Apophasis and Pseudonimity in Dyonisius the Areopagite - Charles M. Stang

 “Or, if the poet everywhere appears and never conceals himself, 

then again the imitation is dropped, and his poetry becomes simple narration.” 

Plato, Republic, Book III

Patristics in theology covers the writings and development of the christian dogma from it’s very dawn in the Apostolic Age throughout all of the Late Antiquity. Under a variety of angles this has been in Religious History a field of particular interest: chief among those angles is the sheer drama of conflicting interpretations, that will lead to establish the biblical Canon, dismissing in the process several dozens of apocrypha, and in many ways prefiguring the east/west schism that will mark the separation of orthodoxy and Catholicism. An other notable characteristic of the era, among many others but of particular relevance to this book, is the overlapping presented by the period between, obviously, early Christianity and it’s spin offs (Gnostics, Arians, etc.) on the one hand, Hellenistic Judaism on the other hand and late Greek philosophy and mystagogy.

The Corpus Dionysacium, on which this essay focuses, is an ensemble of texts theoritically authored by Dionysius the Areopagite, a greek disciple of the apostle Paul, who converted from paganism to christianity after hearing Paul’s discourse as reported in the Pauline Epistles, an authorship that has been long discussed and seems to have been now pretty much universally dismissed as a hoax. The borrowings of the author from late neoplatonicians sources evidencing the pseudonimity of the book which, Charles M. Stang insist, has generally been treated as a device to garner undue attention by means of apostolic proximity.

Etienne-Louis Boullée. National Library, 1785

The text itself is a discussions of the heavenly and worldly hierarchies, but also covers a wide area of mystique concerns, that is, of theoretical supputations and practical rites concerned with the contact between the individual mind and the abstract world, tending ultimately towards actual union or dissolution within the absolute. This mystique approach here takes the interesting form of what is called apophatic theology, a practice and a theory to be found in a variety of religions but which the author has here inherited from the very clear influence of the pagans: the central idea could be described as admitting the inneffability of God, and the need, therefore, in order to identify him, not to attempt to describe what He is, but what He is not.

Now we are all set, we should be able to appreciate Stang’s daring thesis, defending Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s intention in borrowing a name some five hundred years older than his. 

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Most of Charles M. Stang’s thesis revolves, unsurprisingly, around the concepts of pseudonimity, which he proposes to see in a radically new light, and around the idea of apophasis or negative theology, which seems to provide evidence for his interpretation of the pseudonym.

Stang insists, breaking with the prevalent interpretation yet drawing on multiple scholarly theories, that the clear pagan neoplatonician influence present in the Corpus must be taken into account, and consider that the actual fifth century author at the very least deeply identify with the biblical character whose identity he borrowed because he was himself a pagan or influenced by pagan philosophy, and converted after reading Paul’s discourse to the Athenians (Acts17:22-31):

In particular, the Athenians maintained a peculiar form of cult known as “the unknown god”, a relatively recent concept, which one could describe as a sort of spiritual fail-safe, in case the established pantheon was to miss any significant deity: the cult given to the unknown god was intended for all the deities who might not have yet been revealed. Paul in his discourse makes a parallel between that unknown god and the christian God, drawing on this rapprochement to the materialist and “vulgar” aspects of the greek religion.

Now seeing the pseudonym, in the light of this passage, as the keystone of his interpretation, Stang argues that Pseudo Dyonisius practice some sort of proto-traditionalism: elements of a primordial, genuine cult of the christian God survives scaterred among the pagan tradition. This allows him not only to “recycle” pagan wisdom, but also to justify his frequent references and borrowing from neo-platonicians metaphysics.

Etienne-Louis Boullée. Cenotaph, 1784

But more importantly, at least for us, is Stang’s daring development of the practice of pseudonymous writing: documenting a certain number of scholarly opinions on the matter and drawing on a couple of case studies (namely the obscure Acts of Paul and Thekla and Saint John Chrisosthome), he goes on to document the peculiar understanding of time he attributes to early christianity, which is somewhat analogous to what Eliade and a crowd of comparative religious scholars evidenced in primitive societies: the beings, here the apostles, part-taking in the founding myths of the tradition, here the life of Christ, belong to a different time-line, para-historical if you will, that allows them thanks to their symbolic nature (archetypal?) to subsist throughout time.

Obviously this is no fundamental news in regards to traditional belief systems and the conceptions of “other-world”, “after-life” and “dream-time” in animist societies for example have already been much discussed but in the particular context of christianity this proves to be quite novel and interesting, questioning for example the wide-spread conception that christian thought is historical rather than mythical. 

But the crunchy bits are still to come, for the core of the thesis concerns the mecanism by which contemporaneity and the apostolic times are super-imposed, or “telescoped” as the author puts it: quoting Derek Krueger, whom you are bound to read more about on this site, he develops an interesting theory of writing as a spiritual exercise, an ascetic practice like the Lectio Divina or Hesychasm. But in the context of early christianity, this allow the writer to perpetuate the transmission of knowledge between the  the apostle and himself much like the apostle received it first from Christ himself – or, to go back to our motif of traditionalism, to create an initiatic chain.

Etienne-Louis Boullée. Cenotaph for Newton, 1784

As we have seen earlier, the pseudonimity of the author has been proved largely from his consistent borrowing from neoplatonicians both in concepts and terminology, Proclus more than any others, but in exploring further timely analogies, Charles M. Stang stretches the author’s ecclecticism to Hellenistic Judaism with Philo of Alexandria, an other major thinker of the era and one of the chief representant of Hellenistic Judaism, a school of thought integrating some of the more rationalized elements of pagan spirituality inside the Jewish tradition. Philo himself report experiencing similar transport but relates it to the second axis of the essay: apophasis, the pursuit of conceiving god by it’s negation. That same Philo become the base of an apophatic anthropology that Stang will proceed to reveal in the Corpus Dyonisacium, complementary to the already recognised apophatic theology.

The essence of this doctrine seems to be found in the need, in order to achieve union with God, not only to experience him through negative definition, "unknowing" him for Stang, but also for the subject to unknow himself. This is achieved on one hand, through an other spiritual practice, less original this one, of the divine names both descriptive and negative, for unknowing god, and through the very exercise of writing for the mystique. 

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The approach to writing as a form of devotional exercise that involves a spiritual communion, and inspire the writer, is especially interesting for us in that it deals with the intrinsiquely irrational concept of creativity, but mainly because of the light it sheds upon the myth-making process.

Therese of Avila’s Interior Castle make use of the image of a castle containing seven mansions as an image for the progression of the soul towards the final unio mystica. This allegoric representation of abstract concept certainly play a role in mythopeia but it is more the space in which this castle exists, the interior space, that is of interest:

Popularized by Loyola, a complementary example is to be found in the spiritual exercises of the Vita Christi which involves a form of intense visualisation of biblical scenes, followed by a projection, in spirit, of the subject inside of the imagined scene. This visual meditation allows interactions with apostolic figures in the ambiguous space of the imagination justified by faith.

The existence of a space in which subjectivity takes the guise of the inferior, material world, to express the mystique path through a narrative is paradoxal: wheras philosophy, at least post-aristotelician, works towards the expression of abstract processes in adequate, abstract terminology, religion and christianity in particular embrace this paradox and perpetuate, although under much control, the proliferation of such didactic symbolic journeys.  This hints, as Henry Corbin develops further in his theories concerning the imaginal space in sufism, at the emotional aspects of religiousity, that needs, unlike the more rational philosophy, to be experienced rather than processed for the subject to enjoy the entirety of it’s message, which includes supra-rational elements.

Etienne-Louis Boullée. Fort Project, 1784

But the spiritual exercise proposed by Stang is not meditation: wheras prayer and meditation pave the way to internalized “creativity”, writing is a very different process: the spontaneity of free-association or the hysteria of glossalia have little space to express themselves in what has been and still is a structuring exercise (of course poetry perpetuate somewhat the myth of spontaneity, but mostly when we decide to write something down, it is in order either to structure our thoughts or to memorise.) Yet there has been a string of claims to such “inspired”, urgent writing or even graphics, like spiritualist automatic writing or Austin O. Spare drawings. But both belong to occultism rather than mystique as such and suffer the universal syndromes of the times: more interest in the means than in the goals: goals which have fully disappeared in the post-modern variations where I am not surprised to see emerging automatic coding and ecstatic film-editing.

It is hard to imagine such exercises involved in the creation of the modernist myths, political or metapolitical, but on that front it is interesting to note that what the Griffin new consensus preach enforce ten years as the core myth of fascism, namely palingenesis, the need for a rebirth of the nation to escape the cycle of decadence, finds an echo in the aim of the ascetic practices, askesis “the reconstituted self”. 

Renato Nicolodi - Monumental Miniatures

“...expressive of enormous power 

put forth, and resistance overcome.”

Thomas de Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1820)

 describing Piranesi’s Carceri, via Wikipedia. 

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Renato Nicolodi is born in 1980 and seems to be based in Belgium. He uses wood and concrete to produce his artworks but other than that, information is pretty scarce.

Renato Nicolodi - Porticus I - Rendering

The monument, in it’s traditional definition, is either a memorial or a ruin. The memorial is a construction a posteriori intended to represent a historical phenomenon considered to be worth being remembered either as a warning or as a celebration, a message from the present to the future about the past. The ruin can be originally a memorial, but at any rate that is not any longer it’s chief appeal: the ruin is a fetishized remain of our past, which participates in anchoring us in myth and history, a message from the past to the present about the future. 

Renato Nicolodi - Porticus II - Rendering

The monument as such has no function. It is tempting to see it as a receptacle of the sacred, which in many cases it might have been in the past, but it is not it’s primary function anymore: the monument seems a fundamentally modern concept. A slow but radical shift in the understanding of the sacred brought it’s focus on time and history rather than space or process. The occasional rarefied ceremony aside, the monument is optional: it’s experience is highly personal and the fruit of an individual decision, it hardly requires any ritual (at least compared to the collective experience of the sacred) aside from the duty of memory, a deeply modern (moral, political and internalized) form of spiritual exercise. 

Renato Nicolodi - Porticus III - Rendering

This shift in our experience of the sacred from the collective to the individual and, less and less, to the historical, is quite significant. Monuments are often regarded as being collective in essence – as manifesting the collective will, but I would here disagree. There is a number of individual monuments, designed, and sometimes even built, by an individual character.  Two of the most spectacular examples would be the Ideal Palace (1879 to 1912) of the Cheval postman or Tomaso Busi’s Ideal Town (1956 to 1981) in Scarzuola. Whereas Scarzuola’s Ideal Town, a real life, contemporary Cappricio, was described by it’s architect as a “autobiography in stone”, paraphrasing hermetic symbolism in a (pre)surrealist fashion (De Chirico springs to mind) and their fascination for the personal cosmology and it’s sacrality, Cheval's Ideal Palace is generally relegated to the "outsider art" section, while his self-confessed objective was "to prove what the will can do". In that regard, the sheer scale of their respective works, and the total lack of financial and technical means of Cheval, do achieve the monumental quality.

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"(...) Crisis Heterotopia, i.e., the are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved 

for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, 

in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc."


Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967

It is clear that the monument belongs in Foucault’s category of heterotopias, although in a rather typical biais his classifications seems to be more oriented towards quotidian, underrated spaces than self-consciously and conspicuous expressions of the sacred. This distance between the modernist aspiration and Foucault's approach I find quite exciting: The monument certainly tick many of the boxes of the checklist we are given to identify Heterotopias.

Nicolodi’s work reminds me of Gerard Trignac cyclopean cities, but obviously the medium itself marks a first significant difference, and more importantly, the aesthetics of the buildings share little aside from their monumentality: Trignac’s wonderful illustrations depict generally a city, as in a set of interconnected spaces, to come back to Foucault’s terminology, wheras Nicolodi focuses on the isolated construction, truncated from it’s environement and leaving the symbolic meaning as sole possible interpretation of the building. This understanding of the space as a self-standing, autonomous microcosm further the clean and sharp modernism of the building, which, if they echo the future as much as antiquity, show no signs themselves of the passage of time, unlike the run down towers of Trignac slowly backing down in face of the vegetation.

The monument, as I said earlier, relates deeply to history, as either the cause or the purpose of the circumstances in which it is built: they commemorate a change or a turning point, real or fictional, which acts for the collective (generally the nation) as a coming of age. Revolution, essentially, is the teenage crisis of the free-world. Those Crisis Heterotopias are essentially the sacred space in which the transitory initiations are performed or experienced, liminal  yet not exactly ritual, or not intrinsically ritual, just like the monument. The difference between the monument and Foucault’s Crisis Heterotopia, though, intervene at an interesting level: whereas his system is essentially centered around the individual experience, the monument is a transition space for the supra-individual. 

Renato Nicolodi - Atrium I 

"On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure 

that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary 

to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the 

only trace of our existence in the world and in language."

Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967

The monumentality of the Heterotopia of Deviation has probably been best outlined by the very curious engravings of gigantic prison scenes of the architect Piranesi (but can also be in Nicolodi's epic interpretation of Bentham's Panopticon) found War memorials come to mind as the widespread and obvious example of Heterotopia of Deviation, where the collective/self sacrifices are actualized to perpetuate the statu quo it originally achieved. But it is worth noting that the individuality of those dead for the cause become dissolved in their collective sacrifice: they live in the cause, and just like ritual visits on the tomb and memorial masses resurrect the deceased for the time he is the focus of our attention, in the case of the collective sacrifice, daily life itself should ideally be a celebration of the deceased who died for our way of life, for our ordinary rituals. The monuments are as many tombstones to the society that disappeared in those conflicts. 

The instance of the mausoleum is of particular interest and in the case of Lenin’s it might even give us a hint as to the specificity of the modernist-authoritarians relationship to the sacred: the monument is individual in that it only celebrates one dead, whereas the awkward equivalent in our western democracies would either celebrate the abstracted heroe (The Unknown Soldier) or the collective (Cenotaphs). In both cases however, the paradoxical relationship, in modern societies, between the mourner and the mourned is one of a crowd claiming an personal, emotional, rather than ritualised or social relationship with the mourner. The ability for the "symbol" (Lenin, the Unknown Soldier) to sustain such intransigent connections with such a large amount of people might well participate to divinize him. 

Renato Nicolodi - Atrium I

"Fourth principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time - which 

is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, 

heterochronies.The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive 

at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time."

Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967

When in The Total Art of Stalinism, Boris Groys describe the Avant Garde and the Socialist Realist art as both attempting at establishing themselves in an extrahistorical space, he does not address, maybe because it is so obvious, the shared monumentality of the two discussably opposite movements: Monuments are more than anything else Heterotopias of Time, they exist chiefly as a testament from the past to the future, a testament from an idealised past to an imaginary future. In that regard they deny the present but not the individual. The personal experience of the visitor is purely turned towards the past (memorials) or the future (the project) negotiating through the audience’s experience a unity between the contemporaneity and the mythical time. To achieve this the monument needs complete contemporaneity, that is no trace of quotes or composite aesthetics, a tension or paradoxe eminently exposed in Stefan Hoenerloh's paintings. 

The example selected for this type of Heterotopias is the library - this is obviously reminiscent of Borges Library of Babel, that is so monumental in it's proportion, that it is constituted of an indefinite or perhaps infinite repetition of the same space. Repetition is a characteristic of both the sacred and the industrialized, a feature I have come to consider as playing an essential part in modernist aesthetics, because in it's multitude, it isolate the object as a signifier. This is peculiarly obvious in Erik Desmazieres Escher-like illustrations (as shown here on the awesome blog of the awesome illustrator John Coultart) or the (less convincing) Michelle Lord "City of the Immortal" project. 

Unsurprisingly, Foucault’s 1964 lecture starts out on the fundamental duality of space and time, relating at time “anxiety of our era” to the overwhelming concern for space. The monumental could be seen as either confirming or countering this view: denying it as it expresses an urgent preocupation with time, and confirming it in it’s expression of this concern in terms of space.

Renato Nicolodi - Atrium I

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"Looking back at the ruins of the twentieth century, we see more paradoxical mergers: between suprahuman state models and human practices, between individual aspirations and collective pressure, between ascending dreams and down-to-earth everyday survivals."

Svetlana Boym, Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia, 2007

Renato Nicolodi - Personal Museum II

The scale of Nicolodi's art works certainly participates of displacing them definitely from the space of the collective into the space of the individual: the ritual value is withdrawn and from an environment, the monument becomes an object, if not a tool. Whereas the environment in the ritual is meant t to manifest the limits, the duty or tradition, the tool itself is empowering, it is the conductor of action, and of symbolic action, by which the participant can interact with the tradition by either perpetuating it or transgressing it. 

Renato Nicolodi - Personal Museum II

This shift in the balance of power might transform the ritual from an oppressive method of enforcing the statu quo into an individualistic self assertion, making him into if maybe not a Demiurge in the sense of Boris Groys, at least a entity on the level of collective or impersonal ones, and his own decision as national interest. 

Renato Nicolodi - Personal Museum II

Quirino De Giorgio

"The utter antithesis between the modern world and the old is determined by all those things that formerly did not exist. Our lives have been enriched by elements the possibility of whose existence the ancients did not even suspect. Men have identified material contingencies, and revealed spiritual attitudes, whose repercussions are felt in a thousand ways."

Antonio Sant'Elia, Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, 1914

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 Quirino De Giorgio - Project for a stone lighthouse, 1931

Quirino De Giorgio - Project for a lighthouse with a 

luminous beam for the Yugoslavian border, 1931

 Quirino De Giorgio - Memorial to the dead at Sea, 1931

 Quirino De Giorgio - House near the sea with helicopter, 1931

Quirino de Giorgio

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"5. That, just as the ancients drew inspiration for their art from the elements of nature, we—who are materially and spiritually artificial—must find that inspiration in the elements of the utterly new mechanical world we have created, and of which architecture must be the most beautiful expression, the most complete synthesis, the most efficacious integration"

Antonio Sant'Elia, Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, 1914

Geotheanum

“Thinking … is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. 

Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.”

Rudolf Steiner in Goethean Science (1883)

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via Form is void


“The sense for the perception of architecture is not the eyes — but living. Our life is its image.” 

Rudolph Schindler

Hexen 2.0 - Part 3

Black Dog Publishing, who is also running the gallery space where the Litterature exhibition is hosted, published an art book and, interestingly, a tarot deck of Treister’s project. They have been working with Treister for several years and my copy of Hexen 2039 was already published by them – as I said earlier they provided me with a book and a deck: The book itself is a paperback in calendar format, full colour and thick matte paper. No fold-in poster in this one, but a succession of the various elements constituting the complex Hexen 2.0 ecosystem, from the diagrams to the tarot cards, via the bibliography, the portraits, etc. as well as a short discussion of the project by art historian Lars Bang Larsen.

During the talk they hosted at WORK gallery, Suzanne Treister mentioned the sign at the Science Museum recommending a thrity minutes circuit between her artworks – certainly in 30 minutes spent in a gallery space, one can only experience the technique of the artist. The concept and the narrative, which for me holds the more revolutionnary aspects of the project, we can at best glimpse at – neither the extreme complexity of the diagrams, nor the coherence of the narrative or the seamless integration of the artwork into history, can there be experienced. One need time, patience, and research to fully uncipher the project, and in that regard, the book format seems very appropriate.

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Mathew Wilson Smith in his seminal study of the relatively overlooked subject of the Gesamtkunstwerk titled The Total Work of Art, drawing on Adorno, posit Wagner, who is widely regarded as the originator of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as we understand it, at the root of a dialectic movement between organicist immersive art work and the ideal of Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus theater, or, more surprisingly, of Bertold Brecht. Smith argues that Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung did not contradict, and indeed worked with the notion of Total Art Work, in a “synthetic” or at least non-organic sense.

Hexen 2.0 : Installation at the Science Museum

I am yet to read his conclusions but his tackling of the notion of cyberspace I see in the continuity of this evolution: Treister’s practice is inherently multimedia, not only in the computerized sense of the word, as demonstrated by her pioneering publications of Rosalind Brodsky’s adventures on CD-rom, but also in her more recent use of different medias on each sides of the Hexen’s diegesis. On the level of the artwork, visual arts certainly have the upperhand, but through the use of large amounts of texts, as well as prints or photo-montage, she achieves enough variety to be immersive. On the level of the “narrative” itself, the artworks represent a variety of formats, documenting in the particular complementarity of historical research, the subject of her work. The particular ungraspable quality of this subject, part history, part scientific phenomena, and part political manifesto, participate in it’s “real world” aesthetic quality – but it is in collapsing the clear-cut separation between the world at large and the microcosm of her artwork that she achieves the quality of Gesamtkunstwerk, harnessing, like various experimental video games in the past (In Memoriam for example), real world genre and events into her own “narrative”.

Hexen 2.0 : HISTORICAL DIAGRAMS: The Computer - From the 

MK ULTRA via Counter-Culture to Technogaianism

Here I put narrative in inverted comas because, indeed, the narrative structure of Hexen 2.0, which was already rather unusual in Hexen2039, is virtually non-existent, or more accurately it is invisible. In gamification this is what they would call a sandbox project, as in the fact that the author provides the audience with a certain number of modules in which they are free to evolve, to explore or to ignore, with no particular goal, a defining feature of open-world game design, which certain commentators (Bullfrog’s Peter Molyneux or SimCity’s Will Wright for example) has defined as a the essential separation between game and virtual realities.

Maxis/Electronic Arts, SimCity 4, 2003

This types of environments, be it in the form of games or of pure simulation (SugarScape), are often credited as archetypal emergent systems, and, funnily enough, studied closely by a variety of inheritors of the cybernetic tradition, from AI engineers to social scientists.

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But all is not emergent in the world of Hexen 2.0. In the sixties, when Philip K. Dick was writing The Man in the High Castle  one of his most famous works and probably the most celebrated uchronia in Science Fiction (exemplifying the counter-narratives dear to the artist, reminiscent of the recent development of counter-factual history), he was using the I Ching to write, to devine the plot. Many years later he was actually blaming inconsistencies in the story-line on that practice. As I do for Treister he seemed back then to consider his work as one of world-building, which might be a bit creepy given his later gnostic leanings, but which we can imagine to have involved the creation of actors and forces, which, once associated with the abstract elemental forces of the I Ching, were then combined and recombined according to the “interpretations” of the book.

Philip K. Dick's famous letter to the FBI about 

Solarcon-6 and a (alleged...) worldwide Nazi conspiracy

The influence of Dick, whose style has been occasionally coined “paranoid fiction” and involved a variety of governmental, occult or philosophical factions, is often quoted by Treister – maybe her decision to use a tarot deck, with it’s rich symbolism and modular potential, to illustrate the various elements of her mythos, is again a reference to the writer.

HEXEN 2.0 : Tarot: XXI : THE WORLD

The 78 card deck itself is large enough to be fully readable, printed on thick card and seemingly takes Crowley’s own tarot deck as a starting point. The cards constitute in my eyes the “meat” of the project, more so maybe than the large historical diagrams, and many of the most interesting elements of the Hexen nebula are more widely developped here. The form itself is ambiguous: like Jodorowski, or Jung, one can think, as we do for every symbol resisting historicisation, of the major arcana at the very least, as timeless archetypes – or one can follow Timothy Leary in seeing them as a narrative of themselves, depicting the evolution of man, or in the present case, the evolution of society.