Justified True Belief

(●) The most quoted theologian in Christendom whose real name nobody knows, and the writer who taught the church how to speak about a God beyond speech. + Around the year 500 somebody in the Greek-speaking East sat down and wrote four short books and a set of letters about God, angels, and worship, and signed them with the name of a man who had been dead for four hundred years. The name was Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian who believed when Paul preached on Mars Hill (Acts 17:34). The church took the signature at face value, and for the next thousand years these books carried something close to apostolic authority. Thomas Aquinas cites them constantly. Dante builds the heavens of his Paradiso on their scheme of the angels. The English classic The Cloud of Unknowing is downstream of one of them. Nothing whatever is known about the author. Not his name, not his birth, not his death, not the city he wrote in, and even the round date attached to him, around the year 500, is a convention rather than a fact. Every date in his story has to be fixed the same way, from the outside: by what the books quote, by what they describe, and by who first quotes them. The window runs from about 485, because he had clearly read the pagan philosopher Proclus, who died that year, to the 520s, when Christians in Syria begin quoting him. "Pseudo-Dionysius" is simply the name scholarship gives an author who is real but anonymous, and "the Areopagite" is the borrowed part. Here is the fact worth remembering. The word hierarchy appears first in his pages, and the coinage is almost certainly his. He built it out of two Greek words, hieros (sacred) and arche (rule or origin), to name something he thought he saw everywhere: a sacred order in which light comes down from God through ranks, each rank receiving as much as it can hold and passing it on. Every later use of the word, in a company, an army, or a filing system, traces back to a man whose own name we have lost.

(●) c. 51 AD: Paul preached to the philosophers of Athens, and one of the few who believed was named Dionysius. + The story starts with a real man about whom we know one sentence. Paul, waiting in Athens for his companions, argued daily in the marketplace until the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers brought him up to the Areopagus, the rocky rise below the Acropolis where the city’s old council met and the hill the King James Bible calls Mars’ hill, and asked him to explain the new teaching. He gave them the altar to the unknown god and the resurrection (Acts 17:22–31). Most of them laughed. Luke names two who did not: "Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris" (Acts 17:34). An Areopagite was a member of that council, so the convert was a man of standing. That is all Scripture says about him. Eusebius, the fourth-century historian, passes on a line from Dionysius of Corinth, a bishop of the second century, saying that this Dionysius became the first bishop of Athens (Ecclesiastical History III.4), and later centuries filled the silence with martyrdoms. In France the legend went further still and merged him with Denis, the martyred first bishop of Paris, which is why the abbey of Saint-Denis would later take such a personal interest in him. Nothing else was recorded. A convert of Paul, named once, with no writings and no biography: an empty space in the record, and exactly the kind of space a later writer could step into.

(●) c. 485 – 520 AD: Probably in Syria, a writer produced four treatises and ten letters, and signed them with that name. + The four books are The Divine Names, The Mystical Theology, The Celestial Hierarchy, and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and they are addressed to "Timothy," Paul’s companion. Their Greek is dense and hymn-like, more like liturgy, the ordered words of public worship, than lecture, and their author knows the Athenian philosophy of his own day inside out. That last point is how the date is fixed, because a man can only borrow from books that already exist. Proclus, who ran the Platonic school at Athens and was the most systematic pagan philosopher of his generation, died in 485, and in the fourth chapter of The Divine Names the argument that evil is not a thing in its own right tracks Proclus’ treatise On the Existence of Evils step by step, sometimes phrase by phrase. So the writing comes after Proclus. A second clue works the same way. Around 476, Peter the Fuller is said to have introduced at Antioch the practice of reciting the creed during the eucharist, the service of the Lord’s Supper, and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy describes that custom as ordinary, which is not how anybody writes about a novelty while it is still new. Other details in the same book, the anointing with consecrated oil and the shape of the service, look Syrian. Then there is the silence at the far end: nobody at all quotes these books until the 520s. Between them the clues will carry this much, and no more: a Christian of the eastern empire, writing about a generation after Proclus. Everything sharper than that is guesswork. He did not simply leave his work unsigned. He furnished it. He tells Polycarp that he stood at Heliopolis beside a pagan philosopher and watched the moon cross the sun at the hour of the crucifixion (Letter 7). He tells Timothy that he was among those who came to see the body of the mother of Jesus, with James and with Peter (The Divine Names III.2). One letter is addressed to the apostle John in his exile on Patmos, assuring him he will be released (Letter 10). It is a first-century world, built with care, by a man living in the sixth.

(●) 532 AD: The books surfaced at a debate before the emperor, and a bishop objected on the spot that no father had ever heard of them. + The books had been in quiet circulation for a decade or so, quoted by Severus of Antioch in his own writings. Their first appearance in a public dispute was as evidence in somebody else’s argument. The emperor Justinian had summoned bishops to Constantinople to try to heal the split left by the Council of Chalcedon eighty years earlier. Chalcedon had said that Christ is one person in two natures, divine and human; the party that looked to Severus, by then a bishop in exile, held that after the union there is one nature, and would not sign. Their spokesmen arrived with an ancient authority on their side, or so it seemed. They read out a letter of Dionysius the Areopagite describing a "new theandric activity" in Christ (Letter 4), one operation that is divine and human at once, which sounded very much like their case. If Paul’s own convert had written that, the one-nature party had a witness four hundred years older than the council they were resisting. Hypatius, bishop of Ephesus, answered that these writings could not be genuine, because no father and no council had ever quoted them, and if Cyril of Alexandria had known such a witness he would hardly have left it lying unused. That is a good argument, and it is essentially the argument scholarship still makes. It did not prevail. The effect of the hearing was in fact the reverse of what Hypatius wanted, because the corpus, which is the ordinary name for the whole body of writing that travels under Dionysius’ name, had now been produced in public as a proof text, and from there it stayed in circulation and began to be copied. Within a few years the books were travelling in another language. Sergius of Reshaina, a Syrian physician and translator, put them into Syriac before his death in 536. Whoever wrote them, then, they existed and were valued enough to be worth a translator’s labour well before that date.

(●) c. 540 AD: A Palestinian bishop wrote the notes that answered the doubts, and the corpus passed as apostolic. + John, bishop of Scythopolis in Palestine, did for these books what a good editor does for a difficult author: he wrote scholia, running notes in the margin, explaining the hard words and heading off the objections. Where the text sounded Neoplatonic, meaning that it talked the way the pagan Platonists of Proclus’ school talked, with all things streaming out from one source and climbing back to it, he showed how a Christian could say those words honestly. Where it sounded like Severus he pulled it back toward Chalcedon. Where a reader might notice how much the language resembled the pagan philosophers, he offered the reassuring explanation that the philosophers had borrowed from Dionysius, which had the chronology exactly backwards and settled a good many nerves. It worked. After John’s notes the corpus circulated as the writing of an apostolic man, with its own commentary attached, and the two were copied together for centuries. In transmission the scholia got mixed up with later notes and passed under the name of Maximus the Confessor, and it took until 1940, when Hans Urs von Balthasar separated the layers, for John to get his own work back.

(●) c. 630 AD: Maximus the Confessor read him into Chalcedonian orthodoxy, and the Greek East never let him go. + A century later the corpus found the reader it needed. Maximus the Confessor was the sharpest theologian of the Byzantine world and its most stubborn, a man who would eventually lose his tongue and his right hand rather than sign a compromise about the will of Christ. He took up the Dionysian vocabulary and put it to work: the procession of all things from God and their return, the ranks of the angels, the negative way of speaking, all of it fitted into a theology whose centre is the incarnation. That same phrase from Letter 4 which the Severans had used in 532, the "theandric activity," came back into dispute in Maximus’ own lifetime, when a new compromise proposed that Christ has only one will. Maximus read the phrase as meaning that the two natures act together in the one Christ, each doing what is proper to it, and it was that reading the church endorsed. The Lateran Council of 649, at which Maximus was the moving intelligence, cited Dionysius as a father. After Maximus the question of authorship stopped being asked in the East. John of Damascus quotes him a century later as a matter of course, and Greek theology has been arguing in his terms ever since.

(●) 862 AD: An Irishman at the Frankish court turned the corpus into Latin, and the West gained an authority it believed was apostolic. + In 827 a Byzantine embassy brought the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious a Greek manuscript of the corpus as a diplomatic gift. It went to the abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris, whose abbot Hilduin had every reason to be pleased: his house was built over the grave of Denis, first bishop of Paris, and here, apparently, were the collected works of that same saint, who was also Paul’s Athenian convert. Hilduin wrote the life that welded the three men into one and had the Greek translated. The translation was close to unreadable. Charles the Bald, Louis’ son, handed the job to the one man at his court who genuinely knew Greek, an Irish scholar named John Scotus Eriugena, who worked at it from about 860 and finished in 862. Eriugena’s Latin gave the West a usable text, and he absorbed it so completely that his own great work, the Periphyseon, reads in places like a Dionysian treatise. From that translation the corpus entered the schools, and stayed. Robert Grosseteste retranslated it around 1240 with a commentary; Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas lectured on it; and the mistaken identity outlasted them all, so that for most medieval readers this was simply Saint Denis, the apostle’s friend and the patron of France.

(●) 1457 – 1895 AD: Scholars took the name apart over four centuries, and the books outlived it. + Lorenzo Valla, the Italian humanist who had already exposed the forged charter known as the Donation of Constantine, turned the same eye on this corpus in his notes on the New Testament in 1457, and concluded that Paul’s convert did not write it. Erasmus read Valla, agreed, and said so in print from 1504 onward, which made the doubt public property. Luther, who disliked the theology as much as the pedigree, wrote in 1520 that in the Mystical Theology its author "follows Plato rather than Christ" (The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Wace and Buchheim translation). Defenders held the line for another three centuries, and the question stayed genuinely open. It closed in 1895. Two German scholars, Hugo Koch and Josef Stiglmayr, working separately and publishing within months of each other, laid the fourth chapter of The Divine Names beside Proclus’ On the Existence of Evils and showed that the one follows the other too closely for coincidence, and in the direction that a man of about 500 borrows from a man who died in 485. That settled it. What is remarkable is what happened next, which is nothing. The books did not come off the shelf. The Orthodox churches still read him as a father; Catholic and Protestant theologians still quote him; the critical Greek edition and a full English translation both appeared in the twentieth century. The authority turned out to rest on the theology rather than the signature, which is a compliment the author himself would probably have refused.

What He Taught

(T1) Every name Scripture gives God is true, and not one of them is adequate. + Ask someone who has never seen the sea what it is like, and you will be told that it is blue, and cold, and very large, and that it moves. Every word of that is true. Nobody who has stood on a beach in a gale would say the description is the thing. Dionysius thinks all our talk about God works like that, only more so, and he starts where a Christian should start, with the words God has actually given us. Theologians call this the affirmative way, or cataphatic theology, from a Greek word meaning to say yes: God is good, God is light, God is life, God is a rock, God is a consuming fire. Dionysius takes his names from Scripture and says plainly that he will use no others, and he collects them by the fistful. God says "I am who I am" to Moses (Exodus 3:14); God is called Good, Wise, King of kings, Ancient of Days, Salvation, Righteousness. Thirteen chapters of The Divine Names work through them, one after another. Then he notices that the same Scripture keeps pulling the names away. When Manoah asks the angel what his name is, the answer refuses to give one, because the name is wonderful (Judges 13:18). No one has ever seen God (John 1:18). He dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see (1 Timothy 6:16). How unsearchable are his judgments (Romans 11:33). So the Bible does both things at once, and Dionysius refuses to drop either half. The names are not guesses to be improved on; they are given, and they are true. They are also not measurements. What this guards against is a particular kind of idolatry, the kind that happens in the head rather than the workshop, where a person builds a manageable God out of accurate words and then worships the model.

(Q) "Conscious of this, the Sacred Writers celebrate It by every Name while yet they call It Nameless." + Source: The Divine Names I.5 (Rolt translation). "It" is Rolt’s rendering of the Greek for the divine reality above all being, and the capital letters are his. Dionysius is closing an argument that all things desire God, each after its own kind, and the sentence is his summary of what the biblical writers do: they pile up names and then say the name is beyond them.

(T2) The road to God runs out of words, and ends in a darkness brighter than light. + If the names are true and none of them fits, what do you do next? Dionysius answers with the shortest of his books, a few pages called The Mystical Theology, and with a picture from a sculptor’s yard. A sculptor does not add anything to the marble. He takes away, and the figure that was hidden in the block stands out. Denying things about God, Dionysius says, works the same way: it is not subtraction but disclosure. This is the negative way, or apophatic theology, from the Greek for denial. You say God is good, and then you say God is not good the way anything else is good. You say God is light, then you deny that too, because the word came from lamps and suns. Then, and this is the step that makes him unusual, you deny the denials, because "not light" is also a human word and God is no more contained by our negations than by our affirmations. What is left is not a blank. It is what he calls the divine darkness, and he insists it is dark the way the sky at noon is dark to someone who looks straight at the sun. His model for the climb is Moses. The people stand at the foot of Sinai; Moses is purified, separated, brought up through the trumpets and the fire, and then, at the top, he does not see God. He enters the cloud. "The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was" (Exodus 20:21). That verse is the hinge of the whole book. Two cautions belong here, and Dionysius would grant the first. This is not agnosticism, the position that we cannot know anything about God, because he has just spent thirteen chapters on what God has told us. It is a claim about the limits of created minds facing an uncreated God, which is what Paul is saying when he writes that now we see in a mirror dimly (1 Corinthians 13:12). The second caution is a real criticism. A Christian does not only climb; God came down. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), and the face nobody could see has been made known by the Son (John 1:18). Dionysius says so, and calls Jesus the source of every hierarchy. He says it far more briefly than he describes the ascent, and readers have been complaining about the imbalance ever since.

(Q) "Guide us to that topmost height of mystic lore which exceedeth light and more than exceedeth knowledge, where the simple, absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of heavenly Truth lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness." + Source: The Mystical Theology I.1 (Rolt translation). The opening words of the book are a prayer, addressed to the Trinity and overheard by the reader, before a single argument has been made. "Dazzling obscurity" has been quoted, borrowed and translated so often that it has become the standard English phrase for what he means (T2).

(T3) God is the Good that pours itself out, and everything that exists is that overflow. + The sun does not decide to shine. It does not weigh the merits of a field before warming it, or hold back light from a stone because the stone cannot use it. Shining is simply what it is doing by existing. Dionysius uses that image for the first and highest of the divine names, Goodness, and he means it to answer a question people actually ask: why is there anything at all, and what was in it for God? His answer is that there was nothing in it for God, and that this is the point. Goodness is not a possession God has but a giving that God is, and the giving does not diminish the giver any more than the sun is poorer at noon. Creation is that overflow, and every creature holds as much of it as its nature can hold, which is why a man and a stone are both good and not equally alive. Then the movement turns and comes home: everything that has been given being wants its source back, "those that have mind and reason seeking It by knowledge" (The Divine Names IV.4), down to things that seek it only by existing. There is an old worry to name here, because Dionysius sits close to it. His pagan teachers thought the world flowed out of the One, which was their name for the single source of everything, by a kind of necessity, the way heat comes off a fire whether the fire wills it or not. Emanation is the word for that picture, and a Christian cannot say it. Scripture says God made the world freely, out of nothing, and could have made no world at all. Dionysius is a Christian on this point: he speaks of God as Creator and of creatures as made, not as pieces of God spilled outward. But he inherited the vocabulary of emanation along with everything else, and it is fair to say that his language runs closer to the edge than his doctrine does. The gain is worth the risk, which is why the church kept him. If goodness is what God is, then existence is not neutral. Being here at all is already a gift, and Genesis has been saying so from the first page: God saw that it was good.

(Q) "For as our sun, through no choice or deliberation, but by the very fact of its existence, gives light to all those things which have any inherent power of sharing its illumination, even so the Good sends forth upon all things according to their receptive powers, the rays of Its undivided Goodness." + Source: The Divine Names IV.1 (Rolt translation). Rolt’s text carries a parenthesis after "the Good," explaining that the Good stands above the sun as an original stands above a faded copy; leaving it out shortens the sentence and changes nothing in the sense. The sun analogy is old. Plato used it in the Republic for the Form of the Good, and Dionysius knows he is picking it up secondhand. What he adds is the last clause: the light arrives "according to their receptive powers," which is the seed of his whole doctrine of ranks (T5).

(T4) Evil is not a rival power. It is a good gone missing. + Blindness is not a substance. You cannot bottle it, or find a gram of it in an eye. Blindness is sight that should be there and is not, which is why a stone is not blind and a man can be. Dionysius argues that all evil is like that. It has no nature of its own and no maker of its own; it is a lack, a falling short, a good that has gone missing from something that ought to have had it. Philosophers call this the privation account of evil, from the Latin for being deprived. Follow it out and several things happen at once. There is no dark god at the other end of the universe balancing the good one, which was a live option in his world and in ours. Nothing is evil all the way down, because a thing that had lost every good would have lost existence too and would not be there to be evil; even the devils, he says bluntly, exist by the Good, and their existence is good. And nobody has to explain how a good God manufactured a bad substance, because there is no bad substance to manufacture. Two honest qualifications. First, this is not the claim that evil is unreal or that suffering is imaginary. A wound is a real wound, and a man dying of one is not consoled by being told that his injury is technically an absence. The claim is about what kind of thing evil is, not about how much it hurts. Second, the account explains the metaphysics and leaves the harder question standing: why God permits the lack. Dionysius has less to say about that than Augustine does, and much less than the book of Job. Where he is strong is the point Scripture makes in its first chapter, that everything God made was good, and that whatever has gone wrong since is spoilage rather than a second creation.

(Q) "Thus evil hath no being, nor any inherence in things that have being. Evil is nowhere qua evil; and it arises not through any power but through weakness." + Source: The Divine Names IV.34 (Rolt translation). "Qua" is Rolt’s Latin for "considered as": evil is nowhere to be found as a thing in its own right. This is the summary line of the long chapter on evil, and it is also the chapter that gave the game away. When Hugo Koch and Josef Stiglmayr set it beside Proclus’ treatise on the same subject in 1895, the resemblance was close enough to date the corpus for good.

(T5) Heaven and the church are one ladder of light, each rank passing on what it has received. + Think of a row of mirrors angled down a stairwell, with a window at the top. The light is all one light. Every mirror in the row is genuinely lit, and every mirror lights the one below it, and none of them manufactures anything. That picture, more or less, is what Dionysius invented the word hierarchy to describe, and he defines it as a sacred order that is being shaped into the likeness of God as far as it can be. He works it out twice. The Celestial Hierarchy takes the names for heavenly beings scattered through Scripture and sorts them into nine orders in three ranks of three: seraphim, cherubim and thrones at the top, closest to God; lordships, powers and authorities in the middle; principalities, archangels and angels at the bottom, the ones who deal with us. The names are all biblical, from Isaiah’s seraphim (Isaiah 6:2–3) to Paul’s thrones and dominions and rulers and authorities (Colossians 1:16; Ephesians 1:21), and Dionysius admits at the outset that no human being knows how they are arranged. He is offering an order for what Scripture names, not a report. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy then does the same for the church on earth, and the parallel is the whole argument. Three sacred rites, baptism, the eucharist and the consecration of the ointment; three orders of clergy, bishops, priests and deacons; three ranks of the people, monks, the faithful, and those still being prepared. What angels have directly through the mind, we have through water, bread, oil and words, because we are the kind of creature that learns through the senses. So the liturgy is not a lesser thing than the angelic contemplation. It is the same light coming down the stairs to where we are. This is the part of him that has done the most damage when it was read carelessly, so three things are worth holding on to. The scheme is a picture, offered as a picture, and the church has never made it doctrine. Where Dionysius says the lower orders receive only through the higher, Scripture says something different about how a Christian comes to God, and that difference is where the gospel parts company with him. And the angels themselves are servants, not objects of worship, a line Paul draws sharply (Colossians 2:18) and Dionysius does not cross.

(Q) "Hierarchy is, in my judgment, a sacred order and science and operation, assimilated, as far as attainable, to the likeness of God, and conducted to the illuminations granted to it from God, according to capacity, with a view to the Divine imitation." + Source: The Celestial Hierarchy III.1 (Parker translation). The first definition of the word, in the book that coined it. "Science" here is Parker’s Victorian English for knowledge, and "operation" for activity: a hierarchy is an order, a knowing and a doing, all at once, and its purpose is likeness to God rather than rank for its own sake.

(Q) "It transcends all affirmation by being the perfect and unique Cause of all things, and transcends all negation by the pre-eminence of Its simple and absolute nature." + Source: The Mystical Theology V (Rolt translation). Rolt runs on for one more clause, "free from every limitation and beyond them all," which adds emphasis rather than sense. The last sentence of the last chapter of the shortest book, after a page of relentless denials in which God is said not to be soul or mind or number or greatness or power or life or truth or kingship or wisdom or oneness or goodness. The point of the denials is not that these words are false but that they are ours. That closing balance, too big for our yes and too big for our no, is the sentence a thousand years of Christian theologians took from him.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The Greek East received him as a father, and built its theology of the unknowable God on his foundation. + Once Maximus the Confessor had shown how to read him, Dionysius became part of the furniture of Eastern theology. John of Damascus, writing the first great summary of Greek doctrine in the eighth century, opens with the incomprehensibility of God and reaches for Dionysian language to say it. The nine orders of angels passed into the liturgy, the icons and the hymns of the Byzantine church, where they have stayed. The deepest debt is later. In the fourteenth century Gregory Palamas defended the monks of Mount Athos, who claimed that in prayer they saw the uncreated light of God, against the charge that this was nonsense: if God is unknowable, they cannot be seeing him, and if they are seeing him, he is not unknowable. Palamas answered by distinguishing God’s essence, which no creature will ever know, from God’s energies, his own activity going out to be shared, which creatures really do receive. That distinction is now standard Orthodox teaching, and Palamas argued it with Dionysius open in front of him; the quarrel that produced his Triads was in good part a quarrel about how Dionysius should be read. The whole shape of it, a God who gives himself away without ever being possessed, is Dionysian. Christians elsewhere have found the essence-and-energies distinction harder to place, and the argument about it is old and continuing. What is not in dispute is where the East learned to speak this way.

(†) The Latin West made him a schoolbook, and its greatest theologians argued from him. + After Eriugena’s translation the corpus became something a medieval student simply had to know, and the roll of men who worked on it reads like a roll of the best minds in the schools. Hugh of Saint Victor was lecturing on The Celestial Hierarchy at Paris in the 1120s and 1130s. A century after him Robert Grosseteste made a better Latin version, around 1240. Albert the Great commented on the whole corpus, and his pupil Thomas Aquinas wrote a commentary on The Divine Names and then went on quoting Dionysius throughout his own work, by one count more than seventeen hundred times. What Aquinas took was the discipline of the negative way. Having argued in the Summa Theologiae that God exists, he turns to the question of what God is and says at once that we cannot know what God is, only what he is not (I, question 3, prologue), and then proceeds by removing from God everything that belongs to creatures: composition, change, limit, time. Later, arguing that words like "good" apply to God and to us neither in the same sense nor in wholly different senses, Aquinas is working the ground Dionysius cleared. Bonaventure closed his own ladder of ascent, the Itinerarium mentis in Deum (the journey of the mind into God), by praying the opening words of The Mystical Theology whole, speaking them, as he says there, along with Dionysius (VII.5). Dante set the nine orders turning around the point of light in Paradiso and put Dionysius himself among the wise in the heaven of the Sun. He reached ordinary readers too. In fourteenth-century England an anonymous writer made a spiritual handbook for a young disciple, told him to put everything he knew and everything he loved beneath a cloud of forgetting, and to strike at the cloud of unknowing above him with a dart of longing love, and then put The Mystical Theology into English himself, from the Latin, so his reader could see where the idea came from. The Cloud of Unknowing is still in print in airport bookshops. Two centuries later John of the Cross, writing about the dark night through which a soul passes to God, is drawing on the same well.

(†) Where his own record will not carry weight: a borrowed name, and grace that comes down by rank. + Two things in the ledger are his own doing, and a third is a matter of proportion. - The name. He did not publish anonymously and let others guess. He wrote himself into the first century on purpose, addressing Timothy, writing to the apostle John on Patmos (Letter 10), claiming to have watched the sky darken at the crucifixion in the company of a named philosopher (Letter 7), and placing himself with Peter and James beside the body of the mother of Jesus (The Divine Names III.2). Antiquity did put books under honoured names more freely than we do, and some readers have argued that the persona is a literary device rather than a fraud, a way of saying that this teaching belongs to the apostolic church and not to him. Perhaps. But the church’s reception of these books rested for a thousand years on a claim that was not true, and Hypatius of Ephesus was right in 532 when he said so out loud and was not listened to. The redeeming fact is that when the claim finally collapsed the theology stood without it, which suggests the theology never needed it. - The ladder. The hierarchies are not only a picture of order; they are a claim about how God reaches people. In The Celestial Hierarchy the second rank receives the divine light only through the first, and he says this is fixed absolutely by God (VIII.2). In The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy the same rule runs down through the orders of the church, and when the monk Demophilus takes it on himself to correct a priest, Dionysius tells him that what is due comes to us through those set above us and not otherwise (Letter 8). Set that beside the New Testament and the emphasis falls somewhere else entirely. There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5). A new and living way stands open through the curtain, so that believers have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus (Hebrews 10:19–22), and they are told to draw near to the throne of grace themselves (Hebrews 4:16); through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father (Ephesians 2:18). Nothing in that is arranged by rank, and the ordinary Christian in it is not standing in line waiting for the light to reach him through somebody nearer the front. In fairness, Christians have read Dionysius charitably here, and he gives them grounds: he calls Jesus the source and perfecting of every hierarchy, and he says the highest rank is taught by God without any intermediary at all. Letter 8 has two things to be said in its favour as well. Its purpose is mercy, not rank: he is defending a repentant sinner whom Demophilus had thrown out, and reminding him that Christ goes out after the one who has wandered off and carries him home on his shoulders. And the letter ends with Carpos, a holy man who lay awake praying that two men who had fallen away would be struck down, and saw Christ come and stand between them and the pit, ready, he said, to suffer again for them. Even so, the order is the frame he argues inside, and a reader coming from Hebrews will notice the difference. - The proportion. The corpus has a real doctrine of Christ, and it is not an afterthought: the incarnation is the pivot of Letter 4 and Jesus is named as the source of every hierarchy. But the ascent is described at length and the descent in a sentence, and Golgotha does very little work in a body of writing about how creatures come to God. Luther put this as rudely as it can be put, and the rudeness has stuck for five hundred years, but the observation does not depend on Luther. A reader can go a long way into The Mystical Theology before meeting the cross. None of this is why the church has kept him, and none of it is a reason to put him down. He is the writer who taught Christians that the words they have for God are given, and true, and not the measure of him. That lesson is worth the trouble he came with.