A sixth-century monk posed as Saint Paul's convert and fooled Christendom for centuries
The author signed himself Dionysios, implying he was the Athenian whom Paul converted in the Book of Acts. For roughly a thousand years many readers believed it, and his writings shaped Christian mysticism. Only in 1895 did two scholars prove he had borrowed heavily from Proclus, who died in 485.
The Corpus Dionysiacum includes treatises on the Celestial Hierarchy and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and a short but influential Mystical Theology, often described as the first work in which theology became explicitly mystical. It made its author the founding figure of apophatic, or negative, theology, which approaches God by saying what God is not. He also mentions seven further works that are either lost or invented to suggest a vast first-century library. His style draws on Plotinus, including the image of a sculptor cutting away stone to reveal a figure.
Doubts arose almost at once. In 532, at a meeting with Emperor Justinian, followers of Severus of Antioch cited one of his letters, but Hypatius of Ephesus rejected it because no Church Father or council had ever quoted it. John of Scythopolis defended its authenticity around 540, and by the 7th century Maximus the Confessor and the Lateran Council of 649 accepted it. Thomas Aquinas and Peter Abelard had private suspicions that went largely unheeded.
The Renaissance changed that. Lorenzo Valla showed in 1457 that the author could not be Paul's convert, and Erasmus publicised the view from 1504, drawing criticism from Catholic theologians. At the Leipzig debate with Martin Luther in 1519, Johann Eck still used the angelic hierarchy to argue that papal supremacy dated back to the apostles. The decisive evidence came when J. Stiglmayr and H. Koch showed independently that a chapter on evil in The Divine Names relied on a treatise by Proclus.
Modern scholars place the writings in Syria between about 485 and 528, partly because his description of sacraments matches Syriac rites. Who he really was remains open; candidates range from Peter the Iberian to Damascius, last head of the Athenian Academy. Some argue forgery is a modern idea and that he saw himself as passing on a tradition, while Bart Ehrman and others disagree. A few theologians still defend a first-century date, a view mainstream historians reject.
Source: Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
