Dionysius THE AREOPAGITE (i.e. member of the Areopagus, q.v.), one of the few Athenians who, according to Acts, xvii. 34, were converted by the preaching of the Apostle Paul. A later tradition makes him the first Bishop of Athens, and a martyr of the church. The celebrated Greek writings which bear his name, and, connecting Neoplatonism with Christianity, laid the foundation for the mystical theology of the church, were not written by him, but attributed to him after a fashion not uncommon in antiquity. They are first mentioned in 533, when they were appealed to by the Monophysite sect of the Severians against the authority of the Council of Chalcedon. From the 6th century they were generally accepted as genuine, and exercised a very great influence on the development of theology. They include writings On the Heavenly Hierarchy, On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, On Divine Names, On Mystical Theology, and a series of ten Epistles. In the Western Church they are first referred to in one of the Homilies of Gregory the Great. In the 9th century Erigena, at Charles the Bald's command, prepared an annotated Latin translation; and he and many of the scholastic theologians who followed him drew much of their inspiration from this source. The date assigned to the pseudo-Dionysian writings is fixed by Kanakis as early as 120, by Frothingham as late as 520. Harnack holds that it has not yet been decided at what period between 350 and 500 they were written, and adheres provisionally to the second half of the 4th century, with a final recension about the year 500. This great unknown thinker was probably an Alexandrian. His fundamental thought is the absolute transcendence of God, which he attempts to connect with Pantheism by regarding God as absolute causality, and as multiplying himself through his indwelling love in all things. His theology is twofold—on the one hand, descending from God to created things, and concluding from these the absolute inexhaustible being of the One; on the other hand, rising from things to God, denying of him everything that is conceivable, and finding him exalted above truth and error, being and not-being. 'The divine darkness is unapproachable light.' The Incarnation is part of the self-unfolding of God in the world, and the redemption of the individual is mediated by the three degrees of the heavenly hierarchy, and by the three degrees of the church's hierarchy—bishops, priests, and deacons, and the media between them are the six 'mysteries' or symbolical priestly actions, to each of which is attributed a special mysterious significance.
The standard edition is that of the Jesuit, Balthasar Corderius (Antwerp, 1634; Brescia, 1854; and reprinted in Migne's collection). German translations by Engelhardt (1823), French by Darbois (1845), and English by Rev. John Parker (1894). See DENIS (St); and the studies by Hipler (1861), Niemeyer (1869), and Schneider (1884); Dorner's Doctrine of the Person of Christ, div. ii. vol. i.; Harnack's Dogmenengeschichte, vol. ii.; and Westcott in the Contemporary (1867).