Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
It ends in silence, and the silence is the truest thing the soul can say. But it is a silence of union, and what it keeps from you is only the means by which you thought you held Him. Consider the order of the negations. We do not begin by denying the highest names. When we affirm, we start from what is nearest to the Cause and come down; when we deny, we must start from what differs most from the goal.
It is truer to say that God is life and goodness than that He is air or stone, and truer to deny that drunkenness or fury can be attributed to Him than to deny that the categories of human thought apply to Him.1 The ladder is real, and each rung is a truth about how near or far a thing stands from Him. A God who is no one would have no such ladder, for nothing would stand nearer to Him than anything else.
Then the ascent contracts the speech. As the argument mounts, its terminology narrows, and when the whole ascent is passed it will be totally dumb, being at last wholly united with Him whom words cannot describe.2 Mark what the dumbness is: it is the end of a road, a being "wholly united." Agnosticism leaves a man standing outside a door he cannot open, whereas this brings him through it.
As for the names themselves, I do not abandon them. We speak of the Godhead as Unity and Trinity, yet It is not a Unity or a Trinity such as any creature can know, and we apply these titles to That which is beyond all titles, expressing under the form of Being That which is beyond Being.3 Even Goodness we do not ascribe to Him because the name is fitting; we consecrate to Him the name we most revere, and in this we agree with the Sacred Writers, though the actual truth is far beyond us.4
The names are hymns of reverence addressed to someone, and that someone is not made empty by the failure of our grammar to contain Him. This is why I preferred the negative method. It lifts the soul above everything cognate with its finite nature and, guiding it through all the conceptions of God's Being that are transcended by that Being exceeding all name, reason and knowledge, it reaches beyond the farthest limits of the world and joins us to God Himself, so far as even we men have the power of union with Him.5 What the denials remove is what we know; what they leave is what we are joined to.
God is not one of the things that are, not even the highest; He is the Cause of all that is and beyond it all. Every name Scripture gives Him is truly affirmed of Him as Cause and more truly denied of Him as beyond; and the denials are not the last word either, for He is beyond every affirmation and every denial. The negations are superlative, not defective.
The soul that leaves behind the senses and the intellect and all that they know is united by unknowing to the One who is beyond knowing, and its silence is a hymn and not an absence.67
Surely it is truer to affirm that God is life and goodness than that He is air or stone, and truer to deny that drunkenness or fury can be attributed to Him than to deny that the may apply to Him the categories of human thought.The Mystical Theology
in proportion to its ascent it contracts its terminology, and when the whole ascent is passed it will be totally dumb, being at last wholly united with Him Whom words cannot describe.The Mystical Theology
we apply the titles of \"Trinity\" and \"Unity\" to That Which is beyond all titles, expressing under the form of Being That Which is beyond Being.The Divine Names
Even the title of \"Goodness\" we do not ascribe to It because we think such a name suitable; but desiring to frame some conception and language about this Its ineffable Nature, we consecrate as primarily belonging to It the Name we most revere.The Divine Names
Hence we have given our preference to the Negative method, because this lifts the soul above all things cognate with its finite nature... and there joins us unto God Himself, in so far as the power of union with Him is possessed even by us men.The Divine Names
For He is not This without being That; nor doth He possess this mode of being without that. On the contrary He is all things as being the Cause of them all, and as holding together and anticipating in Himself all the beginnings and all the fulfilments of all things; and He is above them all in that He, anterior to their existence, super-essentially transcends them all.The Divine Names
For if all the branches of knowledge belong to things that have being, and if their limits have reference to the existing world, then that which is beyond all Being must also be transcendent above all knowledge. 5.The Divine Names
The doctrine for which the corpus is famous; read as agnosticism, as a last refinement of metaphysics, as a theology of praise, and as a practice of prayer, and contested on every one of those readings.