Ontology and Desire in Dionysius the Areopagite

This chapter focuses on a discussion of the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, a key figure in the formation of the Christian mystical tradition. The chapter explores Dionysius’s work, its distinctive characteristics—which arise principally from Dionysius’s idiosyncratic coupling of Christian theology and Neoplatonism—and the mixed legacy he bequeaths to his theological offspring. The chapter sketches the key contours of the Dionysian problematic to which subsequent discussions in the book will return, focusing in particular on his conjunction of eros and ontology and the consequences of this marriage for his account of freedom, materiality, hierarchy, and universality. This Dionysian legacy contains crucial antagonisms with which his intellectual descendants must grapple: the structural homology of creation and fall, the dual desire to escape and to affirm the material world, the problematic association of the hierarchies of ecclesial authority and being itself, and an account that simultaneously denies and embodies the transformation of Christianity by the encounter with that which is foreign to it. As a result, it is not straightforwardly—if at all—possible to be simply faithful to Dionysius’s work, which is itself internally inconsistent.