the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

that followed, three translators improved upon Hilduin’s rudimentary one, numerous
commentaries were produced throughout the Middle Ages, and hundreds of manuscripts
survive from the Middle Ages. 431 John Scotus Eriugena (ninth century), 432 Thomas
Aquinas (thirteenth century) 433 and Albert the Great (thirteenth century) 434 all
commented extensively on Dionysius.
Commentary on the Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,
2005),
431 John Scottus Eriugena was given the task of retranslating the works by Charles the Bald (then Holy
Roman Emperor) in 860. Knowledge of Greek in the Latin west was limited but not entirely absent, as
Jeauneau describes in his article on the tools that might have been available in Carolingian times for
learning Greek, such as glossaries and bilingual psalters. Édouard Jeauneau, "Jean Scot Érigène et le Grec,"
Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi (Bulletin du Cange) XLI (1979), 26-40. As for the surviving manuscripts,
for German-speaking regions at least, a search of the online catalogue www.manuscripta-mediaevalia.de
for “Dionysius Areopaita” returns 110 hits, for manuscripts containing both parts of the CD as well as the
whole corpus. Iter Italicum (http://cf.itergateway.org/italicum/), a database for uncatalogued Renaissance
manuscripts, returns 317 results for “Dionysi*”. This is a crude measure of Dionysius’ popularity, but it is
sufficient to show that Dionysius was widely read and copied in Europe throughout the Middle Ages.
432 According to Rorem, Eriugena’s main debt to Dionysius is the “dynamic of procession and return, exitus
and reditus, descending pluralization and ascending unification.” We will encounter this dynamic in Weigel
again in Chapter 4. Paul Rorem, "The Early Latin Dionysius: Eriugena and Hugh of St. Victor," Modern
Theology 24, no. 4 (October 2008): 601-614; Paul Rorem, Eriugena's Commentary on the Dionysian
Celestial Hierarchy (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005); Thomas Michael Tomasic,
"The Logical Function of Metaphor and Oppositional Coincidence in the Pseudo-Dionysius and Johannes
Scottus Eriugena," The Journal of Religion 68, no. 3 (July 1988): 361-376; Dominic J. O’Meara, “Eriugena
and Aquinas on the Beatific Vision,” in Eriugena redivivus: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte seines Denkens im
Mittelalter und im Übergang zur Neuzeit, ed. Werner Beierwaltes, (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1987).
433 Moulin and Burrell attempt to deconstruct the classification of Albert and Aquinas as “Western” and
Dioysius as “Eastern,” but nevertheless acknowledge that the ideas of Albert and Aquinas emerged from a
productive encounter with Greek, Islamic and Jewish thinkers. (635) Burrell’s portion of the article on
Aquinas gives a helpful introduction to Aquinas’ reading of Dionysius. It was long thought that Aquinas
was purely Aristotelian (as opposed to Platonist/Neoplatonist) but this opinion has been challenged,
particularly, as Burell and Moulin point out, in the way that Aquinas puts forward a not-strictly-dualist
philosophy (i.e. God is completely transcendent and yet not entirely Other from it). (645) David Burrell
C.S.C. and Isabelle Moulin, "Albert, Aquinas, and Dionysius," Modern Theology 24, no. 4 (October 2008):
633-649. Chenu comments that in fact Aquinas was attempting to reconcile two strands of Neoplatonism,
that of Augustine and that of Dionysius (ultimately incompatible, in his opinion). M.-D. Chenu O.P. in
Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin
West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little, 49-98 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968).
On the afterlife of Platonism and Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages in general, see Chapter VIII of Endre v.
Ivánka, Plato Christianus: Übernahme und Umgestaltung des Platonismus durch die Väter (Einsiedeln:
Johannes Verlag, 1964).
434 A good introduction to Albert’s commentary on Dionysius is Simon Tugwell’s introduction to the
Paulist Press edition of Albert’s work (the relevant pages are 39ff). The intellectual environment for
Albert’s reading of Dionysius is the reaction against what Tugwell calls “Eastern influences” in the
university, by which is meant the recently translated works of Greek, Islamic and Jewish theologians (John
Damascene, John Chrysostom, Avicenna, and Al-Ghazali, for instance). The point of contention was an
epistemological matter: whether full and direct “enjoyment and vision of God” is possible, either in this life
or in heaven. The negative bent of these newly available philosophers suggested that this was not possible,
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