A Short Letter That Shaped a Thousand Years of Negative Theology

The Mystical Theology is a brief text, addressed in the form of a letter to a disciple named Timothy, that lays out the most concentrated statement of apophatic, or negative, theology in the entire Dionysian corpus, arguing that God transcends every positive description as much as every negation, so that the highest form of theological speech is not affirmation or denial but a movement beyond both into what the text calls a divine darkness of unknowing. Short as it is, the work exercised influence wildly disproportionate to its length, becoming a foundational reference point for the whole subsequent tradition of Christian negative theology in both the Greek East and the Latin West, cited and commented on by theologians across many centuries and many different schools of thought who otherwise had little in common.

McGinn's study of the origins of Christian mysticism traces how the specific vocabulary and structure of apophatic argument the Mystical Theology establishes became, in effect, the shared grammar later mystical writers used even when developing very different theological systems of their own. The text builds its argument through a deliberate progression of negations, denying first sensible and then intelligible categories of God, until ordinary language itself is exhausted.