This Handbook contains forty essays by an international team of experts on the antecedents, the content, and the reception of the Dionysian corpus, a body of writings falsely ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, a convert of St Paul, but actually written about 500 AD. The first section contains discussions of the genesis of the corpus, its Christian antecedents, and its Neoplatonic influences. In the second section, studies on the Syriac reception, the relation of the Syriac to the original Greek, and the editing of the Greek by John of Scythopolis are followed by contributions on the use of the corpus in such Byzantine authors as Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, Theodore the Studite, Niketas Stethatos, Gregory Palamas, and Gemistus Pletho. In the third section attention turns to the Western tradition, represented first by the translators John Scotus Eriugena, John Sarracenus, and Robert Grosseteste and then by such readers as the Victorines, the early Franciscans, Albert the Great, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Dante, the English mystics, Nicholas of Cusa, and Marsilio Ficino. The contributors to the final section survey the effect on Western readers of Lorenzo Valla's proof of the inauthenticity of the corpus and the subsequent exposure of its dependence on Proclus by Koch and Stiglmayr. The authors studied in this section include Erasmus, Luther and his followers, Vladimir Lossky, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Jacques Derrida, as well as modern thinkers of the Greek Church. Essays on Dionysius as a mystic and a political theologian conclude the volume.

This handbook brings together forty chapters on the antecedents, the content, and the reception of the Dionysian corpus, a body of writings falsely ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, a convert of St. Paul, but actually written in around 500 A.D.

The volume edited by Georgios Steiris, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Dimitrios Pallis, independent researcher of Christian Platonism of Late Antiquity and modern Greek theology, and Mark Edwards, Professor of Early Christian Studies at the University of Oxford, and for the publication of which a number of experts with international recognition collaborated, includes essays that examine the relationship of the Areopagite with earlier and later authors of the East and the West. Furthermore, the stance of Luther and his descendants towards the Dionysian corpus is studied, as well as the echoes of the latter in modern theology and philosophy.