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.