Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

A Borrowed Name, an Ordered Heaven

Earliest record
528 CEThe corpus is datable only by what it borrows and by who first quotes it. In 1895 Hugo Koch and Josef Stiglmayr showed independently that the treatment of evil in On the Divine Names 4.18-35 reworks Proclus's De malorum subsistentia, so the author writes after Proclus's death in 485. Severus of Antioch and his party cite the corpus between 518 and 528, the firm terminus being the date of the Syriac translation of the Severan work in which the citations stand. The first dated public appearance is the Collatio cum Severianis at Constantinople in 532, where the Severan bishops quoted Letter 4 on Christ's single theandric activity and Hypatius of Ephesus denied the authenticity of what they quoted, on the ground that no Father or council had ever cited it. Older reference literature, including the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia, dates that colloquy 533; modern scholarship dates it 532.
Said to date from
the 50s CEasserted by The corpus itself, which signs as Dionysius, addresses its treatises to Timothy and its letters to Gaius, Dorotheus, Sosipater, Polycarp, Demophilus, Titus and John on Patmos, and in Letter 7 claims that the author watched from Heliopolis the eclipse at the Crucifixion. The identification with the Athenian of Acts 17:34 was defended in the East from the sixth century and held in the Latin West until Valla. The 50s are the conversion at Athens, used here only to place the claimed author on a timeline; the corpus itself implies a later date of writing, since Letter 10 addresses John on Patmos.

The claim is about 500 years older than the evidence.

He coined the word 'hierarchy'. Valla doubted his apostolic name in 1457; it fell in 1895, when Koch and Stiglmayr traced his doctrine of evil to Proclus, who died in 485.

Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 16-19; Hugo Koch, Philologus 54 (1895), pp. 442-458; Josef Stiglmayr, Historisches Jahrbuch 16 (1895), pp. 253-273 and 721-748

Anonymous Greek author of c. 500 who wrote as Dionysius, Paul's Athenian convert of Acts 17:34.

More context

Four Greek treatises and ten letters appeared in the early sixth century signed by Dionysius the Areopagite, whom Paul converted at Athens (Acts 17:34). Severan bishops quoted them at the Constantinople colloquy of 532, where Hypatius of Ephesus questioned the passage, since Cyril and Athanasius would surely have used it. It did not stick: John of Scythopolis wrote scholia defending the corpus between 532 and about 548. Valla doubted the attribution by 1457, Erasmus from 1504; in 1895 Hugo Koch and Josef Stiglmayr traced On the Divine Names to Proclus, who died in 485. The Celestial Hierarchy ranks the angels in three triads of three — the scheme Aquinas systematised, Dante versified and Agrippa tabulated in 1533. All nine names are scriptural; the ranking, and the word hierarchy, are his.

Light

The Mystical Theology gave the West its language of unknowing; the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing names Saint Denis as its authority.

Shadow

His Ecclesiastical Hierarchy made rank a channel of grace. Luther wrote in 1520 that he platonises more than he christianises.

Sources13 sources

Primary source

  • Martin Luther, De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium, 1520, WA 6:562Luther's judgement that Dionysius platonises more than he christianises, and his open doubt about who the author was.
  • Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, trans. "J.F.", Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1651, Book III, ch. 10 ('Of Divine emanations, which the Hebrews call Numerations, others attributes; The gentiles gods and Deities; and of the ten Sephiroths')That Renaissance occult philosophy set one angelic order beside each of the ten sephiroth, taking the nine ranks in the Dionysian order and adding a tenth of blessed souls - the route by which the scheme entered later English-language occultism.
  • Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, 1987, trans. Colm Luibheid with Paul Rorem, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987); The Celestial Hierarchy chs 6-9; Letter 7 (to Polycarp); The Mystical Theology chs 1 and 5The contents of the corpus and its pseudonymous signature; the arrangement of the nine angelic orders into three triads at Celestial Hierarchy chs 6-9, with each of the nine names taken from scripture; the author's claim in Letter 7 to have observed at Heliopolis the eclipse at the Crucifixion; and the apophatic vocabulary of The Mystical Theology, which ends by denying the denials as well as the affirmations.
  • Anonymous (ed. Patrick J. Gallacher), The Cloud of Unknowing, TEAMS Middle English Texts, 1997, Rochester: Medieval Institute PublicationsThat the fourteenth-century English apophatic tradition names its debt to Dionysius explicitly, so the Mystical Theology's vocabulary is demonstrably in use in vernacular devotion.

Scholarship

  • Josef Stiglmayr, Der Neuplatoniker Proklus als Vorlage des sogenannten Dionysius Areopagita in der Lehre vom Uebel, Historisches Jahrbuch 16, 1895, pp. 253-73 and 721-48That the doctrine of evil in On the Divine Names depends on Proclus's De malorum subsistentia, which places the author after Proclus's death in 485 and makes the apostolic attribution untenable.
  • Hugo Koch, Proklus als Quelle des Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita in der Lehre vom Boesen, Philologus 54, 1895, pp. 442-458 (DOI 10.1524/phil.1895.54.14.442)The same demonstration of Proclan dependence, reached independently of Stiglmayr in the same year.
  • Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism (The Presence of God, vol. 1), 1991, New York: CrossroadThe place of the Dionysian corpus in the formation of Western Christian mysticism and the standard account of its transmission.
  • Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, ed. Vittoria Perrone Compagni, De occulta philosophia libri tres, 1992, Leiden: Brill; Book III, ch. 10That the sephirothic correspondence chapter belongs to the 1533 Cologne print rather than to the 1510 draft, so the tabulation is dated to 1533 on the critical edition rather than on the 1651 English translation.
  • Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, 2nd ed., 2007, Oxford: Oxford University PressThe line of dependence running from Platonism through Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and Evagrius to Dionysius, and the limits of the claim that the corpus is simply Neoplatonism in Christian dress.
  • Mark Edwards, Dimitrios Pallis and Georgios Steiris (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite, 2022, Oxford: Oxford University Press; ISBN 9780198810797The current scholarly consensus that the corpus was written about 500 CE by an author who was not the Areopagite of Acts 17:34; the state of the question on its genesis and its Syriac reception; and the editing of the Greek by John of Scythopolis, whose scholia accompany the surviving manuscript tradition.
  • Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence, 1993, pp. 10, 12, 16-19That the author coined the word 'hierarchy'; that Hypatius challenged the authority of the cited text around 532; that Valla's doubts date from 1457; the Mystical Theology's 'beyond every denial, beyond every assertion'.

    Few writers have ever coined a new word with a broader history

  • Sergei Mariev, Hypatios of Ephesos and Ps.-Dionysios Areopagites (Byzantinische Zeitschrift 107/1), 2014, pp. 113-138That at the Collatio cum Severianis in spring 532 Hypatius questioned only the passage the Severans cited, not the whole corpus, and otherwise held Dionysius in esteem.

    questioned the attribution of only one specific passage to Ps.-Dionysios

The tradition itself

  • Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology, chs 1 and 5 (c. 500)The reading on this entry: God beyond every assertion and every denial, reached by unknowing in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.