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WorkPseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

The Letters

Ten letters in the voice of Paul's convert: to John exiled on Patmos, to a monk who burst into the sanctuary, about an eclipse at the Crucifixion.

by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite40 passages held

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Original title
Ἐπιστολαί
First published
(aged 25)
Original language
Greek

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Overview

A sophist named Apollophanes, the seventh of these letters reports, has been calling its writer a parricide for turning the learning of the Greeks against the Greeks. The writer asks Polycarp, a bishop, to remind Apollophanes of the day the two of them stood together at Heliopolis and watched the moon approach the sun, touch its edge and draw back, against nature, at the hour of the Crucifixion. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite wrote all ten letters as Paul's Athenian convert, to figures of the apostolic age, and the last, to John the Evangelist in exile on Patmos, foretells his release and return to Asia. Four short ones to Gaius, a monk, press the treatises' teaching into single points; the fourth says that Christ, being God and man, did neither divine things as God nor human things as man, but worked by "a certain new God-incarnate energy". That phrase drew the corpus into the quarrels over Christ's nature. When the two sides met for talks in Constantinople in 532, the party of Severus of Antioch, the exiled patriarch who rejected the Council of Chalcedon, cited the fourth letter, and Hypatius of Ephesus, speaking for the Chalcedonian bishops, disputed that the writings were genuine. The longest letter, the eighth, rebukes Demophilus, a monk who had abused a priest for receiving a penitent and forced his way into the sanctuary: whatever the priest's fault, Dionysius writes, it was not a monk's place to correct the order above him. The ninth explains to Titus why scripture speaks of God through homely images, a house, a bowl, food and drink. Historians place the letters, like the treatises, around 500. Lorenzo Valla, the Italian humanist, argued in 1457 that they could not be by Paul's convert, and from 1504 Erasmus spread the doubt.

Key concepts

What is the 'new God-incarnate energy' in the letter to Gaius?

Dionysius's phrase for how Christ acted: not sometimes as God and sometimes as man, but as one agent in whom both work together. A virgin conceives, water holds up a man's earthly feet: human things done in a way above the human. The Greek, theandric, means God-manly. Because it can be read as one activity or as two joined, both sides of the later quarrel over Christ's nature claimed it.

What does Dionysius mean by order in the letter to Demophilus?

Each person keeping to the place and task God's arrangement gives them, so that light passes down rightly. Monks stand at the sanctuary doors, he writes, not to guard the holy things but to remind themselves that they are nearer the people than the priests. A monk who corrects a priest, even a faulty one, puts himself out of place, and that disorder is a sin of its own, whatever the priest did.

How can God be 'above Godhead' and 'above Goodness'?

Because the words Godhead and Goodness name the gift by which creatures are made divine and good, and God is the giver beyond the gift. In the second letter to Gaius, Dionysius explains that we can share in deity and goodness only as a likeness received from God. God himself is the source above that source, never shared or held, and so above even the names that describe our sharing.

What are the two kinds of theology in the letter to Titus?

One hidden, taught through symbols and rites, and one open, taught through argument and demonstration. Dionysius says the unspoken kind is woven into the spoken, and that both are needed: the first moves the soul toward God without explaining, the second persuades by proof. He reads Wisdom's two foods the same way, the solid food standing for one kind of teaching and the flowing drink for another.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Mercy above zeal

What should a devout person do when someone in charge seems too soft on a sinner? The longest letter answers a monk who took matters into his own hands, and the answer is: not that.

Demophilus, a monk, abused a priest for receiving a penitent and forced his way into the sanctuary. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite rebukes him twice over: he broke the order that sets monks below priests, and he chose severity where God shows meekness. Moses was chosen for his gentleness, and Christ rejoices over the lost who are found. The letter ends with the vision of a holy man named Carpus, who prayed for sinners to be struck down and saw Jesus reach down to save them instead. Zeal without mercy, on this view, is disorder dressed as piety.

  • forgiveness
  • compassion
  • mercy
  • meekness
  • humility
  • sin
  • religious hierarchy
  • religious authority
  • priesthood
  • salvation

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Stating the truth instead of winning

Is refuting a wrong opinion the same as holding the right one? Dionysius thinks not, and tells his correspondents to say what is true and let the quarrel go.

To the priest Sopatros he writes that to denounce someone else's view is no victory, since one may refute a false opinion and still miss the truth, which is one and hidden. To Polycarp he says he has never been eager to answer the Greeks, only to know the truth and then speak it. When the sophist Apollophanes calls him a parricide for turning Greek learning against the Greeks, he replies by reminding him of the eclipse they watched together at Heliopolis. To John on Patmos he writes that persecutors harm themselves and should be prayed for.

  • truth
  • wisdom
  • religious teaching
  • knowledge
  • divine knowledge
  • miracles
  • divine providence
  • causation
  • divine justice
  • afterlife

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God made man, and God at table

How can a God beyond every name become a man, or sit at a feast? Two short letters press the treatises' teaching into a single phrase about Christ and a single banquet scene.

Writing to the monk Gaius, Dionysius says Christ, being God and man, did neither divine things as God nor human things as man, but worked by a new God-incarnate energy, a phrase that later fuelled the quarrels over Christ's nature. Writing to Titus, he reads the house, the bowl, the meat and the drink that Wisdom sets out in Proverbs. The round, open bowl is providence without beginning or end; the solid and the liquid food are two kinds of teaching. Even God's drunkenness, he argues, names an overflowing goodness.

  • incarnation
  • theological symbolism
  • scriptural interpretation
  • divine transcendence
  • divine goodness
  • divine wisdom
  • negative theology
  • apophatic theology
  • joy
  • ritual

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Within this work

passages held
40
distinct concepts
107
by passages held, corpus-wide
#682

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “divine providence” and “divine transcendence”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 3 concepts, joined by 3 pairings. 15 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
divine providencedivine transcendence2
divine providencetheological symbolism2
divine transcendencetheological symbolism2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 500 The Celestial Hierarchy (Περὶ τῆς οὐρανίας ἱεραρχίας)

    The heavenly half of a pair: the order of the angels, which The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy then follows down into the church. In the manuscripts it stands first among the treatises; Hugh of Saint-Victor, the Paris theologian, wrote a commentary on it in the twelfth century.

     EN
  2. 500 The Divine Names (Περὶ θείων ὀνομάτων)

    By the corpus's own cross-references it is the first of the surviving theological treatises: The Mystical Theology names it among the works written before it. It is also the longest work in the corpus, written around 500 under the name of Paul's Athenian convert.

     EN
  3. 500 The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (Περὶ τῆς ἐκκλησιαστικῆς ἱεραρχίας)

    A walk through six rites of the church, written as the earthly sequel to The Celestial Hierarchy; after The Divine Names it is the longest treatise in the corpus. It is read here in John Parker's Victorian English.

     EN
  4. 500 The Letters (Ἐπιστολαί) you are here EN
  5. 500 The Mystical Theology (Περὶ μυστικῆς θεολογίας)

    The shortest of the four treatises, a few pages long, and the source of the language of darkness and unknowing that later mystics took up, from the Rhineland preachers to John of the Cross.

     EN
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