Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Foreword
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Origen of Alexandria
- Chapter 2 Gregory of Nyssa
- Chapter 3 Augustine
- Chapter 4 Gregory the Great
- Chapter 5 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
- Chapter 6 Maximus the Confessor
- Chapter 7 Alexander of Hales
- Chapter 8 Thomas Gallus
- Chapter 9 Bonaventure
- Chapter 10 Thomas Aquinas
- Chapter 11 Late medieval mystics
- Chapter 12 Nicholas of Cusa
- Chapter 13 Jonathan Edwards and his Puritan predecessors
- Chapter 14 John Wesley
- Chapter 15 Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar
- Chapter 16 Analytic philosophers of religion
- Select bibliography
- General index
- Index of select biblical references
- References
Chapter 5 - Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Foreword
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Origen of Alexandria
- Chapter 2 Gregory of Nyssa
- Chapter 3 Augustine
- Chapter 4 Gregory the Great
- Chapter 5 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
- Chapter 6 Maximus the Confessor
- Chapter 7 Alexander of Hales
- Chapter 8 Thomas Gallus
- Chapter 9 Bonaventure
- Chapter 10 Thomas Aquinas
- Chapter 11 Late medieval mystics
- Chapter 12 Nicholas of Cusa
- Chapter 13 Jonathan Edwards and his Puritan predecessors
- Chapter 14 John Wesley
- Chapter 15 Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar
- Chapter 16 Analytic philosophers of religion
- Select bibliography
- General index
- Index of select biblical references
- References
Summary
Despite a considerable amount of scholarly attention that Dionysian mystical theology garnered in the last century, relatively little had been written about the Areopagite's account of non-physical perception. For example, Karl Rahner's and Hans Urs von Balthasar's historically structured accounts of the doctrine of the spiritual senses treat the works of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius of Pontus, Pseudo-Macarius, Augustine, Diadochus of Photice and Maximus the Confessor, but pass over the Areopagite's contribution in silence. In the second volume of his theological aesthetics Balthasar considers Pseudo-Dionysius's aesthetics at length and briefly mentions the Areopagite's concept of spiritual vision, but does not connect this concept to his earlier extensive discussion of the spiritual senses.
In his lectures read at the Sorbonne in 1945–6, Vladimir Lossky credits Dionysius's mysticism with being a ‘synthesis of all that we have encountered so far in the Fathers of the first five centuries on the subject of the vision of God’. Lossky observes that Dionysius has ‘the doctrine of the spiritual senses’, but says surprisingly little about the content of this doctrine in his lectures or elsewhere. Other scholars likewise acknowledge the presence of the spiritual perception motif in the Corpus Dionysiacum, but do not dwell upon Dionysius's peculiar reworking of this theme at length. The present chapter aims at filling this lacuna.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Spiritual SensesPerceiving God in Western Christianity, pp. 86 - 103Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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