The handbook contains forty essays by over thirty contributors from various universities
on the antecedents, the content, and the reception of the Dionysian corpus, a body
of writings falsely ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, a convert of St Paul, but
actually written about ad 500. The first section contains discussions of the genesis
of the corpus, its Christian antecedents, and its Neoplatonic influences. In the second
section, studies on the Syriac reception, the relation of the Syriac to the original
Greek, and the editing of the Greek by John of Scythopolis are followed by contributions
on the use of the corpus in such Byzantine authors as Maximus the Confessor, John
of Damascus, Theodore the Studite, Nicholas Stethatos, Gregory Palamas, and Gemistus
Pletho. In the third section, attention turns to the Western tradition, represented
first by the translators John Scotus Eriugena, John Sarracenus, and Robert Grosseteste
and then by such readers as the Victorines, the early Franciscans, Albert the Great,
Aquinas, Bonaventure, Dante, the English mystics, Nicholas of Cusa, and Marsilio Ficino
The contributors to the final section survey the effect on Western readers of Lorenzo
Valla’s proof of the inauthenticity of the corpus and the subsequent exposure of its
dependence on Proclus by Koch and Stiglmayr. The authors studied in this section include
Erasmus, Luther, and his followers, Vladimir Lossky, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Jacques
Derrida, as well as modern thinkers of the Greek Church. Essays on Dionysius as a
mystic and a political theologian conclude the volume.
