Saint Paul’s sermon on “the unknown God” at the Areopagus in Athens gained only a few converts, among them a certain Dionysius the Areopagite (Acts 17). The Greek philosophers had little patience for Paul’s message about bodily resurrection. Four centuries later another Dionysius proposed a creative development and fusion of Greek patristic and pagan Neoplatonic mystical doctrines within a highly systematic corpus that climaxes with Moses meeting “the unknown God” in darkness. Here the resurrected Jesus is the ultimate hierarch through whom divine light descends. I thus begin with the “real” Dionysius, the Christian theologian so deeply marked by Athens....

Albert and Aquinas appropriated the Areopagite’s mystical theology seven hundred years after the first publication of the Dionysian corpus. Their understanding of the Greek father becomes more comprehensible in light of the rich tradition of translation and commentary that bridged these centuries. I will focus on those elements of the late antique and early medieval Dionysian tradition that directly pertain to Albert’s and Thomas’s interpretations of union. Like chapter 1, this survey of key doctrinal themes and historical developments mostly summarizes the results of contemporary research. The present chapter has a strictly preparatory function for parts 2 and 3 of...

Albert’s first extensive treatment of union with God comes in hisSentences Commentary. In addition, this and another early work (theDe homine) contain Albert’s longest studies of key anthropological and epistemological themes that undergird any scholastic mystical theology. The present chapter treats these background issues: the soul’s structure, its relation to the body, noetics, eschatology, and divine naming. In addition, many of these themes contain elements of a mystical theology, especially the docrines of theimago, the Son’s and the Spirit’s invisible missions, grace, faith, charity, the Spirit’s seven gifts, and glory. Thus many of these doctrines simultaneously serve...

Albert arrived in Cologne in the summer of 1248 to found a new Dominicanstudium. He had considerable freedom to determine this doctoral school’s curriculum. He made the works of Dionysius and Aristotle the foundational texts for the firststudiumcourses. Albert also may have lectured on the Bible and the Lombard, though we have neither historical reports nor manuscript traditions for such projects.¹ As noted in chapter 3, recent research shows that all of his Dionysian commentaries date from the early Cologne period—that is, Albert deliberately chose to place the Greek father’s entire corpus at the heart of...

Aquinas left Cologne in 1251 or 1252, his notes of Albert’s lectures on the Dionysian corpus in hand. Thomas walked to Paris in order to begin his term asbaccalaureus biblicusbefore proceeding to comment on the Lombard.¹ One of the first distinctions in Aquinas’s work on theSentencesalready analyzes Moses on Mt. Sinai in very Albertian fashion, as we will see in chapter 8. More importantly, Thomas begins to develop his own vision of union through an intense dialogue with Scripture, Aristotle, Augustine, and Dionysius, not to mention his contemporaries. The synthesis that emerges is unthinkable without these...

Having considered the structure of Thomas’s mystical subject, I now turn to the various modalities of God’s gracious gifts that enable union with him. As usual, I will focus only on those elements of key doctrines that illumine Aquinas’s understanding of the nature of mystical union. With one exception I treat the same issues that I considered in the study of Albert’s “mysticism from above” (chapters 3–4): the divine missions, divine action, grace, the Spirit’s seven gifts in general, the virtues of faith and charity, and the vision of God. The exception is the study of divine action. In...

The Dionysian element of Thomas’s theology of union proceeds from and in turn marks Aquinas’s creative development of the theory of the divine names. Because naming follows knowing, new insights on the manner of our union with God through knowing affect the doctrine of divine naming and vice versa. Since Thomas’s approach to the possibility and limits of naming God differs from the Areopagite’s, the significance of Moses in the dark cloud also shifts for Aquinas. Like Dionysius, Thomas carefully integrates the pieces of his theological puzzle into a systematic whole. Also, Aquinas’s theology of union grants a significant place...

We now have an overview of the doctrinal framework for Thomas’s reception of the Areopagite’s theology of union with God. In the last three chapters I articulated Aquinas’s understanding of the mystical subject, the structure of elevating grace, and the path of noetic ascent to God by knowing and naming him. Thomas especially appropriates the Dionysian theology of union in four parts of his corpus: (1) in his discussion of union passages in theCommentary on the Divine Names; (2) in a few citations of theMystical Theologyscattered throughout Thomas’s corpus; (3) in his doctrine of the Spirit’s gift...