The Mystery of Union with God: Dionysian Mysticism in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas by Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P. (review)

The dionysian pedigree of high medieval mysticism is often noted but seldom detailed. Bernhard Blankenhorn’s debut The Mystery of Union with God meets this lack with an accomplished analysis of Dionysian mystical union as adopted and adapted by the most prominent of its Dominican inheritors, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. The book bills itself as a work of historical theology; it is the right description, after all, just to the extent that Blankenhorn advances an argument by curating a section of the theological archive without becoming entombed therein. The section is, as the title suggests, Dionysian mystical union in the thought of two of its thirteenth-century Dominican scions. And the argument? Attention to Blankenhorn’s archival redisplay reveals that he thinks the intellectualist representation of Dionysian mysticism embroidered by Albert and Thomas—for whom Dionysius’s “union beyond mind” is finally and principally intellective, as opposed to affective—the most elegant.

The Mystery of Union with God unfolds in three asymmetrical parts. The first part begins with an expositional engagement with the Corpus Dionysiacum (hereafter, CD) on themes of anthropology, epistemology, divine naming, and mystical union. These are the nodes around which subsequent chapters on the Dominican Dionysius will coil. Among the book’s greatest virtues (there are many) is the historiography displayed in the second chapter. There Blankenhorn lucidly traces the CD’s migration from its early Byzantine commentators—namely John of Scythopolis and Maximus Confessor—westward to its Latin translators and glossers. It is here that the book’s argument, until now slinking in the subtext, begins to surface. Following others, Blankenhorn argues that Eriugena’s translation of the CD into Latin (inadvertently?) inaugurates the affective reading that will come to typify the Victorine-Franciscan axis. “None of this can be found in Dionysius,” Blankenhorn hastens to add. This “major transformation” acts to “radically reshape” the Mystical Theology in particular and “sharply contrasts with the historical Dionysius” in general (43; 46; 45; 444).

Enter Albert the Great, whose thought occupies part II. Chapter 3 assays doctrines apposite to mystical union in the Parisian Albert’s work, itself a vertigo-inducing synthesis of Aristotelian, Augustinian, Dionysian, Avicennian, and Averroist patterns of thought. Forged in the heat of polemics issuing from the 1241 condemnations at Paris, Albert’s position on the visio Dei integrates Dionysian axioms into a broadly Augustinian frame. This introduces the category of created theophany and, so, a created lumen gloriae, “the keystone that fuses what he holds to be of lasting value in the Greek and Latin patristic traditions” (106). This innovation, along with his emphasis on created grace, allows the early Albert to interpolate active modes of cooperation into Dionysius’s largely passive grammar of union. Blankenhorn next arranges an exhaustive analysis of mystical union texts within Albert’s Cologne-era commentaries on the CD. A deeper conversion to Dionysian theology marks this era—and this “in conscious opposition to the dominant, more kataphatic Augustinianism of [Albert’s] day” (206). But Albert’s commentaries foreground human cooperation by means of the theological virtues and collapse “union beyond mind” into divine naming. To that extent, the argument runs, Albert’s interpretation still indulges a chastened kataphaticism.

With Albert in full view, Blankenhorn turns to Thomas. The first chapter of part III treats pillars of Thomistic anthropology, epistemology, and psychology. Playing Averroës to Albert’s Avicenna, Thomas de-Platonizes many of his teacher’s doctrines, even as he systematizes his own. Chapter 6 considers grace and its concomitants in Aquinas, and Blankenhorn stresses the fundamentally Trinitarian shape of mysticism in Thomas, whose defense of the intellect’s stayed presence in union is of a piece with his defense of filioque. The next chapter contributes to the literature on question 13 of the prima pars of the Summa theologiae with a...