The Corpus in Orthodox Theology

In the Christian East the Corpus never moved from the center. From the sixth century to the present it has been a foundation of Orthodox mystical and liturgical theology: the source of the apophatic approach to God, the framework for reading the Divine Liturgy as the earthly enactment of the heavenly worship, a wellspring of the theology of the icon and the symbol, and — through Maximus and Palamas — a pillar of dogma. This file traces that continuous and foundational presence, down to its retrieval by the modern Orthodox theologians.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (the Corpus Areopagiticum)

A Continuous Centrality

Where the Western reception of the Corpus rose with the medieval schools and then receded when the pseudonym was exposed, the Eastern reception has been continuous and central from the sixth century to the present (see The Influence on the West). The reason lies in the manner of the Corpus’s reception in the East: it was absorbed, scholiated, and woven into the dogmatic and liturgical fabric of the tradition by Maximus the Confessor and the Byzantine Fathers, so that its theology became not a discrete authority to be invoked but a constitutive layer of Orthodox thought itself (see Maximus and the Scholia; Louth 1989; Golitzin 1994). To read Orthodox theology is, in large part, to read a tradition that has internalized the Areopagite.

The Apophatic Foundation

The Corpus gave the Christian East its classic articulation of apophatic theology, and that apophaticism became a defining feature of Orthodox thought about God. The conviction that God in his essence is radically unknowable — that all theology must finally pass beyond affirmation and negation into the silence of union — runs from the Mystical Theology through Maximus and John of Damascus into the whole Byzantine tradition and on into modern Orthodoxy (see Negation and Union). The twentieth-century theologian Vladimir Lossky made Dionysian apophaticism the very starting-point of his influential Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, presenting the negative way not as one method among others but as the characteristic Eastern approach to the knowledge of God (Lossky 1944/1957; Louth 1989). The Orthodox insistence that God is known in his energies but unknowable in his essence — the Palamite dogma — is the systematic form of this Dionysian apophaticism (see Palamas and the Essence–Energies).

The Theology of the Liturgy

The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy made the Corpus a foundation of Orthodox liturgical theology. Its reading of the Church’s rites as the sensible enactment of the heavenly mysteries — the worship of earth as the image and extension of the worship of heaven — became the governing framework of the Byzantine commentary tradition (see The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy). Maximus’s Mystagogy takes up the Dionysian method and applies it to the Divine Liturgy; the later Byzantine liturgical commentators — Germanus of Constantinople, Nicholas Cabasilas, Symeon of Thessalonica — stand in the same line, reading the liturgy as a symbolic ascent through which the worshipper is drawn into the heavenly reality (Golitzin 1994; Louth 1989). The Orthodox sense that the Divine Liturgy is “heaven on earth,” that the visible rite veils and conveys an invisible glory, is in large measure the Dionysian theology of the symbol made the common possession of the Church (see The Byzantine Church).

Symbol, Icon, and the Sensible Mediation of the Divine

The Corpus’s theology of the symbol — the “dissimilar similarities” through which sensible images both veil and reveal the divine, and the doctrine that embodied creatures are raised to the spiritual through the material (see The Celestial Hierarchy) — fed directly into the Eastern theology of the image. John of Damascus, the great defender of the holy icons, drew on Dionysian principles in arguing that matter can be a vehicle of grace and that the visible image leads the mind to the invisible prototype (see St. John of Damascus; Louth 1989). The Dionysian conviction that the divine light reaches the human creature through ordered, sensible mediation undergirds the whole Orthodox sacramental and iconographic vision: the icon, like the rite, is a sensible symbol through which the worshipper ascends to the reality it images.

The Hesychast and Dogmatic Synthesis

The Corpus reached the very center of Orthodox dogmatics through the hesychast controversy and the theology of Gregory Palamas, treated in its own place (see Palamas and the Essence–Energies). It is enough to mark here that the essence–energies distinction, conciliar Orthodox teaching since the fourteenth century, was drawn from the Dionysian distinction between the imparticipable God and his communicated processions — so that the Areopagite stands at the foundation not only of Orthodox mysticism and liturgy but of Orthodox dogma. The spiritual tradition of the Jesus Prayer, which seeks the vision of the uncreated light, belongs to the same Dionysian-Palamite stream (see The Jesus Prayer). Through Maximus and Palamas the Corpus is not a peripheral mystical curiosity but a load-bearing element of the Orthodox confession.

John of Damascus and the Eastern Systematizers

The Corpus’s place in Orthodox theology was secured not only by the great mystical and dogmatic theologians but by the systematizers who fixed the common teaching of the Church. John of Damascus (c. 675–749), whose Exposition of the Orthodox Faith became the standard summary of Eastern doctrine, transmits the Dionysian theology of the divine names, the apophatic approach to God, and the ninefold ordering of the angels as settled teaching, carrying the Areopagite’s contributions into every later Orthodox dogmatics (see St. John of Damascus; Louth 1989). Through the Damascene’s synthesis the Corpus’s angelology and its doctrine of the unknowable-yet-named God passed into the textbooks of the tradition, so that later generations received Dionysian theology without always knowing its source — a mark of how thoroughly it had been absorbed. The same is true of the hymnographers and the iconographers, in whose work the Dionysian vision of a hierarchical cosmos bathed in divine light, mediated through sensible symbol, is everywhere assumed.

The Modern Retrieval

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen a deliberate Orthodox retrieval of the Areopagite, fully conscious of the modern dating and unembarrassed by it. Vladimir Lossky placed Dionysian apophaticism at the heart of his account of Eastern theology; John Meyendorff traced the Corpus through the Christological and Palamite history of Byzantium; and Alexander Golitzin produced a sustained reading of the Corpus from within the Eastern monastic and liturgical tradition, arguing that the writings are best understood not as a Neoplatonic import but as a mystagogy rooted in the worshipping life of the Church (Lossky 1957; Meyendorff 1975; Golitzin 1994, 2013). This modern Orthodox scholarship accepts the c. 500 dating (see The Pseudo-Dionysius Problem) and finds the Corpus’s value undiminished by it — a confirmation, in the present, of the tradition’s long judgment that the authority of these writings rests on their truth and their reception, not on the name they bear (see The Theological Assessment). In the East the Areopagite remains what he has been since Maximus: a master of the tradition, read, prayed, and built upon.

References

Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957 (French orig. 1944). (Dionysian apophaticism as the starting-point of Eastern theology.)
Meyendorff, John. Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. Crestwood: SVS Press, 1975. (The Corpus through the Byzantine Christological and Palamite tradition.)
Golitzin, Alexander. Et Introibo ad Altare Dei: The Mystagogy of Dionysius Areopagita. Thessaloniki: Patriarchal Institute, 1994; and Mystagogy: A Monastic Reading of Dionysius Areopagita. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2013. (The liturgical-monastic reading; the modern Orthodox retrieval.)
Louth, Andrew. Denys the Areopagite. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989. (The Eastern reception, the theology of symbol and icon, and the apophatic tradition.)