The Treatises and Letters

The Corpus Areopagiticum consists of four treatises — The Divine Names, The Mystical Theology, The Celestial Hierarchy, and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy — together with ten Letters. This file lays out the structure of that whole: what each work treats, how the author cross-references them, the works he claims to have written but that do not survive, and the great organizing movement of procession and return that gives the Corpus its architecture and its place at the head of the Christian mystical tradition.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (the Corpus Areopagiticum)

The Shape of the Whole

The Corpus that survives under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite is a small library of remarkable density: four treatises of widely differing length and ten letters, the whole occupying a single modern volume (the Luibheid–Rorem translation, 1987, runs to some three hundred pages including apparatus). Its author conceived it as an ordered body of teaching, not a collection of occasional pieces. He refers from one treatise to another, presupposes that the reader will take them in a particular sequence, and frames the entire enterprise as the unfolding of the names and manifestations of God — from the highest theology of the Trinity, down through the names drawn from creation, into the angelic and ecclesiastical orders, and back up through negation into silence (Rorem 1993; Louth 1989).

The four extant treatises are best understood not as independent works but as movements of one argument. The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology form the theological core — the naming of God and the un-naming of God. The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy form the hierarchical pair — the orders of heaven and the orders of the Church through which the divine light is mediated to creation (see The Hierarchies). The ten Letters function as appendix and key, applying and condensing the teaching of the treatises in shorter compass.

The Divine Names

The Divine Names (Peri theiōn onomatōn), in thirteen chapters, is the longest treatise and the cataphatic heart of the Corpus. It asks how the unknowable God may nonetheless be named, and answers that God is named from his effects — from the perfections that proceed from him into creation and bear witness to their source. The names Scripture gives to God — Good, Being, Life, Wisdom, Power, Beautiful, Love, and the rest — are treated each in turn as a “procession” (proodos) of the divine into the created order, a ray of the One that can be praised and contemplated (Divine Names 1–13; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). The treatise is explicitly the positive, affirmative theology that the Mystical Theology will then negate (the two are read together in The Divine Names). At its head stands the insistence that all such naming is governed by Scripture: the theologian may praise God only by the names “the sacred writers” have revealed (Divine Names 1.1–4; Luibheid–Rorem 1987).

The Mystical Theology

The Mystical Theology (Peri mystikēs theologias) is, by contrast, the briefest of the four — five short chapters, a handful of pages — and the summit of the whole. Where the Divine Names ascends through affirmation, the Mystical Theology descends into negation: it strips away every name, every concept, every affirmation and even every denial, until the mind, “renouncing all that the mind may conceive,” passes “into the darkness of unknowing” where God is met beyond knowledge (Mystical Theology 1.1–3; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). Its compression is deliberate; it is the apex toward which the longer treatises climb (it is read in full in The Mystical Theology). Its influence, out of all proportion to its length, founded the apophatic tradition of Christian mysticism East and West.

The Two Hierarchies

The Celestial Hierarchy (Peri tēs ouranias hierarchias), in fifteen chapters, sets out the nine ranks of the angelic world arranged in three triads — Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominions, Powers, Authorities; Principalities, Archangels, Angels — through which the divine illumination is passed down from God to the lowest orders and so to humanity (Celestial Hierarchy 6–9; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). It is the source of the standard Christian ordering of the angels (see The Celestial Hierarchy). The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (Peri tēs ekklēsiastikēs hierarchias), in seven chapters, presents the Church’s sacraments (above all Baptism, the Eucharist or “Synaxis,” and the consecration of the chrism) and its orders of clergy and laity as the earthly image and continuation of the heavenly hierarchy — the means by which the same divine light reaches embodied human beings through sensible signs (Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 1–7; Luibheid–Rorem 1987; see The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy). Together the two hierarchies describe a single mediated cosmos: one light, descending in ordered ranks from the Source through the angels to the Church.

The Ten Letters

The ten Letters close the Corpus and form a deliberate ascending sequence of recipients, from a monk to a bishop to an apostle. The first four, to the monk Gaius, treat the divine darkness, unknowing, and — in the much-discussed Letter 4 — the Christology of the Incarnate Word, who “did things human in a way that surpasses the human,” a phrase that would become central to the Christological controversies the Corpus later entered (Letter 4; Luibheid–Rorem 1987; see Maximus and the Scholia). Letter 7 addresses Polycarp and contains the claim to have witnessed, with Apollophanes at Heliopolis, the darkening of the sun at the Crucifixion (Letter 7.2; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). Letter 8, to the monk Demophilus, is a sharp lesson on order and the limits of zeal. The eighth and ninth treat symbolic theology; the tenth and last is addressed to “John the Theologian, apostle and evangelist,” exiled on Patmos — placing the apostle John himself within the dramatic frame of the persona (Letter 10; Luibheid–Rorem 1987; see The Name and the Corpus).

The Works That Do Not Survive

The Corpus repeatedly refers to other treatises by its author that are not extant. He names a Theological Outlines (or Theological Representations), said to treat the Trinity and the names proper to the whole Godhead; a Symbolic Theology, on the sensible and corporeal images of God in Scripture; and works On the Soul, On the Properties and Ranks of the Angels, and On the Just and Divine Judgment, among others (Divine Names 1.8; 13.4; Mystical Theology 3; Celestial Hierarchy 15.6; Luibheid–Rorem 1987). [Disputed: whether these works ever existed is unresolved — some scholars hold that they were genuinely written and lost; others, more commonly, that at least several are fictional, part of the persona's self-presentation as the author of a vast and coherent system, designed to lend the surviving treatises the appearance of summaries drawn from a larger whole (Rorem 1993; Louth 1989)]. Either way, the references function within the Corpus to situate the extant treatises as the apex of a larger architecture: the most general theology in the lost Outlines, the most concrete in the lost Symbolic Theology, and the Divine Names and Mystical Theology as the pivot between them.

Procession and Return

The organizing logic that binds these works is the great Neoplatonic rhythm of procession (proodos) and return (epistrophē), baptized into Christian use. All things proceed from God as from their Source — the divine goodness pouring itself out into being, life, mind, the angelic ranks, the Church, the sensible world — and all things return to God as to their End, drawn back up the same ladder by love and illumination (Divine Names 4; Celestial Hierarchy 1.1–3; Louth 1989; Rorem 1993). The Corpus maps both arcs. The cataphatic theology of the Divine Names and the descending order of the two hierarchies trace the procession, God’s outflow into the named and ranked world; the apophatic theology of the Mystical Theology traces the return, the mind’s ascent back through negation into the darkness of union (see Negation and Union). To read the Corpus in order is to follow that double movement — down into the world of names and ranks, and up again into the silence beyond them. This dependence on the structure of Neoplatonism, and specifically on Proclus, is at once the source of the Corpus’s power and the chief evidence for its late date (see The Pseudo-Dionysius Problem).

See Also

References

  • Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. (The four treatises and ten Letters; Divine Names 1–13; Mystical Theology 1–5; Celestial Hierarchy 6–9, 15; Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 1–7; the references to lost works at Divine Names 1.8, 13.4, Mystical Theology 3; the Letters to Gaius, Polycarp, Demophilus, John the Theologian.)
  • Rorem, Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (The architecture of the Corpus; the question of the lost works; procession and return.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Denys the Areopagite. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989. (The structure and reading-order of the Corpus; the Neoplatonic framework.)