Dionysius the Areopagite

This chapter treats the Dionysian Corpus as a late antique "literary fiction" consisting of a core collection normally regarded as being the Corpus itself, a set of missing writings playing a structural role in the fiction, several layers of the textual transmission, early commentaries appended to the original core collection, and a series of legends that surrounded the fiction. It presents the fictitious setting and its implication for the structure of the Corpus, briefly treating questions of the date of appearance, of the early manuscript tradition. The chapter discusses the first commentaries and provides a sketch of the scholarly debates on the problem of the possible aims of the fiction and its milieu of provenance. It talks about the pseudonym "Dionysius the Areopagite." Mazzucchi and Lankila claim that a superficial layer of scriptural and Christian theological thought was enough for the author to clothe his philosophical thought in Christian garb.