Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

Yeah, they're our guys, too.

I mean, our big number one dude, Thomas Aquinas, I mean, his whole thought is absolutely saturated with the thought of Dionysius the Areopagite and John of Damascus.

I mean, the Eastern patrimony deeply enriches and fructifies the Latin tradition.

And I think it would go well for the Orthodox to acknowledge that when they talk to Catholics or write about Catholics.

At the same time, Thomas Gallus was deeply beholden to the effective spirituality that had grown up around the medieval commentaries on the Song of Songs.

And like Hugh of St. Victor, Thomas Gallus was also a great student of the mystical treatises of Dionysius the Areopagite, the father of medieval mysticism.

In particular, he hoped to show that these two sets of writings were not only mutually compatible, but were really two sides of the same coin.

Or as Thomas Gallus put it, quote, there are two forms of knowledge of God.

The one is intellectual and works through consideration of creatures.

That's facts, right? The other knowledge of God is incomparably better.

It is described by Dionysus, it is the superior wisdom by way of the human heart, end quote.

According to Thomas Gallus, to know God fully and wholly, you have to ascend to what he calls the apex of the soul.

Is there anything else that either of you wants to get in before we just wrap it up with a conclusion here?

Yeah, maybe just a brief mention of someone that Father had mentioned earlier is the figure of Pseudo-Dionysius, or as Urban and I like to say it, just Dionysius.

Yeah, so because this purportedly apostolic figure figure was not known to be a fifth or sixth century pseudonymous writer in the 13th century.

You know, he was treated with basically apostolic authority and the way in which Bonaventure, having learned Dionysus at this point, and actually I think that Bonaventure and Thomas are the first of their orders to study in Paris with the entire corpus of Dionysus' the manner in which the figure of St. Francis is interpreted in a very, very clear Dionysian lens that wasn't done before.

has made a great impact on the shape of Franciscan theology after that.

And maybe as a closing mention, the episode of the Stigmata, which I do not believe is legendary.

Dozens of people swore to seeing and adoring and kissing the exact same thing.

Um, but you know, he, he receives this, um, as part of a retreat during St. Michael's Lent in, uh, on top of this mountain called Mount Alverna, which was given to him by Count Orlando of Cusi as, uh, as a hermitage.

So it doesn't make any sense to put a bunch of people together and learn a core curriculum where half the people aren't getting any of it.

a quarter of the people are totally bored and maybe some subset are like actually kind of on par with whatever so actually recognizing that learning happens at these different levels and using those as the guidance rather than just age groupings would also be really huge because then you're in your cohort of people that's actually at your zone of proximal development you're actually learning from people and i think there's a whole model here that we could begin to develop around um A kind of almost kind of, you know, I'm thinking of like pseudo Dionysius, who's the guy who coined the idea of hierarchy, which I know is a kind of nasty term for some people.

But the basic idea that he's getting at there is that if you read his works in his kind of religious order, there are people that are kind of your mentors.

And then there are people that are sort of below you that you're mentoring and just taking the term in that sense.

Now, you've introduced me to somebody I had never read before, Plotinus.

Now, and you also write about, people call him pseudo-Dionysius, but there are other people who think there's nothing pseudo about him.

Anyway, let's not get into that debate.

What, why, what, and what did Plotinus and what did pseudo-Dionysius or Dionysius believe about beauty?

Yeah, so Plotinus was not a Christian.

He rubbed shoulders with Christians.

And this is where, and we'll probably get here later, I hope we do, I think it's the beauty of our gospel, but this is where Christians differ so much about God's beauty and our beauty.

Yeah, let's carry on.

So this is an idea that's core.

It will obviously live on in Pseudo-Dionysius, and it lives on in the Christian tradition, and it will live on in Kabbalah and all kinds of other things.

So this idea also develops.

But again, at the core of it, it's an ascent theory.

Therefore we cannot assign any definite number to the effects of government.

On the contrary, Dionysius says, Divine Names 12, God contains all and fills all by his providence and perfect goodness.

But government belongs to providence.

Therefore there are certain definite effects of the divine government.

Considered in the first way, nothing can resist the order of the divine government.

This can be proved in two ways.

Firstly, from the fact that the order of the divine government is wholly directed to good, and everything by its own operation and effort tends to good only, for no one acts intending evil, as Dionysius says, Divine Names 4.

Secondly, from the fact that, as we've said above, answer 1, add 3, answer 5, add 2, every inclination of anything, whether natural or voluntary, is nothing but a kind of impression from the first mover, as the inclination of the arrow toward a fixed point is nothing but an impulse received from the archer.