The Names of God and the Qualities of God
An outgrowth of the principle of God’s “incomprehensibility” beginning in the Old Testament is the mystifying issue over the “names” of God or how mankind tries to name God. Dionysius the Areopagite developed that idea. He wrote a body of work called On the Divine Names. The Apostle Paul’s preaching on the Areopagus at Athens helped convert Dionysius to Christianity. A person’s name bears a key a feature or likeness, but names are not the same as a person’s nature, as the iconographer Aidan Hart explains how icons relate to the prototypes. St. Gregory the Theologian writes that “our starting-point must be the fact that God cannot be named.” To help understand the meaning of names, St. Gregory ordered them hierarchically in the tradition of Dionysius. The first type bears closely to His essence: I AM, Lord. The second type bears the power of God shown outwardly: All-Powerful and King of Kings, Lord of Sabaoth. The last type bears the ekonomia of God: God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God’s actions with His people. How we bear the image of the Holy Trinity in ourselves matters, but we are not able to lower God into our minds by a simple identification or by one word that settles it all. We cannot make God man by our names or philosophies or signs, but God can become man to save His named ones on earth. Many of the so-called human forms of God, like walking, vengeful, regretful, asleep, are to be taken allegorically. St. Gregory of Nyssa presents the namelessness and the ungraspable nature of God as the basic tenet of Christianity in Against Eunomius. Some of the main struggles against Christianity include Arius and Eunomius on the one hand, and Gnosticism and the Manicheans on the other hand, who misunderstood the divine names of the personal, Living God. He explains further that the names that we find in Holy Scriptures are worthy of reverence, but that we must take heed so that we do not think that God needs those names, but rather that we need them to understand God. Dionysius the Areopagite teaches that the divine names come from “the beauty of the processions” of the Holy Trinity, and this essence of “emanations” are beyond our understanding. We can experience them as energies working in the world around us.