Saint Dionysius the Areopagite

Dionysius the Areopagite was an Athenian judge at the Areopagus Court in Athens, who lived in the first century. A convert to Christianity, he is venerated as a saint by multiple denominations. As related in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 17:34), he was converted to Christianity by the preaching of Paul the Apostle, being first stirred to Christian doctrine by Paul's sermon at the Areopagus: After his conversion, Dionysius became the first Bishop of Athens, though he is sometimes counted as the second after Hierotheus. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches. He is the patron saint of Athens and is venerated as the protector of judges and the judiciary. His memory is celebrated on October 3. By the early-sixth century, the Corpus Dionysiacum, a collection of four philosophical-theological treatises that "adapted and transformed" Neoplatonic categories into Christian mystical thought, was being explicitly used and attributed to the first-century Areopagite "by just about all parties in the Christian east" (Chalcedonians, Miaphysites, and Nestorians). The historical origins of the documents and identity of the author are somewhat unclear before this period and have therefore been subjected to extensive historical and literary scrutiny. Most scholars adopt a critical view of the writer as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Debate within Dionysian scholarship typically presupposes inauthenticity and explores possible motives for the fictional attribution—whether as an act of honorific memorialization or strategic deception. The principal argument concerns the writer’s dependence on the language and thought of the fifth-century philosopher Proclus, first demonstrated in articles by Hugo Koch and Joseph Stiglmayr at the turn of the twentieth century. This position has become so widely accepted that a terminus post quem for the corpus is commonly set at Proclus’ death in 485.