The Pseudo-Didymian De trinitate and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite: A Preliminary Study

The present study proposes the hypothesis that the author of the Pseudo-Dionysian Corpus – a slim volume of late antique pseudepigraphy – is to be considered either the author of many more works, or as someone belonging to a group of pseudepigraphers who have produced a coherent larger ‘Dionysian Corpus’. In fact, some of the extracorporeal works to which the author refers throughout his Corpus and which our scholarship generally tends to consider as purely fictitious, are extant and can be identified by diverse philological methods. In this study one such work is treated, the Outlines of Theology (Θεολογικαὶ Ὑποτυπώσεις), several times referred to in the Dionysian Corpus as one of the author’s main works on positive theology. It is being argued that this work can be recognised in the anonymous De trinitate, found in a unique manuscript in the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome, attributed to Didymus the Blind and published by G.L. Mingarelli. First, the study demonstrates that the De trinitate could not be composed earlier than the second half of the fifth century and, second, it treats one particular reference to the Outlines of Theology in the Mystical Theology, showing that this reference not only summarises the content of the De trinitate, but also refers to a specific passage in the second book of the latter work. A comparative study of the parallel texts in the De trinitate and the Dionysian Corpus reveals, better than any other method, the author’s (or the authors’) theology, a product of a specific movement of Christian Platonism, which was given in the fifth-sixth centuries the rather irrelevant name of ‘Origenism’ and was condemned as such in 553 AD.