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Appendix (5)

Dyonisius de Areopagiet

Second only to that of St. Augustine was the influence exercised by the strange and nameless writer who chose to ascribe his works to Dionysius the Areopagite, the friend of St. Paul, and to address his letter upon mysticism to Paul's fellow-worker, Timothy. The pseudo-Dionysius was probably a Syrian monk. The patristic quotations detected in his work prove that he cannot have written before A.D. 475; it is most likely that he flourished in the early part of the sixth century. His chief works are the treatises on the Angelic Hierarchies and on the Names of God, and a short but priceless tract on mystical theology. From the ninth to the seventeenth century these writings nourished the most spiritual intuitions of men, and possessed an authority which it is now hard to realise. Medieaval mysticism is soaked in Dionysian conceptions. Particularly in the fourteenth century, the golden age of mystical literature, the phrase "Dionysius saith" is of continual recurrence: and has for those who use it much the same weight as quotations from the Bible or the great fathers of the Church.

The importance of Dionysius lies in the fact that he was the first, and for a long time the only, Christian writer who attempted to describe frankly and accurately the workings of the mystical consciousness, and the nature of its ecstatic attainment of God. So well did he do his work that later contemplatives, reading him, found their most sublime experiences reflected and partly explained. Hence in describing those experiences, they adopted his language and metaphors; which afterwards became the classic terms of contemplative science. To him Christian literature owes the paradoxical concept of the Absolute Godhead as the "Divine Dark," the Unconditioned, "the negation of all that is" - i.e., of all that the surface consciousness perceives - and of the soul's attainment of the Absolute as a "divine ignorance," a way of negation. This idea is common to Greek and Indian philosophy. With Dionysius it enters the Catholic fold.