PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE (547)

PSEUDO-DENIS THE AREOPAGITE.

Probably a Syrian monk who known only by his pseudonym wrote a series of Greek treatises and letters for the purpose of uniting Neoplatonic philosophy with Christian theology and mystical experience.

These writings established a definite Neoplatonic trend in a large segment of medieval Christian doctrine and spirituality -especially in the Western Latinn Church- that has determined facets of its religious and devotional character to the present time.

Historical research has been unable to identify the author who having assumed the name of the New Testament convert of St. Paul (Acts 17:34) could have been one of several Christian writers familiar with the Neoplatonic system of the 5th-century Athenian Proclus.

The treatises On the Divine Names, On Mystical Theology, On the Celestial Hierarchy and On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy comprise the bulk of the Dionysian corpus of writings, supplemented with ten letters affecting a 1st-century primitive Christian atmosphere. Their doctrinal content forms a complete theology from the Trinity and angelic world through the incarnation and redemption to the last things and provides a symbolic and mystical explanation of all that is.

The system is essentially dialectical or "crisis" (from the Greek word meaning crossroads, decision), theology, the simultaneous affirmation and denial of paradox in any statement or concept relative to God. God´s transcendence above all rational comprehension and categorical knowledge ultimately reduces any expression of the dininity to polar pairs of contraries: grace and judgement, freedom and necessity, being and nonbeing, time and eternity. The incarnaton (enfleshment) of the World, or Son of God, in Christ, consequently was the expression in the universe of the inexpressible whereby the One enters into the world of multiplicity. Still the human intellect cann apply to God positive, analogous terms or names such as The Good, Unity, Trinity, Beauty, Love, Being, Life, Wisdom or Intelligence assuming that these are limited forms of communicating the incommunicable.

Such dialectic is an exact reflection of the Neoplatonic thought of Proclus. The Divine Names and Mystical Theology treat the nature and effects of contemplative player -the discilined abandonment of senses and intelligible forms to prepare for the immediate experience of light from the divine darkness and ecstatic union- in a manner and scope that make them indispensable to the history of Christian theology and piety.

The author displays more theory than practice, more abstract speculation than symbolic expression of personal mystical experience. His treatises on the hierarchies wherein he theorized that all that exists -the form of Christian society, the stages of prayer and the angelic world- are structured as triads that are the images of the eternal Trinity, introduced a new meaning for the term hierarchy.

The key Neoplatonic principle that good is diffusive of itself or that absolute good must communicate itself and cause greater participation in its own goodness, logically concludes that creation in neccessary. This theorem evokes the perennial Christian Neoplatonic dilemma that Dionysius tried to meet: how to reconcile an apparent necessity on God´s part to create with the basic proposition that divine freedom is inviolable. Neverless, the axiom that creation is the outgoing expression of God and must eventually return to him (the Latin existus-reditus principle) exerted the deepest fascination for medieval Scholastic theologians and together with the concept of evil as the absence of or distance from good provide writers of the Latin Church with the basic structure for their various theologies and spiritualities.

Bede the Venerable in 8th-century England, the 9th-century Irish philosopher-humanist John Scotus Erigena, the 12th-and 13th-century Scolastics Hugh of St. Victor (Paris), Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, the 14th-and 15th-century Rhineland and Flemish mystics and the 16th-century Spanish nystics all were influenced by Dionysian thought.

Writers of the Greek and Eastern churches already sympathetic toward Platonic thought, simply absorbed the Dionysian corpus in their theologies as one element among others of this intellectual school. Such syntheses were effected by Gregory of Nazianzus and other 4th-century résumé of Maximus the Confessor and the works of the 14th-century mystic Gregory Palamas.