The Influence on the West

Carried into Latin above all by John Scotus Eriugena in the ninth century, the Corpus became one of the great authorities of the medieval West — a fixed point of scholastic theology cited reverently by Aquinas, Albert, and Bonaventure, and the fountainhead of the apophatic mystical tradition that runs through the Victorines, the Cloud of Unknowing, and the Rhineland mystics. This file traces that immense influence, sustained for centuries by the belief that the writings were the work of an apostolic disciple of St. Paul.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (the Corpus Areopagiticum)

The Latin Translations

The Corpus entered the West by way of translation, and the history begins with a politically charged gift. In 827 the Byzantine emperor Michael II sent a manuscript of the Corpus to the Frankish king Louis the Pious, where it came to the abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris. The abbey’s patron, Denis (Dionysius) of Paris, had by then been conflated with the Areopagite, so the writings arrived already wrapped in a powerful local legend (see Feast and Cult). The abbot Hilduin produced a first Latin version and a Life fusing the three Dionysii into one; but his translation was rough (Rorem 1993; Louth 1989).

The decisive translation came a generation later from John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815–877), the Irish philosopher at the court of Charles the Bald, who around 860–862 rendered the entire Corpus into Latin together with the scholia. Eriugena not only translated but absorbed the Areopagite, building the apophatic and Neoplatonic vision of the Corpus into his own great work, the Periphyseon — and so transmitting Dionysian theology to the Latin Middle Ages at the deepest level (Rorem 1993; Louth 1989). Later medieval translations and commentaries followed — by John Sarrazin, Robert Grosseteste (who knew Greek and retranslated the Corpus in the thirteenth century), and others — each renewing the West’s access to the writings. Through these versions the Corpus became a standard authority of the schools.

The Authority of “Dionysius” in Scholasticism

In the medieval West the Corpus carried very nearly apostolic weight, and for a plain reason: the schools believed it to be the work of Paul’s own convert, a sub-apostolic witness second in authority almost to Scripture itself (see The Name and the Corpus). Cited simply as “Dionysius,” the writings became a fixed authority that every theologian had to reckon with. Thomas Aquinas quotes the Corpus many hundreds of times across his works and wrote a full commentary on The Divine Names; the Dionysian theology of the divine names, of participation, of the angelic hierarchy, and of evil as privation is woven through the Summa Theologiae (Rorem 1993; Louth 1989). Albert the Great lectured and commented on the whole Corpus; Bonaventure built his mystical ascent, the Itinerarium mentis in Deum, on a deeply Dionysian foundation, culminating in an apophatic passage into the “darkness” beyond intellect drawn straight from the Mystical Theology. The ninefold ordering of the angels in Western theology, the analysis of the divine names, and the privative doctrine of evil all reached the scholastics through Dionysius. He was, for the medieval West, simply one of the authorities — and the apostolic attribution was the reason.

The Apophatic Mystical Tradition

If the schoolmen took from Dionysius a body of doctrine, the mystics took from him a way. The Mystical Theology, with its ascent into the divine darkness beyond all knowing, became the charter of Western apophatic mysticism (see The Mystical Theology). The Victorines of twelfth-century Paris, above all Hugh and Thomas Gallus, commented on the Corpus and developed from it a mysticism of love transcending knowledge. The fourteenth-century English Cloud of Unknowing — whose very title echoes the Dionysian “cloud” — is steeped in the Mystical Theology, and its anonymous author also produced an English paraphrase of the treatise (Deonise Hid Diuinite) (Rorem 1993; Louth 1989). In the Rhineland, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and Henry Suso drew on Dionysian apophaticism for their preaching of the “ground” of the soul and the God beyond God; the same stream runs on through the Theologia Germanica and into later figures. The Dionysian darkness — the union with God beyond concept and image — became one of the master themes of Western mysticism, and its source was the Corpus.

Dante and the Wider Imagination

The Areopagite’s reach extended beyond the schools and the cloister into the literary imagination of Christendom. In the Paradiso, Dante places “Dionysius” among the wise and follows his ordering of the nine angelic ranks, having a soul correct a lesser authority by appeal to the Areopagite’s scheme as the true one (Paradiso 28; Rorem 1993). The angelology of the Corpus — seraphim and cherubim descending through the ranks to archangels and angels — passed through the medieval theologians into the common Christian picture of heaven, and so into the art, poetry, and devotion of the whole Western Middle Ages (see The Celestial Hierarchy).

The Two Faces of the Western Dionysius

The Western reception ran along two channels that the medieval mind held together but that are worth distinguishing. One was speculative and doctrinal: the Corpus furnished the schools a body of teaching — the metaphysics of participation, the analysis of the divine names, the hierarchy of being, the privative theory of evil, the ordering of the angels — that could be incorporated into the great systems, and Aquinas above all made it a permanent part of Latin theology by absorbing it into the Summa (Rorem 1993). The other channel was affective and mystical: the Mystical Theology offered not a doctrine but a path, the dark ascent of love beyond knowledge, and it was this that the Victorines, the Cloud-author, and the Rhineland preachers seized upon. Thomas Gallus’s distinction between the intellect and the higher “affection” by which the soul touches God in the darkness — read out of Dionysius — became a charter for a whole tradition of love-mysticism that set the heart above the head in the final ascent (Rorem 1993; Louth 1989). The same Corpus thus fed both the most rigorous scholastic system and the most ardent apophatic mysticism of the medieval West — a double fertility that testifies to the range of the writings and the depth of their hold on the Latin imagination.

The Authority and the Question

The whole of this immense influence rested, for most of its history, on the belief that the writings were apostolic. That belief began to crack in the West at the Renaissance: Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth century, and after him Erasmus, raised doubts about the apostolic authorship on philological and historical grounds, long before Koch and Stiglmayr settled the matter in 1895 (see The Pseudo-Dionysius Problem; Rorem 1993; Louth 1989). The exposure of the pseudonym diminished the Corpus’s authority in the West in a way it did not in the East: cut loose from its apostolic moorings and caught in the polemics of the Reformation, “Dionysius” gradually receded from the central place he had held in Latin theology. Yet the debt remained immense and permanent. The Western doctrine of the divine names, the scholastic angelology, the privative account of evil, and the whole apophatic mystical tradition bear the Areopagite’s imprint to this day — the legacy, in the West as in the East, of a pseudonymous Syrian theologian of the year 500 (Rorem 1993).

References

Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. (The Mystical Theology and Celestial Hierarchy underlying the Western reception.)
Rorem, Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (The chapter on Western influence: Eriugena, Aquinas, the Victorines, the Cloud, the Rhineland mystics, Dante; Valla and Erasmus and the unraveling of the attribution.)
Louth, Andrew. Denys the Areopagite. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989. (The Latin translations and the medieval reception.)
Dante Alighieri. Paradiso 28. (The angelic ranks ordered after Dionysius.)