Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Mysterious Syrian disciple of Plotinus
Excerpted from A Whirld of Words: A Reader's Commonplace Dictionary. Find the LINK to the Introduction and WORKS CITED below.
Dionysius the Areopagite
the Areopagite, Dionysius by name, who was, as Luke related in the Acts, the first convert after Paul’s address to the Athenians in the Areopagus. He became the first bishop of Athens, a fact recorded by a very early writer, another Dionysius, pastor of the see of Corinth
(Eusebius 1989) p. 67
Dionysius the Areopagite is a major figure in the history of Neoplatonism. For nigh on a thousand years – from late antiquity to the close of the fifteenth century – he was usually identified with the Dionysius mentioned in Acts 17.34 as one of those who had listened to the ‘new doctrine’ (17.19) St. Paul had preached to the Athenians. This had taken place on the ‘hill’ of Mars (the Areios/Areos pagos), the spur jutting out from the western end of the Acropolis and separated from it by a short saddle. Originally the seat of the city’s highest court of justice, it had become, in the first century under Roman rule, the seat of a court, or council, focusing on religious matters – and according to tradition, Dionysius sat on that court. The decision by the Apostle to preach there had therefore been a dramatic one. Instead of the ‘unknown god’ inscribed on a city altar, the Apostle to the Gentiles had proclaimed ‘the God that has made the world and all things therein’. This was the God, moreover, who ‘is not worshiped with man’s hands, as though He needed any thing, seeing He giveth to all life and breath’ (17.23 – 25). For ‘in Him we live and move and have our being’, as certain of the Greeks’ own poets had already declared (17.28). Paul is quoting, it is now believed, from Epimenides of Crete’s Cretica. He then cites line 5 from Aratus’ Phaenomena (from its opening praise of Zeus), ‘For we are also his offspring’. When they heard him speak of the resurrection, some of St. Paul’s auditors had mocked him, but others, including Dionysius and a woman named Damaris, had declared that they wanted to hear more of the new teachings before Paul departed for Corinth. This Dionysius, St. Paul’s first Athenian convert, is called, appropriately, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the various Eastern orthodox churches regard him as one of the seventy apostles. He became in short one of the two or three most profound and influential architects of a thousand years of Christian thought and, more important, of Christian mysticism; for his was the way of inner ascent into both darkness and light. In the medieval Latin West, only Augustine among the Church Fathers had a profounder impact
(Ficino et al. 2015) p. vii, x, xxxiii
over a hundred years later, circa 170 CE, another Dionysius, the bishop of Corinth, had referred to the Areopagite as the first bishop of the church of Athens; and later confusion then identified him with a third Dionysius, who became the legendary St. Denis, the patron saint of France and the bishop of Paris. For hagiography proclaimed that after his conversion, Dionysius the Areopagite had traveled to Jerusalem to attend on Mary in her last days and was struck with amazement at the glory surrounding her. He had stayed there until after her Assumption (or Dormition), before traveling on to Rome and witnessing the martyrdom of St. Paul. Subsequently, he had been sent by St. Clement of Rome to preach in France (ca. 90 CE). Eventually, after converting many, he was accused in the reign of the emperor Domitian, imprisoned with two other saints, and beheaded in 96 CE. In 626 CE, his relics and those of two other saints had been collectively deposited in the abbey of St. Denis (the French form of Dionysius). Denis’ feast day became October 9 in the Catholic West, and October 3 in the Orthodox East, where he is still celebrated in one commemoration with Dionysius the Areopagite. More significantly from our viewpoint, in the early sixth century four important treatises and ten letters became linked with a fourth Dionysius, a Christian Neoplatonic theologian, who is now known as the pseudo-Dionysius, or, better, as the pseudo-Areopagite
(Ficino et al. 2015) p. viii
modern scholarship has demonstrated he was deeply indebted to the thought of Proclus (411-485 CE), the last of the great ancient non-Christian Neoplatonists. This Dionysius’ writings were first cited by Severus the Patriarch of Antioch between 518 and 528 CE; and in 532, at a colloquy at Constantinople, the Monophysites appealed to the writings, while attributing them, whether by guile or ignorance it is impossible to determine, to St. Paul’s Athenian convert. It is true that doubts had been voiced in late antiquity about the attribution of the writings, which, in addition to the Mystical Theology and the Divine Names, including the Celestial Hierarchy, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and ten letters, a collection that became known as the Corpus Dionysiacum or the Dionysiaca. Maximus the Confessor and the Lateran Council of 649 settled the question for a millennium by decreeing the apostolic and not the Proclian origin of the Corpus Dionysiacum and declaring instead that it was Proclus who had stolen Dionysius’ ideas and not the reverse. Henceforth, the prestige of this composite philosopher-theologian-saint and his identification with France’s St. Denis, along with the metaphysical and dialectical profundity of the writings attributed to him, made him and his proto-Proclian works central to the philosophy of the Middle Ages
(Ficino et al. 2015) p. ix, x
around 500, an otherwise unknown disciple of Proclus, under the name of Paul’s Athenian convert Denys the Areopagite, wrote treatises On the Divine Names and On Mystical Theology, which remain unmatched in their profound austerity by any other Christian work of contemplative literature. Many theories about the identity and aims of the Areopagite, who may have been a heretic, a champion of orthodoxy, a Christian apologist for philosophy, and the evangelist to the pagans or even a pagan of Christian sympathies
(Edwards 2000) p. lv
Pope Paul I (757-767) sent Greek books to the Frankish king, Pippin the Short, including Aristotle, Dionysius the Areopagite, grammar, geometry, and spelling
(Dodwell 1993) p. 66
in 827 CE the abbey of St. Denis received a manuscript of Dionysius’ work in Greek from King Louis the Pious, who had in turn received it as a gift from the Byzantine emperor Michael II. This donation effectively initiated the medieval West’s fascination with Dionysus (sic) and his theology
(Ficino et al. 2015) p. xxxiii
in the eyes of medieval men, the author of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius (who is also referred to as Denis, Denis the Areopagite, or Pseudo-Denis, and whom modern scholarship has been unable to identify) was a convert of St. Paul and a confidant of the Apostle. This accounts for the exceptional authority which this Christian disciple of Proclus enjoyed, although it is probable that he wrote at the beginning of the sixth century. In the version of John the Scot and others, the complicated works of Pseudo-Dionysius present a picture of the celestial world and a conception of the spiritual life that deeply influenced, in a variety of ways, the mentality of the Middle Ages. The doctor of the Celestial Hierarchy and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy presents 'a hierarchical world in which distinctions between its various levels are never obliterated,' where even intelligences are assigned a place, according to the schema that late Neoplatonism, with Denis the Areopagite as its first intermediary, communicated to the Middle Ages. In a system of hierarchical knowledge in which light descends from above, intellects turned themselves toward the supreme principle with a view toward divinization. Consequently the Areopagite is also the doctor of mystical theology
(Vignaux 1959) p. 20
Dionysius, known as Saint Denis, who, according to St. Gregory of Tours, was sent in the time of the Emperor Decius, in the third century, from Italy to France as missionary to its people; there he became the first bishop of Paris and Patron of the land. He is not to be confused with ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’ who was converted at Athens by St. Paul (Acts XVII, 34) in the first century. Nor was he the ‘Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’ whose (disputed) date may be about 500 AD, the author of theological treatises and letters famous in medieval days. The Emperor Louis the Pious commanded his arch-chaplain, Hilduin, to compose the Life of Saint Denis of France. Unfortunately, just at this time the Byzantine emperor, Michael II, sent to Louis a copy of the writings of the ‘Pseudo-Dionysius’, and in his Life of Saint Denis Hilduin most grievously mixed up the two men and their doings
(Duckett 1967) p. 258
Hilduin of Saint-Denis, who was responsible for the first translation of the Corpus Areopagiticum into Latin, also wrote a hagiographical account of the Passio sanctissimi Dionysii, in which the Areopagite was identified with Dionysius, bishop of Paris
(Pseudo-Dionysius 1987) p. 22
there is some Philosophical amusement in tracing the birth and progress of error. Till the beginning of the ixth Century the two Dionysii, of Athens, and of Paris, however adorned with imaginary trophies were carefully distinguished from each other in the Greek and in the Latin Churches. Under the reign of Lewis the son of Charlemagne, about the year 824, Hilduin Abbot of St. Denys resolved to confound them and to dignify the Gallican Church by assigning its origin not to an obscure Bishop of the third Century, but to a celebrated Philosopher of Athens who received his Mission from the Apostles themselves. As the genuine writers of Antiquity refused to countenance this opinion, Hilduin though he sometimes quoted and corrupted them found it necessary to create the works of Aristarchus of Visbius &c which existed only in his fancy or at the most in the suspicious archives of his convent. The zeal and correspondence of the Benedictine Monks spread the tale as far as Rome and Constantinople. It was published by Anastasius in the Latin, and by Methodius in the Greek tongue. From the East it was reverberated back into France with such an encrease of sound; it was so grateful to the ear of national vanity; that as early as the year 870, the famous Hincmar Archbishop of Rheims could scarcely persuade himself that there still existed any remains of incredulity. In the seventeenth century Sirmond the Jesuit and the indefatigable Launoy ventured to restore the long-lost distinction of the two Dionysii, and the Bigots after some struggle were reduced to silence
(Gibbon 1972) p. 319
after the cruel events that had ruined Abelard's life he had found refuge at St.-Denis during the gay and inefficient administration of Abbot Adam. Abelard facetiously announced a discovery that, from the point of view of St.-Denis, amounted to lèse majesté: he had chanced upon a passage in Bede according to which the titular Saint of the Abbey was not the same person as the famous Dionysius the Areopagite mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles and held to have been the first Bishop of Athens, but was identical with the more recent and far less famous Dionysius of Corinth. Abelard was accused as a traitor to the Crown, was thrown into prison, managed to escape, and sought shelter in the territory of Thibaut of Blois
(Panofsky 1955) p. 125
Denis, the so-called Pseudo-Areopagite, blends Neoplatonic philosophy with the magnificent theology of light in the Gospel of St. John, where the divine Logos is conceived as the true Light that shineth in darkness, by which all things were made, and that enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world. Upon this passage the Pseudo-Areopagite bases the edifice of his own thought. Creation is to him an act of illumination, but even the created universe could not exist without light. From this metaphysical concept of light, the Pseudo-Areopagite also deduced his epistemology. The creation is the self-revelation of God
(Simson 1988) p. 52
the Abbey of St.-Denis owed its ecclesiastical position to the fact that it preserved the relics of the saint and martyr who, in the third century, had converted France to Christianity and was hence revered as the patron of the royal house. But this St. Denis was held to be identical with an Eastern theologian who was one of the great mystical writers of the early Christian era and, in fact, of the Christian tradition – the second Denis, the Pseudo-Areopagite. Abelard dared to suggest that the Apostle of France was not the same person as the Areopagite
(Simson 1988) p. 103, 106
that mysterious Syrian disciple of Plotinus who had great prestige in the West under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite
(Pieper 1965) p. 82
a tally of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas has turned up almost seventeen hundred quotations from Dionysius Areopagitica
(Pieper 1962) p. 45
the Areopagite: this writer, probably a Syrian monk, whose literary activity seems to have taken place around the beginning of the sixth century, effectually concealed his identity under the name of St. Paul's convert, Dionysius the Areopagite, and by his references to Timothy and other personages connected with the Apostle, and to the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin, created the belief, at least in readers at a distance in space and time, that he was a witness to the teaching and way of thinking of the primitive church. The unknown writer not only concealed his identity very effectually from posterity, but also ensured for his writings, for more than a thousand years, a respect and an authority which they would certainly not otherwise have acquired, and in consequence, through a misapprehension without parallel in either sacred or profane literature, much of his teaching has become embedded in the theological tradition of the West. It was not till the last decade of the nineteenth century, when two scholars, working independently, proved beyond a doubt that the pseudo-Denis derived some of his doctrine from Proclus (410-485), that general agreement was reached as to the true date and climate of ideas of the anonymous author. It has been convincingly shown that the principal debt of Denis is to St. Gregory of Nyssa, and through him to Clement of Alexandria and Origen. The principal parts of the Dionysian legacy to the West were the negative and superlative theology, the strongly hierarchic conception of being, an elaborate angelology, and the doctrine of mediated illumination and spiritual knowledge conferred by the sacraments and by angelic ministration
(Knowles 1962) p. 55, 56, 57
Dionysius’ reputation, and that of the writings attributed to him, had been effectively secured forever by the distinction and accomplishments of his medieval interpreters. In the Eastern Church, the Corpus Dionysiacum came to be regarded indeed as the supreme summa theologica. In the Western Church, the Greek treatises were translated into Latin in the ninth century by Hilduin (ca. 838) and John Scotus Eriugena (ca. 862), in the twelfth, in part, by John the Saracen (ca. 1165), and in the thirteenth by Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1240)
(Ficino et al. 2015) p. xii, xiii
Denys the Areopagite had presented a bewildering problem to Western scholars before the time of Grosseteste. On the surface, his credentials were impeccable. It was universally agreed that the writer of the works which went under his name was the Athenian convert of St Paul, who had later become bishop of Paris and died a martyr’s death evangelizing Gaul. His shrine near Paris was the religious centre of Capetian France. His writings were believed to be the earliest Christian writings outside the Bible. His position, therefore, as a link with the Apostolic Age was unchallenged. The monks of St Denis and the kings of France who wished to glorify their patron saint, and theologians everywhere who wished to find their roots in Apostolic teaching, had every reason to promote the study of Denys’s writings. And yet, despite their labours, they had failed to stimulate interest in them. The reasons are not far to seek. Try as they might to torture the Greek into intelligible Latin, the language of those writings remained obscure, their doctrinal content was imprecise, and what was intelligible seemed perilously like heresy. They presented none of the clear statements of doctrine which could be used in the twelfth-century schools. They were too elusive and contorted in their piety to serve the purposes of public more private devotion. The calm and lucid mind of Hugh of St Victor had been able to extract from the most obviously useful and least puzzling of Denys’s works a full account of the nine orders of angels. This filled a gap in the spiritual cosmology of Christendom; but even here the main doctrine of angels had already been satisfactorily elucidated for the Latin world by Gregory the Great, who transmitted the Dionysian hierarchy with only one alteration [Gregory reverses the position of Virtues and Principalities.] Denys satisfied many of his deepest instincts. They provided the fullest account in Christian literature of the multifarious gradations of Being flowing out from God and carrying the imprint of the divine nature through all the subordinate orders of ministering spirits and earthly agents. They satisfied Grosseteste’s instinct for seeing order in a vast array of details, and they allowed him to make his own contribution to this order in developing his view of Light as the agent which carried the divine unity throughout the universe, penetrating the whole from the unchanging One to the manifold diversity of created beings. And, besides all this, Denys linked together the Greek and Latin Churches, the Apostolic age and the present day, Platonism and Christianity. Grosseteste was a natural Platonist who distrusted Plato. Denys provided a Platonism rooted in the Bible and in the Apostolic age – a Platonism that was wholly Christian. This was what Grosseteste as a scientist, philosopher and theologian most desired: the unity of God and Creation stamped with the authority of the earliest Church. He found it in Denys
(Southern 1986) p. 200, 201, 202, 203
Erigena is a voice in the wilderness; he knew Greek, he had read many of the Greek fathers, and he had translated the pseudo-Denis into Latin and developed a whole system of theology based on later Neoplatonism. He was the head of the palace school under Charles the Bald (c. 845)
(Knowles 1962) p. 77
Pseudo-Dionysius presents a sacramental universe in which material things have greater value, as channels, one might almost say flasks, for the transmission of divine reality
(Smalley 1964) p. 370
Dionysius the Areopagite mentioned in Acts 17.34
(MacCulloch 2010) p. 165
Dionysius the Areopagite drew on the thought of Neoplatonists in his exploration of how divinity could intimately combine with humanity through a progress in purging, illumination and union
(MacCulloch 2010) p. 439
despite official disapproval a large proportion of Proclus' output survived, and some of it was unexpectedly influential. It was not long before an unknown writer attempted the seemingly daunting task of reconciling Platonic metaphysics as expounded by him with the doctrines of Christianity. The author of this synthesis had the daring idea of passing it off as the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, the convert of St. Paul
(Wilson 1983) p. 41
an episode from Justinian's reign deserves mention. In 532 a convocation was held before the patriarch to deal with the doctrines of the heretic Severus. The authenticity of several documents brought forward as evidence was challenged. Hypatius, bishop of Ephesus, argued that Dionysius the Areopagite should not be cited, as the works attributed to him were not genuine. Although the forgery was produced c. 500 and had not had much time in which to acquire the status of a classic, this skepticism is extremely remarkable. There is practically no other trace of such an attitude until the Italian Renaissance, and the forger, who adapted Neoplatonic metaphysics to Christian needs, must be one of the most successful members of his profession ever to have existed. He ranks with the author of the Donation of Constantine
(Wilson 1983) p. 54
the earliest surviving letter of More describes his attendance at Grocyn's lectures in St. Paul's Cathedral. The lectures were on 'Dionysius the Areopagite'. 'Dionysius' – the pseudo-Dionysius – was a Christian Platonist of the sixth century who plagiarized Proclus; but since he was wrongly identified with the Dionysius whom St. Paul converted at Athens, his 'pious plagiarism', 'one of the most momentous in history', had become the fountainhead of Christian Platonism throughout the Middle Ages
(Trevor-Roper 1985) p. 31
in his works, the two fundamental ideas are those of hierarchy, according to which all things human and divine are arranged in a fixed order of authority, the underlying principles being taxis (order) and harmony, and mystery, the gap between human and divine and the consequent need for revelation through signs
(Cameron 1991) p. 214
Jean Daillé, 1549-1670, exposed Pseudo-Dionysius in a book published in 1666
(Burke 1969) p. 63
in the Greek East controversy flared occasionally around the corpus of Neoplatonic writings that were claimed to be by Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of the Apostle Paul. One Theodore, known only from a later summary of his work, argued in the sixth century against the sophisticated view that the work must be forged, since it was not cited by the fathers of the church, did not figure in Eusebius' lists of the writings of the fathers, treated in detail ecclesiastical traditions 'which grew up in the Church long after the death of the great Dionysius', and even mentioned Ignatius of Antioch, who died under Trajan, more than half a century after the time of the Apostles
(Grafton 1990) p. 22
though occasional doubts were also voiced in the Middle Ages, even as Dionysius remained one of the capstones of Christian orthodoxy, the debate about his dates was not energetically reopened until the Renaissance, when Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), in his pathbreaking Annotations to the New Testament, raised serious linguistic questions about the dating and thus the genuineness of the Corpus. Even so, the majority view prevailed for decades more, and such Quattrocento figures as Ficino and Pico fervently adhered to the traditional notions of Dionysius’ Pauline conversion and the first-century provenance and orthodoxy of the awe-inspiring treatises attributed to him. Finally, in 1895 there appeared, almost simultaneously, the independent findings of two distinguished philologists, Hugo Koch and Joseph Stiglmayr, who demonstrated incontestably that the author of the De divinis nominibus 4, section 19-35-was in fact extracting from Proclus’ treatise De malorum subsistentia. Establishing these sources and their contexts enabled other scholars in turn to situate the Dionysian oeuvre in the context of the fifth-century Monophysite controversy. In this late stage in the history of the Corpus Dionysiacum, Dionysius, the Athenian Areopagite of Acts 17.34, was at last clearly distinguished from his various namesakes and most important from the Neoplatonic Pseudo-Areopagite of late antiquity, and from the St. Denis of French hagiography (who lived, it now appears, in the third century). The works themselves were at this point definitively assigned to the Pseudo-Areopagite who flourished in the late fifth or early sixth century and was a Christian follower of Proclus
(Ficino et al. 2015) p. xi, xii
mysticism
mysticism became a major doctrinal force with the composition of the works that were published under the pseudonym of Dionysius the Areopagite, described in Acts 17.34 as one of the few Athenians who joined Paul and believed; arising about 500, probably in the Monophysite circles of Syria, the Dionysian corpus soon achieved wide acceptance as a subapostolic exposition of how the celestial hierarchy of God and the angels was related to the ecclesiastical hierarchy of bishops and priests with their sacraments; it was the Eucharist to which Dionysius devoted primary attention as the sacrament of deification
(Pelikan 1971) p. 344
Subscription to A Worlde of Wordes is FREE.
LINK to the Introduction to A Whirld of Words: A Reader's Commonplace Dictionary.
WORKS CITED
Burke, Peter (1969), The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold) 6 , 154.
Cameron, Averil (1991), Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press) xv, 261.
Dodwell, C. R. (1993), The Pictorial Arts of the West, 800-1200 (New Haven: Yale University Press) 461.
Duckett, Eleanor Shipley (1967), Death and Life in the Tenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press) x, 359.
Edwards, M. J. (2000), Neoplatonic Saints: The Lives of Plotinus and Proclus by Their Students (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press) lx, 150, 2 maps.
Eusebius (1989), The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, trans. G. A. Williamson (New York: Penguin) xxxix, 435.
Ficino, Marsilio, Allen, Michael J. B., and Pseudo-Dionysius (2015), On Dionysius the Areopagite, Vol. 1 (The I Tatti Renaissance Library; Cambridge: Harvard University Press) lxxi, 516.
Gibbon, Edward (1972), The English Essays of Edward Gibbon (Oxford: Clarendon Press) xix, 650.
Grafton, Anthony (1990), Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press) x, 157.
Knowles, David (1962), The Evolution of Medieval Thought (New York: Vintage Books) 356.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2010), Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking) xvii, 1161, 32 p. of pl.
Panofsky, Erwin (1955), Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday) xviii p., 1 l., 362.
Pelikan, Jaroslav (1971), The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) xxiii, 394.
Pieper, Josef (1962), Guide to Thomas Aquinas (New York: Pantheon Books) 181.
--- (1965), The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays (Henry Regnery) 122.
Pseudo-Dionysius (1987), Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press) ix, 312.
Simson, Otto Georg von (1988), The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order (3rd edn.; Princeton: Princeton University Press) xxiii, 282, 51 p. of pl.
Smalley, Beryl (1964), The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press) xxii, 406.
Southern, R. W. (1986), Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe (New York: Oxford University Press) xii, 337.
Trevor-Roper, H. R. (1985), Renaissance Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) viii, 312.
Vignaux, Paul (1959), Philosophy in the Middle Ages: An Introduction (New York: Meridian Books) 223.
Wilson, Nigel Guy (1983), Scholars of Byzantium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) vii, 283.