The Explanatio is a line-by-line Latin commentary on the Pseudo-Dionysian treatise De mystica theologia, completed in 1241 by Thomas Gallus, abbot of the Augustinian house of Sant'Andrea in Vercelli and the last major theologian of the Victorine school. Gallus had been a canon and prior at Saint-Victor in Paris before being sent to Italy in 1219, and he spent his career returning again and again to the Dionysian corpus: the Explanatio is the fullest of his three successive treatments of the Mystical Theology, following an earlier gloss and a condensed paraphrase. The situation that produced it was a specific one. Dionysius had become newly available and newly contested in the Latin schools, and the question of what his "unknowing" actually meant — whether the darkness at the summit of the ascent was a defeat of the intellect or something else entirely — was open.
Gallus answers that it is something else entirely. Where the treatise strips away every name and concept until the soul stands in a darkness beyond speech, Gallus insists that the soul does not simply stop there. Above the highest reach of intelligence lies what he calls the principal affection, the apex of the mind, and it is by love rather than by understanding that this apex is united to God. Union is therefore real knowledge, but knowledge of a kind that cannot be converted back into concepts — a knowing by experience and by contact, not by apprehension. This is the position later summarized in the formula that love reaches further than intellect. Gallus builds it out with a full architecture: a graded ascent of contemplation mapped onto the nine orders of angels, so that the soul's progress toward union is charted through hierarchies rather than left as a single leap into the dark. Negation, in his hands, is not merely the erasure of speech but the clearing of a space where desire can do what thought cannot.
This reading became the dominant Western interpretation of Dionysius for the next two centuries. Bonaventure absorbed it, Hugh of Balma extended it, and the English author of The Cloud of Unknowing wrote out of it — the Middle English rendering of the Mystical Theology known as Deonise Hid Divinite follows Gallus's construal rather than the bare Greek. Anyone tracing how apophatic theology became affective mysticism in the Latin West is tracing a line that runs through this text.
Who should read this: readers working seriously on the Dionysian tradition, on the Victorines, or on the sources behind The Cloud of Unknowing, and those who want to see exactly where the West decided that love outruns knowledge. It presumes familiarity with the treatise it comments on and rewards patience with scholastic distinctions. It is not devotional reading, and it will frustrate anyone hoping for a self-contained account of the contemplative life.
Explanation of Dionysius' On Mystical Theology
by Thomas Gallus
The Explanatio is a line-by-line Latin commentary on the Pseudo-Dionysian treatise De mystica theologia, completed in 1241 by Thomas Gallus, abbot of the Augustinian house of Sant'Andrea in Vercelli and the last major theologian of the Victorine school. Gallus had been a canon and prior at Saint-Victor in Paris before being sent to Italy in 1219, and he spent his career returning again and again to the Dionysian corpus: the Explanatio is the fullest of his three successive treatments of the Mystical Theology, following an earlier gloss and a condensed paraphrase. The situation that produced it was a specific one. Dionysius had become newly available and newly contested in the Latin schools, and the question of what his "unknowing" actually meant — whether the darkness at the summit of the ascent was a defeat of the intellect or something else entirely — was open.
Gallus answers that it is something else entirely. Where the treatise strips away every name and concept until the soul stands in a darkness beyond speech, Gallus insists that the soul does not simply stop there. Above the highest reach of intelligence lies what he calls the principal affection, the apex of the mind, and it is by love rather than by understanding that this apex is united to God. Union is therefore real knowledge, but knowledge of a kind that cannot be converted back into concepts — a knowing by experience and by contact, not by apprehension. This is the position later summarized in the formula that love reaches further than intellect. Gallus builds it out with a full architecture: a graded ascent of contemplation mapped onto the nine orders of angels, so that the soul's progress toward union is charted through hierarchies rather than left as a single leap into the dark. Negation, in his hands, is not merely the erasure of speech but the clearing of a space where desire can do what thought cannot.
This reading became the dominant Western interpretation of Dionysius for the next two centuries. Bonaventure absorbed it, Hugh of Balma extended it, and the English author of The Cloud of Unknowing wrote out of it — the Middle English rendering of the Mystical Theology known as Deonise Hid Divinite follows Gallus's construal rather than the bare Greek. Anyone tracing how apophatic theology became affective mysticism in the Latin West is tracing a line that runs through this text.
Who should read this: readers working seriously on the Dionysian tradition, on the Victorines, or on the sources behind The Cloud of Unknowing, and those who want to see exactly where the West decided that love outruns knowledge. It presumes familiarity with the treatise it comments on and rewards patience with scholastic distinctions. It is not devotional reading, and it will frustrate anyone hoping for a self-contained account of the contemplative life.