Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita, De coelestis hierarchiae
[and other works]. Manuscript, Italy, ca.1450 (BPH 9)

This Renaissance manuscript contains the Latin translation by Ambrogio Traversari of a number of works dating to the 6th century. There was hardly a medieval philosopher or a theologian, let alone a mystic, unfamiliar with the Corpus Dionysiacum. These texts gained great authority because they were attributed to the Pauline convert Dionysius Areopagita (Acts 17.34).The works of pseudo-Dionysius served as a ‘correction’ to the growing Aristotelianism of the scholastic era and later, when scholasticism had degenerated into mere quibbling, it was again Dionysius who was re-introduced by scholars like Nicolaus Cusanus as an advocate of the ideal synthesis between erudition and comtemplative depth. In the renaissance humanists such as Ficino and Pico della Mirandola read the Areopagitica especially because they believed they might here find the quintessence of Platonism and at the same time the source of the Neoplatonists who wrote ‘after Dionysius’: Plotinus, Jamblichus and Proclus amongst others.