J. Gregory Given - An Intertextual Approach to Pseudo-Dionysius and its Preliminary Results

For decades scholars have attempted to situate the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius within the late antique Christian discourse by a sort of learned free association; attention has been paid “less to specific parallels of vocabulary or argument than to the broader themes, or directions of thought,” as Alexander Golitzin explains in his Et Introibo Ad Altare Dei, the standard work on Dionysius’ relationship to his Christian predecessors. Such harmonious comparison of “broader themes” is predominately a theological pursuit and ultimately does little, I contend, to aid our historical understanding of Dionysius. Yet Proclus, the very writer to whom the most rigorous attention has been paid with regard to “specific parallels of vocabulary or argument,” has emerged as the strongest historical referent we have in the scholarly discussion on Dionysius’ corpus. In this paper I propose an intertextual method to identify in a more concrete manner Dionysius’ most proximate Christian predecessors. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept (via Kristeva) of a text as a “mosaic of quotations,” I consider the idiosyncratic selection and grouping of disparate biblical quotes and images, turning to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae to seek similar arrangements in the extant Greek corpus. Even within a circumscribed test of this method on Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchy, I identify a handful of “new objective links” to Cyril of Alexandria and Theodoret of Cyrus, two competing figures who loom large in the decades preceding the emergence of the Dionysian Corpus. Both are absent from Golitzin’s magisterial account of Dionysius’ predecessors. In the works of Cyril and Theodoret we find the earliest extant appearances of several idiosyncratic pairings of disparate biblical quotes and images that are also deployed in the Celestial Hierarchy. We also find the likely sources of Dionysius’ mysterious “secondhand etymologies” for Seraphim, Cherubim, and Gelgel. On the strength of these intertextual connections, I contend that scholars should consider the legitimate possibility that the author of the Corpus Dionysiacum drew directly on the work of these great fifth century rivals, and call for heightened attention to their texts when tracing the “broader themes” at play in the tradition leading up to the composition of Dionysius’ corpus.