  One of Dionysius’ favorite sources of symbols is a verse from the 78th psalm: “the Lord awoke, like a strong man, powerful but reeling with wine.” Taken literally, the verse indicates that God sleeps and gets drunk on wine, two activities that properly apply only to embodied, visible beings. Only an embodied being can manifest the activities to which the names “sleep” and “drunkenness” literally refer. If we are to apply such terms to God, they must be attached to a foreign, intelligible content that will be able to lead the interpreter of the symbolic name to the contemplation of an intelligible name. In “sleep,” for example, Dionysius finds a meaning common to both intelligible and visible things: withdrawal from the world. He concludes that God’s sleep is his “removal from and lack of communication with the objects of his providence.” In drunkenness, Dionysius sees a kind of over-filling, and so he explains that God’s drunkenness is “the overloaded measurelessness of all goods in the one who is their cause.” From the easily comprehended literal meaning of the term, the reader rises to the more difficult intelligible terrain of imparticipability and measurelessness.