A Biography of Pseudo-Dionysysius (650 - 725).

A Biography of Pseudo-Dionysysius (650 - 725).

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, (flourished c. 500), probably a Syrian monk who, known only by his pseudonym, wrote a series of Greek treatises and letters for the purpose of uniting Neo-Platonism philosophy with Christian theology and mystical experience. These writings established a definite Neo-Platonism trend in a large segment of medieval Christian doctrine and spirituality—especially in the Western Latin 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 Neo-Platonism system of the 5th-century Athenian Proclus.

Original Dionysius the Areopagite was a figure mentioned in the New Testament as being converted by St. Paul's preaching in Rome. Pseudo-Dionysius maintained the fiction in his writings of their being addressed to Timothy, the addressee of two of St. Paul's Epistles. In the Middle Ages Dionysius and Pseudo-Dionysius were thought to be the same person, and in addition were identified with St. Denis, a third-century missionary who was martyred in France. The tangle of identities was not resolved until the nineteenth century, the delay being mostly due to obliviousness to the historicity of things which pervaded medieval thought.

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 10 letters affecting a 1st-century primitive Christian atmosphere. Their doctrinal content forms a complete theology, covering the Trinity and angelic world, the incarnation and redemption, and the last things, and provides a symbolic and mystical explanation of all that is. God’s transcendence above all rational comprehension and categorical knowledge ultimately reduces any expression of the divinity to polar pairs of contraries: grace and judgment, freedom and necessity, being and nonbeing, time and eternity. The incarnation of the Word, 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 can 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.