Christology and the Eucharist in Two Redactions of Pseudo-Dionysius

This chapter treats questions related to Christology and the celebration of the Eucharistic offering in the Corpus Dionysiacum. It demonstrates that the text that we have in all the extant Greek manuscripts is heavily corrupted and shows the signs of reworking. However, we have witnesses to an earlier state of the text in Sergius of Reshaina’s Syriac translation, datable to the period before AD 536, and the first indirect witnesses. While the original version of the Corpus can be dated to the 470s/480s, the second redaction must date to the 530s/540s. As this two-redaction theory has been heavily criticised, the second half of the study demonstrates its validity on three examples taken from the Ecclesiastic Hierarchy. The first shows the hopelessly corrupt state of the Greek text on the example of the liturgical event in which the orders, judged unworthy of the communion, are excluded from the eucharistic offertory. This example also shows how the corrupt Greek text can be emended based on the Syriac. The second example treats of the liturgical events following the exclusion of the unworthy ranks, a text that, in earlier scholarship, was thought to refer to the Nicaea-Constantinopolitan Creed, introduced into the liturgy in AD 515. The analysis shows that the text refers to something else: the oratio oeconomiae preceding the Institution Narrative and the anamnesis, misunderstood as a reference to a pre-Creed by the sixth-century Redactor and by the first commentator of the text, John of Scythopolis. The same example also shows how the radically dyophysite Christology of the original Corpus was mitigated in the second redaction. The third example shows how a text based on Evagrius of Pontus’ Origenist theory of contemplation was changed in the second redaction under the heat of the Second Origenist controversy. The study concludes that the mysterious author whom we had believed to be the “genuine” Pseudo-Dionysius is in fact a pseudo-Pseudo-Dionysius. It was the latter who exerted a great influence on Western Mediaeval, Byzantine, and Eastern Christian theology.