Dionysius the Areopagite

Writing under the name of Dionysius, the Athenian converted by St Paul (Acts 17:34), an unknown author of the late fifth or early sixth century — “Pseudo-Dionysius” to scholars — gave the Christian tradition its deepest map of unknowing.

His short Mystical Theology teaches the apophatic, or negative, way: since God infinitely surpasses every idea we can form, we draw near not by adding concepts but by releasing them all.

In “a total abandonment of yourself and all things,” he writes, the soul is “carried on high, to the ray of the divine darkness” — the brilliant darkness, beyond image and thought, where God dwells.