Acknowledgments
I wish to express my profound gratitude to my advisor, Roberta C. Bondi, who first introduced me to Denys and who taught me that good history is an exercise of both memory and heart that ushers the historian into the presence of a great cloud of witnesses. I owe thanks, as well, to Wendy Farley and Don Saliers whose seminars fueled my imagination and whose careful work as committee members sharpened the project. The project was also helped along in its early stages by Maggie Kulyk, a fellow...
B Bibliographical Survey
The field of scholarly literature addressing the question of the roles of yearning and theurgy in Denys's sacramental theology and theological anthropology is in one sense quite broad, but in another sense surprisingly narrow. Though Denys exerted vast influence on developing Christian dogma, because of his assumed apostolicity, attention to crucial elements of his true context has come only relatively recently. Work on the corpus since its pseudonymous character came to light has focused on...
A The Absence of Context
Eighty-one years after the Council of Chalcedon convened in 451, fifty years after the issuance of the Henoticon in 482, and fourteen years after its abandonment in 518, Chalcedonian and Monophysite Christians, still struggling to find common ground, converged on Constantinople in 532 to discuss their diverging views on the relationship between humanity and divinity in the Incarnate Logos. A report from that conference contains a curious note. Severus the Monophysite, or another representative...
The Historical Argument
Recognizing the formative role that the theurgical Platonists, and especially lamblichus and Proclus, played for Denys means more than simply identifying key passages where Denys borrows their language and concepts. Careful attention to the structure of Denys's thought indicates not only that he borrowed from the theurgists, but also that Denys stands among them as a fellow theurgist at the heart of whose theology we find a description of the cosmos and of the place of the human in it that...