Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Christian Neoplatonism

The corpus attributed to "Dionysius the Areopagite" — the Athenian convert of Paul mentioned in Acts 17:34 — consists of four treatises (The Divine Names, The Mystical Theology, The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy) and ten letters, first securely attested in the historical record at the Council of Constantinople in 532, where both orthodox and Monophysite disputants cited the texts, the Monophysites in their favor. Modern scholarship, beginning decisively with the philological work of Josef Stiglmayr and Hugo Koch published independently in 1895, established that the corpus in fact dates from the late 5th or early 6th century CE, roughly four hundred years after the apostolic Dionysius could plausibly have lived, and that its author — now conventionally called "Pseudo-Dionysius" — drew heavily and often verbatim on the Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus (412–485), head of the Platonic Academy in Athens, particularly Proclus's Elements of Theology and Platonic Theology.