Works The surviving corpus comprises: •
Divine Names (''''); •
Celestial Hierarchy (
); •
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (''''); •
Mystical Theology (''''), "a brief but powerful work that deals with negative or apophatic theology and in which theology becomes explicitly '
mystical' for the first time in history"; • Ten
epistles. Seven other works are mentioned repeatedly by pseudo-Dionysius in his surviving works, and are presumed either to be lost or to be fictional works mentioned by the Areopagite as a literary device to give the impression to his sixth-century readers of engaging with the surviving fragments of a much larger first-century corpus of writings. These seven other works are: •
Theological Outlines (''''), •
Symbolic Theology (''''), •
On Angelic Properties and Orders (''''), •
On the Just and Divine Judgement (''''), •
On the Soul (''''), •
On Intelligible and Sensible Beings, •
On the Divine Hymns.
Dating • In the
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy Dionysius twice seems to allude to the recitation of the Creed in the course of the liturgy (
EH 3.2 and 3.III.7). It is often asserted that
Peter the Fuller first mandated the inclusion of the
Nicene Creed in the liturgy in 476, thus providing an earliest date for the composition of the Corpus. Bernard Capelle argues that it is far more likely that
Timothy, patriarch of Constantinople, was responsible for this liturgical innovation, around 515—thus suggesting a later date for the Corpus. • It is often suggested that because Dionysius seems to eschew divisive
Christological language, he was probably writing after the
Henoticon of
Zeno was in effect, sometime after 482. It is also possible that Dionysius eschewed traditional Christological formulae in order to preserve an overall apostolic ambience for his works, rather than because of the influence of the
Henoticon. Also, given that the
Henoticon was rescinded in 518, if Dionysius was writing after this date, he may have been untroubled by this policy. Another widely cited latest date for Dionysius' writing comes in 532, when, in a report on a colloquy held between two groups (
dyophysite and
miaphysite) debating the decrees of the
Council of Chalcedon,
Severus of Antioch and his miaphysite supporters cited Dionysius' Fourth Letter in defence of their view. It is possible that pseudo-Dionysius was himself a member of this group, though debate continues over whether his writings do in fact reveal a miaphysite understanding of Christ. It seems likely that the writer was located in Syria, as revealed, for example, by the accounts of the sacramental rites he gives in
The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which seem only to bear resemblance to Syriac rites.
Authorship The author pseudonymously identifies himself in the corpus as "Dionysios", portraying himself as the figure of
Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of
Paul the Apostle mentioned in Acts 17:34. Various legends existed surrounding the figure of Dionysius, who became emblematic of the spread of the gospel to the Greek world. A tradition quickly arose that he became the first bishop of Cyprus or of Milan, or that he was the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews; according to Eusebius, he was also said to be the first bishop of Athens. It is therefore not surprising that that author of these works would have chosen to adopt the name of this otherwise briefly mentioned figure. The authorship of the Dionysian Corpus was initially disputed; Severus and his party affirmed its apostolic dating, largely because it seemed to agree with their Christology. This dating was disputed by
Hypatius of Ephesus, who met the monophysite party during the 532 meeting with Emperor
Justinian I; Hypatius denied its authenticity on the ground that none of the Fathers or Councils ever cited or referred to it. Hypatius condemned it along with the Apollinarian texts, distributed during the Nestorian controversy under the names of Pope Julius and Athanasius, which the monophysites entered as evidence supporting their position. The first defense of its authenticity is undertaken by
John of Scythopolis, whose commentary, the
Scholia (), on the Dionysian Corpus constitutes the first defense of its apostolic dating, wherein he specifically argues that the work is neither Apollinarian nor a forgery, probably in response both to monophysites and Hypatius—although even he, given his unattributed citations of Plotinus in interpreting Dionysius, might have known better. Dionysius' authenticity is criticized later in the century, and defended by
Theodore of Raithu; and by the 7th century, it is taken as demonstrated, affirmed by both
Maximus the Confessor and the
Lateran Council of 649. From that point until the Renaissance, the authorship was less questioned, though
Thomas Aquinas,
Peter Abelard and
Nicholas of Cusa expressed suspicions about its authenticity; their concerns were generally ignored. The Florentine humanist
Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457), in his 1457 commentaries on the
New Testament, did much to establish that the author of the
Corpus Areopagiticum could not have been St. Paul's convert, though he was unable to identify the actual historical author.
William Grocyn pursued Valla's lines of textual criticism, and Valla's critical viewpoint of the authorship of the highly influential
Corpus was accepted and publicized by
Erasmus from 1504 onward, for which he was criticized by Catholic theologians. In the
Leipzig disputation with
Martin Luther, in 1519,
Johann Eck used the
Corpus, specifically the
Angelic Hierarchy, as argument for the apostolic origin of
papal supremacy, pressing the Platonist analogy, "as above, so below". During the 19th century Catholic historians too came generally to accept that the author must have lived after the time of
Proclus. The author became known as 'Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite' only after the philological work of J. Stiglmayr and H. Koch, whose papers, published independently in 1895, demonstrated the thoroughgoing dependence of the
Corpus upon Proclus. Both showed that Dionysius had used, in his treatise on evil in Chapter 4 of
The Divine Names, the
De malorum subsistentia of Proclus. Dionysius' identity is still disputed. Corrigan and Harrington find pseudo-Dionysius to be most probably... Ronald Hathaway provides a table listing most of the major identifications of Dionysius: e.g.,
Ammonius Saccas,
Pope Dionysius of Alexandria,
Peter the Fuller, Dionysius the Scholastic,
Severus of Antioch,
Sergius of Reshaina, unnamed Christian followers of everyone from
Origen to
Basil of Caesarea,
Eutyches to
Proclus. In the past half-century, Alexander Golitzin,
Georgian academician
Shalva Nutsubidze and
Belgian professor Ernest Honigmann have all proposed identifying pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite with
Peter the Iberian. A more recent identification is with
Damascius, the last scholarch of the
Neoplatonic Academy of Athens. There is therefore no current scholarly consensus on the question of pseudo-Dionysius' identification. The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy claims: Other scholars such as
Bart D. Ehrman disagree, see for example
Forged. While pseudo-Dionysius can be seen as a communicator of tradition, he can also be seen as a polemicist, who tried to alter Neo-Platonic tradition in a novel way for the Christian world that would make notions of complicated Divine Hierarchies more of an emphasis than notions of direct relationship with the figure of Christ as Mediator. Some modern scholars, including recent contributor
Evangelos Nikitopoulos, Romanian professor
Dumitru Stăniloae, and English translator
John Parker, argue in favor of a traditional composition date in the late first to early second century. Their case draws upon harmonizations with alleged anachronisms, contemporary lexical parallels and idiosyncrasies, and internal literary and historical consistency. Most significant are the pre-Proclean references to the corpus by figures such as
John Chrysostom and
Juvenal of Jerusalem, and especially by members of the
Alexandrian tradition—
Pantaenus,
Origen,
Gregory Nazianzus, and
Jerome—who demonstrate familiarity with the
Corpus Dionysiacum. Even
Proclus himself, who admitted to "summariz[ing] the observations rightly made... by some of our predecessors" such as Origen, appears to cite an external source for the
euphemism "flowers and supersubstantial lights"—a phrase explicitly found only in Dionysius. Linguistic analyses further suggest that nearly two-thirds of Dionysius' terminology lacks precedent in any known pre-sixth-century Christian or Neoplatonic text, while another quarter can be traced to ante-Nicene philosophical sources such as Platonic dialogues. Nikitopoulos argues that this primitive theological vocabulary aligns with the intellectual profile reconstructed for another second-century Eastern convert with a pagan Greek education:
Justin Martyr. ==Thought==