Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

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Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is the name modern scholarship gives to the anonymous author of a small body of Greek theological writings produced around the year 500, who signed them as Dionysius the Areopagite — the Athenian named in the Book of Acts as a convert of Paul. The works claim, in passing, to come from a man of the first century. They could not have. They draw openly on the late Neoplatonist Proclus, who died in 485, and quote a liturgy that did not exist in apostolic times. The author’s real name, place, and life are unknown, and may stay that way.

The corpus is short: four treatises and ten letters. The Divine Names asks how the unnameable God can be spoken of at all. The Mystical Theology — a handful of pages, the most influential of them — argues that the highest knowledge of God is reached by stripping every name and concept away, until thought falls silent before what exceeds it. The Celestial Hierarchy ranks the angels in nine orders, the arrangement Western art and imagination would inherit, and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy mirrors that order in the church’s rites. Throughout, the structure is the Neoplatonist one: all things proceed from God and return to him, by degrees, through intermediate ranks.

What the texts contribute is a disciplined way of unsaying. The author held that God is beyond being, beyond goodness, beyond every affirmation a mind can form — so that the truest theology proceeds by denial, each negation itself finally negated, leaving not a concept but a darkness brighter than light. This is the via negativa, the negative or apophatic way, which the author inherited from the Neoplatonists and made his own by systematizing it for Christian theology.

The borrowed name succeeded completely. For roughly a thousand years the writings were read as the work of Paul’s disciple, carrying very nearly apostolic authority; they were translated into Latin in the ninth century and stitched into the theology of the medieval West. Thomas Aquinas cites them constantly. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing worked directly in their wake. Only in the Renaissance did humanist scholars begin to doubt the attribution, and the case is now settled. The doubt cost the texts none of their force; theologians went on reading them, knowing the name was not the man’s.

It is a strange standing for a body of work — central to Christian mysticism, foundational to how the tradition learned to speak of the ineffable, and written by someone who chose to disappear behind a name from Scripture. Whether the disguise was reverence, modesty, or a bid for a hearing he might not otherwise have won is among the things the writings do not say. What they left is a method for approaching what cannot be said, and the silence at the end of it.

→ In the library: Parker — The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (1899) · The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912) — its Dionysian source

→ Related: Neoplatonism · The One · Emanation · Gnosis · Hugh Of Saint Victor · Bonaventure