i. Next to that of Augustine, the most potent influence on mediaeval Christology in the West was that of the unknown writer (probably active during the later years of the 6th cent.) whose Ec- clesiastical Hierarchy, Heavenly Hierarchy, Divine Names, and Mystical Theology were credited to Dionysius the Areopagite, converted by St. Paul on the occasion of his visit to Athens. The waiter was thoroughly imbued with the Neo-Platonic thought of L'lotinus, Proclus, Jamblicus, etc., and wrought out a magnificent and higlily impressive .scheme of Christian theosophy on a Neo-Platonic basis. The credit of these works was greatly en- hanced by the supposition that they constituted the esoteric teachings of the Apostle Paul, which were too .spiritual and exalted for the people of his time. In The Divine Names (ii. 10) :
' The Son is all in all and the head of all things . . . , for He is the fulness and cohesiveness of all thinjfs, and He conserves and firmly binds the parts by the wholeness, and He is neither part nor whole for He is above these, but both part and whole as having embraced all things ; for He is exalted above nature, and is antecedent to causation ; and He is the perfect among us imperfect, and imperfect among the perfect angels as being superperfect and anteperfect, and having no point of compari- son with them as regards perfection ; and He is the formative principle in things lacking form as the creator and originator of all form, and without form with respect to things that have received form as being above form.'
Much more is said by way of emphasizing the absolute transcendence and the relative immanence of the Son.
This view of Christ and the world would seem to preclude belief in a specific Incarnation ; but the devotion of pseudo-Dionysius to the creed of the Chui'ch and his sense of the reality of historical Christianity held him back in some measure from sheer Docetism. He maintained, therefore, that the Deity of Jesus in its exceeding goodness came even to our nature and truly assumed the substance of our flesh, so that the Most High God could be called man, the super-essential essence thus shining forth out of humanity. He communicated Himself to us without mixture or change, suttering no harm from His unspeakable humiliation. He was super- natural in our natural, super-essential in what be- longs to our essence, and He possessed in a unique manner all that is ours, of us, and above us. True to his pantheistic conception that God can be named with the names of all His creatures, pseudo- Dionysius asserts that He who is the author of
man was truly man as to His entire nature. Yet He was not merely man, and not merely super- essential in relation to man ; but He is actually- man above men and according to men, or, in other words. He is the archetypal man of whom all indi- vidual men are the unreal copies. In a superhuman manner He performed human acts. He was a man humanly born, but man above man ; and inasmuch as in Him God had become man. He developed a Divine-human energy (Ep. ad Caiiini, iv. ). The pseudo-Dionysius found it practically impossible to find any place in the Universe for the God-man Jesus Christ, thus vaguely and Docetically con- ceived (Dorner). To assign Him a place in the earthly sphere would be degrading ; to place Him in the heavenly order would involve Docetism. Without being quite willing to do so, he virtually relinquished the historical Christ, retaining only the eternal. These writings figured largely in the Cliristological controversies in the East during the 7th and 8th centuries.
5. Maximus the Confessor (d. 662), though a staunch advocate of Dyothelitism, taught a form of mysticism derived largely . from the pseudo- Dionysius. Banished by the Eastern Emperor because of his uncompromising opposition to Mono- thelitism, he made Carthage the scene of his later activities, and from this vantage ground diffused throughout the Western Church the pseudo-Diony- sian mysticism. He regarded the pseudo-Dionysius as the holy revealer of Divine mysteries, as the 'all-holy,' the 'great saint,' the ' God-revealer,' and he had no doubt as to his identity with St. Paul's Athenian convert. Almost equally with the Areopagite, Maximus falls into iiantheistic and Docetic conceptions.
The fulness of the Godhead which was in Christ by nature is in Christians by grace, as far as their nature is capable of receiving it. Man on account of his love to God becomes God for God ; on account of his love to man he becomes man for man. Christ is continually and of His own will mystically born, for He is made flesh in and through the redeemed. The Logos became the Son of Man in order that He might make men gods and sons of God.
The Incarnation can hardly be said to have been regarded by Maximus as more than a theophany, and it was by no means limited to Jesus. If the latter participates in the Divine more fully than other men, it is only because His nature lard hold of it more fully (cf. Dorner, II. i. 228 0".). The heterogeneous mixture of pseudo-Dionysian Neo- Platonic mysticism and mystagogy with Dyothelit- ism in Maximus opened wide the door in the West as well as in the East for the influence of the former.