Dionysios the Areopagite
c. 50 · Christian Mysticism · Prominent
Dionysios the Areopagite is the Athenian whom Paul converted in Acts 17, and the Greek treatises that carry his name have been read in the Church under it since antiquity, though whether he wrote them himself was already disputed in the sixth century. Their subject is the God beyond every name, known by unknowing, and the ascent they describe runs not away from the world but through Scripture, the liturgy and the sacraments, which is where their celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies belong. He set out three ways of speaking about God: affirm every good name, then deny them all, then negate the negations and pass into the darkness where Moses met God on Sinai. He ranked the angels in nine orders grouped in three triads, and held that evil is no substance in itself, only a falling short of the good.
Signature
The position Dionysios is most identified with in the Profiler:
- The Divine
- leans Indescribable
- Paradox
- Apophatic Pointer
Positions on the 7 axes the sources answer
- The Divine
- leans Indescribable (84 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Beauty
- leans Objective (86 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Universals
- leans Realism (12 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Order
- strongly leans Vertical (7 on a 0–100 scale from Vertical to Horizontal)
- Nature of Reality
- strongly leans Unity (4 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Transcendence (97 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Ignorance
- mildly between Bondage and Bliss (60 on a 0–100 scale from Bondage to Bliss)
13 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Dionysios refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Monarchy
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Union with God
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Good Real, Evil Privative
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - End of Things
- Transfiguration
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Perception
- Eidetic Intuition
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Receptive Intellect
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Divine Command
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Synergism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Emanation
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Sacred Time
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Authority
- Divine Revelation
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- Logos
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Paradox
- Apophatic Pointer
What is the status of paradox? - Law
- Divine Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Ascent of the Soul
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Path to the Divine
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Imago Dei
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- The Divine
What is your primary bond and loyalty?