  (a) First, Dionysius evidently cannot accept in any single straightforward sense the Neoplatonic notion of a One that excludes the possibility of expressing trinity. He therefore links in a new way God as unrestricted being with God as utterly beyond being or any determinate predications. At the same time in the DN he argues that the ecstasy of love, which moves as a unifying force through creation without departing from itself, is the divine nature. Dionysius admits, in a note from Plato’s Phaedrus, that it is characteristic of yearning not to allow “lovers to belong to themselves but only to their loved ones” (DN 4, 13). This is shown, he goes on to argue, by the providential care of the greater for the lesser (a reference to Proclus’ divine providential love (eros pronoetikos) from the Commentary on the First Alcibiades, #56), by the love of equals, and by that of the lesser for those better than them (a reference both to Aristotle’s seminal treatment of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics and to Proclus’ returning or converting love (eros epistreptikos) in the same Commentary above), as also in the case of St. Paul’s famous dictum “I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Might then such a belonging to one’s beloved be characteristic of God, if perhaps in a different sense?