Pseudo-Dionysius as Polemicist: The Development and Purpose of the Angelic Hierarchy in Sixth Century Syria (review)

Pseudo-Dionysius’s Angelic Hierarchy is often overlooked in the Dionysian corpus as readers seek out the more theologically practical works. It is a younger sibling of sorts, paired with other texts, like the Divine Names, and used as context for their insights, but never quite valued as a solitary work. In this book, Rosemary Arthur finds a place for the Angelic Hierarchy, revisiting and expanding her thought about its provenance: she argues that, rather than being the model for Stephen bar Sudhaili’s Book of the Holy Hierotheos, Angelic Hierarchy is a polemical response to it. The product of the late 520s or early 530s, Pseudo-Dionysius’s catalog of the orders of angels is a rebuttal that deliberately conceals its author in the name of establishing a particular, fixed account of angelic natures.

Pseudo-Dionysius is pressed to take on the task of categorization—to clarify the numbers, names, and roles of angels—because of bar Sudhaili’s overly Evagrian portrait of the universe, the function of the sacraments, and the mutability of human beings and other rational creatures. The Book of the Holy Hierotheos tells of the ascent of the mind through and beyond many levels of intellect before its arrival at the Good from which it fell; such speculation has earned bar Sudhaili a reputation as the most heady of the Syrian Christians writing at the turn of the sixth century. The Book has many parallels with the Angelic Hierarchy, and scholars have in the past thought it to be written after the Hierarchy and dependent on it. However, Arthur argues that it is more logical to consider Pseudo-Dionysius to have created the Hierarchy after bar Sudhaili’s Book and to have written it as a direct response to the Book. As she explains in chapter 5, “Summa or Polemic?,” Psuedo-Dionysius’s polemical purpose explains the fixation that Angelic Hierarchy shows with angels who do not deviate from their roles, as well as the argumentative language of the text and its self-presentation as a summa on the angelic world.

Arthur extends her argument by providing a likely historical context for the production of the Angelic Hierarchy. In chapter 4, she locates the author of the Angelic Hierarchy among a group of Monophysite bishops, all of whom follow Severus of Antioch. Developing a scenario in which Severus may have arranged the production of the Dionysian corpus, Arthur names several possibilities for its author before settling on Sergius of Reshaina as the likely suspect. Sergius’s authorship has been proposed by other scholars (Hausherr in 1936, von Balthasar in 1940), but Arthur’s discussion of the context of Monophysite struggles and the particular difficulties of the 520s and 530s gives the claim added heft.

There are two related issues, however, that detract from Arthur’s presentation. The first is the presence in the book of several chapters that appear to divert from the work’s primary aim. Given that Pseudo-Dionysius as Polemicist is arguing for a specific historical relationship between the Angelic Hierarchy and the Book of the Holy Hierotheos, readers may be surprised to see that two of the chapters of the book explore the wide-ranging potential influences on the whole of the Dionysian corpus, which are both difficult to trace and overly general. The first chapter participates in a long tradition of guessing about Pseudo-Dionysius’s relationship to other intellectual traditions in the first five centuries of this era, classified as “Christian and Non-Christian Sources.” This chapter, and two others, “The Angelic Hierarchy” and “The Unknowability of God,” speculate about the ways that Dionysius’s ideas may be related to many different writers and texts, from Philo of Alexandria to Proclus to Gregory of Nazianzus. These chapters are conducted under a different rubric than Arthur’s main argument: they are exploratory, rather than explanatory, and Arthur more often than...