Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence.

• Author: Marler, J.C.

In the history of Oriental Greek, the Corpus dionysiacum is a literary monument the influence of which has transcended barriers of language, culture, time, and tradition. And, in the period covered by the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was a work to the expounding of which the best minds in Christendom, whether Eastern or Western, had been much devoted. Pretending to be a collection of texts surviving from the hand of Dionysius the Areopagite, the putative philosopher whose conversion to Christianity is recorded in Acts 17, there can be no question of its success as a literary forgery; and, long after its claims to authenticity were finally overturned, in 1895, by Hugo Koch and Josef Stiglmayr, defenders of its orthodoxy are still to be found.

Since Paul Rorem, for the whole of his scholarly career, has been preoccupied with the Corpus dionysiacum, he is eminently qualified to comment on its contents. The present work, intended as a companion to his and Colm Luibheid's translation, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), is an unpretentious handbook that will be most useful to students not already familiar with the textual detail of the Corpus dionysiacum or with the scholarly bibliographies which now surround it. Rorem, however, does not appear to have made extensive use of the scholarly apparatus which Beate Suchla, Gunter Heil, and A. M. Ritter, in 1990-91, included with their critical text of the Corpus dionysiacum (Patristische Texte und Studien, vols. 33 and 36 [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter]).

As commentary, Rorem's treatment of each section of the Corpus dionysiacum is paraphrastic and somewhat uncritical; and, as an introduction to its influence, his account must be far less concerned with origins than with consequences. Because the present work is primarily in service to what he and Luibheid have rendered into English, Rorem offers scant reference to the texts in Greek and there is no discussion, as perhaps there should be, of important manuscripts. Scholars, therefore, who are specifically concerned with the Corpus dionysiacum as a theological product of western Syria in the last quarter of the fifth century will not be enlightened by Rorem's commentary - as to whether, for example, Pseudo-Dionysius' explanation of the "order of hierarchs" may owe anything at all to the ascetic regime which was described by Philoxenus of Mabbugh (Manbidj or Hierapolis) (c. 450-523), the celebrated doctor of the...