ABSTRACT
The Dionysian God is a collection of seeming contradictions: it is a unity without distinction which transcends all of creation, and yet this simple being contains the plurality that is creation. In his treatise On Divine Names, Dionysius attributes some positive names to God to describe God as a monad: Good, Being, Life, Wisdom, Power, Peace, Greatness and Smallness, Sameness and Difference, Similarity and Dissimilarity, Rest and Motion, Equality, and One. The Divine Names is an exposition of the supremacy of the Godhead, both as to how it encompasses and how it simultaneously surpasses the totality of creation. While Dionysius is not explicit about the function of the quality of unity as it pervades the universe, Proclus gives a metaphysical description of divine unity. Divine unity is the source of all oneness in the universe because everything participates in divine unity – based on this premise, Dionysius describes the dichotomy between One and Many in terms of Part and Whole.
