Love in Dionysius the Areopagite and St Maximus the Confessor

Abstract

Love (erōs, agapē) is a fundamental category in the sixth-century Dionysius the Areopagite and the seventh-century Maximus the Confessor, the latter being confessedly dependant on the former, and both formative for the later Byzantine tradition. Both are indebted to earlier thinkers, both pagan thinkers such as Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus, and Christian thinkers such as Origen and the Cappadocian Fathers. Dionysius’s teaching on love presents a fundamentally metaphysical account, with cosmic entailments. He assimilates the two Greek words for love, erōs and agapē, seeing them both as manifestations of beauty and responses to beauty, and using them more or less interchangeably for the ecstatic love of God for the cosmos and the love that underlies the creatures’ return to union, to the One. Maximus shares Dionysius’s sense of love as metaphysical and cosmic, but his teaching is much more practical, and presents love as something that can be attained by the Christian or monk, though it requires genuine ascetic struggle. He makes more of a distinction between erōs and agapē than Dionysius, seeing erōs as perfecting the soul’s desire, while agapē perfects the soul’s thumos, psychic energy. Maximus’s understanding of the interrelated psychological makeup of the soul, influenced by Evagrius, though with its own characteristic emphases, also underlies his sense of what is meant by the restoration of the cosmos.