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Around the year 500, four treatises began to circulate through the cities and monasteries of the Eastern Roman Empire. They claimed to be works of Dionius Theopagite, a shadowy figure from the New Testament. The real author is unknown. For the next millennium, these forged books would profoundly influence Christian thought. Today's video, a collaboration with Religion for Breakfast, will explore how. Pseudo Dionius, as he is customarily known, lived in a rapidly changing world. The Western Roman Empire had collapsed a generation before to be replaced by a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms. The Eastern Empire had remained intact and was flourishing
under the careful management of Emperor Anastasis I. The greatest external threat to Anastasia's Roman Empire was Kavad Sha and Sha of Persia, who repeatedly attacked the eastern frontier. Pseudo Dionius, who likely came from Syria, may have witnessed the fallout of those attacks in Syria and throughout the empire. However, the principal source of domestic tension was the monofysite controversy. The monofysites held that the incarnate Christ had only a single divine nature instead of the double nature, divine and human claimed by the Chelseedonian Orthodox. The distinction was anything but trivial. To monophysites, it was the essential unity of God and man in Christ that gave ordinary Christians the hope
of salvation. By the turn of the sixth century, the Eastern Empire was confessionally divided with the Orthodox dominant in the Balkans and Asia Minor and Monophysites ascendant in Egypt and Syria. Pseudoysius himself seems to have been a moderate monophysite. The controversy would continue until the Arab conquests swallowed the eastern provinces. The christoologgical disputes raging through the empire, left untouched, the dwindling minority of Romans who remained polytheists. The most visible of these were the philosophers of Athens. For decades, the most famous Roman intellectual was Proclas, head of the Batonic school at Athens.
A tireless author and commentator, he supposedly wrote 700 lines every day. Proclas produced the definitive synthesis of what we call neoplatonism. Plotinus, the original neoplatonist, had drawn from Plato's later dialogues a conception of the universe in which all things emanate from an ineffable first principle, the one. From the one emerges noose, the divine mind container of the platonic forms. From noose derives suk, the world soul, generator of the cosmos. Human souls are mired in the complexity and multiplicity of the material world. But by contemplation, they can rise to ecstatic union with the one. By the time
Proclas and Pseudodonius were writing two centuries after the death of Plotinus, Neoplatanism was the Eastern Roman Empire's leading philosophical tradition. Its appeal was not limited to pagans. Christian authors tended to regard Plato as the most palatable of the Greek philosophers. St. Augustine described the doctrines of Plato refracted through the works of the Neoplatonists as a sort of halfway house on the road to Christianity. and used Platonic concepts to interpret the biblical creation story. But it was left to our anonymous friend Pseudodionius to truly synthesize Neoplatonism with Christian theology.
Pseudodionius wrote 10 surviving letters and claimed to have composed a number of works that are no longer extent and may have never existed. His legacy, however, is defined by four treatises. Two of these works, the celestial hierarchy and the ecclesiastical hierarchy discuss how the various orders of angels and priests mediate between God and man. According to pseudo Dionius, the hierarchies of both the heavens and the church, organized in good neopatonic fashion into unities and trinities, transmit the splendor of God to worshippers. They also model the means by which Christian souls like the mind of a neoplatonic sage can ascend to the source of all things.
The other two works explore the nature of God. The divine names is an example of cataphatic theology which attempts to make positive statements about the attributes of God. Plotinus had identified the one with the absolute good. Pseudo Dionisius likewise begins by defining God as the essence of goodness. He continues by applying to God the names of the neoplatonic triad being life and mind and then a number of terms and categories derived from contemporary philosophy concluding with perfect oneness. The mystical theology pseudodonius's most influential work takes the opposite approach. Apohatic theology emphasizes the absolute transcendence and ultimate unknowability of God. God cannot be
confined in a cage of words. It is only possible to define what he is not. This way of conceptualizing the divine had a long history in Platonism even before Plutinus applied it to the one. Proclas had developed the concept and pseudodionius following the lead of petristic plagonists like origin and Gregory of Nissa applied it to Christian theology. Pseudodians begins with an allegory of Moses ascending Mount Cyani. As he climbed, Moses was dazzled by unearly lights, but there was nothing to be seen at the summit, only a cloud which wrapped Moses in the ineffable presence
of God. Neither can we, Pseudo Dionius continues, ever glimpse God. But we can remove some of the obstacles that stand in the way as a sculptor carves away stone to reveal his statue. First, we should negate the attributes most distant from God, sensible characteristics like shape and form. We should proceed through the divine names of cataphhatic theology not because God truly lacks such attributes but because they are inadequate for describing him. Then and only then can the mind ascend to contemplation of the divine mystery. Pseudo Dionius can never have imagined how influential his treatises would become. When the iconoclast controversy
tore the Greek church apart in the 8th century, Daisius's description of the earthly and celestial hierarchies through which God communicates by countless visible symbols inspired John of Damascus to write the definitive defense of icons still a cornerstone of Orthodox Christianity. Starting in the 9th century when John Scotas Urugina translated them into Latin, Pseudo Daisius's works were incorporated into Catholic theology. A series of Scholastic philosophers culminating in Thomas Aquinus wrote commentaries on them. Aquinus described God using the epiphatic terms of the mystical theology in his magisterial suma theologica. The mystical theology also inspired Catholic mystics from
Meister Echart to St. John of the Cross all drawn to the idea of union with the ineffable essence of God. Pseudodianis even shaped the course of European architecture. Abbott Suge of Sandeni who effectively invented the Gothic style when he rebuilt his church to have larger windows was an avid reader of Pseudo Dionius. Suge had a Latin poem inscribed on the church door urging all who entered to be transported through the light within to the greater light of Christ. An illusion to Dionius's Neopatonic cosmos. The influence of pseudo Dionius waned after the Renaissance when the great humanist Lorenzo Valla demonstrated that Dionius the Aropagite could not have written the works ascribed to him but as
poetry if nothing else. A few passages retain their power, perhaps none more so than the invocation at the beginning of the mystical theology. Ineffable Trinity, God beyond God, the good surpassing good, makes straight our way to the loftiest summit, beyond knowing, past seeing, of that mystical scripture, where the mystery that is God, changeless and absolute, lies wrapped in silence and the darkness beyond light. For more on epithetic theology, check out Religion for Breakfast's video linked on screen and in the description.
My new book, Leaky Aqueducts, Battle Pigeons, and Mystery Cults, is now available for pre-order. You'll find a link in the description. You'll also find links in the description to the Tolen Stone Patreon where I'm currently reviewing the first season of HBO's Rome and to my two other channels. There are new podcast episodes up on Tolenstone footnotes in a series of new videos on sites in Spain and Turkey appearing on synic routes to the past. Thanks for watching.
