Ashley Purpura: “Pseudo” Dionysius the Areopagite’s Ecclesiastical Hierarchy: Keeping the Divine Order and Participating in Divinity

 In contrast to present day understandings of hierarchy that often refer to exclusionary power structures, “Pseudo” Dionysius the Areopagite’ who coined the term for Christian usage, describes hierarchy as a divine order that unites and deifies. In his letters, however, Dionysius also speaks adamantly against leaving or reaching beyond one’s place in the hierarchy, even if the superiors one depends on for hierarchical illumination are in error. If one is to take Dionysius’ ecclesiastical hierarchy as descriptive of, or prescriptive for, a community’s ecclesiology and soteriology, then the successful functioning of the ecclesiastical hierarchy among fallen humanity and Dionysius’ insistence on maintaining it need to be further explained. Consequently, in this paper I suggest the tension between divine participation and human fallibility is resolved by reading the ecclesiastical hierarchy primarily as participation in the unchanging infinite image of God.  As such, the ecclesiastical hierarchy can transform its human participants but not be transformed by their sinfulness.  In this paper I pursue this point by three main arguments:  a) demonstrating Dionysius’ description of the hierarchy necessitates its participants ability to be deified, b) proposing the hierarchic mysteries described in The Ecclesastical Hierarchy enable the participants to actively engage in the divine life, and c) showing that the human composition of the hierarchy is with every human action and interaction reshaped to nevertheless reveal the divine image. Therefore, Dionysius can argue both that the hierarchical order and those participating fully and correctly in it are essential for deification, and that even when some participants do not function correctly the hierarchical participation should still be maintained as a means of deification.