The Divine Names

A Greek treatise in thirteen chapters, written around 500 by an author who presented himself as Dionysius, the Athenian converted by Paul in Acts 17. It asks how the names given to God in scripture can be true of a God who is beyond being and beyond every name. The answer is that the names are drawn from God's effects: because everything comes from God, God can be praised by every name and yet is none of them. Chapter 4, the longest, treats the Good, which gives itself to all things as the sun gives light, and then beauty and love, arguing that God's love goes out to all things and draws them back. The same chapter argues at length that evil has no being of its own: it is a lack, or privation, of good. Later chapters treat being, life, wisdom, power, justice, peace and finally the One. The work draws heavily on the Neoplatonist Proclus.

It is a main source of negative, or apophatic, theology in Christian thought, and a clear example of how Neoplatonist ideas about the One and the Good passed into medieval philosophy.