  Dionysius is practising forms of theological meditation in the sense that the earlier Church Fathers had understood this, not as a type of objectified, academic knowledge, but rather as a more complex, intersubjective form of address, communion and contemplation. Dionysius adopts the word theurgy, “god-work”, together with theology, “god-word”, to describe the inmost reality of this practice, adopting it from the later Neoplatonist understanding of a hidden sympathy or interconnectedness between material things and the sacred, divine significances resident in them by virtue of divine power. Iamblichus, for instance, had denied that pure thought or contemplation could bring about union with the divine. What was crucial was the performance of certain ritual actions or theurgy, “god-work”, in the belief that one could attain to the divine by the incarnation of divine forces in material objects, statues, or human beings through the divine power mirrored everywhere in the universe and in the natural sympathy of all parts, and not just by talking about the gods (theo-logy) or by looking at them (theoria). For some modern critics, Dionysius’ adaptation of pagan theurgy is analogous to calling the Christian sacraments “magical”, which also results in the subsumption of everything (morality as well as contemplation) to a form of magical correspondence. But Dionysius does not understand theurgy in this way. For him, “theurgy is the consummation (sygkephalaiosis) of theology” (EH 432B), which is to say that God’s activity within all the orders of nature does not abolish nature, morality, contemplation, or science but rather completes them and makes possible the divinization of human nature.