How a Forged Roman Book Remade Christianity

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How a Forged Roman Book Remade Christianity

toldinstone 29.05.2026 47 450 просмотров 3 023 лайков

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Around the year 500, four treatises claiming to be works of Dionysius the Areopagite began to circulate through the Eastern Roman Empire. They were destined to change the course of Christian thought. For more on apophatic theology, check the new video from@ReligionForBreakfast: https://youtu.be/Ey1N3lzIm7c Preorder my new book: https://www.amazon.com/Leaky-Aqueducts-Battle-Pigeons-Mystery/dp/1493090607 Upcoming group tours: https://toldinstone.com/trips/ The Toldinstone Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/toldinstone Chapters 0:00 Introduction 0:40 The Eastern Roman Empire 1:20 Monophysites and Chalcedonians 2:17 Neoplatonism 3:38 Christian Neoplatonism 4:10 Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies 5:00 Divine Names 5:37 Mystical Theology 7:15 Influence of Pseudo-Dionysius 8:48 Enduring significance

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Introduction

Around the year 500, four treatises began to circulate through the cities and monasteries of the Eastern Roman Empire. They claimed to be works of Dionysius the Areopagite, a shadowy figure from the New Testament. The real author is unknown. For the next millennium, these four books would profoundly influence Christian thought. Today's video, a collaboration with Religion for Breakfast, will explore how. Pseudo-Dionysius

The Eastern Roman Empire

Pseudo-Dionysius, as he is customarily known, lived in a rapidly changing world. The Western Roman Empire had collapsed a generation before, to be replaced by a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms. The Eastern Empire had remained intact and was flourishing under the careful management of Emperor Anastasius I. The greatest external threat to Anastasius's Roman Empire was Kavadh, Shahanshah of Persia, who repeatedly attacked the Eastern frontier. Pseudo-Dionysius, who likely came from Syria, may have witnessed the fallout of those attacks.

Monophysites and Chalcedonians

In Syria and throughout the Empire, however, the principal source of domestic tension was the Monophysite controversy. The Monophysites held that the incarnate Christ had only a single divine nature, instead of the double nature, divine and human, claimed by the Chalcedonian Orthodox. The distinction was anything but trivial. To Monophysites, it was the essential unity of God and man in Christ that gave ordinary Christians the hope of salvation. By the turn of the 6th century, the Eastern Empire was confessionally divided, with the Orthodox dominant in the Balkans and Asia Minor, and Monophysites ascendant in Egypt and Syria. Pseudo-Dionysius himself seems to have been a moderate Monophysite. The controversy would continue until the Arab conquests swallowed the Eastern provinces.

Neoplatonism

provinces. The Christological disputes raging through the empire left untouched the dwindling minority of Romans who remained polytheists. The most visible of these were the philosophers of Athens. For decades, the most famous Roman intellectual was Proclus, head of the Platonic school at Athens. A tireless author and commentator, he supposedly wrote 700 lines every day. Proclus produced the definitive synthesis of what we call Neoplatonism. Plotinus, the original Neoplatonist, had drawn from Plato's later dialogues a conception of the universe in which all things emanate from an ineffable first principle, the One. From the One emerges Nous, the divine mind, container of the Platonic forms. From Nous derives Psyche, the world soul, generator of the cosmos. Human souls are mired in the complexity and multiplicity of the material world, but by contemplation, they can rise to ecstatic union with the One. By the time Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius were writing, two centuries after the death of Plotinus, Neoplatonism was the Eastern Roman Empire's leading philosophical tradition.

Christian Neoplatonism

Its appeal was not limited to pagans. Christian authors tended to regard Plato as the most palatable of the Greek philosophers. Saint Augustine described the doctrines of Plato, refracted through the works of the Neoplatonists, as a sort of halfway house on the road to Christianity, and used Platonic concepts to interpret the biblical creation story. But, it was left to our anonymous friend, Pseudo-Dionysius, to truly synthesize Neoplatonism with Christian theology.

Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies

theology. Pseudo-Dionysius wrote 10 surviving letters and claimed to have composed a number of works that are no longer extant and may have never existed. His legacy, however, is defined by four treatises. Two of these works, The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, discuss how the various orders of angels and priests mediate between God and man. According to Pseudo-Dionysius, the hierarchies of both the heavens and the church, organized in good Neoplatonic fashion into unities and trinities, transmit the splendor of God to worshipers. They also model the means by which Christian souls, like the mind of a Neoplatonic sage, can ascend to the source of all things.

Divine Names

The other two works explore the nature of God. The Divine Names is an example of cataphatic theology, which attempts to make positive statements about the attributes of God. Plotinus had identified the one with the absolute good. Pseudo-Dionysius, likewise, begins by defining God as the essence of goodness. He continues by applying to God the names of the Neoplatonic triad, being, life, and mind, and then a number of terms and categories derived from contemporary philosophy, concluding with perfect oneness.

Mystical Theology

The Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius's most influential work, takes the opposite approach. Apophatic theology emphasizes the absolute transcendence and ultimate unknowability of God. God cannot be confined in a cage of words. It is only possible to define what he is not. This way of conceptualizing the divine had a long history in Platonism, even before Plotinus applied it to the One. Proclus had developed the concept, and Pseudo-Dionysius, following the lead of patristic Platonists like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, applied it to Christian theology. Pseudo-Dionysius begins with an allegory of Moses ascending Mount Sinai. As he climbed, Moses was dazzled by unearthly lights, but there was nothing to be seen at the summit, only a cloud which wrapped Moses in the ineffable presence of God. Neither can we, Pseudo-Dionysius continues, ever glimpse God, but we can remove some of the obstacles that stand in the way. As a sculptor carves away stone to reveal his statue, first, we should negate the attributes most distant from God, sensible characteristics like shape and form. We should proceed through the divine names of cataphatic theology, not because God truly lacks such attributes, but because they are inadequate for describing him. Then, and only then, can the mind ascend to contemplation of the divine mystery. Pseudo-Dionysius can never have imagined

Influence of Pseudo-Dionysius

how influential his treatises would become. When the iconoclast controversy tore the Greek Church apart in the 8th century, Dionysius's description of the earthly and celestial hierarchies through which God communicates by countless visible symbols inspired John of Damascus to write the definitive defense of icons, still a cornerstone of Orthodox Christianity. Starting in the 9th century, when John Scotus Eriugena translated them into Latin, Pseudo-Dionysius' works were incorporated into Catholic theology. A series of scholastic philosophers, culminating in Thomas Aquinas, wrote commentaries on them. Aquinas described God using the apophatic terms of the mystical theology in his magisterial Summa Theologica. The mystical theology also inspired Catholic mystics from Meister Eckhart to St. John of the Cross, all drawn to the idea of union with the ineffable essence of God. Pseudo-Dionysius even shaped the course of European architecture. Abbot Suger of Saint Denis, who effectively invented the Gothic style when he rebuilt his church to have larger windows, was an avid reader of Pseudo-Dionysius. Suger had a Latin poem inscribed on the church door, urging all who entered to be transported through the light within to the greater light of Christ, an allusion to Dionysius' Neoplatonic cosmos.

Enduring significance

cosmos. The influence of Pseudo-Dionysius waned after the Renaissance, when the great humanist Lorenzo Valla demonstrated that Dionysius the Areopagite could not have written the works ascribed to him. But as poetry, if nothing else, a few passages retain their power. Perhaps none more so than the invocation at the beginning of the mystical theology. Ineffable Trinity, God beyond God, the good surpassing good, make straight our way to the loftiest summit beyond knowing, past seeing of that mystical scripture where the mystery that is God, changeless and absolute, lies wrapped in silence and the darkness beyond light. For more on apophatic theology, check out Religion for Breakfast's video, linked on screen and in the description. My new book, The Aqueducts, Battle Pigeons, and Mystery Cults, is now available for pre-order. You'll find a link in the description. You'll also find links in the description to the Telltale Stone Patreon, where I'm currently reviewing the first season of HBO's Rome, and to my two other channels. There are new podcast episodes up on Telltale Stone Footnotes and a series of new videos on sites in Spain and Turkey appearing on Cynic Routes to the Past. Thanks for watching.

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