Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

Identity and Date

The writings now known as the Corpus Areopagiticum — four treatises and ten letters — first surface in historical record in 532 CE, when they were cited at a colloquy in Constantinople by Monophysite representatives debating Chalcedonian orthodoxy. They claim authorship by Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of the Apostle Paul mentioned in Acts 17:34, and are addressed to figures of the apostolic age — Timothy, the apostle John in exile on Patmos, Titus, the disciple Sopater.

For a thousand years the attribution was accepted in both the Greek and Latin churches, giving the corpus near-apostolic authority. The texts were quoted, commented on, and integrated into the foundations of medieval theology. Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus first raised doubts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, on philological and historical grounds; the consensus that the works are post-Procline, dating to the late fifth or early sixth century, was firmly established by the nineteenth century. The author's actual identity is unknown. Various proposals — Severus of Antioch, the Monophysite Peter the Iberian, a member of the Syrian school around Sergius of Reshaina, or an unknown Syrian monastic theologian — have been advanced; none commands consensus. Recent scholarship by Andrew Louth, Paul Rorem, Sarah Coakley, and Charles Stang has largely accepted the anonymity and shifted attention to what the pseudonymous strategy itself accomplishes.

That strategy is theologically purposeful. By writing as the convert of Paul, the author claims the apostolic seal for a theology that is, in fact, deeply indebted to the pagan Neoplatonism of Proclus (d. 485). The pseudonym both authorizes the integration of Neoplatonism with Christianity and silently identifies the source of the integration: just as Dionysius the Areopagite had carried Paul's teaching to the Athenian philosophers, so the Corpus Areopagiticum carries Athenian philosophy into Christian theology.

The Corpus

The surviving works are:

The Divine Names (Peri Theion Onomaton), the longest treatise, examines the names predicated of God in Scripture — Goodness, Being, Life, Wisdom, Power — and asks how each can apply to a God who infinitely surpasses the meaning the names ordinarily bear.

The Mystical Theology (Peri Mystikēs Theologias), a short and dense treatise of five chapters, presents the apophatic ascent to union with God — the negation of all names, all concepts, all knowing, until the soul is united with the One in the darkness above light.

The Celestial Hierarchy (Peri tēs Ouranias Hierarchias) describes the angelic orders — three triads of seraphim/cherubim/thrones, dominions/virtues/powers, principalities/archangels/angels — each transmitting illumination from the source above to the order below.

The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (Peri tēs Ekklēsiastikēs Hierarchias) describes the analogous earthly hierarchy of the church — sacraments (baptism, eucharist, anointing), clerical orders (bishops, priests, deacons), and ranks of the laity (monks, the baptized, catechumens).

Ten Letters address particular questions of interpretation and practice, including the famous Letter 9 on symbolic theology and Letter 10 to the apostle John on Patmos.

References in the corpus to a Theological Outlines, a Symbolic Theology, and other works either lost or never written produce an internal architecture of mutual cross-reference that scholars have variously read as a real lost corpus or as a literary device.

The Theological Program

The Three Ways: Cataphatic, Apophatic, Mystical

Dionysius's epistemology of God moves in three modes. The cataphatic (affirmative) way predicates of God all the names appropriate to perfection — God is Good, Being, Life, Light — since whatever perfection creatures possess derives from God and must therefore preeminently belong to God. The apophatic (negative) way denies these same names of God — God is not goodness as we know goodness, not being as we know being — since God infinitely transcends the modes of finite perfection. The names point but do not contain; they are useful for the ascent and must be discarded at the summit.

Beyond both affirmation and negation lies the mystical knowing that is no knowing at all: union with the hyperousion — the more-than-being from which all that is proceeds, which cannot be named because it is the source of all names, which cannot be known because it is the source of all knowing. In the Mystical Theology, the soul ascends Mount Sinai with Moses, leaves behind first the multiplicity of the world, then concept and intellect, and enters the gnophos — the divine darkness, dark because of excess of light — in which it is united with what is above being.

This tripartite structure became the standard framework for Christian mystical theology in both the Greek East (Maximus the Confessor, Gregory Palamas) and the Latin West (Aquinas, Bonaventure, Eckhart, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila). The Aquinas of the Summa distinguishes three ways of speaking about God — via causalitatis, via negationis, via eminentiae — in conscious development of the Dionysian program.

Hierarchy

The Greek word hierarchia is a Dionysian neologism, compounded from hieros (sacred) and archē (rule, origin, principle). Hierarchy for Dionysius is the order by which the divine self-communication flows down from the source through ranked intermediaries to the lowest beings capable of receiving it, and the order by which those beings ascend back to the source. The celestial hierarchy of angels and the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the church are parallel and connected expressions of the same principle.

This hierarchical metaphysics is borrowed from Plotinus and especially Proclus's Elements of Theology, in which all that proceeds from the One does so through ranked mediators. The Dionysian innovation: situating this metaphysics in a Christian framework, identifying the source with the Trinitarian God, integrating Scripture and liturgical practice into the descending and ascending hierarchy.

Reception

Greek East

Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) wrote scholia on the Areopagitica that helped fix the Greek interpretation, integrating Dionysius into the Chalcedonian-orthodox synthesis. Gregory Palamas, in the fourteenth-century hesychast controversies, used Dionysian distinctions between God's essence and energies to defend the Athonite monastic theology of contemplative union. Modern Orthodox theology, particularly the school associated with Vladimir Lossky (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 1944), continues to treat Dionysius as a founding authority.

Latin West

The Latin reception began with Pope Gregory the Great's references in the late sixth century. The corpus was translated by Hilduin in 832 and again by John Scotus Eriugena around 860–62, then revised by John the Saracen and others; medieval Latin theology had access to several translations of varying quality. Hugh of Saint-Victor, Albert the Great, and especially Bonaventure and Aquinas integrated Dionysius extensively. Aquinas wrote a commentary on The Divine Names and cites Dionysius approximately 1,700 times in the Summa Theologiae. Albert called him "Dionysius the great theologian."

Medieval Latin mysticism — the Rhineland mystics Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and Henry Suso; the English Cloud of Unknowing (mid-fourteenth century), which is largely a paraphrase of Dionysian themes; the late Spanish mysticism of John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila — develops directly from the apophatic tradition the Mystical Theology had founded.

Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464), whose Of Learned Ignorance and On the Vision of God reformulate Dionysian apophatic theology with sixteenth-century philosophical resources, transmitted the tradition into the early modern period.

Modern

The twentieth-century recovery of Dionysius as a serious theological and philosophical figure has come from several directions: Orthodox theology through Lossky and his successors; Catholic theology through Hans Urs von Balthasar (whose multi-volume Glory of the Lord devotes extended treatment to Dionysius); continental philosophy through Jean-Luc Marion's God Without Being (1982; trans. 1991), which deploys Dionysian apophasis against Heideggerian critique of onto-theology; and scholarship through Paul Rorem (Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and Introduction to Their Influence, Oxford University Press, 1993), Andrew Louth (Denys the Areopagite, 1989), Charles Stang (Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite, Oxford University Press, 2012), and Sarah Coakley.

The standard English translation is Paul Rorem and Colm Luibheid's Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (Paulist Press, 1987) in the Classics of Western Spirituality series.

Significance

Four contributions define the significance of the Corpus Areopagiticum. First, the integration of Proclean Neoplatonism with Christian theology provided the West with its principal channel for Neoplatonic metaphysics, parallel to and partly in addition to the Augustinian channel from Plotinus. Second, the Mystical Theology founded systematic apophatic theology as a Christian discipline, the doctrine that all positive predications of God must be supplemented by their negation and ultimately transcended in unknowing. Third, the Celestial Hierarchy gave medieval theology its standard angelology — three triads of nine choirs — absorbed by Aquinas, Dante, and the iconographic tradition. Fourth, the Dionysian framework shaped the entire Christian mystical tradition, Eastern and Western, from Maximus the Confessor through Eckhart and John of the Cross to the twentieth-century theological retrieval. Few works of comparable historical influence are by an unknown author.

See Also

Plotinus · Augustine · Aquinas