DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE

DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE. 1) According to Acts 17 he is one of the few converts won by Paul’s preaching at the Areopagus before the altar of the Unknown God, and by tradition the patron saint of the city of Athens.

2) An anonymous Syrian (of whom we know nothing certain) who sometime around A.D. 500 used this name as a pseudonym for the writing of a corpus consisting of four extant treatises, the Mystical Theology, the Divine Names, the Celestial Hierarchy, and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, together with ten “Epistles,” a body of work that would enjoy an immensely important role in both the Greek and Latin Middle Ages. The works of Dionysius (or “Pseudo”-Dionysius) are marked by the deep impress of 5th-c. Neoplatonism (q.v.), although they are equally influenced by the Cappadocians, the liturgical commentaries of the 4th and 5th c., Clement and Origen of Alexandria, and perhaps Evagrius of Pontus (qq.v.).

Accepted as much for their profundity as for their subapostolic pseudonym, the Dionysian works left a deep impression on such subsequent writers as Maximus the Confessor, Joh n of Damascus, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory Palamas, and Nicholas Cabasilas (qq.v.). Dionysius was particularly valued for the primacy he accorded apophatic theology, though his works on the hierarchies-a term he appears to have invented-are probably at least as influential, as much for their effect on church architecture and liturgical piety as on theology (qq.v.) per se. Work on his possible relation to the tradition of the Syriac Church (qq.v.) has been slower to develop, although significant discoveries may await researchers in that area.