Techniques and Rules of Ineffability in the Dionysian Corpus

• Main Author: Knepper Timothy D.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2014-06-01
• Series: Studia Humana
• Subjects: dionysius areopagites; speech acts; orthodox christianity
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.2478/sh-2014-0006

Is the Dionysian God, or an experience of the Dionysian God, absolutely ineffable? Does the Dionysian corpus assert or perform such ineffability? This paper will argue that the answer to each of these questions is no. The Dionysian God is known hyper-nous as the hyper-ousia cause of all. And the Dionysian corpus unambiguously refers to, asserts of, and metaphorizes about this God just so. In arguing these points, this paper will call upon both the speech act theory of John Searle and the metaphor theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. More particularly, it will look to Searle’s rules of reference and predication and conditions of illocutionary acts, as well as Lakoff and Johnson’s schematization of metaphor gestalt and entailment to show how Dionysian expressions of inexpressibility are rule-governed and the Dionysian God is thereby (relatively) effable.