Eros as the Meeting of Ecstasies in Christ: The Eucharistic Link between Divine and Human Love in Dionysius the Areopagite

Abstract

Dionysius's vision of eros as a meeting of reciprocal ecstasies – where lover and beloved each pass out of themselves and into the other – has often been read as unifying dimensions of love otherwise thought to stand in tension, such as giving and receiving. I argue that this is true, but that this unity is fully intelligible only when its Christocentric and Eucharistic dimensions are foregrounded. Read alongside his Eucharistic theology, Christ emerges as the inexhaustible gift in whom divine and creaturely love meet without confusion, the one through whom God communicates the movement of his love in a form that creatures can receive and respond to analogically. Dionysian eros is only thereby shown to entail true reciprocity, a meeting of ecstasies that is one and yet irreducibly two.