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Evil in Dionysius the Areopagite, Alexander of Hales and Thomas Aquinas

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Evil in Dionysius the Areopagite, Alexander of Hales and Thomas Aquinas Mark Edwards Evil in Dionysius the Areopagite, Alexander of Hales and Thomas Aquinas Abstract: This paper examines Alexander of Hales’ use and reconciliation of appa- rentlydissonant quotations from Dionysius on tworelated questions, the knowability of God and the origin of evil. Notingthat Alexander,asajunior colleagueofRobert Grosseteste, was one of the first to make extensive use of Dionysius,itshows that he normallycites him in conjunction with Augustine and other Latin writers rather than accordinganindependent authority to him. It is also argued that,although Alexand- er in some respects anticipatesthe conclusionsofAquinas, which are also reinforced by appeals to Dionysius,heismore inclined to admitthe substantiality of evil. Theologyisdistinguished from philosophy, not onlybyits loftier subject-matter,but by its principled subordination of reason to tradition in the investigation of thatsub- ject-matter. No professingChristian before the 18th centurycalled the inerrancy of the Scriptures into question, and anychurchthat purported to be catholicheld fast to the decrees of at least four oecumenical councils,while accordingpresumptive au- thority also to certain individuals whom it esteemed as fathers, doctors or apologists for the true faith. Forthe scholastics Augustine was the cynosureofaLatin constel- lation whose lesser stars were Hilary,Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory the Great,Isidore of Sevilleand (byabout 1200) as recent asaint as Anselm; they too, if less often quoted, werenot to be contradicted, and the samewas true of the easterners John Chrysos- tom and John Damascene, who werenow and then co-opted (through Latin versions) to give the stamp of universality to the sametruths. We should not infer that all orig- inality was precluded:authority might determine what the church was to believe, but not what means of provingitmight be employed by agiven exponent,while there werenumerous corollaries and implications of these normative tenets on which it was possiblefor good Christians to differ.Tobeoriginal meant not so much to estab- lish new beliefs as to show,with unprecedented clarity and fullness, what had al- ways been involvedinthe belief of the church from the time of the apostles. We need not wonder,therefore, thatthe Dionysiancorpus wasadopted with such eagerness by the more innovative thinkers of the 12th century.The author by his own account was among the first neophytes of the apostle Paul, while in reality he was the very model of ascholastic, bringingforth thoughts thatwerenew to the church of his epoch under cover of high antiquity,and minglingthe discourses of Paul and Plato as his mediaeval admirers called on Aristotle to ratify pronouncementswhich had alreadymet the test of orthodoxy.Among these latter-day pupils of the Stagirite, Dionysius sometimesclaims an authority second onlytothat of Augustine; this is evident aboveall in theirappeals to the Dionysian excursusonthe nature of evil, OpenAccess. ©2020 Lydia Schumacher,published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110685022-006 56 Mark Edwards which is at once the author’smost extensive plagiarism from the Greeks and one of his most seminal contributions to the speculative thought of the Middle Ages. As a prefacetoscrutinyofthe relevant passages in the Summa Halensis,Ishallbrieflyre- view the content of the Dionysian corpus and the history of its reception in the west before Alexander; the paper will conclude with anote on the application of the same texts to similar questions in Aquinas’ essayonevil, which, while it is undoubtedly the workofagreater scholarand logician, might not have been the work thatitis had he not been able to build on the groundwork laid by his predecessor. The Dionysian Corpus The Dionysiancorpus is abodyofGreek texts, consistinginits present form of five works,the Divine Names,the Celestial Hierarchy,the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy,the Mys- tical Theology and ten Epistles.¹ These works make occasional referencetoother works by the samehand, which for all that we know are fictitious. Even those that remain are not what they purport to be, for while the author professes to be Diony- sius (or Denys) the Areopagite,Paul’sconvert at Acts 17:34,² his lucubrationswere entirelyunknown before the first quarter of the 5th century.Moreover,both his vo- cabulary and his metaphysical premisses are patentlyindebtedtoProclus, aPlaton- ist of the 5th century,whose teachingonprovidence is at timestranscribed almost wordfor wordinanexcursus on the origin of evil in the fourth book of the Divine Names.³ Recent scholarship has alsobrought to light his affinities with Damascius, another Athenian Platonist who is likelytohavebeenanexactcontemporary of the author.⁴ Ancient and modernreaders who wereable to make the comparison sur- mised that it was the Platonists who had embraced the theologyofDionysius;no moderncommentator with anyhistorical sense, however,will suppose thatthe The standardmodern edition is Corpus Dionysiacum,vol. 1, De DivinisNominibus (hereafter, DN), ed. BeateRegina Suchla; vol. 2,DeCoelesti Hierarchia, De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia, De Mystica Theo- logia, Epistulae,ed. Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter,Patristische Texteund Studien, 33,36(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990 –1). On the significanceofthe pseudonym in its relation to Acts 9:3, 2Cor.12:4and aboveall Acts 17:23, see Charles M. Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Hugo Koch, Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita in seinen Beziehungen zum Neuplatonismus und Myster- ienwesen (Mainz: Kirschheim, 1900); and especiallyJosef Stiglmayr, ‘Der NeuplatonikerProklos als Vorlage des sog. DionysiusAreopagita in der Lehre vonÜbel,’ Historisches Jahrbuch 16 (1895): 253–73. Carlo Maria Mazzucchi, ‘Damascio, autoredel Corpus Dionysiacum, eildialogo Peri politikêsepis- temês,’ Aevum 80 (2006): 299–34.For amoretemperate estimateofthe author’sdebt to the Athenian school, see Sarah Klitenic Wear and John M. Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite and the Neoplatonist Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Evil in Dionysius the Areopagite, Alexander of Hales and Thomas Aquinas 57 church was able to develop thoughts of such rigour and complexity in the 1st centu- ry,orthat having done so it would have let them fall into 400 years of desuetude. The author is by his own profession aChristian, quoting far more than anyone in the apostolic agewould have been able to quote from the corpus thatwenow know as the New Testament,and lapsinginto patent anachronism with his citations from Ignatius and from Clement of Alexandria. The corpus was none the less accepted as genuine in the Middle Ages, and Papal claims werepartiallygrounded in the Eccle- siasticalHierarchy. John of Scythopolis added Glosses,which wereoften translated along with the corpus in the Western tradition.⁵ The commentaries of Maximus the Confessor werealso frequentlyconsulted. In the 9th century,John Scotus Eriugena translated the corpus into alanguagesoheavilycalqued on the Greek that it was at times barelyrecognisable as Latin.⁶ Abbot Hilduin of St Denys seems to have re- vised this version to render it more readable, but without personal knowledge of Greek.⁷ Between 1130 and 1160 John Sarracenus (probablyaGreek speaker)translat- ed the corpus into more lucid Latin,correcting some of Eriugena’serrors.His trans- lation was the basisofthe Glosses of Thomas Gallus on the Mystical Theology,⁸ as well as of the English treatise of the 14th century, Denys Hid Divinite,which comes from the samehand as the Cloud of Unknowing.⁹ Five fatherless textshad thus become the cornerstone of Western mysticism, al- though no wordfor this phenomenon had yetbeencoined and the author himself would not now be regarded as one of its typical exemplars. So much wasapparent alreadytothe contemplative author of Denys Hid Divinite (most probablyaCarthusi- an) who supplements the translation of Sarracenus with his own regimenfor empty- ing the mind of its everydaylumber and attaining atranscendental mode of cogni- tion. By contrast,the chief objective of the Dionysian corpus is not to give precepts for achieving immediate knowledge of God, but to reconcile the anthropomorphic languageofScripture with the philosophic principle that God is known best through negation of all predicates. Thisapophatic mode of apprehension must be balanced by the kataphatic mode, derivedfrom Scripture, in which some terms represent qual- ities which God possesses ‘super-eminently’,while others must be understood sym- Paul Rorem and John C. Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite (New York: OxfordUniversity Press,1998). On his habit of passingfrom ‘word to wordorevenform syllable to syllable, without payingmuch heed to the drift of his author’sargument’,see Philip Levine, ‘TwoEarlyLatin Versions of St Gregory of Nyssa’s περὶ κατασκευῆς ἀνθρώπου,’ Harvard TheologicalReview 63 (1958): 480.Iowethis refer- encetoLydia Schumacher. G. Thery, ‘Jean Sarrazin, traducteur de ScotErigène,’ in Studia mediaevalia in honorem admodum reverendi patris R. Martin (Bruges: Du Tempel, 1948), 359–81. James McEvoy, Mystical Theology:The Glosses by Thomas Gallus and the CommentaryofRobert Grosseteste on ‘De Mystica Theologia’ (Leuven: Peeters,2003). See also Gallus, CommentaireduCan- tique des Cantiques,ed. Jeanne Barbet (Paris:Vrin, 1967). See further Cheryl Taylor, ‘The Cloud-Author’sRemakingofthe Pseudo-Dionysius’
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