The Many Faces of Dionysius. Reflections on The Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite (original) (raw)
Related papers
"Filled with the Visible Theophany of the Lord: Reading Dionysius East and West"
Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, 2012
This article is the latest in a series of papers in which the author has explored how the Divine Names and Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Areopagite have been read in terms of three 'frameworks': Neoplatonic, Greek patristic/ Orthodox Christian, and Medieval Latin scholastic. In this article, the author focuses on Dionsyius's reference to the Transfiguration of the Lord (DN 1.4, 592B-C) and the sort of embodied knowledge we can have of God in theophanic experiences. This text provides a very good example for contrasting the Latin scholastic and Orthodox/Greek patristic interpretations of Dionysius. It also provides an excellent example of a text that cannot be accommodated within a strictly Neoplatonic interpretation of the Divine Names. The author spends most of the article examining the quite different frameworks in which St. Gregory Palamas, on the one hand, and Sts. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, interpret this text. In the end the author shows that these different frameworks for interpreting Dionysius's reference to the Transfiguration rest on quite different epistemologies.
A Defence for a Liturgical Reading of Dionysios the Areopagite
Most of the interest surrounding the study of the Corpus Areopagiticum has focused on its position in relation to Neoplatonist philosophy and Christian theology, with a range of views expressed between these two benchmarks. However, it is possible to consider each work separately as well as the entire CD in a different light, by querying the motivation of the text and the wider context of worship in which it emerged. Although the liturgical orientation in the CD has been noticed by certain scholars (and has been denied by others), there is very little research that actually examines it in detail. This presentation will attempt to approach Dionysios as a writer whose main interest was to deepen the understanding of the liturgical practices of his day in the context of philosophical mystical thought, rather than to get directly involved in the heated theological disputes of the time. In addition, this approach will address the question of his pseudonymity, which, combined with the unusual structure of his entire work, allows us to appreciate him as a unique writer, whose concerns and instincts are more relevant for us today than for his contemporaries.
Le Muséon 117/3-4: 409-446., 2004
This study revisits, first, Ronald Hathaway's hypothesis according to which the first nine Letters of Pseudo-Dionysius are echoing the nine hypotheses of Plato's Parmenides as interpreted in Proclus' school. Within this framework it examines the Fourth Letter treating the Incarnation, which, according to this scheme, should correspond to the realm of enmattered forms. It establishes that the text of the Letter, as it is known to us, is unclear and needs a re-edition, which it does through examining, first, the early indirect transmission of the text, which by far antedates the direct transmission, our manuscript evidence starting in the ninth century. The main elements of this indirect transmission are Sergius of Reshaina's early Syriac translation (early sixth century), the Commentary on the Letter by Maximus the Confessor in Ambigua ad Thomam, which contains the entire text (seventh century) as well as the scholia of John of Scythopolis (sixth century) and of Maximus Confessor. Then, it takes the results of the inquiry into the indirect text tradition and attempts at choosing the correct variants from the direct text tradition. The theoretical result of the inquiry is that the Letter is echoing both the third and the fourth hypotheses of the Parmenides but, by means of this Neoplatonist metaphysics, it teaches a kind of a post-Chalcedonian Antiochian Christology combined to a strong Origenistic tendency.