How Democratic is Dionysian Hierarchy?

There is much to love about David Newheiser’s invitation into the Dionysian—and Derridian—cloud of dark mysteries, and the potential that broods therein. The lucidity of his analysis of those mysteries is perhaps Hope in a Secular Age’s most praiseworthy quality. As someone who has spent many hours struggling to make sense of seemingly inscrutable writing, I consider Newheiser’s accessible, intelligible account of Jacques Derrida’s thought to be a significant achievement. Newheiser demonstrates that alterity and its political implications are the themes that appear across Derrida’s corpus. Throughout the book, Newheiser persuasively counters readings of Derrida that take him to be a thinker resigned to futility or hopelessness and instead shows the bright side of—or the reservoir of hope within—Derrida’s insistence on unknowable futurity and the radical disruption it may invite.

Without discounting all that Newheiser has accomplished in this user-friendly cartography of Dionysian and Derridian concepts, I do want to raise some concerns about the extent to which the ontological hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius’s mystical theology is a useful resource for theorizing modern community, democracy, and justice. Though Newheiser offers corrective replies to Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, who take Pseudo-Dionysius to be an authoritarian bureaucrat or a theocrat who enforces or even sanctifies social inequities, I am left somewhat dissatisfied by his defense of the modern utility of Dionysian thought. As Newheiser himself acknowledges, it is a counterintuitive choice to seek resources for theoretical reflections on democracy in the author who coined the term for hierarchical order.

Questioning Hierarchy in Pseudo-Dionysus

Interpreting an author’s corpus always means wrestling with the exegetical question of priority: which texts or ideas control the interpretative process? This is an acute problem for Pseudo-Dionysius’s readers, who are faced with the onerous and perhaps ultimately impossible task of relating two seemingly opposed sides of his thought. While divine unnameability, excess, boundlessness, and inaccessibility are the emphases in The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, divine mediation and structural conformation are the emphases in The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. This raises a basic question: In which direction does the Dionysian corpus cut? Should the noninstitutional immediacy of passages from The Mystical Theology, for example, be read in light of the institution-affirming ritual instructions of The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, or vice versa?

While Newheiser insists that Pseudo-Dionysius strictly distinguishes “the divine from everything created” and “worries about divinizing that which is worldly” (53), it is difficult not to read the purported homology of churchly and heavenly structures as a legitimation of a certain political status quo, an “ecclesiastical bureaucracy” that is meant to be above reproach because it is a mirror of celestial wonders (133). In fact, to Newheiser’s chagrin, Andrew Louth, Alexander Golitzin, and Jean-Luc Marion endorse such a self-assured vision of Christian worship (and its institutions). In doing so they disavow an account of Christianity that prioritizes the provisional, futural, and an openness to revision or apocalyptic disruption. Newheiser finds in Agamben a fear that Pseudo-Dionysius tends toward “sacralizing the oikonomia of the church by associating it with the theologia of divine transcendence,” thus glorifying governmental power by imbuing it with a heavenly aura (140). But Newheiser argues that in Pseudo-Dionysius God’s unknowability relativizes hierarchical arrangements so that “thearchy undermines every attempt to institute theocracy, including (above all) within the church” (149). Even more radically, Newheiser says that although Pseudo-Dionysius cannot engage politics from a modern perspective, “there is a democratizing force to the structure he describes” (148).

Do Newheiser’s arguments against the hierarchical, antidemocratic features of Dionysian thought do enough to allow for its democratizing force to come to the fore and thus have purchase in the modern world? Looking at the texts, there are real difficulties in sustaining a reading of Pseudo-Dionysius as someone with a negative political theology. His doctrine of God may reiterate superessential incomprehensibility, but his ecclesiology is based on many cataphatic assertions, and he explicitly compares the priestly hierarchy to a governmental and judicial one. For example, in Letter 8, Pseudo-Dionysius chastens the rogue monk Demophilus for rashly entering the holy of holies, overstepping the bounds of his rank in the priestly hierarchy: “A man who took it upon himself without the imperial permission to exercise the functions of a governor would be rightly punished. Or suppose that, when a presiding officer passed sentence of acquittal or condemnation on some defendant, one of the assistants at the tribunal had the audacity to question him. Would he not appear to be openly preempting the authority of the other man?” (273; cf. Newheiser, Hope, 149).[1] Though he insists on the recognition of a radical disjuncture between God and creation, he equally insists on the analogy between the celestial hierarchy and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the heavenly and the earthly. According to Pseudo-Dionysius, God, the “source of perfection, established our most pious hierarchy. He modeled it on the hierarchies of heaven” so that “we might be uplifted” (Letter 8,146). If ecclesiastical or clerical hierarchy is modeled on that of the heavens, on what authority could an ordinary person dispute this power arrangement, modify it, or dissent from it?[2] Modern democratic political institutions are historically contingent, humanly constructed systems founded not by divine intervention but by human decisions. This is not what Pseudo-Dionysius describes in his account of a divinely ordered cosmos and the social institutions that ought to conform to it.

If ecclesiastical or clerical hierarchy is modeled on that of the heavens, on what authority could an ordinary person dispute this power arrangement, modify it, or dissent from it?

One defense of hierarchy might be that it is dynamic, not static. Seen in this way, perhaps, a hierarchy would be open to change because individuals need not remain in their respective stations. It is far from clear that Dionysian hierarchy is dynamic, however. Stasis, the preservation of everything in its ordered state, is the definitional equivalent of salvation in The Divine Names (see The Divine Names, 114; Celestial Hierarchy, 146; and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 233). The formal appropriateness of all things, including their inequality, is protected by divine righteousness. Pseudo-Dionysius’s justification for this stratified arrangement is that it best facilitates illumination for all: “The goal of a hierarchy, then, is to enable beings to be as like as possible to God and to be at one with him. . . . Hierarchy causes its members to be images of God in all respects, to be clear and spotless mirrors.” He continues, explaining that hierarchy “ensures that when its members have received this full and divine splendor they can then pass on this light generously and in accordance with God’s will to beings further down the scale” (Celestial Hierarchy, 154). Dionysian hierarchy causes the transmission of light from top to bottom.

This transmission of light comes in two different forms: direct and indirect, or immediate and mediated, and the implication is that immediacy is preferable: “It is God himself who directly enlightens the primary ranks, through whose mediation he grants indirect enlightenment to the subordinate ranks, in proportion to capacity” (Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 249 [emphasis added]). Whether that capacity can be enlarged and developed or whether it is permanent is left ambiguous. Even more troubling than the emphasis on subordination is the claim that “the directly revealed fulfillments of divine reality are superior to that participation in divine visions which comes by way of others” (Celestial Hierarchy, 168). Superior in what sense? Even if each and all are loved equally by God, they are not treated equally. There seems to be a stark distinction between direct and indirect modes of reception, modes construed as proportionate to the recipient’s merit or qualities. The reader begins to wonder whether perhaps the lowlier ranks in the structure are thought to be lower not just spatially but spiritually or substantively. Jean-Luc Marion attempts to find reciprocity and mutuality in this construal of hierarchy, but as I have just attempted to show, this goes very much against the grain of the text. Hierarchy as a concept is precisely not about a horizontal interdependence between equals, nor is it a kind of Hegelian mutual recognition achieved through struggle. Hierarchy names that form of power in which the higher rules the lower.

There are meritocratic aspects of Dionysian hierarchy, which may indicate a kind of dynamism. Personal achievements, especially in self-discipline, warrant admission into the holiest precincts and their activities: “The share of the divine is apportioned to each in accordance with merit [ἀξίαν]” (Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 197; see also, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 195 and 215).  Jaroslav Pelikan points out that insofar as the condition (of purity) of the ministers and recipients, rather than of the sacraments, determines the measure of light that is imparted, Pseudo-Dionysius “is closer to the Donatist than to the Augustinian definition of the holiness of the church” (278). However, I am not sure that a meritocratic reading helps Newheiser’s case because he aims to highlight themes of finitude, failure, uncertainty, and hope in the impossible.

The Perils of Esoteric Elitism

Another troubling element of the Dionysian writings is their valorization of secrecy, what I will call their esoteric elitism. This is troubling from both a political perspective that values transparency as a protection against tyranny and a theological perspective that values the availability of divine grace especially to the least of these. Newheiser seems to hold these perspectives when he acknowledges that granting ecclesiastical authorities special powers of mediation and denying pedagogy to the polloi holds within it the dangerous possibility of “cement[ing] the privilege of those who claim access to secret knowledge” (99). In response to The Mystical Theology’s prefatory warning to keep its truths invisible to the common multitude, away from the hearing of the uninitiated, Newheiser claims that “authoritarian secrecy is at odds with key features of his [sc. Pseudo-Dionysius’s] overall project” (100). Yet Newheiser seems sympathetic to Derrida’s allowance for the unavoidable persistence of a certain other kind of secrecy. Newheiser’s goal is to show that “religious traditions can contribute to reflection in a secular context” (11). If we are meant to gain insights from Pseudo-Dionysius (and from Derrida) about how to live in modern pluralistic democracies, we must be sure to do the work of sifting out the elements of their thought that directly conflict with this aim. I take the secrecy of esoteric elitism and the static, nonhistorical account of hierarchy to be two such points of conflict. I am not entirely persuaded that the Dionysian structure as described is provisional, which is a problem for the argument that its provisionality is what keeps it anti-authoritarian.

Conclusion: Methods of Reading

I raise this concern about how to glean and apply Dionysian concepts to contemporary life because this question of method looms large for me as well. I study the connections between late-medieval mysticism and modern existentialism, operating out of what some might call the humanist conviction that ancient and medieval texts, though historically distant and so culturally and ethically foreign, can still speak to us in meaningful ways and even aid in the articulation of our modern values and the features of the societies we aim to build or maintain. There are, after all, many ways to be human, and there are many different ways to inherit—and criticize—traditions that predate us.[3]

It may be that every encounter with a text is in some sense a Rorschach test. For example, institutionalists could discover in Pseudo-Dionysius an affirmation of a carefully ordered world whereas others may gravitate to the open-ended darkness. But I am persuaded that the scholarly task requires interpreters to set out context-appropriate rules for their interpretations. Retrieval of the humanistic kind, or simply the work of the intellectual historian, entails a certain kind of methodical precision about what to highlight, what to critique, and what to ignore.

I want to know more from Newheiser about his interpretative method and how he thinks about this Weberian problem of the apparent gulf between the facts of historically distant texts and modern values. Provisional criteria, whether for textual interpretation or for pursuits of justice, are better than no criteria at all. This is a point I hear echoed in Newheiser’s insistence that Derrida affirms determinate commitments even while holding them open to disruption.

[1] Following Newheiser’s practice, all references to the Dionysian corpus will correspond to Colm Luibhéid’s translation published in the Classics of Western Spirituality series published by Paulist Press.

[2] Again, in Letter 8, Pseudo-Dionysius appeals to the priestly order as one that demands obedience because established by God: “Even if disorder and confusion should undermine the most divine ordinances and regulations, that still gives no right, even on God’s behalf, to overturn the order which God himself has established. God is not divided against himself. Otherwise, how could his kingdom stand? And if, as scripture affirms, ‘all judgment belongs to God,’ if, furthermore, the priests come next after the hierarchs as messengers and interpreters of the divine judgments, it is their business to teach you divine things as far as possible and at the right time, through means of the deacons, who judged you worthy to become a monk” (“Letter 8,” 272; cf. Newheiser, Hope, 147).

[3] See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 438. Derrida echoes Heidegger’s account of inheritance as a futural rather than a backward-looking orientation in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, 18; quoted in Newheiser, Hope, 121.