- Lived:
- Unknown — wrote c. 485–520 CE, probably in Syria, while claiming to be a first-century Athenian
- Tradition:
- Christian Neoplatonism; the fountainhead of "negative theology" and Western mysticism
- The Big Idea:
- God is beyond every name we can utter — beyond "good," beyond "being," beyond even "One" — so the deepest knowledge of God is a disciplined, luminous unknowing.
- In their words:
- "Leaving behind everything perceived and everything understood, strain upward in unknowing, as far as you can, toward union with the One who is beyond all being and all knowledge."
- If you remember one thing:
- Philosophy's most successful forgery — a book that lied about its author for a thousand years while telling the truth about the limits of language.