Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

Four treatises and ten letters survive under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian mentioned in Acts as having been converted by Paul's preaching at the Areopagus. The writings themselves reinforce the claim: they address a Timothy, refer to a Paul as the writer's teacher, and mention witnessing the eclipse at the crucifixion.

If the ascription were true these would be apostolic documents, and for a thousand years they were treated very nearly as such. That authority is the reason the corpus shaped medieval theology as thoroughly as it did: to disagree with Dionysius was to disagree with a disciple of Paul. In the Latin West the works acquired a second layer of prestige when they were confused with the patron saint of France, and Eriugena translated them at the Frankish court.

Doubts appeared with Renaissance philology, Valla and Erasmus among the doubters, and the case is now closed. The writings quote and paraphrase the Neoplatonist Proclus, who died in 485; they presuppose liturgical practices of the late fifth century; and they were first cited in a controversy of 532. The author is therefore writing around 500, probably in Syria, and used a pseudonym in the accepted manner of the period. Who he was has never been established, and the many identifications proposed have all failed. The atlas holds him under the name he chose, since it is the only one anyone has.

The Divine Names works through the titles scripture gives to God, goodness, being, life, wisdom, and shows in each case how the word applies and how it fails. The Mystical Theology, which is a few pages long, then removes them. God is not soul, not intellect, not number, not order, not greatness, not equality, not eternity, not divinity, not goodness, not spirit as we understand spirit; and finally the denials themselves must be denied, because negation is still a statement made by a mind. What is left is what he calls the divine darkness, into which Moses enters on the mountain, a darkness which is dark by excess of light.

That is the classical statement of the negative way, and everything in the Western and Eastern mystical traditions that proceeds by unknowing runs back to these pages: Eriugena, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, Eckhart, John of the Cross, and by another route Maximus the Confessor and the whole Byzantine tradition.

The other half of the corpus is the opposite in temper and equally influential. The Celestial Hierarchy arranges the angels in nine ranks in three triads, seraphim and cherubim and thrones at the summit, and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy sets the church's orders in a corresponding pattern, so that being flows down through ranks and returns upward through them. The nine choirs of angels in Western art and liturgy are his, and so is a great deal of medieval thinking about ordered mediation.