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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 September 2024
The renewed interest in prayer and mystical theology has so far given insufficient attention to the writings of one who, if not actually at the fountainhead of such speculation, at least hold a position very near the source. We mean the writer known to tradition as Denys the Areopagite. So solid and forthright a personage as Ullathorne was able to describe his writings as ‘theology in its purest form, divested of controversy and written as if by a spirit with a pen of light'; and to declare that the study of these writings had ‘formed a real epoch in the history of his mind'. This small collection of treatises has, in fact, exerted a regular, uniform influence on spiritual writers throughout the Middle Ages down to modern times, and this particularly in England.
1 Life and Times of Bishop Ullathorne. Butler. Vol. I, p. 33.
2 Edited in one volume in the Orchard Series by Dora Justin McCann, together with Dom Augustine Baker's commentary on the 'Cloud'.
3 Summa Th. I. 94, 1. c. De Veritate 18, 1 ad 12.
4 Republic, Bk. vii, ad init. Only a brief summary of the argument is given here.
5 Dialogues of St Gregory the Great, Bk. II, ch. 35.
6 His final proof of the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo, for instance, seems to turn on this.
7 Cf. Summa Th. I. 94. 1. c.
8 For Plato, of course, the arts were merely imitative, not of the Ideas, but of the concrete things in the material World, mere imitations of imitations. Hence his desire to abolish them from his ideal state.
9 Francis Thompson: In No Strange Land.
10 Divini Illius Magistri, para. i)7.
11 Hills and The Sea. H. Belloc.
12 Postcommunion 11th Sunday after Pentecost.
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