound. The first element is the beauty of equality. As Thierry was digging through Institutio arithmetica, he discovered something intriguing in Boethius’s proportion theory. In the course of proving that every inequality proceeds from equality, Boethius compares geometrical equality to the Good. Like the Good, he suggests, equality is a “mother principle” (mater et radix) that grounds “the power of nature and the integrity of things.” Similarly, the Good is “first by nature and perpetual in the beauty of its substance [suae substantiae decore perpetua].”36 To be sure, Boethius’s sentiment in this passage is a Platonist commonplace, but Thierry 31 “. . . omnes quantitates partium in unam totius confluunt quantitatem, sic et pulchritudines omnium in unam totius conveniunt pulchritudinem in qua . . . multo tamen pulchrior est quae in toto consistit una compages.” UD I.48, 130; trans. Feiss, 425. 32 UD I.48, 130–​132. 33 Massie, “Metaphysics of Primary Plurality,” 8. 34 “Quia uero rationabiliter et quodam ordine pulcherrimo disposita sit secundum sapientiam illa esse creata necesse est.” Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 2, ed. Häring, 555. 35 “Hoc bene dictum est quia pulcritudo eius est fortitudo nullum habet defectum. Quippe ipse deus complicatio rerum omnium in simplicitate cui nichil deest. Ipse enim omnia et ab ipso omnia et per ipsum omnia uelut si quis haberet pulcritudines omnium uel fortitudines in se complicatas nichil deesset fortitudini eius uel pulcritudini eius.” Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones, II.59, ed. Häring, 174. Cf. Boethius, De Sancta Trinitate, 2:101–​102, ed. Moreschini, 170. 36 Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.32.1–​2, ed. Guillaumin, 66–​67.

The Figure as Icon  239 thinks a mystery lies therein. If equality orders nature much like the Good, and the Good is supreme Beauty, then equality itself is maximally beautiful. Thierry reasons as follows: For God is good, such that he is also goodness. Indeed, the same is said concerning equality itself. For it is clear enough that equality is truly beautiful. If a person were born without hands, then as lacking something he would acquire ugliness, since he possesses less than a human person; but if he were born with three eyes, or even more, he would also be considered ugly, since he would exceed the equality of being human. For beauty comes from equality. Hence nothing is more beautiful, and nothing more equal to that which is beautiful, than the Son of God, who is in fact the equality of being, since nothing can be more beautiful or equally beautiful.37

Thierry concludes that if nothing more beautiful than equality can be thought of, then equality is divine. But this makes sense, he says, since he has already given the name aequalitas essendi to the Son of God, as we saw in the last chapter. Nothing is more beautiful than God’s equality, thanks to the Trinitarian self-​relation of unity. We can begin to see that Thierry’s train of thought (nihil pulchrius) leads directly toward Achard’s aesthetics of maximal beauty (pulchrius nihil).38 The second element found in Thierry is the divinity of equality. Equality “remains” (manens) equality even while it is unity. But if it can “remain” this powerfully across difference, reasons Achard, such equality must be God.39 As we saw above, Achard presupposes and builds upon Thierry’s pioneering formulation of a mathematical Trinity. But in fact, Thierry’s triad is far from monolithic. When we look more closely, we see two different methods in his writings, each derived from a different discipline of the quadrivium, either the arithmetical or the geometrical.40 In the arithmetical method, counting unities generates unity, a unity

37 “Ita enim deus bonus est, ut sit etiam bonitas. Illud quidem de ipsa aequalitate dicitur. Aequalitas enim vere decora est, quod inde patet, quoniam si homo sine manibus nasceretur, aliquo modo imperfectus turpitudinem sine dubio incurreret, quoniam homine minus haberet; si vero cum tribus oculis nasceretur, sive pluribus, pro turpissimo quoque haberetur, eo quod aequalitatem essendi hominem excederet. Decor enim ex aequalitate. Unde filio dei nihil pulchrius, nihil aeque ei pulchrum est, quippe aequalitas essendi est, quoniam nihil pulchrius, nihil esse aeque pulchrum potest.” SA I.32 (1309–​1317), 149. 38 See UD I.5, 74, cited above. 39 UD I.11, 80. On the significance of this chapter, see François Medriane, “Unité, pluralité et modalité dans le De unitate: approche du chapitre I.11,” in Achard de Saint-​Victor métaphysicien. Le De unitate Dei et pluralitate creaturarum. Ad argumenta. Quaestio Special Issues, Vol. 2, ed. Vincent Carraud, Gilles Olivo, and Pasquale Porro (Brepols, 2019), 97–​105. 40 On the arithmetical method, see Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.20.8, ed. Guillaumin, 45; and Institutio arithmetica, I.4.5, ed. Guillaumin, 90. On the geometrical method, see Institutio arithmetica, I.32.1–​2, ed. Guillaumin, 66–​67.

240  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation equal to itself and therefore united to equality. In the geometrical method, every inequality returns to equality, and such absolutely prior equality must be coeternal with unity. Thierry invents both methods in Super Arithmeticam, but emphasizes the geometrical.41 In his Tractatus on Genesis, he leads with the geometrical and then pivots to the arithmetical.42 In Commentum, he uses both, but devotes more attention to the arithmetical.43 In the late Lectiones and Glosa, Thierry references the arithmetical method alone.44 Which of these methods does Achard of St. Victor deploy in De unitate? The answer is that Achard fully embraces Thierry’s geometrical method and hardly mentions the arithmetical—​f urther evidence of his reliance upon the early work, Super Arithmeticam. Once Achard recognizes that equality is divine, he creatively reinvents Thierry’s geometrical method in his own terms. If there is a transcendent equality, it will be equal to unity, and both will be equal to God.45 To elaborate on this view, he introduces quadrivial doctrines discussed by Thierry in Super Arithmeticam. Number is divided into even and odd; unity is best expressed as an indivisible odd number.46 The triangle is the origin and end of all other figures, just as the Son is the “figure of the substance” of the Father (Heb 1:3).47 Perfect equality would have to equalize two equalities, producing a third equality between them.48 Since equality corresponds to magnitude in the quadrivium, there can only be three supreme equalities, just as there are three dimensions of space (point, line, plane) in the unit triangle.49 It seems clear that Achard’s radicalization of Latin Neopythagoreanism draws its power directly from Thierry’s Super Arithmeticam commentary. By embracing figure and measure in contemplation, Thierry and Achard collectively bend Latin Christianity away from Plotinus and toward the exteriority of Proclus and Dionysius. Rather than subtract the beautiful magnitudes of the world, Achard multiplies them by the power of infinity; rather than seeking the transcendent One, he seeks the transcendent Many.

41 For the arithmetical argument, see SA I.32 (1220–​1226), 146. For the geometrical argument, see SA II.31 (814–​836), 185–​186. 42 See Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 37–​40, ed. Häring, 570–​572. 43 See Thierry of Chartres, Commentum, II.30–​36, ed. Häring, 77–​79. 44 See Thierry of Chartres, Lectiones, VII.6, ed. Häring, 225; and Thierry of Chartres, Glosa, V.17–​ 18, ed. Häring, 296–​297. 45 UD I.10–​11, 78–​80. 46 UD I.18, 90. Cf. Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.3–​6, ed. Guillaumin, 12–​15; and SA I.3–​7 (589–​ 679), 124–​127. 47 UD I.19, 92. Cf. Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, II.6–​9, ed. Guillaumin, 93–​97; and SA II.5–​6, 169–​170. 48 UD I.20, 92. Cf. Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.32–​II.1, ed. Guillaumin, 66–​81; and SA I.32 (1161–​1215), 143–​146. See also SA II.1 (1–​14), 155. 49 UD I.21–​23, 92–​96. Cf. Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, I.1, ed. Guillaumin, 5–​11; and SA I.1 (80–​ 208), 104–​109. See also SA I.4 (598–​625), 124–​125.

The Figure as Icon  241

Eternal square One of Thierry of Chartres’s more unusual contributions is his comparison of the second person of the Trinity to an eternal “Square.”50 In his Commentum on Boethius’s De trinitate, Thierry invokes a prophetic oracle known as the Spanish Sibyl that circulated shortly before the Second Crusade.51 The fragment he cites states only this: “When you reach the side of the eternal sitting square and the side of the eternal standing squares.”52 To make matters stranger, Thierry interprets these cryptic lines through the lens of Boethian arithmetic. Two multiplied by two makes a square, he explains, and unity multiplied by itself is the “first square.” Such squaring is kind of generation, but the first generation is that of the divine Son, the equality of unity. Thierry concludes: Because the first squaring is the generation of the Son, the Son is the first square. But such squaring is a figure. Therefore, the Son is rightly named the figure of the substance of the Father [Heb 1:3]. . . . The square was well attributed to the Son since this figure is judged to be more perfect than others on account of the equality of its sides.53

In Thierry’s mind, when the New Testament calls Jesus the figura substantiae of the Father, the title figura refers to the kind of shape discussed in Boethian geometry. Trinitarian difference suddenly becomes—​or is revealed to be—​geometrical difference. Without further context, charitably read, this is a rather free exegesis, creative but arbitrary. With Super Arithmeticam in hand, however, we quickly see that Thierry’s contemplation on the divine Square in Commentum was not a whimsical, chance remark. Rather, as part of his commentary on Institutio arithmetica, he offers a more precise elaboration. Much as with the mathematical Trinity, Thierry offers two 50 Thierry of Chartres, Commentum, II.31–​ 49, ed. Häring, 78–​79, 82–​84. Cf. Commentarius Victorinus, 95, ed. Häring, 501. 51 The texts from MSS Munich (clm) 5254 and 9516 are transcribed as two independent versions in Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, Vol. IV (Dunder & Humblot, 1877), 502–​506. The original sense of the Sibyl concerns German nobles traveling to Constantinople, where the Greek emperor sits eternally and the nobility stands eternally. On the Sibyls in medieval literature, see Peter Dronke, “Hermes and the Sibyls: Continuations and Creations,” in Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe (Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1992), 219–​244. 52 “Cum perueneris ad costam Tetragoni sedentis eterni et ad costam tetragonorum stantium eternorum . . . .” Thierry of Chartres, Commentum, II.34, ed. Häring, 79. Thierry cites only a fragment of the Sibyl, but likely used the version from MS Munich (clm) 5254 that continues “et ad multiplicationem beati numeri per actualem primum cubum.” See Giesebrecht, Geschichte, 505. 53 “Et quoniam tetragonatura prima generatio Filii est, et Filius tetragonus primus est. Tetragonatio uero figura est. Merito ergo Filium figuram substantie Patris appellat. . . . Bene autem tetragonus Filio attribuitur quoniam figura hec perfectior ceteris propter laterum equalitatem iudicatur.” Thierry of Chartres, Commentum, II.34, ed. Häring, 79. On Hebrews 1:3, see Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus, 41, ed. Häring, 572.

242  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation explanations of the divine Son as Square, one arithmetical and one geometrical. In the first book of Super Arithmeticam, Thierry outlines an arithmetical explanation. When the number one multiplies itself, it generates nothing but more unity.54 In this sense, the Son is a square number: This is the first squaring [tetragonatura], which unity generates from itself, when unity multiplied by itself produces the first square. For unity multiplied once is the first square; and this is that eternal generation of the square, of which the Spanish Sibyl speaks in its prophecy . . . . The “eternal and sitting square” names the Son of God, whose essence of unity has been generated out of his substance.55

However, numbers (3, 32, 33) also express figures (point, triangle, pyramid). So in the second book, Thierry turns to the geometrical explanation and argues that the Son is not only a square number but a square figure. In Boethian arithmetic, the male or odd numbers express immutability (God, soul), while the even or female numbers express mutability (materiality, corporeality). Yet when it comes to geometry, immutability is expressed by shapes with equal sides, and mutability by shapes with sides of different lengths. Among equilateral figures, triangular numbers combine odds with evens (1 +​2), diluting the power of the monad, but square numbers are composed of pure odd numbers (1 +​3 =​4, 1 +​3 +​5 =​9). Hence, for Boethius, only the squares can preserve the full potency of unity.56 Here Thierry intervenes to offer his second, geometrical account of the divine Square. Form determines matter by using the power of unity to carve out individual beings. Expressed in terms of geometry, form exerts the force of the “equality of being” (aequalitas essendi), squaring matter, so to speak, into substances.57 Thierry explains: “the power of the square lies in form itself; indeed, from the power of the square that very form is also the equality of being.”58 This creative extrapolation of Boethius suggests that the geometrical figure of the square bears a metaphysical significance. The square is not merely a symbol of unity (equal sides, male numbers), but manifests the real power of form to carve into matter. The form squares matter into beings. Then Thierry takes a step further. If God is pure Form, in the Boethian tradition, then God himself possesses the ultimate “squaring” power. Thierry takes the 54 See SA I.32 (1374–​1378), 152. 55 “Haec est tetragonatura prima, quam ex se gignit unitas, quae multiplicata per se primum efficit tetragonum. Semel enim unum, primus tetragonus est. Haec est aeterna illa tetragoni generatio, de qua hyspana sibilla in suo dicit vaticinio . . . . Tetragonum quidem sedentem et aeternum appellat dei filium, quem unitatis natura ex sua genuit substantia.” SA I.32 (1378–​1385), 152. 56 See Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, II.31.1–​11, ed. Guillaumin, 125–​127; cf. Institutio arithmetica, II.10–​12, ed. Guillaumin, 97–​100. 57 See SA II.31 (808–​816), 185. 58 “Vis ergo quadrati in ipsa forma est. Ex vi namque quadrati forma ipsa quoque essendi est aequalitas.” SA II.31 (816–​820), 185–​186.

The Figure as Icon  243 dramatic step of defining God’s divinity in terms of the geometrical “square.” Here is the critical passage: In sum, since form is the equality of being, I say that divinity is form or cause from the power of the square. . . . Form is able to determine matter due to the power of squaring and of unity. Therefore, it is from the power of the square that divinity is the form or cause of things. And this is why the Spanish Sibyl in its prophecy names the Son of God the “eternal square.”59

Thierry’s reasoning is so compressed as to seem fanciful, but in fact he carefully argues his point. In the standard Aristotelian account, form individuates matter by donating unity. Thierry adds the specifically Boethian lemma that form donates not only unity but the equality of being (aequalitas essendi, aequalitas existendi), which instantiates and preserves a given unity. That is, form donates unity by making an entity equal to itself. If form gives both unity and equality, there must always be a geometrical coefficient paired with form’s unifying action. Hence, form works not only through unity (arithmetic) but through squareness (geometry). Thierry concludes that all form is derived from the “power of the square” (vis quadrati), a term he finds in Institutio arithmetica, such that the action of form is the “power of squaring” (vis quadraturae).60 If God is the true Form, and form comes through “squaring,” then it follows that “divinity is the form of all things from the power of the square.” The Word, Wisdom, or Son of God, through whom God creates all things, must also be a Figure, namely, a Square that can preserve the full potency of God’s unity. Now let us examine how Achard of St. Victor handles the Square. In Sermon 13, given on the festal anniversary of St. Victor’s founding, Achard urges his gathered monks to build wisely like Solomon as they construct the house of God.61 He compares Christ’s power, anointing, and wisdom to three “houses.” In the first “house of power,” Achard invokes Thierry’s doctrine as an invitation to Christological contemplation.62 Solomon built his temple out of stone from Lebanon, but Lebanon means “brightening” (candidatio) according to Jerome.63 Christ is thus the true “brightness” that enlightens the world, a Platonic descent of form (light) to matter (darkness).64 “Solely out of kindness,” Achard preaches, “did such a beautiful form 59 “Rursus cum forma sit aequalitas essendi, dico quod divinitas ex vi quadrati forma vel causa est. . . . ex vi quadraturae et unitatis forma habet materiam determinare. Divinitas ergo ex vi quadrati forma vel causa rerum est. Et hoc est quare sybilla hyspana in vaticinio suo filium dei tetragonum aeternum nominat.” SA II.31 (830–​836), 186. 60 See, e.g., Boethius, Institutio arithmetica, II.11–​12, ed. Guillaumin, 98–​99. 61 Châtillon, Théologie, 142–​47, dates Sermons 13–​15 to the post-​abbatial period from 1155 to 1161. 62 On this passage, see Chatîllon, Théologie, 218–​221. 63 Sermon 13, para. 11–​14, ed. Jean Châtillon, Achard de Saint-​Victor. Sermons inédits. Textes philosophiques du moyen âge 17 (J. Vrin, 1970), 145–​149; trans. Feiss, 221. 64 Sermon 13, para. 15–​16, ed. Châtillon, 149–​150.

244  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation unite itself to such unformed material, which was not just unformed but even deformed.”65 God’s “expressed form,” the form of Christ, is received by humanity as an “impressed form” that restores our lost beauty.66 But what is the form of Christ? This form is a square because it is stable and firm. . . . Christ is our form—​as the apostle formed by him shows, Christ became a spiritual square [spiritualis quadratura] for us—​according to the Apostle’s word, Christ “became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” [1 Cor 1:30]. See there a vital, heavenly square! Approach and receive it, you stones, or rather you who without it are dead and earthly. You have been hewn into this square form [in ea quadramini], and thus you have been transformed from dead to living, from earthly to heavenly.67

Achard’s “square” brings to mind the architectural instrument that ensures the uniformity of stones for construction. Christ expresses divine Form by taking on the dimensions of a square, and monks receive Christ when they are thus “squared” (quadramini). He adds that there are further “squares” of the virtues throughout Scripture. “Only in the love of God is the square proposed and imposed as something we must receive,” and only when we become “square” can we cleave to the cornerstone of Christ and to the adjacent stones of our neighbors.68 “Whoever accepts squares of this kind will come through them to that superior square,” namely Christ.69 Achard’s surprising invocation of the Sibylline Square in a homily is an amusing witness to his tutelage under Thierry of Chartres. But something else is going on here. Thierry’s Christian Neopythagoreanism had accentuated God as Form, the Son as Equality, and the importance of thinking in the language of geometrical figuration beyond mere arithmology. In Thierry, we find not only an embrace of world measure in henology, moving past Plotinian suspicions about geometry; and not only a Trinitarian adjustment of the aneidetic condition, clearing the way for the

65 “Forma tam formosa ex pietate sola se univit materie tam informi, nec modo informi sed et deformi . . . .” Sermon 13, para. 16, ed. Châtillon, 150; trans. Feiss, 228. 66 “Forma autem ista et Dei est et nostra: Dei est quia a Deo est, nostra est quia in nobis est; a Deo est expressa, et ab ipso nobis est impressa.” Sermon 13, para. 16, ed. Châtillon, 150; trans. Feiss, 229. 67 “Quadratura quedam est hec forma, quia stabilis est et firma. . . . Christus forma nostra est, qui, ut ostendit Apostolus ab eo formatus, spiritualis quadratura nobis est factus: Christus namque, juxta verbum Apostoli, factus est sapientia nobis a Deo, et justitia, et sanctificatio, et redemptio. Ecce quadratura vitalis atque celestis. Accedite et eam suscipite, lapides vivi, immo sine ea mortui atque terreni; in ea quadramini, et sic ex mortuis vere vivi et ex terrenis celestes efficiemini.” Sermon 13, para. 17, ed. Châtillon, 150–​151; trans. Feiss, 229 (modified). On the image of the square, see Châtillon, Théologie, 219. In viewing Christ as form and in his preference for architectural metaphors, Achard no doubt follows his master, Hugh of St. Victor. See Boyd Taylor Coolman, The Theology of Hugh of St. Victor (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 83–​102. 68 “In sola etiam dilectione dei quadratura proponitur et suscipienda nobis imponitur.” Sermon 13, para. 21, ed. Châtillon, 153; trans. Feiss, 232. 69 “Qui quadraturas hujusmodi acceperit, per eas ad superiorem quamdam perveniet quadraturam . . . .” Sermon 13, para. 22, ed. Châtillon, 154; trans. Feiss, 234.

The Figure as Icon  245 One to serve as Form of forms, thanks to the unity of Father and Son. In addition to these epochal shifts in Latin Christianity, made possible by Boethius, let us remember one more: the Chartrian reconstruction of kataphasis through unfolding structures of space, tantamount to the tiered hierarchies of Dionysian theology. Now, Thierry was well aware of apophatic traditions in Augustine, Dionysius, and possibly Eriugena. According to two student reportationes, Thierry praised the doctrine of beatus Dionisius that theology was twofold (duplex), both affirmative and negative.70 Yet it is important for us as contemporary readers to recognize that his distinctive contributions all elevate visuality, spatiality, and positivity. Thierry pivots away from the invisibility of number in arithmetic toward the visibility of figure in geometry, not least in the unfurling folds of line. And he pivots away from the immensity of God’s Word and Wisdom toward the very essence of measure, christening the Son with the titles figura, aequalitas, and quadratus. He inscribes these nominative strategies into extensive space as geometrical figurations that do not require erasure as one ascends toward God. If the One were formless, then divine names like Equality, Square, or Fold must eventually give way under the pressure of infinite negation. But if the One is Form, such figures can operate as icons. This is precisely the trajectory that Achard of St. Victor fulfills in his humble homily on the Square. Diving heedlessly into the depths of kataphatic theology, Achard is a son of St. Victor, to be sure, but also a bona fide Chartrian and Boethian theologian—​not every abbot sings the virtues of the Square. Christ is our Form, he preaches, and Christ became a spiritual Square for us. Behold and contemplate that heavenly Square, he tells his listeners. You have already been squared by the divine Square, he adds, inverting the intentionality of their gaze. For the Square that Achard elevates for contemplation before their eyes is not only an object of vision but a subject of preemptive action upon them, an ecstasy of God toward them. In a word, Achard fashions the figure of the Christ-​Square into an icon: a Form that forms his community with sovereign anteriority, squaring them into existence, encompassing them and measuring them with its own lines, and irradiating them with divine Beauty—​not withdrawing into darkness, but brightening the whole world with a positivity that cannot be eclipsed. The more geometrical that Achard’s theology becomes, the more kataphatic it becomes as well.

Guarding the Many Achard of St. Victor is the unlikely but quietly brilliant successor of Thierry of Chartres, who not only continued his teacher’s project of melding the Boethian

70 See Tractatus de Trinitate, 26, ed. Häring, 309; and Commentarius Victorinus, 99, ed. Häring, 501–​502.

246  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation quadrivium with Augustinian theology but raised it to a new degree of clarity, perhaps even more than his master. Achard defines what Thierry left unstated and unfolds what he kept enfolded. His book is almost literally the culmination of the “hidden heritage” of Boethian Neoplatonism, “one of the last systems of thought constructed on Roman and Latin currents before the rediscovery of Aristotle.”71 By returning again and again ad fontes to mine the early insights of Super Arithmeticam, Achard realizes the radically kataphatic potential of Chartrian mathematical theology. He demonstrates that the geometrization of Christian contemplation proposed by Thierry does not reduce the field of visibility, as in the subtractive apophasis of Alcinous or Plotinus. Rather, figures of measure, like icons, can point from the infinite beauty of mundane forms all the way to the equalizing power of the Form of forms. Beyond such debts to Thierry, however, Achard remains an impressive philosopher in his own right. Many abbots give sermons, but few spend their leisure luxuriating in Neopythagorean aesthetics. What does it mean to philosophize as a Victorine without Aristotle and outside the Parisian schools?72 For Achard, philosophy is a mode of contemplation, namely contemplating the multitude of forms as they appear—​both in the world and in the divine mind—​in one and the same moment. The wonder occasioned by this synchrony is the heart of Achard’s philosophical experience. To this extent, he repeats Thierry’s interpretation of the forma formarum as the divine mind. But for Achard, gazing upon the divine ideas does not mean turning away to the starry heavens above; it means beholding with surprise the virtual eternity of every particle of matter, suspended as it is within divine memory. Achard embraces alterity, multiplicity, and plurality as unquestionably positive goods, since they express the wild diversity of forms eternally born inside God himself. As in Dionysius, the divine One does not need to be protected from contact with lesser forms or to assert an absolute freedom from self-​giving eros. Rather, unbound by autarchy, the ecstatic One pours itself into the Many. After Dionysius, after the iconophiles, after Boethius and Thierry, we finally reach the maximal inversion of the aneidetic condition. Achard does not guard the One, as Plotinus did. Achard, in effect, guards the Many: the infinite plurality that mirrors the true Plurality, the Trinity. In a fully Christianized henology, the One guards difference. Achard never discusses his philosophical methods in De unitate Dei, but we can infer some principles from his approach to demonstration. Echoing Anselm of Canterbury, Achard holds that because the Trinity is the greatest conceivable 71 Mohammad Ilkhani, “Achard of Saint-​ Victor and Philosophy,” in Achard de Saint-​ Victor métaphysicien. Le De unitate Dei et pluralitate creaturarum. Ad argumenta. Quaestio Special Issues, Vol. 2, eds. Vincent Carraud, Gilles Olivo, and Pasquale Porro (Brepols, 2019), 93. 72 See David Albertson, “Philosophy and Metaphysics in the School of Saint Victor: From Achard to Godfrey,” in A Companion to the Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris, eds. Hugh Feiss and Juliet Mousseau (Brill, 2017), 353–​386.

The Figure as Icon  247 beauty, it is “fitting” (convenientiae) that the Trinity exists.73 Yet while reason can “prove” (comprobavit) that God is unity, it can only accept the plurality of God (as Trinity) through faith.74 Only then can reason test the conclusions affirmed by faith by discovering intrinsically “necessary reasons” (necessariis . . . assertionibus).75 Reason is good at identifying “necessary and manifest reasons” (rationes necessariae et manifestae), especially when handling arithmetic and geometry.76 But as Achard points out, the search for necessary arguments is always a participation in divine necessity or God’s own reason.77 As the Form of forms, God’s mind contains a plurality of ideas.78 Divine Wisdom is thus one and yet also multiplex, an “impenetrable and infinite multitude” (quandam impenetrabilem et infinitam . . . multitudinem) generating a profusion of forms.79 Philosophy is contemplation of God because the perfection of reason is God’s mind, a kind of virtual multiverse recapitulating every single being.80 To philosophize is to participate in that divine Reason, tracing the depths of the triune Plurality as it “disseminates” (distribuire) God’s eternal reasons throughout the created order.81 Every creaturely detail is held up against the vast mirror of infinite possibility and cherished all the more for its singularity. Now according to Achard, these eternal reasons do not abide as one giant set in God’s Wisdom but are instead a countable plurality of eternally distinct forms, indeed an infinite distinction of forms exhausting every possibility. To underscore his point, Achard frequently states that the totality of created forms is the “same number” (numero idem) as the totality of eternal forms.82 The finite, determinate forms embodied in the universe flow from the countless infinity of virtual possibilities in God’s mind. Here (hic) there is only one moon; there (ibi) one finds infinite moons. Here the sky is round; there it is also triangular, square, and pentagonal—​ every infinite dimensional possibility. A beautiful thing here is twice, thrice, up to infinite degrees greater in beauty there, for the beauty of a single eternal reason exceeds the beauty of our entire material cosmos. Yet still the plurality of forms “there” (ibi) truly corresponds to the plurality of forms “here” (hic).83

73 UD I.5, 74. Feiss suggests that Achard learned this Anselmian method from Hugh, but then decided to go his own way and pursue Thierry’s quadrivial methods. See Feiss, “The Trinity in De unitate,” 39–​40. 74 UD I.9, 76. 75 UD I.12, 80. 76 See UD I.41, 110; UD II.18, 190; and UD I.48, 130–​132. 77 UD II.17, 182–​184. Mohammad Ilkhani paints Achard as a “rationalist” both logically and epistemologically, since for him “the world is made by Reason extending and unfolding.” Ilkhani, “Achard of Saint-​Victor and Philosophy,” 88. 78 UD I.40, 110. 79 UD II.18, 186–​88. On divine Wisdom, Achard makes allusions to Ws 7:22, Ws 7:27, and Eph 3:10. 80 UD I.45, 116–​118. 81 UD II.18, 186. 82 UD I.46, 120. 83 See, e.g., UD I.46, 118–​122.

248  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation That is to say: in an unsurpassable way, God’s mind is amenable to number, albeit infinite numbers. Every measurable difference is eternally preserved. Achard’s distinction between hic (here, in the world) and ibi (there, with God) reiterates that between the sensible “here” (ἐνταῦθα) and the intelligible “there” (ἐκεῖ) used by Plato and later expanded by Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius.84 However, as Jean-​Louis Poirier observes, Achard’s radical unification of hic and ibi “banalizes” transcendence and works exactly contrary to Plotinian Neoplatonism. Poirier calls this “the disappearance of any halo effect, any distance effect, any nostalgia,” which makes it “impossible to speak of Neoplatonism” in Achard in any straightforward way: “at the very moment when he reactivates the pair ibi/​hic by generalizing their use, Achard expurgates whatever remains of Neoplatonic themes.”85 But how can one moon here be the “same number” as infinite moons there? Temporal forms operate differently than eternal forms. Forms embedded in bodies vary in number with time. Without bodies, forms can be one and many at the same time, such that a finite number here and an infinite number of there can be the same number. Achard explains: Simultaneously—​something that cannot occur in creatures—​there the same thing is a certain thing numerically one and a certain thing numerically other; indeed, things can be numerically as many as God can make them—​that is, numerically infinite—​and nevertheless in all these there is that certain thing that is numerically one . . . .86

If the eternal forms were indistinct, nothing could be known distinctly; to know one thing would be to know everything.87 If the number of eternal forms were different than the number of temporal forms, God would know creation imperfectly. God would not immediately know creatures (per seipsum), but depend on an instrument (per medium). So one must affirm that the mundane forms (in actu) and eternal forms (in intellectu Dei) are the “same in number” (numero idem).88 God’s mind, then—​the One-​Many as Intellect—​is the real, eternal, infinite plurality of forms. Without mitigating that eternal distinction, its plurality belongs to a single Exemplar, namely, God’s reason. But rather than Word or Wisdom, Achard prefers to call this exemplar the singular divine Form. God’s Word is the supreme 84 For ἐκεῖ in Plotinus, see Enneads II.4.2–​4, V.3.10, V.8.3, and VI.7.2. 85 See Jean-​Louis Poirier, “L’adverbe ibi dans le De unitate,” in Achard de Saint-​Victor métaphysicien. Le De unitate Dei et pluralitate creaturarum. Ad argumenta. Quaestio Special Issues, Vol. 2, ed. Vincent Carraud, Gilles Olivo, and Pasquale Porro (Brepols, 2019), 143, 146–​147. 86 “Simul ergo, quod in creaturis fieri nequit, res eadem ibi est res quaedam numero una et res quaedam numero altera, imo res numero tot quot vere ea[s]‌Deus facere potest, id est numero infinitae, et in omnibus tamen ipsa eadem ibi est res quaedam numero una . . . .” UD I.48, 124; trans. Feiss, 420. 87 UD I.44, 116. 88 UD I.46, 120.

The Figure as Icon  249 forma that generates infinite forms.89 God is precisely not formless, because as the Form of forms, God exerts a definite limit or measure upon lesser forms. Therefore, writes Achard, God is “not without form, but the highest formal beauty, yet not formed by another” (non informis, sed summe formosa, non tamen formata).90 Achard’s elegant formula, stunning in its simplicity, could not have stated the aesthetics of supreme Form any more precisely. It closely parallels two other versions that we already encountered in Plotinus in Chapter 3 and in Dionysius in Chapter 5. According to Plotinus, the One is the shapeless shaper who engenders form in the shaped (καὶ τὸ εἶδος ἐν τῷ μορφωθέντι, τὸ δὲ μορφῶσαν ἄμορφον ἦν) (VI.7.17). Achard agrees that the One is not formed by another, but not that the One is formless. For Achard, God’s very own Form is the source of formal beauty: God gives what God is, not what he does not have. Then in Dionysius, we read that the One is “form giving form among those without form as the source of form; but formless among the formed as beyond form” (εἶδος εἰδοποιὸν ἐν τοῖς ἀνειδέοις ὡς εἰδεάρχις, ἀνείδεος ἐν τοῖς εἴδεσιν ὡς ὑπὲρ εἶδος).91 Achard’s Latin is a compact paraphrase of the first half of Dionysius’s statement. But Achard does not take the additional step, as Dionysius does in the second half, to contrast supreme Form and lesser forms apophatically (defining ὑπὲρ εἶδος with the negation ἀν-​είδεος). Rather than rely on apophasis, Achard opts for kataphatic intensity: summa formosa, the supreme positivity of Form shining ever, infinitely brighter, without reserve and without restraint. The heart of philosophical contemplation for Achard of St. Victor is wonder-​ filled delight in the face of overwhelming beauty, and more precisely, the beauty of harmonious plurality, refracted through magnitude. The maximal harmony and greatest wonder of all—​and so the highest philosophical act—​would be to behold the infinite number of beauties as one singular beauty, not as a composite or abstract whole, but as a dynamic network (connectio) preserving each individual in its glorious singularity. But to encompass this infinite nexus in one simple glance (intuitus), Achard readily concedes, is the sole privilege of the “divine Eye” (oculus divinus).92 God alone perceives—​God is—​that infinitely beautiful virtual multiverse, inestimable to all but God, the only one capable of defending its full expanse. God alone enumerates the infinity of singularities; God alone measures its 89 UD II.3, 140. 90 UD II.14, 174; my translation. Fernand Brunner uncovered similar lines in a poem by Bernard of Cluny (fl. ca. 1140 CE), author of De contemptu mundi, which weaves together Boethius, Augustine, and Hilary of Poitiers, among other Latin Platonist sources. See Brunner, “Deus forma essendi,” 92. The lines read: “Formarum qui forma vigens informia formans /​Est formatarum formator formaque rerum /​Ut dat sana fides, sunt omnia facta per ipsum.” Bernard of Cluny, Carmina de trinitate et de fide catholica, ed. Katarina Halvarson, Bernardi Cluniacensis Carmina de Trinitate et De Fide Catholica. Studia Latina Stockholmiensia 11 (Almqvist & Wiksell, 1963), 26–​27 (ll. 658–​660). 91 DN II.10 (648C). 92 UD I.48, 130–​13.

250  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation immensity. Only God grasps the secret quantity of eternal forms abiding across time and eternity. For Achard, then, God is not only the fount of numbers, in the Trinity of unity, equality of unity, and equality of equality. As he pivots from arithmetic to geometry, Achard contemplates God as a Measure, the only Measure who takes the measure of the whole. God is not lacking in measure, but is the supreme Measure, unmeasured by others, the Measure without measure.

Epilogue In one of Augustine’s commentaries on Genesis, recalling the words of Wisdom 11:20, he names God the Number without number, the Weight without weight, and especially the Measure without measure (mensura sine mensura). The Creator gives order to all creatures as their mensura, but with an infinite standard that remains uniquely unknown, sine mensura. It is a particularly beautiful divine name: a repetition joined by a negation. Its double affirmation encircles and literally circumscribes the denial with mensura. The name is both kataphatic and apophatic at the same time. Some have suggested that Augustine simply repeats a phrase of Plotinus (μέτρον οὐ μετρούμενον, Ennead V.5.4), but that explains little about its meaning or context. It also assumes that Augustine’s theological aesthetics is identical with the Greek philosopher’s and that the prerogatives of Christian teaching left Plotinian henology entirely intact. In fact, as is often the case with Augustine, we are witnessing here a transition in progress beyond the parameters of Hellenic Neoplatonism. We catch Augustine’s phrase poised halfway between two aesthetics, on the move from formlessness toward form. Does “Measure without measure” stand as a mere symbol, a poetic invocation of measure, but devoid of any precise quantification? Or does “Measure without measure” mean the hard edges of a measure grown infinite, a magnitude beyond conceiving, the mensuration performed by God himself ? Within the aneidetic condition of Tradition A, negation always outstrips affirmation. We might compare God to measure, but in fact (on this view), God is without measure, neither exerting it nor possessing it, since finally God lacks every determination as the formless One. If no other framework existed, Tradition A could be mistaken for the natural order of things. Yet now we can view the same divine name from a different perspective, the theological aesthetics of Tradition B. From that point of view, the divine Measure portions out creatures in space and time. God’s own Measure endows their mundane geometry with analogical force. Their little lines and shapes originate within God’s own vast measures, ordered by a paradigm impressed and then withdrawn. Although their figures are traces of the divine Measure, nothing in those magnitudes and dimensions could ever define or contain the transcendent Creator. For this divine name preserves apophasis at its heart: mensura sine mensura. Yet in its particularity, mensura expresses something positive and indelible about God: God is not only Beauty and Goodness and Wisdom but also Measure. God’s Measure is that specific, eternal Form whose

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation. David Albertson, Oxford University Press. © David Albertson 2025. DOI: 10.1093/​9780198947004.003.0014

252  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation edges are reflected in the sharp figures of lines and spheres. There is a Measure that does not come from any other measure, nor is limited by them, and yet remains a veritable, unique measure, the Measure without measure. So the name mensura is also consummately kataphatic, expressing God’s sovereign self-​figuration. The kataphatic name preserves the apophatic moment it holds within, harmonizing both faces of contemplation and both idiolects of speech. In my last book, I traced the interplay between Number (ἀριθμός) and Word (λόγος) by studying how a handful of medieval Christians contemplated number as a secondary mediation between God and the world. In this book, I have turned from invisible number to visible space, that is, from the domain of arithmetic to the domain of geometry or the visual inscription of measurable figures. Here the problem is not mediation, or formal order, but visibility, or formal appearance. The visibility of Form as such is εἶδος, but the concrete visuality of number occurs as the figuration of a line (γραμμή) drawn through space. Every such incursion into graphic visibility is an extension into spatial intervals. Hence, as we read in Nicomachus and Boethius, the pivot from arithmetic to geometry is also a pivot from Number (ἀριθμός or τὸ ποσόν) to Magnitude (μέγεθος or τὸ πηλίκον). Taking a cue from these two ranks of the ancient quadrivium, we can clarify the nature of the historiographical project found in these pages. If my last book established the dialectical emergence of the divine Word against the background of Number, this book has studied the emergence of divine Form against the background of Magnitude. In other words, to understand the interplay of Form and formlessness, we have to understand form’s persistent connection with magnitude, figure, and measure. One immediate consequence is that Hans Urs von Balthasar’s influential project of “beholding the Form” (Schau der Gestalt) can be significantly amplified to include not only εἶδος and μορφή in the field of theological aesthetics but also μέτρον, σχῆμα, μέγεθος, even γραμμή. I hope this book clears the ground for future work in that direction. If it is necessary today to retrieve the full meaning of kataphasis in Christian mystical theologies and rescue it from apophatic oblivion, the best strategy is to return to magnitude, figure, and measure—​in a word, to the geometry of Christian contemplation. This means shifting our gaze from the invisible interior of experience to the exterior world. To remember kataphasis, our first task is not to reexamine founding instances of mystical writings, whether the visionary dreams of Perpetua and Felicitas, Origen’s meditations on eros in the Song of Songs, Gregory of Nyssa’s allegory of the ascent of Moses, or Augustine’s vision with Monica in Book IX of Confessions, as important as these moments are. Rather, we must delve into the roots of Christian discourse as such: the Christian modification of Greek concepts of infinite negation; the Christian expansion of Greek concepts of erotic desire; and the epochal Christian turn toward the visual field in the icon. What grounds these three and holds them together, I argue, is the practice of measure, and the

Epilogue  253 visible figures that unfold out of mensuration, so that the world is no longer silent but comes to speech. I have tried to sketch a new hypothesis about the foundations of Christian mystical contemplation as the gradual emergence of not one but two theological aesthetics. The first task in Part I was to historicize Plotinian Neoplatonism, so that we can no longer imagine that it provides the transparent, universal coordinates for all past and future Christian contemplation; rather, it is one discursive possibility among others. I showed that Plotinus’s distinctive henology takes shape as he distances himself from Neopythagorean influences and grows suspicious of the contemplative value of world measure. Some early Christians adopt the resulting aneidetic condition of divine formlessness without reservation (Tradition A). Others contest it and seek to surpass it with a counter-​aesthetics of divine Form, in order to accommodate the total novelty of the Incarnation in the space and time of the world (Tradition B). Apophasis and kataphasis are deployed in both of these traditions, but in different ways, as we have seen. To be sure, most Christian authors probably struggle somewhere in between the two traditions in their experience and in their writing, either juxtaposing them or shifting from one to the other. Still, it is crucial that we be able to tell the difference. In Part II, we watched the stepwise reversal of the aneidetic condition unfold over the centuries. The consistency of this pattern of gradually dissenting from Plotinus through sustained meditation on the Incarnation is remarkable in itself. It was the Christians, to our surprise, who turned our attention to the body, materiality, and exteriority, working against the native tendencies of Hellenic Neoplatonism to leave the world behind. Taken together, these three representative episodes allow us to discern a robust alternative to Tradition A in the emergence of Tradition B. Divine Form only appears once Magnitude appears, that is, once the three henological postulates of Plotinus are reversed: eros, autarchy, and Logos. For Plotinus, the One cannot love, but for Dionysius, the One is in erotic ecstasy. And if the One gives itself in love beyond itself, extending into our world, figuration arises not only in the ascent upward but in God’s own ecstatic descent, impressing and leaving behind hierarchical measures that etch that erotic circuit into space and time. For Plotinus, the One is absolutely self-​sufficient or autarchic; but for John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite, the One gives itself away in complete kenosis in the human life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And if God freely discards his autarchy and pours himself out in the Incarnation, God arrives fully into the conditions of measure and spatial magnitude, transforming geometry from within. For Plotinus, the One cannot also be the Logos, lest it become the Form of forms; but for Thierry of Chartres and Achard of St. Victor, the One as the Logos is indeed the Form of forms. And, the Boethians add, the One is the Logos because both are Unity and Equality, and the Equality of the two, a self-​mensuration at once geometrical and Trinitarian. By the same measure, God

254  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation equalizes all things as themselves and unfolds all things into worldhood, as the line unfolds from the point. Thus, in Part I, form was still opposed to figure, in order to elevate the One above form. But in Part II, we saw form and figure reconciled, and the pattern that I promised in Chapter 1 began to emerge. When measure and figure are viewed as obstacles to contemplation, then formlessness reigns. But when geometry is elevated into a uniquely privileged analogy, an unsurpassable Form comes into view. The presence of measure guards and preserves the iconicity of form. Once the contradiction of Plotinian henology is complete, the fruit is a fecund analogical space that finds traces of God within line, quantity, and measure in the real dimensions of the world. Geometrical figuration is the refuge, the sanctuary, of the theological aesthetics of Form flowing from the Incarnation and Trinity. Likewise, Christian contemplatives who expect to find God within the magnitudes of the world naturally venture beyond the confines of Plotinus’s aneidetic condition, whether they know him or not. Plotinus removed every limit from negation, so it could erase every form. But both Dionysius and the Byzantine iconophiles circumscribe apophasis by setting the limit of the line. As Theodore states, the icon contains the form of Christ in its linear graph. Kataphasis is saved from the fate of infinite negation through figural inscription, when the line is tattooed on the body of the world. Dionysius draws on Proclus to reconfigure Christian Neoplatonism, and Theodore, to our surprise, adds a few elements from Euclid. But in Chapters 8 and 9, I proposed that to retrieve the geometrical origins of ancient Christian mystical theology, we needed to look beyond ancient Greek Christian traditions and compare Latin traditions in medieval Europe. While neither ancient nor mystical, medieval Boethians place measure and figure at the center of their thought and thus announce the signature of Tradition B with a new degree of clarity. Thierry and Achard articulate the underlying structures that bind negation, eros, and visuality together. They render the aesthetics of supreme Form visible against the background of Magnitude and in the vocabulary of the Neopythagorean quadrivium. In the divine Squaring, the curve of the fold, and the wild beauty of the Many, Thierry and Achard inscribe onto the page, so to speak, the fine lines and arching shapes and twisting planes in the world that constitute an exterior field for affirmative speech about God. That field plots the spatial coordinates of kataphatic expression. In the laboratories of their commentaries, we see the skeleton of kataphasis anatomized, so that we can better grasp its living, breathing animation in works by Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, or Julian of Norwich. For the same reasons, these women and other authors like them are the true descendants of the magisterial Byzantine iconophiles. They know the power of the image as figure, of the figure as measure, and of measure as the refuge of Form. In the study of Christian mysticism today, kataphatic texts are still considered less philosophically interesting than their apophatic neighbors. By and large,

Epilogue  255 philosophers of religion today are not hastening to read Mechthild and Julian as much as they are Dionysius and Meister Eckhart. Perhaps the women mystics win their importance otherwise, as idiosyncratic expressions of erotic desire, bodily pain, or poetic imagination, but for many contemporary readers, kataphatic mysticism evokes no philosophical wonder. It is time to reverse that state of affairs. In fact, it is apophasis that no longer radiates mystery or invites awe. Aniconism is the ubiquitous, monotonous, tedious signature of the late modern world, and the notion that the Absolute is formless has become unremarkable, even mundane. On the contrary, what would truly evoke wonder would be the prospect of a Form that cannot be negated, that unaccountably and inexplicably remains. An authentic kataphasis would be more than mere non-​negativity. It would be the possibility of an autonomous inscription without reserve, acheiropoietic and unbeholden to erasure, the possibility of a name above all names. Iconoclasm today is not a matter forbidding painted images on wooden boards or dismantling luxury mosaics. There is no need to lift a hammer. Contemporary iconoclasm is rather a condition of suspicion introduced and perpetuated by default at the level of theological aesthetics. As I suggested in Chapter 1, the shadow of the negative falls over all kataphasis now. Surely, this is partly due to the global hyperinflation and depreciation of images that we are living through technologically. The more manically we multiply our images, the more we evacuate them of presence and the more diaphanous they become. At the same time, the symptoms of our late modern aphasia began to set in not decades but centuries ago when our relation to world measure profoundly changed. We began to lose our grip on kataphatic speech during the new conditions of mathematized measurement in the seventeenth century, and I am convinced that we will only exit our speechlessness by the same doorway. To be modern is to think of the world as what is measurable, and therefore to name God or the Absolute a contrario as the Immeasurable. The resulting disjunction between the measured world and the measureless God is so complete, the chasm so vast, that totalizing apophasis seems the only legitimate manner of speaking. Our habits of negation have become customary, but they constrict our world. The vibrant manifold of divine presence in the world erodes step by step, dimmed by our fading repertoire of names. If anyone tries to say that God is near, that God remains in the world, that God is present through materiality, or that God dwells in the body or the earth, these are mere words on the page in a language that few among us truly comprehend any more, like a mother tongue drifting toward extinction. In this situation, a purely poetic retrieval of kataphatic language can be tempting, but it does not suffice, as if we could leap over the intervening distance to the alienated world simply by reviving a few old metaphors, inventing new ones, or more fancifully imagining ourselves to speak on behalf of the mute objects that fill our silent world, through a feat of defiant, virtuosic, literary performance. The

256  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation world remains silent, so we try to speak even more in its stead. That verbal strategy, common today in the environmental humanities and ecological theology, is a counsel of despair. It only reinforces the dichotomy between quality and quantity, poesis and mathesis, Word and Number. It leaves in place the metric binary and confines speech to an arbitrary renaming of all things, precisely because our signs have become so empty and fungible and our images so incredibly cheap. Sheer poetic renaming is a poor consolation and an inadequate therapy for the silence of the world and our deafness to the full symphony of the Christian past. What we require is not a faltering retreat into language despite the world, but a courageous recovery of language about the world, in the dialect of Magnitude. Given the crash in our image currencies, and given the prestige of formlessness and apophasis, we can respond to contemporary aniconism by repeating the gesture of the Byzantine iconophiles. They sought to recalibrate the iconoclasts’ totalizing negation in light of Christian teachings on the Incarnation. In the eighth and ninth centuries, just as in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, the legacy of Dionysian apophaticism was initially claimed by the iconoclasts, as if it endorsed their limitless negation. But soon John and Theodore realized that in fact Dionysian theology not only intensifies apophasis but in equal measure strengthens the kataphatic gifts of figuration. They taught that the Incarnation of God in the body of Jesus radically alters the conditions of negation. No one can live and see God’s face, yet the icon achieves just that. The iconoclasts protested that the procedures of ordinary figuration would contain God, but Theodore demonstrated how the invisible can be seen in the graphic lines of circumscription. In much the same way, the repetitive technological frames that govern our visual culture seem to homogenize all we can see and exhaust our attempts at figuration. They seem to make seeing God through the physical dimensions of our disenchanted, quantified, object-​ridden cosmos all but impossible in the twenty-​ first century. To repeat the iconophilic gesture today means not to escape or deny these aniconic conditions but to view them from a new angle, just as Theodore did. Today, as then, it is the line that enforces negation. The totalizing imaginal grid of universal mathematization is built from pure quantity or linear measure. The line orders all that we see. If we could see lines differently, we would see the world differently. As we saw in Chapter 2, well before Plotinus, apophasis originated in Alcinous in an act of measure: the subtractive reduction from solid to plane to line to point, which leads the mind toward invisibility. In Tradition A, subject to the aneidetic condition, the line’s access to invisibility is predicated on the eventual erasure of every form. Plotinus and aniconic Christians from antiquity into modernity view geometry and quantitative measure in this way. But we also saw, after iconoclasm, that the line had other capabilities. Every line drawn by the eye or the hand is a perigraphic tracing that coordinates the unseen and the seen, apophasis and kataphasis, preserving the integrity of both. In Tradition B, line does not erase

Epilogue  257 form and hence does not evacuate presence from what is measured. Even God enters into measure through self-​delineation, impressing the world with figures and capacitating its magnitudes with theonymic power. Dionysius, the magisterial iconophiles, and the Boethian tradition all affirm this in their own way. The details we uncovered in the iconophile episode revealed something further. The ground of the iconicity of Byzantine icons, it turns out, was not their abstract style, reverse perspective, or harmonious composition. Rather, as we saw in Chapter 7, the original guarantor of iconicity was the line itself. Iconicity is inherently, intrinsically, and originally geometrical. The theonymic reference achieved by the icon functions because of circumscription, that is, due to the analogical force of figural inscription. All lines are traces of a primordial impression made by the Form of forms. The line is analogy; every line analogizes, because ἀναλογία as proportion exists through magnitude and measure, that is, through the spatial relations of lines. Every line is the recession of a divine touch, opening a memory of what remains. As we learned from Mondzain and Marion, the line is a kenotic practice, an emptiness that bears witness to Incarnation; a raw wound incised into space; the slender threshold that nonetheless overflows with what it contains, like the uterine space of the Virgin; the limit of the void that is also the edge of the divine. Today, geometrical measurement can seem ridiculously inappropriate for the task of naming God, lest it immediately contain the divinity, just as Byzantine iconoclasts feared about the icon. Our practices of measurement do inevitably occur within our post-​Cartesian imaginary. Its abstractions often end up reinforcing the aesthetics of formlessness of Tradition A. The threat of measure hovers over beings like a sword of Damocles, converting them into reproducible objects. To be measured is to be incapable of presence. If all things can be measured with mathesis universalis, then what is truly real is the eternal and infinite grid of quantity, not the dull beings lodged within it. The clean lines of the matrix screen out images like a sieve, privileging abstract figures as if to approximate formlessness through the repetition of the same. In this way, the full potencies of iconological line are misrecognized as abstractions in the autoclasm of empty space. But what matters here is not the brute presence or brute absence of quantified world measurement, even when totalized in the mathesis universalis, but the hermeneutic capacities that govern our vision of it. Not, again, because a flight into the hermeneutics of language might allow for a poetic escape from the problem, a salvation by neologism. For that poetic gambit itself relies upon the metric binary, which can only be deconstructed historically by exposing the contingency of Tradition A. I hope to have begun that process in this book. Once the forgotten history of Tradition A is laid bare, it loses its pretensions to universality, self-​evidence, and indispensability. With that way cleared, we could in theory gain access to a different experience of the same geometrized world. Tradition B holds the keys to reopening the world to contemplation and discovering a new relationship with the

258  The Geometry of Christian Contempl ation abstract screens and windows that frame our fields of vision. Within that aesthetic, geometry and negation could operate quite differently. The spatial field of points and lines and arcs could offer a haven for forms where the eye can rest as it seeks the One. Rather than erasing every form, negation would traverse the distance between supreme Form and lesser forms, not to cancel them but to measure them, in order to encompass them in participation. We only need to shift our gaze slightly to glimpse a new vocation for our geometrized cosmos. Viewed outside the aneidetic condition, that infinite grid of quantity towering before us like a wall, the mathetic field, could appear from another perspective as a different kind of barrier: a gate, a doorway, even a window. The screen of diremptive measure could be redeemed into a screen that expands vision rather than contracting it, that brightens rather than dims. The universal geometrical grid could become, in a word, an iconostasis, a barrier that mediates an analogical vision of God. What is the name for this measure that measures differently, still in the domain of line, but resisting the aneidetic condition in order to protect kataphatic speech about God in the world? If we revisit Mugler’s handbook of Greek geometry, the two best candidates are “katagraphy” (καταγραφή /​καταγράφειν) and “katametry” (καταμέτρησις /​καταμετρεῖν). Both terms appear in Euclid and Proclus, and the second in Aristotle and Archimedes as well. The first option is a variation of “circumscription” (περιγραφή); the second adds a preposition to intensify “measure” (μέτρον). Both reflect the positivity of “kataphasis” (κατάφασις). In their original senses, katagraphy means tracing a figure, especially the sudden moment of realizing the visibility of such a figure into being. Katametry, by contrast, concerns the assignation of a numerical value to a spatial quantity; the object of katametry is always a magnitude. The katametric line is not opaque, but transparent, not silent, but alive. It propels the eye katagraphically beyond itself to behold a presence extruded through its dimensionality by means of absence, as a trace. To stabilize kataphasis, I have proposed that we study its embeddedness in world measure, or geometry. Those linear measures in Tradition B, or katametry, made possible iconological reference to divine Form, or katagraphy. Yet the katametric function of line persists well outside the icon. If we reorient our vision, the network of lines sustaining our contemporary scientific and technological quantification of the world could become katagraphic—​not a force for iconoclastic erasure but for kataphatic inscription. Living within our mathematized cosmos, our only chance for “re-​enchantment”—​beyond temporary poetic variations—​is to hear the line speak again, as a trace bearing witness to an anterior presence. Exclusive secularism begins with a decision that becomes a habit: seeing the immanent as empty. Immanence in fact is the reduction to what is visible, and nothing more than that. What is visible concretely means what is measurable as multitude or magnitude in a given dimension. The visibility of measurement is the line. Hence, secularity means the decision to view the line as non-​analogical, an arbitrary decision that has become a habit, and soon enough an unwarranted conviction, namely, the

Epilogue  259 assumption that all visible lines must be katametric failures. But do they fail? Why would they? If the One is formless, then measure evacuates presence. But if the line were a katagraphic trace of supreme Form, then all measured visibilia as such would be theophanic images of that Form. Then the delineated world itself, the universal mathesis, would become iconic, or rather iconostatic. Iconology would welcome within its powers the potent emptiness of line. For in katametric vision, the emptiness of space is not empty; it is the impression of a withdrawn anterior presence, the negative type of the Form of forms. Then the forces of measurement that pervade our human depths could be recognized as a brush with the One, a ray inside the darkness. As Theodore taught, presence arrives through absence. The mathematization of our vision, the irreversible quantification of the real, and the ubiquitous network of invisible lines that order our being and thinking can open themselves to contemplation if we can turn the kaleidoscope by a single twist. The geometry of the world must have two faces, since measure is capable of harmonizing apophasis and kataphasis, mensura sine mensura. Viewed from one direction, the measures that structure our technologized spaces only drain divine presence from the world, exposing a distance so vast that all of our words fail. But if we shift our vision slightly, the same geometrical field, the same lines and grids surrounding us, might suddenly appear as imprints of divine touch and icons of divine immanence. If we can wake to this new way of seeing, our silent world could reveal a startling face hidden within the quanta of measure, waiting inside the cut of every figure, breathing within every interval. Despite the latency of this possible future, sealed within the delicate amber of the Christian past, it remains open to us today, still transparent to our vision, ironically even more so now than in its initial, ancient setting.

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure David Albertson https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198947004.001.0001 Published online: 06 May 2025 Published in print: 17 July 2025

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Subject: Christianity, Religion, Mysticism, Philosophy of Religion Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

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The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure David Albertson https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198947004.001.0001 Published online: 06 May 2025 Published in print: 17 July 2025

Online ISBN: 9780198947004

Print ISBN: 9780198946977

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Published: May 2025

Subject: Christianity, Religion, Mysticism, Philosophy of Religion Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

For the bene t of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abgar of Edessa 205–7 absence 11–12, 24–25 , 166, 185–86, 201–2 , 258–59 stamp as 111, 113, 155 Absolute, the 11–13, 24–25 , 49, 134, 138n.129, 254–55 as formless 13, 22–23 , 25, 51, 103, 137–38, 140, 185–86  See also formlessness; the One Achard of St. Victor 8, 212–15, 230–40, 243–50, 253–54 acheiropoieta (ἀχειροποίητα) 206–7 , 254–55 aesthetics 6–7 , 252, 254–55, 257 in Dionysius 117–18, 137, 139, 208–9 in Plotinus 48–49, 58, 60, 71–72 , 75–77 , 116, 120–21 , 142, 174–75 in Thierry of Chartres and Achard of St. Victor 211–13, 216, 233–39, 248–49, 254 two 8, 21–22 , 23n.34, 24, 27, 74, 251, 253 Alan of Lille 233–34 Alberti, Leon Battista 152–53, 199n.130 Alcinous 35–40, 42–43, 46, 245–46, 256–57 alterity 58–59, 102, 120–21 , 123, 225–26 , 246 Ambrose of Milan 162 Ammonius Saccas 30, 41–42 analogy (ἀναλογία) 12–13, 22–23 , 36, 55, 57, 60–61, 143–44, 216–17, 251–52, 254, 257–59 in Dionysius 108, 117, 119–20 , 127–28 , 132–34, 176 in John of Damascus 163–66 of number and form 50–52  See also harmony; proportion Andrew of St. Victor 234 aneidetic  See condition, aneidetic Angela of Foligno 254

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angels 41, 87–88, 99–102, 110–12, 127, 130–31, 146–47, 167, 169–70 , 180, 188 See also demons aniconism 23–24 , 31–32, 43n.53, 78–79 , 82, 143–44, 148–52, 200, 254–57  See also aneidetic; apophasis; iconoclasm Anselm of Canterbury 235, 237, 246–47 anthropomorphism 143–44, 146–49, 158–59 apophasis (ἀπόφασις) 5–7 , 11–16, 22–26 , 28, 179, 211–12, 244–45, 251–57, 259 in Dionysius 3–4, 87–92, 100–8, 113, 116–17, 124, 127, 130–31, 134–40, 138n.129, 150, 208, 249 in John of Damascus 170–71 , 174–75 , 180 in Plotinus 35–38, 40–42, 46–48, 76–77 , 79–80, 245–46 in Theodore the Studite 182–86  See also denial; kataphasis; negation; subtraction; unknowing Aristotle 28–29 , 33–34, 38, 73–74 , 104–5, 154, 176–81, 194–95, 197n.124, 209–14, 223–24 , 233–34, 243, 245–46 on form of forms 59–60, 227 on mathematics 49–50, 94–95, 173, 258 arithmetic 25–26 , 42, 246–47, 249–50, 252 in Boethius 209–10, 214–17, 242 in Thierry of Chartres 217–18, 220–22 , 224–25 , 228–29 , 241, 243–45 See also number; quadrivium art 12–13, 23–25 , 28–29 , 115, 151–54, 173, 182, 206 See also icon; image; painting Ascension 142, 187 ascent (ἀνάγειν) 2–3, 22, 28, 71–72 , 96–97, 209, 253–54 in Dionysius 90, 105, 107–8, 110–11, 113, 118, 127–28 , 136–37, 165 in Plotinus 31, 33, 35, 39, 41–42, 48–49, 53–54, 65–66, 74–75 , 102 asceticism 30–31, 78, 82–83, 91–92, 156–57, 176 astronomy 176, 220–21 , 224–25  See also quadrivium Athanasius of Alexandria 129–30, 162 Augustine of Hippo 23, 87, 93, 150, 209, 231–32, 244–45 on measure without measure vii, 251 and Plotinus 7–8, 22–23 , 30–31, 76, 79–80, 148–49 autarchy (αὐτάρκεια) 253–54, 257 loss of 122–23 , 126–28 , 134–35, 175, 203–4, 208–9, 216, 223–24 of the One 61–64, 69–70 , 73–74  See also power; slave Bacon, Francis 17–18 Badiou, Alain 14–15 Balthasar, Hans Urs von vii, 13–14, 75n.74, 89–90, 124, 252 baptism 41, 109–11, 129–31, 135–36, 169–70 , 186 Basil of Caesarea 78–80, 162 Basilides 38–40 Baudrillard, Jean 205–6 beauty 21–23 , 95–96, 146–47, 162, 211, 224, 251–52, 254 in Achard of St. Victor 234–39, 243–50 in Dionysius 108–10, 112, 115, 118, 128, 132, 166 in Plotinus 31–33, 36, 46, 53–55, 64–66, 71, 100 See also aesthetics; sublime Being 18, 22, 38, 40, 53, 63, 73n.68, 98–99, 132, 136 See also the Good; the One Benjamin, Walter 205–6 Bernard of Clairvaux 233 binary, metric 18–19, 255–58 body 28, 81–82, 253–55 as beautiful 64–65 of God 142–47 of Jesus 5, 26–27 , 138–39, 150, 160–61, 167–74 , 180–84, 186–91, 193–99, 202–4, 208, 256

and soul 109–10, 118 Boethius, A. M. S. 23, 93, 209–25 , 227–31, 235–36, 238, 241–42, 245–46, 252, 257 Buddhism 2, 4–5 Caiazzo, Irene 214n.29, 217–18 Calcidius 214 Cappadocian Fathers 30–31, 79–80, 87, 100, 123–25 , 176, 190–91 See also Basil of Caesarea; Gregory of Nazianzus; Gregory of Nyssa Celsus 138 center (μέσος, κέντρον) 28, 45–47, 57, 66, 108–9, 128–30  See also point Certeau, Michel de 2–3 chora (χώρα) 38–39, 47, 66, 84, 198–99, 202 Christology 146–47, 154, 160–62, 174–75 , 182–83, 186, 189–90, 192–94, 199–201 , 213–14, 243–44 See also Jesus Christ; Word Cicero 28–29 circle (κύκλος) 28, 33–34, 45–48, 57, 95–96, 98–99, 108–10, 123–24 , 128–31, 145, 210, 216–17, 236 circumscription (περιγραφή, περιγράφειν) 150, 155–56, 179, 230, 251, 254 in Constantine V 158–59, 178–79 by Intellect 58–61 in John of Damascus 160, 180 negating 54, 82, 168–71 , 179–80 in Nicephorus of Constantinople 180–81 in Theodore the Studite 154, 177–78 , 182–201 , 203–4 See also inscription Clarembald of Arras 233, 235–36 Clement of Alexandria 36–37, 41–42, 162, 179–80 color (χρῶμα) 32–33, 82–83, 168–71 , 169n.94, 171n.97, 179–80 condition, aneidetic 60, 75–77 , 79, 84, 87–88, 102, 127–28 , 133–36, 170, 184–85, 200, 251, 253, 256–58 axioms of 58–72 , 99, 203–4, 208–9 reversing 71–72 , 77, 103–4, 126–27 , 134–36, 139–40, 150, 175, 204, 227, 231–32, 244–46, 253–54  See also apophasis; formlessness Constantine I 172–73 Constantine V 157–58, 176–78 , 181–82, 200 Constantine VI 177 containment (κατάληψις) 28, 46–47, 98–99, 135, 178–81, 187–89, 194–95, 229–30, 246–47, 257 contemplation (θεωρία) 6, 21–27 , 150–51, 196–97, 252–54, 257–59 in Achard of St. Victor 213, 241–47, 249–50 Christian 7–8, 74–76 , 79, 140–43, 147–49 in Dionysius 3, 92, 106, 115–16 in Evagrius 78–79 , 82 in Plotinus 30–31, 34–35, 43–46, 48, 53–54, 122, 179 continuity (συνέχεια) 28, 33–34, 37–38, 54–55, 133–34, 173, 173n.103, 228 cosmos 5, 18–20 , 38, 93, 98–99, 122–24 , 219–20 , 230–31, 237–38, 247, 256–59  See also universe Council of Chalcedon 156–57, 160–62, 178, 182, 189–90, 190n.80 Council of Nicaea 109–10, 148–49, 208–9, 211, 227 Council of Nicaea, Second (Nicaea II) 154, 161–62, 162n.62, 176–78 critique 5, 13–15, 24 Cross 129–30, 157–60, 181, 186–88, 193, 200–2 , 206–7 Cyril of Alexandria 162, 187–88 Cyril of Jerusalem 129–30 Damascius 93, 248

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Daniélou, Jean 13–14 darkness 5n.9, 11–12, 100–1, 104–7 , 113, 243–45, 259 De Lubac, Henri 13–14 Deconstruction 11, 13–14, 138n.129 deiform (θεοειδὲς) 33, 107–8, 112, 115 Deleuze, Gilles vii, 221n.51 Demiurge 66, 97–98 demons 80–82, 180 See also angels denial (ἀφαίρεσις) 5, 12, 40, 100–1, 104–5, 107, 170–71 , 251 See also apophasis; negation; subtraction density (πάχος) 168–69, 188 See also mass depth (πλάτος, βάθος) 26, 28, 47, 207 Derrida, Jacques 13–14, 102 Descartes, René 17–18, 24, 173, 257 diagram (διαγραφή) 45–46, 92–93, 145, 197, 207, 209–10 icon as 198–201 , 203, 213 in Proclus 94–97 See also  gure; graph difference 59–60, 87–88, 102, 129–33, 140, 222, 225–26 , 229, 237–40, 246 spatial or geometrical 33–34, 45–46, 48, 57–58, 79–80, 114–15, 216–17, 220–21 , 241 dimension (διάστασις) 112, 171, 173, 200, 244, 247, 254, 256, 258–59 of the divine body 142–47 of multitude and magnitude 209–10, 220–21 subtracting 36, 46, 93–94, 183, 197 three 43, 180–81, 188, 194–95, 203–4, 240 two 130, 196–97, 206–7 Dionysius 3, 13–14, 23, 76–77 , 87–91, 99, 182–83, 203–4, 208–9, 216–17 and Achard of St. Victor 236, 246, 249 identity of 91–92 in John of Damascus 150–51, 156, 160–66, 170–71 , 175 Diotima 36, 65–66, 70–72 , 122–23 divinization 93–94, 109–11, 115, 164, 183 division 58–59, 95, 126, 219 Duns Scotus, John 138 Dupré, Louis 17 economy 89, 103, 107, 110–11, 115, 164, 166, 171, 192–93, 208 ecstasy (ἐκστάσις) 22, 91–92, 103–4, 119–28 , 131–32, 134–35, 137–38, 140–41, 150, 170, 216–17, 233, 245–46, 253– 54 See also gift; kenosis; self emanation (πρόοδος, ἐπιστροφή) 39, 72–73 , 88–89, 98–99, 107–8, 111, 122, 132–33, 165, 209n.1, 224, 237–38 enhypostasis 189–91 Enlightenment 11–13, 20 epistemology 21, 81, 88–89, 94–95 equality 28, 223–27 , 253–54 divine 213, 215–18, 229–31, 233, 237–45, 249–50 geometrical 93, 104, 131, 215 Erasmus, Desiderius 92 eros (ἔρως) 8, 90–91, 93–94, 203–4, 208–9, 252–54 in Dionysius 99, 103–4, 106, 110–12, 116–28 , 130–31, 134, 140–41, 150, 166, 216–17, 246 in John of Damascus 165–71 , 175 in Plotinus 22, 64–72  See also love Eucharist 96, 109–10, 130–31, 157–60, 193, 201–2 , 206–7  See also sacrament

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Euclid 27, 36–37, 93–97, 153n.14, 176, 199–200 , 254, 258 Eudorus of Alexandria 35–38, 93–94 Eusebius of Caesarea 79–80, 152, 162, 172–73 , 196–97, 205–6 Evagrius of Pontus 22–23 , 78–84, 100, 147–50 evil 53–54, 67, 135–36, 210, 223–24 excess (ὑπερβολή, ὑπεροχή) 28, 32–33, 67, 89, 100, 105, 107–8, 111, 113, 120, 123, 134–37, 140 experience, religious 2–6, 11, 16–19, 30–32, 40–41, 84, 91–92, 95, 104, 167, 192, 206–7 , 252–53 extension (διάστασις, ἐκτάσις, μέγεθος) 17–18, 30, 33, 54–55, 55n.10, 59–60, 95, 97–98, 128, 143, 146, 174, 179, 183, 198–99 and ecstasy 124, 128, 130–31, 134, 216–17 of line 47, 56–58, 130, 189, 200–1, 203, 215, 219–20 , 222, 233, 252 exteriority 5–6, 12, 47–48, 55, 171, 189, 200, 252–56 face 130n.87, 138–39, 144–45, 147–48, 162, 168, 178, 188, 192–93, 195–96, 199–200 , 205–7 , 259 Feuerbach, Ludwig von 13 Ficino, Marsilio 22–23 gure (σχῆμα, τύπος) 17–18, 28–29 , 31–33, 74–76 , 87–88, 114–15, 142–43, 150–51, 175, 203, 207–8, 213, 215–16, 227, 244–45, 251–54, 256, 258–59 and circumscription 179–80, 196–99 of Cross 181, 200–1 as divine 42, 94–98, 146 and form 26–28 , 34, 44–45, 56–57, 75–76 , 104, 128 and formlessness 43, 61–62, 82–84, 163–64 geometrical 26–28 , 32–34, 37, 43–46, 56–59, 65–66, 123–24 , 128–30, 183, 194–95, 199–200 , 220, 222–23 , 225–26 , 242, 244–45 and Intellect 33–34, 58–61 of Jesus 139, 142–43, 167–70 , 172, 174, 186–87, 194, 205–6 and negation 6, 24–25 , 42, 49, 54, 78, 117, 170–71 , 196–97 Son as 216–17, 226–27 , 240–41, 243 as theonymic 25, 43–44, 80–81, 109–10, 124, 127–28 , 130–31, 135–36, 163–66, 184–85, 195, 200 as written or impressed 13, 25–26 , 45, 57–58, 80–82, 94–95, 107–13, 115–16, 126–27 , 129–30, 160–61, 168, 182–83  See also diagram; line; shape Florensky, Pavel 152–53, 192 orilegia 160–67, 169–73 , 177–78 , 213 ow 38–39, 53n.4, 56, 120–21 , 237–38 folding 95–96, 124, 210, 253–54 in Plotinus 45–46, 53, 70, 128–29 , 216–17 in Thierry of Chartres 213, 215–22 , 230–33, 235–36, 238 form (εἶδος) 12–13, 21–29 , 68–69, 73–74 , 80–82, 87–88, 90–91, 98–99, 105–6, 150–51, 203–4, 208–9, 248–49, 252–55, 257–59 of being 226–27 , 231 in Dionysius 115–18, 126–28 , 130–31, 134–41 of forms 23–24 , 59–61, 65–67, 71–73 , 75–76 , 126–27 , 137–38, 140, 208–9, 216–17, 227, 230–31, 233, 236, 244–49, 253–54, 257, 259 and Incarnation 165, 167–69, 172–73 , 183–84, 186–89, 195, 199–201 , 206–7 , 243–45 and matter  See materiality and number 50–52 in Plotinus 32–34, 38, 43–45, 48–49, 56–57, 64–67 supreme 8, 22–23 , 27, 50, 60–61, 65–66, 71–72 , 74–76 , 87–88, 112–13, 127–28 , 134–35, 137–39, 150, 211–12, 216, 230–31, 233, 236, 243, 248–49, 254, 257–59  See also deiform; form-giving; formlessness

form-giving (εἰδοποιεῖν) 22–23 , 67, 73, 103–4, 107–10, 117–18, 135–41, 249 formlessness (τὸ ἀνείδεον) 8, 13, 22–25 , 103–6, 117–18, 126–27 , 134–38, 170, 174–75 , 185, 208–9, 216, 222, 251–57 historiographical effects of 72–77 in Evagrius 79, 82–83 of the One 34, 39–40, 43–44, 49–51, 56, 58, 60, 63–69, 142, 171n.97 See also condition, aneidetic Foucault, Michel 13–14 Freud, Sigmund 13 Galilei, Galileo 17–18 gender 12–13, 39, 93, 144–45, 188, 242 See also sexuality geometry (γεωμετρία) 12, 18–19, 25–28 , 115, 136, 150–51, 153, 160, 174, 208–9, 230–31, 249–54, 256–59 of circumscription 64–65, 156, 189 in Dionysius 123–24 , 127–30, 132 in Iamblichus 87, 92–94 in Plotinus 33–34, 36, 42–44, 47–48, 53–54, 60–61, 74–76 , 116 in Proclus 94–99 in Theodore 194–95, 199–200 in Thierry of Chartres 215, 219–23 , 241–45 See also  gure; mathematics; measure; shape Germanos of Constantinople 154 gift 28, 60, 67, 106, 114–15, 126–27 , 132, 140, 163–64, 174, 206–7 , 256 prohibition of 63–64, 69–70 , 246 as self-giving 70, 72–74 , 103–5, 109–11, 127–28 , 134, 137–38, 165, 167, 170, 183–84, 216–17  See also ecstasy; form-giving; kenosis Gilbert of Poitiers 212n.16, 213–14, 233–35 Gnosticism 35–36, 38–44, 46–47, 52–54, 59, 61–63, 93–94, 97–98, 144–47, 185 gods 42–46, 43n.53, 61, 92–99, 110–11, 114, 117, 143–44, 168–69, 196 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 13 Golitzin, Alexander 91–92, 101–2 , 105, 119–20 , 123–24 , 126n.69, 148–49 Good, the 22, 36, 37, 67–70 , 72–73 , 105, 121–24 , 126 as autarchic 62–63, 67, 99 beyond being 50, 62, 136 as equality 223–24 , 229–30, 238–39 as form 65–66, 135–36 as formless 61–62, 64, 66–67 as gure 37 as remaining 122, 131–32  See also Being; the One graph 25–26 , 47–48, 57–58, 80–81, 94–95, 115–16, 124, 151–52, 171, 174, 178–79 , 181–83, 192, 197, 200, 202–3, 252, 254, 256 See also diagram Gregory of Nazianzus 78–80, 162–63, 179–80, 187 Gregory of Nyssa 13–14, 36–37, 79–80, 124, 132, 150, 162, 179–80, 194, 252–53 Gregory Palamas 89 Gregory the Great 159 Hadewijch of Brabant 11–12 Han, Byung-Chul 24–25 harmony (ἀναλογία) 31–32, 93–94, 107, 111, 117–18, 124, 209–10, 213–15, 229–30, 235–38, 249–50  See also music; proportion Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 13 Heidegger, Martin 13–14, 17–18 henads 97–99, 131 henology 18n.27, 74, 76–77 , 138, 174–75 , 246, 253–54

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in Dionysius 87–88, 119, 126–27 , 134–35, 135n.120, 139–41 Neopythagorean 35, 40 in Plotinus 8, 35–37, 49–50, 60–61, 67–68, 68n.42, 76–77 , 125–27 , 137, 251 in Proclus 87, 97–99 in Thierry of Chartres 222, 236, 244–45 See also the One Hermann of Carinthia 235–36 hiddenness 3–5, 15, 17, 26, 56, 88n.3, 94–95, 100, 109n.129, 112, 139–40, 142–45 hierarchy (ἱεραρχία) in Dionysius 88–92, 101–4, 107–16, 119–20 , 124, 128, 132–37, 139n.134, 140 in John of Damascus 164 in Plotinian hypostases 38, 53, 60, 216 in Theodore the Studite 182–83 hierotopy 152–53 Hildegard of Bingen 6–7 , 19–20 , 23, 138, 254 Hugh of St. Victor 233–34 Husserl, Edmund 17–19, 24 Iamblichus 36–37, 40–41, 46n.61, 79–80, 87, 93–94, 96–100, 117, 129–31, 133–34, 156, 209, 213 icon (εἰκών) 101–2 , 150–56, 201–2 , 206, 213, 245, 256–59 in John of Damascus 165–67, 171 in Theodore the Studite 182–83, 185–86, 191–95, 198–201 , 203 See also iconoclasm; iconophiles; image; impression iconoclasm 151–55, 157–59, 161–62, 172–73 , 175n.108, 176–79 , 196–97, 200, 256–57 critique as 13–15, 23–24 , 255, 258–59  See also aniconism; apophasis iconophiles 153–55, 160, 174–75 , 177 Idealism 13 image (ἴνδαλμα, εἰκών) 31, 112n.151, 112, 115, 151, 165–66, 180–81, 192, 200, 256 geometrical 45–46, 48, 97–98, 108–9, 128–30, 182–83 as impression 81, 111–12 Jesus as 142–43, 192–94 of the One 47–48, 60 potential 196–99 reproduced 205–7  See also icon; imagination; impression imagination 94–97, 97n.58, 209–10, 216–17 immanence 27, 69, 89, 112, 258–59 impression (ἀποτύπωσις, τύπος) 23, 44–45, 49, 58–59, 64, 78–84, 107–8, 111–13, 115–18, 128–30, 155–56, 160–61, 168–69, 182–83, 198, 200, 257 See also  gure; inscription; seal Incarnation 146–47, 253–54 as caesura 5, 109–10, 138, 170–71 , 174–75 , 184–85, 203–4, 256 and circumscription 158–60, 193–94, 198, 200 and form 136–40, 167–69, 185–86 as image 169–70 , 173n.104, 205–7 as self-giving 72–73 , 165, 172–73 , 183–84, 201–2  See also Jesus Christ; Word in nity (ἄπειρον) 28, 54–55, 58–60 of the cosmos 235–38, 245–50 divine 134, 235 of negation 31, 87–88, 117, 137–38, 184–85, 244–45, 254 spatial 48, 54–58, 201–2  See also limit inscription (εἰκονογραφία, ἀναγράφειν) 12, 24–25 , 28, 57–58, 115–16, 252, 254–55, 257–59 circumscription as 168, 174, 178–79 , 182–85, 193–94, 198–202 , 204

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geometrical 25–26 , 45–48, 56, 96–97, 128–31 hierarchy as 111–13, 128, 130, 160–61 in imagination 94–95 See also diagram; graph; impression; line Intellect (νοῦς) 30, 62, 65, 122 and forms 43–45, 66, 131, 208–9, 216, 227 and Logos 58–61, 69 and magnitude 33–34, 45–48, 55n.8, 128–30, 179, 216–17 in Middle Platonism 38–40 and number 53, 179 and the One 59–60, 67–70  See also mind interiority 5–8, 20–21 , 28–30, 45–48, 55–60, 83–84, 92, 98–99, 105, 178–79 , 189, 200, 252–53 interval (διάστημα) 28, 79–80, 197, 259 intoxication 2–3, 68–69, 121–22 invisibility 12–13, 66, 187 of form 31–33, 95 and geometry 27, 36, 47, 184–85, 191, 196–97, 200, 207, 219–21 , 244–45, 256–57 of God 26–27 , 30, 146–49, 166, 170–72 , 174–75 , 180, 192–93 of interiority 5, 18–19, 44–45, 252–53 in Jean-Luc Marion 201–2  See also visibility Irenaeus of Lyons 42, 46–47 Islam 4–5, 31, 156–57 James, William 16 Jesus Christ 8, 38–39, 41–42, 82–83, 91–92, 122, 136–38, 150, 167, 179–80, 186–87, 256 body of 142–43, 146–47, 168–73 , 183, 201–2 , 208 circumscription of 178, 180, 183–98 as gure 26–27 , 241, 243–45 kenosis of 160–61, 165, 167, 189, 204, 253–54 making images of 30, 151–54, 158–60, 168–70 , 172–73 , 173n.104, 181, 200, 205–7 measures of 26–27 , 160, 168–71 , 173–74 , 182–83, 199–201 , 203–4, 254 name of 137–41, 146–47 Passion of 167, 186–88, 199, 203–4 See also Christology; Incarnation John Chrysostom 162, 167, 176 John of Damascus 6, 8, 150–51, 153–54, 156–80, 182–84, 189, 194, 196, 200–1, 205, 208, 213, 253–54 John of Salisbury 233 John Scotus Eriugena 13–14, 212–13, 244–45 John the Baptist 165, 188 Judaism 4–5, 13, 31, 41–42, 119, 143–49, 152, 156–57, 174–75 Julian of Norwich 6–7 , 23, 254 Justin Martyr 42, 179–80 Kabbalah 4–5, 145 Kant, Immanuel 13 katagraphy 258–59 katametry 258–59 kataphasis (κατάφασις) 150–51, 182, 185, 251–59 in Achard of St. Victor 234–35, 244–46, 249 in Dionysius 3–4, 88–91, 101–2 , 130–31, 134–35, 137–40 problem of de ning 5–8, 11–16, 23–26  See also apophasis kenosis (κένωσις) 160–61, 165, 172–75 , 182–84, 189, 192–93, 200–2 , 204, 257 See also gift; Incarnation; reduction Keramion 205–7

Lactantius 159 Latour, Bruno 14–15 law 83, 107–8, 174–75 , 180, 223–24 Leo III 154, 157–58, 162 Leo V 177 Leontius of Byzantium 189–90n.77 Leontius of Neapolis 162 life 40, 53, 58, 70, 93–94, 108–9, 132, 136 light of Christ 138–39, 243–44 of the Good 22, 33, 36, 132, 179 ray of 105–6, 111–13 sapphire 80–81, 83–84  See also color; shadow; sight limit (πέρας, ὅρος) 18, 28, 38–39 circumscription as 183–84, 254, 257 of hierarchy 103–4, 118, 123–24 , 138–39 mathematical 54–60, 93, 96, 128–29 , 173n.103 One or God as 55, 66–67, 71–73 , 131, 134, 248–49 point as 219–20  See also in nity line (γραμμή, εὐθεῖα) 25–26 , 28–29 , 200–4, 252, 254, 256–59 of circumscription 8, 56, 160, 174–75 , 179, 181–85, 189–94, 196–201 drawing 113, 155–56, 169–70 , 196 as fold 213, 219–22 , 233, 253–54 and One 34, 47, 57–58 and point 33–34, 37, 43, 48, 93, 199–200 , 207, 215 of seal or stamp 112, 129–30, 182–83 and shapes 36, 56–57, 123–24 , 130–31  See also diagram; graph; inscription; shape liturgy 92, 99, 101–2 , 109–13, 138–39, 144, 152–53  See also theurgy Locke, John 17–18 Logos (λόγος) 8, 38, 42, 58–61, 158–59, 208–9, 252–56  See also Trinity; Word Lombard, Peter 234 Lossky, Vladimir 89, 106 Louis the Pious 161–62 love 117–28 , 170, 174–75 , 203, 244, 253–54 divine (φιλανθρωπία) 107–8, 140, 163–67 as eros (ἔρως)  See eros as longing (πόθος) 167–70 as loving (ἀγάπησις) 103–4, 107–8, 110–11  See also eros Lyotard, Jean-François 29 magnitude (μέγεθος) 8, 28, 200, 203, 215, 237–38, 251–54, 256–58 and circumscription 33–34, 53–58, 179 of divine body 142–47 as divine name 124, 131–34, 140–41, 208, 216–17 and folding 219–21 , 233 and kenosis 172–75 , 189, 203–4 negating 31–33, 46 See also extension; measure; quantity; size Mandylion 205–7 Many, the (τὰ πόλλα) 53–57, 61, 69, 129–30, 212–13, 216, 220–21 , 236–37, 246, 254 See also multiplicity; the One Marguerite Porete 11–12, 23

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Marion, Jean-Luc 13–14, 113, 138n.129, 201–2 , 257 Marius Victorinus 40, 79–80 Marx, Karl 13 Mary, Virgin 30, 159, 167, 186–88, 192, 194–95, 201–2 , 207 mass (ὄγκος) 46, 54, 55n.10, 168–69, 175, 179–80  See also magnitude; materiality; quantity; size master 62–63, 68–69 materiality 17–19, 46, 48, 54, 56n.11, 57n.15, 158–59, 180, 196–97, 208, 214–15, 242, 253–55 and form 66–67, 129–30, 135–36, 179, 211–12, 224–25 , 230–31, 242–44 of icons 155, 159–60, 165–67, 170–71 , 176, 186, 193–94, 200–1 of impressed seal 129–30, 155–56, 182–83, 198 of Jesus 160, 167, 171, 183–84, 188, 196–97 Neopythagorean theories of 34n.11, 38–39, 93–95, 224–26  See also body; mass mathematics 3, 8, 17–18, 27, 93, 128, 173, 213n.22, 245–46, 256, 259 in Alcinous 36–37 in Boethius 209–13 in Iamblichus 93–94 in Plotinus 49, 52–54, 58 in Proclus 94–99 in Thierry of Chartres 213–15, 217–18, 220–25 , 227–31  See also arithmetic; geometry; mathesis universalis; quadrivium mathesis universalis 17–19, 24, 131–32, 257–58 Maximus Confessor 138, 160–62 McGinn, Bernard 3–4, 17 measure (μέτρον) vii, 24–28 , 67, 144–47, 215, 220, 252–54, 258–59 divine 47–49, 55, 64, 66–67, 72–73 , 128, 131–34, 150, 208, 227, 249–50 equality as 223–26 , 229–30, 244–45 and hierarchy 98–99, 107, 117–18, 127–28 , 253–54 of Jesus 171, 173–74 , 182–83, 186, 191, 194–95, 203–4, 256–57 and modernity 17–19, 24, 255, 257–58 and negation 23–24 , 33–34, 56–57, 61–62, 126–27 without measure vii, 48–49, 249–52, 259 world 8, 18–21 , 25–26 , 29, 199, 244–45, 253, 255, 258–59  See also magnitude; mathematics; quantity Mechthild of Magdeburg 254–55 mediation 4, 26, 60–61, 83, 98–99, 108, 114, 139, 189, 192–93, 200, 203, 216–17, 230–31, 252 Meister Eckhart 4, 13–14, 22–25 , 212–13, 254–55 Merkavah 144–49 mind 80–84, 97–98, 115–16, 136, 140 divine 42, 93, 166, 208–10, 216, 227–31, 235, 246–49 mirror 2–3, 95–96, 111–12, 169–70 , 192, 202 Moderatus of Gades 33–40, 42, 50, 93–94 modernity 2, 5–7 , 14–15, 17–20 , 22, 24–25 , 76–77 , 101–2 , 236, 254–57 monad (μονάς) 38, 93, 97–98, 122, 130–31, 219, 225, 242 See also number; the One; unit Mondzain, Marie-José 151, 201–2 , 206, 257 monk 80–84, 114, 129–30, 147–48, 156–58, 177–78 Moses 83, 101–2 , 105–6, 144–45, 168–69, 174–75 , 180, 186–87, 252–53 motion 17–18, 33–34, 93, 104–5, 124, 130–33, 210–11, 222, 224–25 multiplication 92–93, 107, 122, 241–42 multiplicity (πλῆθος) 52–56, 60–61, 73–74 , 96–97, 107, 131, 234–35, 246 See also the Many; plurality music 176, 209–10, 214–15, 220–21 , 224–25  See also harmony; quadrivium

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mysticism 1–6, 8, 11–22 , 24–26 , 144–45, 148–49, 254–55 Nag Hammadi 38–39, 41, 46–47 name 28, 251–52, 254–55 of God 3, 36, 40, 48–49, 55, 117–20 , 123, 126, 131–32, 142, 146–47, 178, 211, 215, 231, 241, 244–45 icon as 193–94 of Jesus 138–40, 193–94 nature (φύσις) 17–18, 20 human and divine 185, 189–91 as Plotinian hypostasis 30–31, 39, 44, 56, 58–61 negation 142, 150, 184–85, 252–54, 256–58 in Dionysius 87–90, 100–6, 113, 117–18, 136–38, 140 and mysticism 3–6, 12–16, 20–26 in Plotinus 35, 40–42, 48, 62, 76–77 , 87 See also apophasis; denial; subtraction Neoplatonism 6–8, 73, 77, 89–92, 117–18, 152, 174–75 , 209–10, 251, 253–54 Athenian 75–76 , 93–94, 97–98, 125–26 , 128, 130–31, 133–34 Christian 13–14, 42, 71, 78, 87–88, 101–4, 116, 119–22 , 148–49, 166 medieval 214, 234–35, 245–46 Plotinian 35–37, 43, 51, 74–77 , 123–24 , 126–27 , 140–42, 237–38, 248 See also Platonism Neopythagoreanism 8, 33–43, 49–54, 74–75 , 87, 93–94, 122, 145, 173, 209, 211–12, 214, 216–17, 235–36, 253 Christian 8, 209, 212–15, 222–24 , 227–29 , 231–33, 237, 240, 244–46, 254 See also Pythagoreanism Nestorianism 178, 189–90 Nicaea II  See Council of Nicaea, Second Nicephorus of Constantinople 150–51, 154, 156, 158–63, 165–66, 177–82, 191–92, 194–95, 201, 213 Nicomachus of Gerasa 33–37, 39–40, 42, 93, 173, 209–10, 213, 220–21 , 223, 228, 252 Nietzsche, Friedrich 13 number (ἀριθμός) vii, 17–18, 25–26 , 31–32, 38–39, 56, 94, 131, 229, 235, 240, 252 and folding 219–20 , 222 and God 241–42, 247–51 and monad 122, 130–31 theory of 33–34, 49–54, 211–12  See also arithmetic; monad; unit Numenius 35–36, 53–54 One, the (τὸ ἕν) 33, 38–39, 122, 142, 174–75 , 203–4, 208–9, 237, 244–46, 253–54, 259 and autarchy 61–64 and eros 64–72 , 103–4, 106, 125–27 as formless 49–51, 72–77 , 135, 137–41, 249 and geometry 32–34, 43, 46–49, 225–27 and Intellect 58–61, 216–17 and magnitude 53–58  See also the Absolute; Being; the Good; henology ontology 18n.27, 20–21 , 29, 33–34, 39–40, 45, 56, 66, 88–89, 98–99, 117, 133–34, 223–24 , 226, 233, 237 See also Being order (τάξις) 28, 54–56, 108–9, 112, 118, 128, 131–33, 136–37, 229 See also hierarchy Origen of Alexandria 41–42, 118, 147–49, 252–53 painting 115, 155–56, 158–59, 168–70 , 172–74 , 180–81, 196, 199–200 , 205 paradox 66, 184–85, 219 Parmenides 36–40, 50, 66, 73–74 , 97–98, 129–30, 133 passions 32–33, 68–69, 80–84, 118, 121n.39, 126 pattern (παράδειγμα, ἐκτύπωμα) 58, 112, 160, 200–1 Paul, Apostle 91–92, 119–20 , 146–47, 167, 172–74 , 189, 226–27 Pentcheva, Bissera 153–56, 158–60

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Perl, Eric 50, 69, 77n.76, 101–2 , 123–24 , 126 Phaedrus 21, 65, 119, 121–22 phenomenon 136–37, 139–40, 143, 169–70 , 174, 183–84, 205, 235 Philebus 53–54, 235 Philo of Alexandria 42, 46–47, 146–47 Philolaus of Croton 53–54, 92–93 philosophy 8, 14–15, 19–20 , 27, 30, 41, 52, 58, 76, 87–88, 96–97, 140–41, 151–52, 155, 157, 174, 177–78 , 196, 209– 10, 214, 227, 233–34, 246 physics 17–18, 21, 194, 209–12, 217, 221–22 , 231 place (τόπος) 5, 28, 46–47, 56, 80–81, 83–84, 179–81, 187–88, 194–95, 198–99 See also space plane (ἐπίπεδον) 57–58, 93, 124, 183, 196–97, 202, 205–7 , 240, 256–57  See also surface Plato 22, 28–29 , 33n.8, 35–38, 43n.50, 43n.53, 53–54, 73, 90–91, 93, 120–22 , 132, 173, 209, 248 versus Plotinus 45–46, 50, 63, 65–67, 71–74 , 125 Platonism 5, 21–22 , 35–36, 65, 74, 101, 119, 132–33, 148–49, 174–75 , 233, 235, 238–39 Christian 41, 212–13, 216 Middle 4, 35–40, 50, 53–54, 74–75 , 122, 146–47 Sethian 41–42 See also Neoplatonism Plotinus 7–8, 22–25 , 30–80, 88–89, 93–94, 119–20 , 122–23 , 142, 148–49, 156, 167, 170–71 , 173, 179, 203, 208–9, 215–17, 219, 222, 227, 248, 253–54, 256–57 versus Achard of St. Victor 236–38, 240, 245–46, 248–49 versus Dionysius 87–88, 90–92, 99–104, 106, 114–17, 122–23 , 125–30, 134–35, 137–38, 140–41, 150, 152, 175, 208 versus Plato 45–46, 50, 63, 65–67, 71–74 , 125 plurality 124, 131, 225, 234–38, 246–50  See also multiplicity point (στίγμα, σημεῖον) 26, 28, 33–34, 47–48, 56–57, 93, 123–24 , 128–31, 162, 173n.103, 207, 215, 222, 240, 242 and folding 45–46, 219–21 and negation 36, 43, 256–57 Porphyry 30–32, 35–36, 39–40, 52, 79–80, 93–94, 133–34, 138, 152, 209, 214 postmodern 11–12, 236 power 47, 61–64, 69, 73–74 , 157–58, 224–25 , 238–39, 242–44 prayer 2–3, 23–24 , 30, 75–76 , 78–84, 96–97, 147–49, 169–70 Proclus 23, 40–41, 72–75 , 87–90, 92–93, 96, 108, 116–17, 129–36, 156, 166, 213, 215, 240, 248, 254 on emanation 122, 131–32 on eros 90–91, 99, 118–19, 124–26 on geometry 27, 96–100, 123–24 , 209–10, 258 on imagination 94–95, 209–10, 216–17 on theurgy 96–97, 99 prophecy 28–29 , 121–22 , 180, 186, 217–18, 241–43 proportion (ἀναλογία) 27–28 , 31–32, 107, 117, 127–28 , 131–32, 197, 225, 229–30, 238–39, 257 providence 53–54, 118, 164, 209–10, 220–21 , 223–24 , 229–30 Pythagoreanism 33–36, 45, 49–50, 66, 92–94, 97–98, 128, 199 See also Neopythagoreanism quadrivium 176, 212–15, 220–22 , 224–25 , 228–29 , 239–40, 245–46, 252, 254 quantity (ποσόν, πηλίκον) 18, 28, 82, 237–38, 249–50, 254–58 and geometry 33–34, 48–50, 53, 82, 104, 107, 131–34, 173n.103, 219, 222 and icon 171, 179, 182, 194–95, 199 and kenosis 160, 172–73 , 189, 203–4 and the One 33, 38, 51, 170–71  See also extension; magnitude; measure reduction (συστέλλειν) 172–73 , 183, 197, 203–4 remaining (μένειν) 28, 46, 48–49, 61–63, 69, 73–74 , 98–99, 121–27 , 131–34, 137–40, 150, 239–40, 254–55

Renaissance 22–23 , 152–53 representation 45–46, 82–83, 95, 113, 173–74 , 180–81, 185–86, 191–92, 196 See also  gure; image; symbol reproduction 152–53, 168, 205–7 Republic 36–38, 50, 62, 97–98, 196 ressourcement 1–2 , 13–14 Resurrection 187–89, 191–92, 203 revelation 13, 41–42, 107–9, 111–12, 139–40, 142–45, 163–64, 174–75 , 194–95, 198, 207 See also theophany Richard of St. Victor , 233–34 Romanticism 13, 22–23 sacrament 2–3, 100–1, 108–12, 167, 188–89, 198n.127 See also Eucharist Scheler, Max 4 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 13 Scripture 3, 13, 82–83, 87–88, 101–2 , 110–12, 118–19, 163, 166, 168, 180, 186, 199–200 , 244 sculpture (ἄγαλμα) 32–33, 45, 100, 115, 180, 192 seal (σφραγίς, ἐκτυπώματα) 111–13, 129–30, 155–56, 182–83, 198, 206 See also impression; inscription secularity 5, 14–15, 258–59 Sefer Yetzirah 145–46 Se rot 145, 145n.14 self 5, 7–8, 17–20 , 22, 26, 33, 68–71 , 96, 100, 104, 124 and self-giving 70, 72–73 , 103–5, 110–11, 127–28 , 134, 137–38, 140, 165, 170, 183–84, 216–17, 223–24  See also ecstasy; kenosis and self-measuring 173, 196–97, 237, 253–54, 256–57 and self-suf ciency 61–64, 67–68, 99, 117–18, 122–23 , 126–27 , 175, 203–4, 253–54  See also autarchy Seneca 42, 228, 231, 235 sexuality 2–3, 43n.50, 68n.41, 188 See also gender shadow (σκιά) 60, 105–6, 180, 183, 193–94, 196–99, 206–8 shape (μορφή, σχῆμα, χαρακτῆρα) 6, 8, 18, 22, 26–29 , 40–41, 80–82, 144–46, 215, 224–25 , 241–42, 251–52 in Dionysius 87–88, 109n.129, 109–12, 115, 117–18, 126–29 , 135–36 in John of Damascus 163–74 , 180, 203–4 in Nicephorus of Constantinople 180–81 in Plotinus 32–33, 43–49, 58–62, 64–66, 249 in Proclus 92–93, 95–96, 105–6 in Theodore the Studite 186–87, 191–92, 194–97, 199–200 , 204 See also  gure Shi’ur Qomah 144–46, 148–49 Shroud of Turin 206–7 Sibyl, Spanish 241–43 sight 21–22 , 30–33, 44–46, 64, 75–76 , 81, 142, 146–48, 159, 168–70 , 186, 256–59  See also visibility; visualization sign 12–13, 22–25 , 29, 101–2 , 107–8, 110–15, 118, 129–30, 143, 173n.105, 198n.127, 200–1, 255–56  See also graph; seal; symbol silence 11–12, 26, 29, 40–41, 88, 100–2 , 107, 255–56 Simon of Tournai 234 simulacrum 33, 118, 205–6, 211–12 size 8, 32–33, 104, 132–33, 142–43, 148–49, 171–72 , 200–1, 207 See also magnitude; mass; quantity sketch 28–29 , 56, 169–70 slave 46–47, 62–64, 172–73 , 189, 199–200 , 203–4 See also autarchy; kenosis Socrates 65–66, 71–72 , 121–23 , 196 solid 17–18, 45, 93, 182–83, 188–89, 194, 197–99, 220, 256–57  See also density; mass; materiality solitude 2–3, 33, 50, 63, 68–71 , 102, 119–20 , 213 soul (ψυχή) 17–20 , 24, 93–96, 109–10, 118, 210, 242

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in Plotinus 30–33, 38–39, 41–42, 53, 56–57, 60–61, 64–65, 68–69, 71, 179, 216 space (τόπος) 7–8, 12, 18, 20–21 , 25–26 , 28–29 , 79–80, 82–84, 146, 252, 254, 257–58 in Dionysius 110, 112, 124, 128–34, 137–38 of the icon 152–53, 171, 173, 180–84, 186–89, 197–202 in Plotinus 36, 37, 43, 45–48, 54–60 in Proclus 92–93, 95–99 in Thierry of Chartres 216–17, 220, 222, 244–45 See also extension; geometry; place; topology Speusippus of Athens 93, 99 sphere (σφαῖρα) 28, 45–48, 58–60, 128–30, 210, 220–21 , 251–52 Spirit, Holy 83, 122, 129–30, 208–9, 215, 225, 237 square 33–34, 92–93, 213, 217–18, 224–26 , 235–36, 241–45, 254 Stoics 67–68 straightness vii, 33–34, 58, 66, 96, 123–24 , 129–31  See also line sublime 11–13  See also beauty subtraction 3–4, 13, 25–26 , 32–33, 36–37, 46, 78, 81–82, 89, 93–94, 107, 183, 224, 240, 245–46, 256–57  See also denial; negation; reduction Su sm 4–5 surface (ἐπιφάνεια) 8, 26, 28, 36–37, 43–46, 49, 93, 112, 155, 173n.103, 178–81, 188, 194–95, 201–2 , 206–7 , 220 symbol (σύμβολον) 45–46, 101–3, 109n.129, 109–13, 118, 124, 128–31, 143, 163–64, 200, 242, 251 See also  gure; icon; sign symmetry (συμμετρία) 69, 107–8, 117, 120–21 , 124, 128, 162, 164 See also harmony; proportion Symposium 21, 36, 65–66, 70–72 , 119–20 , 122–23 Synod of Hiereia 154, 157–59, 172–73 , 176–78 Syrianus 87, 131 technology 18, 111–12, 255, 258–59 Theodore Abû Qurrah 154 Theodore the Studite 8, 150–51, 153–63, 165–66, 176–79 , 182–201 , 203–4, 208, 213, 230, 253–54, 256, 259 Theodoret 162 Theodoric the Great 209–10 Theon of Smyrna 39–40, 122 theophany 90, 108–9, 109n.129, 112–13, 117, 143–45, 174, 259 Theophilus of Alexandria 147–48 theurgy 46, 92–97, 99, 101–2 , 144–45 See also liturgy Thierry of Chartres 212–36, 238–46, 253–54 Timaeus 38–40, 66, 210, 214 time 131–33, 139, 172–73 , 181, 197–99, 220–21 , 248 topology 7–8, 20–21 , 46–48, 114–15, 153 See also place; space totality 219–20 , 247 touch (ἐπαφή) 28, 47, 68–69, 80–81, 111n.144, 111–13, 120, 142–43, 167, 171, 183–84, 194, 199, 204, 206–7 , 257, 259 trace (ἴχνος) 32–33, 47, 51, 56n.11, 58–60, 64–65, 74–76 , 107–8, 128–30, 132, 150–51, 201–2 , 205, 208, 251–52, 254, 257–59 Tradition A 22–25 , 27, 30–31, 50, 74–77 , 77n.76, 103, 126, 148–49, 251, 253–54, 256–58 Tradition B 22–25 , 27, 50, 74–77 , 87–88, 146, 148–49, 211–12, 233, 251, 253–54, 256–59 Trans guration 195–96, 203–4 triangle 92–93, 96, 199–200 , 240, 242, 247 Trinity 72–73 , 82–83, 105–6, 108–10, 163, 211–15, 226–27 , 229, 234–35, 237–38, 241, 246–47, 254 mathematical 215n.32, 217–18, 223–24 , 226, 235–37, 239–42, 249–50  See also Logos; Word Troeltsch, Ernst 4 Turner, Denys 15n.13, 88–89, 102, 120–21

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union (ἕνωσις) 30, 41–42, 68–69, 88–89, 107, 110, 114, 120, 121n.42, 125, 179 unity 96, 124, 131–32, 211–12, 215, 219–22 , 224–27 , 229–30, 237, 239–43 See also monad; number; the One; union universe 19–20 , 54, 96, 103, 120, 123–24 , 128, 131, 145, 247 See also cosmos unknowing 11–12, 14–15, 24, 88, 100, 104–5, 118 See also apophasis; denial; negation; subtraction Valentinus 38–39, 145 See also Gnosticism Valla, Lorenza 92 Varro 28–29 veneration 150–51, 157–62, 165–67, 170–71 , 173, 181–82, 191, 193–94, 196–97, 200–1  See also worship Veronica 201–2 , 206–7 virtual 96–97, 205–6, 246–47, 249–50 visibility 22, 25–27 , 43, 56–58, 95, 113, 142–43, 171, 173–74 , 182–83, 187–89, 195, 202, 207, 244–46, 252, 258– 59 See also invisibility; sight; visualization vision  See sight visualization 25–26 , 30–31, 48, 96 See also sight; visibility Weber, Max 4 William of St. Thierry 233 Williams, Rowan 15–16 womb 53, 97–98, 187–88, 202, 207, 257 Word 138–39, 150, 159–60, 165–67, 170–71 , 182–84, 189–91, 202–3, 208–9, 211, 223, 230–31, 243–45, 248–49, 252 See also Logos worship 157–60, 167, 173 See also veneration Xenocrates of Chalcedon 93, 99 Zohar 145