All of this looks so alien to the spirit of modern philosophy that we may well ask if there is anything really philosophical in Dionysius' practice? The answer has to be affirmative, for there is a perfectly reasonable pattern to the whole of Dionysius' works. In addition, Dionysius regards his own task as a kind of demonstration (apodeixis) or showing (deixai). In the Divine Names, such demonstration is given a Pauline resonance when Dionysius states that we should hold to the scriptural revelation of divine names “not in the persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the power granted by the Spirit” (DN 585b; cf. Paul 1 Cor 2–4). In other words, Dionysius here sees scripture as providing the basis for a deeper understanding of attribution or predication that will lead us beyond our own merely human capacities. That such a demonstration involves the unpacking of the symbolic, contemplative, and mystical significances of ordinary things by the aid of scriptural testimony is clear in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which again starts from Dionysius' purpose of demonstrating what the hierarchy comprises; and that this includes arguments, reasons, the possibility of debate and even improvement upon Dionysius' demonstrations by his interlocutor becomes clear too at the end of the work, when the literary humility that is characteristic of his writing (cf. EH 568a ff.; DN 981c–984a; CH 340b) shows itself to be philosophically justified by Dionysius' ability to set out both sides of the case for and against infant baptism in the understanding that he may not fully be in possession of the most complete view of the situation and that his interlocutor should “use” what he has said “as steps (epanabathmois) to a higher ray of light” (EH 568d–569a). This is a thought couched in terms very reminiscent of Socrates' wish in the Republic to subvert or destroy hypotheses and use them as stepping stones to something better, and it is also a thought not unworthy of Wittgenstein's similar view at the end of the Tractatus. The words immediately following make clear the connection between charity of interpretation, open-endedness and demonstration: “Be generous with me then, my dear friend,… and show (deixon) to my eyes that more beautiful and unified beauty which you may be able to see”. Demonstration in this sense, then, includes much of what we might consider to be properly philosophical, but at root it is also a form of “divine reading” (lectio divina, or meditative, prayerful reading) of nature and word, a receptive recognition as a kind of method or making one's way “to hear the sacred words as receptively as possible, to be open to the divine workings of God, to clear an uplifting path (hodopoiesis) toward that inheritance that awaits us in heaven, and to accept our most divine and sacred regeneration” (EH392a).

5. Afterlife: Significance and Influence

In sum, Dionysius represents the instantaneous resonances, possible in unusual circumstances, between forms of thought and practice that may at first sight appear entirely divergent. He is therefore in some respects a dangerous thinker, yet at the same time a forger of new possibilities:
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[*]Partly because as a Christian he cannot accept at face value the Neoplatonic view of the One as excluding trinity, Dionysius forges a new way of thinking about God by linking beyond-beingness with unrestricted being and by combining in God's transcendent love both power and a kind of hyperessential, erotic vulnerability. In the first instance, he provides a fruitful link between philosophies based upon a transcendent principle beyond being (for example, the Good) and philosophies of being, and in the second instance he suggests a loving God whom, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, it makes sense to address in prayer. At the same time, however, this standpoint leaves room, from a modern viewpoint particularly, for interreligious dialogue since, while it is certainly a Christian view, it also remains radically open-ended.

[*]He also succeeds in transposing Pagan Neoplatonism into a complete Christian theology, from the Trinity and the angelic world through the incarnation and redemption to the sacramental life and orders of the Church, and extending to the old Law, and provides not only a symbolic and mystical explanation, but a profound reconsideration of the importance of liturgical practice as a response to both the hidden and the more manifest divine workings of grace in scripture, ritual, morality, law and even material things.

[*]Together with scripture, the Fathers, and the entire ancient tradition, he provides a framework and a vocabulary for ordinary spirituality as well as mystical practice, especially for describing the approach of the soul through inactivity of all knowledge to a state of unification with God “in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence” (MT 1); and his complex negative theology transmits a theory of signification that in many ways is so self-subversive and necessarily deceptive at each level (both kataphatic and apophatic) that for future generations after his own time it will hardly be possible to translate his works without also writing commentaries upon them.

[*]In addition, Dionysius' view of the visible created universe was to have a marked influence for two reasons, first, because his vivid sense of the aesthetic and imaginative beauty of the sensible universe, pervaded from the perspective of divine beauty by interrelatedness and harmony (see esp. DN 7), came to inspire Abbot Suger's program for a new architecture, the Gothic cathedral, and, second, because Dionysius also took account of ugliness, defect, resistance, and evil by his theory of evil as privation and non-being, a theory adopted from Plotinus (with significant changes) and Proclus and destined to have further influence upon Aquinas in medieval times and Ficino in the Renaissance.

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For the long commentary tradition, from John of Scythopolis to Aquinas and Ficino, see bibliography 2 below. St. Gregory the Great refers to Dionysius in his own commentary on the angels and probably had the complete works at Rome. But the study of Dionysius did not take off in the Latin West until the Byzantine emperor Michael the Stammerer sent a copy of the Dionysian corpus as a gift to the Frankish king Louis the Pious in 827. This copy served as the source of the first translations of Dionysius into Latin. The first translation, made around 838 by Hilduin, abbot of a monastery near Paris (who identified Dionysius not only as St. Dionysius the Areopagite but also as the first bishop of Paris), was so unintelligible that Charles II asked the great Irish philosopher, John Scottus Eriugena, to make a new translation that he completed in 862 and that was subsequently revised with clarifications in 875. The influence of Dionysius is profound in Eriugena's own thought as it would be later in the Franciscan tradition (especially Grosseteste and Bonaventure) and also to a lesser extent in the Dominican (both Albert and Aquinas wrote commentaries). In fact, the abiding-procession-return triad may be said to form the essential structure of Aquinas' unfinished masterpiece, the Summa Theologica. The influence of Dionysius' ideas pervades not only the Italian and English Renaissance, but also the Rhineland mystical writers, such as Meister Eckhart (d. 1327), Tauler (d. 1361), Ruysbroeck (d. 1381), Gerson (d. 1429), and later Denis the Carthusian (d. 1471) and Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464) (whose work On Learned Ignorance owes a debt to Dionysius' agnosia or unknowingness, as does also the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing) and the great Spanish mystics, for example, St. John of the Cross (d. 1591). In the Greek East, Dionysius' On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy inspired a series of liturgical commentaries, beginning with the Mystagogy of Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) and continuing with works by Germanus of Constantinople (d. 733) and Nicholas Cabasilas (d. 1390). Dionysius played a major role in the Palamite controversy of the 14th century, cited both by Gregory Palamas (d. 1359) and by his opponents. In the modern world, Dionysius has received less attention, though he is of some importance for 19th century German Idealist thought and also to a lesser extent for English and American Romanticism. In the so-called “postmodern” world, however, two thinkers who have written about Dionysius with great insight are Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida. Derrida, in particular, has been one of the few contemporary philosophical thinkers, if not the only one, to realize the importance of Dionysius in relation to deconstruction (a term he does not use himself) and to explore the complex nature of prayer, address, and denial in the context of the necessarily deceptive and open-ended possibilities of negative theology.