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[hgr]

van Esbroeck’s ideas in the light of new facts

From this section on I will sketch the scholarship after 1997 related to the Honigmann’s and van Esbroeck’s thesis directly or indirectly and add some my own, previously unpublished, considerations.

The date of the Historia Euthymiaca as Corpus’ terminus ante quem

The so-called Historia Euthymiaca is preserved in several fragments of unequal length and even more unequal fame among the scholars. The most famous fragment is dealing with a legend of Dormition put in the mouth of patriarch of Jerusalem Juvenal at the time of the Council of Chalcedon (451). When Pulcheria and Marcian ask him about Dormition, he refers to Dionysius Areopagite and quotes DN 3:2.
The Historia has been dated by Wenger (1955) to the large interval from the 6th to the 8th century, but van Esbroeck (1975—1976) opted for the 6th century (on the ground of a new document in Arabic). In my 2007 paper I attributed the whole work to the patriarch of Constantinople Euthymius/Euphemius (490—496, † 515), most likely, after his deposition. This date fits perfectly the time of the publication of the pseudonymised recension of the Corpus Areopagiticum, but leads to the shift of the terminus ante quem. So far, the terminus ante quem was established on the ground of the earliest quotation from the Corpus in a Syriac translation of an anti-Julianistic work of Severus whose manuscript is dated to 528 according to the colophon. Indeed, these works of Severus were translated into Syriac almost immediately, but, nevertheless, this date of the manuscript of the Syriac version would presuppose a date between 520 and 525 for the Greek original (and certainly not earlier than 518, the date of the start of the anti-Julianistic polemics). My attribution of the Historia Euthymiaca leads to the terminus ante quem 515 for the Corpus Areopagiticum, that is, closer to van Esbroeck’s dating (ca 500).

DN 3:2 as the Dormition scene

Is DN 3:2 describing the Dormition? I was a witness of a hot polemics between van Esbroeck and Ritter at the next Oxford Patristic Conference in 1995, but, unfortunately, it has never resulted in further publications.
After Ritter (1994), several scholars supported his doubts (e. g., Pinggéra 2002: 25). However, nobody proposed any alternative. The only exception is István Perczel (2008: 558–559) with an ingenuity so characteristic to him. His idea is the following.

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“Consider for example the famous story from DN 3.2, which is allegedly the author’s eyewitness account of the Dormition of Mary, the Mother of God, in Jerusalem. The text, however, does not say anything like this. It only speaks about an event where “Dionysius,” “Timothy” the addressee of his treatises, “many of their holy brethren,” as well as “James the Brother-of-God” and “Peter, the coryphee and most venerable Head of the theologians,” as well as the author’s teacher, the “holy Hierotheus,” all “gathered together to contemplate the Body that is Principle-of-Life and Receiver-of-God.” After this contemplation, “it was judged just that all the high-priests celebrate, according to their capacities, the infinitely powerful Goodness of the weakness of the Principle-of-Divinity.” In his commentary on this passage, John hazards a guess: “perhaps he [Dionysius] calls ‘Body that is Principle-of-Life and Receiver-of-God’ that of the holy Mother-of-God at her Dormition.” From this hypothesis, however, grew the whole legend of Dionysius’ and Hierotheus’ presence at the Dormition, finally canonised in the service to Saint Dionysius on October 3 by Theophanes the Confessor [in fact, Theophanes (9th cent.) wrote the liturgical canon (hymn) that implies that the memory was already existing, because Theophanes’ large canon-writing program was a part of a liturgical reform and by no means an introduction of cults of dozens new saints. — B. L.].
My reading of this text is that here “Dionysius” is not inventing a fictitious story but is encoding a real one; the gathering was that of bishops contemporary to “Dionysius,” who are mentioned under pseudonyms, too, so that “James the Brother-of-God” should be the bishop of Jerusalem and “Peter,” apparently adorned by the attributes of the “Apostolic See,” the bishop of Rome, while the contemplation of the Lifegiving and Godbearing Body is a concelebration of the Eucharist followed by the “celebration of the powerful Goodness of God’s weakness,” that is, a discussion on the Incarnation. So I believe that here Dionysius describes a council in which he took part, possibly the Council of Chalcedon.”

I certainly do agree with Perczel’s approach when he treats this legend as an allegoric presentation of apostolic sees, even if I do not agree that Peter is here presenting Rome. I think he presents Antioch, not less “Petrine” see, quite actual to the historical context of the Corpus Areopagiticum. Even in the case if we reject van Esbroeck’s hypothesis completely, we have to take into consideration that the four large treatises of the Corpus, including DN, are addressed to Timotheos, that is, to the see of Ephesus, within the patriarchate of Antioch. Moreover, in any case, the Corpus is to be dated to a period when Rome was separated from the whole East (482—519) and could hardly be any concern to a more or less important Eastern Church faction. The history of patriarch Euthymius of Constantinople who failed to re-establish communion with Rome because of his refusal to break the policy of the Henotikon is a demonstration of the real value of Rome even in the eyes of the most Chalcedonian groups.
Perczel’s identification of the “Lifegiving and Godbearing Body” [τοῦ ζωοαρχικοῦ καὶ θεοδόχου σώματος] as the Eucharist is highly problematic. In our passage, the author clearly distinguishes the “contemplation” of this Body and the liturgy that took place only “after” the contemplation (εἶτα ἐδόκει μετὰ θεὰν ὑμνῆσαι τοὺς ἱεράρχας...). If the “Body” here would be the Eucharist, one should expect rather the reverse sequence.
In the situation of the Council of Chalcedon one could expect to see here a specific role of the body (holy relics) of the martyr Euphemia, but the epithets like “lifegiving” and especially “Godbearing” [lit., “God-accepting”] are, in this case, unlikely.
Therefore, it would be safer to return to the previous hypothesis of John of Scythopolis that it is the body of Theotokos that is meant. It would be especially safer now, when we can accept, for John of Scythopolis, an earlier date, closer to the appearance of the Corpus. Indeed, Perczel has reason when he says (2008: 559): “This example serves to illustrate how remote we are with John’s edition from the original context of the CD.” I agree here with Perczel while, unlike him, I think that John’s guess about the “Body” is right; nevertheless, John already needs to guess instead of knowing for sure. But I would mean here not the distance between John and the earliest pseudonymised edition of the Corpus, but that between John and the Urtext of Peter Iberian.
Now we have other reasons to confirm John of Scythopolis’ guess and to resolve doubts of Ritter.
The testimony of the Historia Euthymiaca is to be considered now as another witness of an early tradition of the comprehension of DN 3:2, even earlier than “re-dated” John of Scythopolis. Moreover, the agreement between both Historia Euthymiaca and John would reveal their common roots in an even earlier tradition of exegesis of Dionysius. But “earlier” than 515 means “contemporaneous” to the publication of the Corpus. There could be nothing earlier than that.
Finally, the monograph by Stephen Shoemaker on the Dormition accounts (2002) could help to unpack some of van Esbroeck’s too succinct formulations. This monograph illustrates at length the context that remained implicit—despite of being much important—in van Esbroeck’s papers (which are so “esoteric” and almost unreadable to those who do not realise the work of van Esbroeck as a whole).
Starting from the middle of the 5th century and up to the time of Justinian the proliferation of different Dormition accounts was enormous (s. Shoemaker 2002 pursuing the way of the earlier studies of van Esbroeck and Wenger). The earliest preserved accounts datable to the 4th century were rescued from an almost complete obscurity, and a large amount of new accounts appeared. All this was in connection with establishment and further development of the new feast of Dormition in Palestine. This new form of the cult of Theotokos, established sometime on the eve of the Council of Chalcedon in the context of competition between Constantinople and Ephesus in the 440s (cf. Lourié 2007), became especially important as a mean of the hagiographic expression of the post-Chalcedonian Christological discussions. Therefore, any legendary scene conform to the accounts of the gathering of apostles before the deathbed of Theotokos would be comprehended, if it occurs in a text of the second half of the 5th century or the early 6th century, as the Dormition scene. Thus was the context of the hagiographical literature of the epoch.

van Esbroeck’s ideas  on the crossroad of different approaches

There were recently several studies restarting the search of Corpus Areopagiticum’s Sitz im Leben from the beginning. Some of them were going against van Esbroeck’s and Honigmann’s thesis, while without any direct polemics or even mention of it.

Theological approach

The approach that I call “theological” was and still is presented by István Perszel who published a long series of papers on the Corpus Dionysiacum starting from, at least, 1999 until now (his latest 2008 article has been reprinted in 2009). Perszel is scanning the theological doctrines which appeared during one hundred years from the middle of the 5th century to the middle of the 6th century and pointing out any parallels or sharp oppositions with those of Dionysius. I would admit that he is extremely successful in such a search, in the extent that no theological study of the Corpus could be possible now without taking into account his observations. Moreover, he contributed to the study of the text of the earliest pseudonymed recension in Greek that is partially accessible through the earliest Syriac version (Perczel 2000, 2001, 2008) and to the study of the text of the Letter IV (Perczel 2004).
All this said and despite my admiration of Perczel’s ability to find theological correspondences between the texts of the relevant epoch, I think that his historical reconstruction contain a serious methodological flaw. Dealing with the theological texts in general and especially with such texts as the Corpus Areopagiticum that was infinitely reread and rethought by almost all theological parties since the very moment of its appearance, we need some firm extra-theological landmarks allowing to locate its genuine theological sense within a large continuum of possibilities. This is why I think that it is the hagiographical approach that could be here the most effective. And this is why I think that the theological approach has to be applied at the very last turn, only when all other approaches were applied before.
Otherwise, as we see in these Perczel’s studies, we can obtain a more or less plausible explanation of mutual relations of some texts, but we will be still unable to obtain a demonstration of uniqueness of such decision. And this is a methodological and simply logical flaw.
Such demonstrations of uniqueness are, in the patrological studies, very often obvious and, thus, could remain implicit. Such are the cases when we know well historical circumstances when our theological documents were produced. Sometime, however, they turn out to be an important part of the whole theological investigation. This is especially true in the case of the Corpus Areopagiticum. However, this component of Perczel’s studies is meagre and not convincing (as we have seen above in the case of the Dormition scene). The author of the Corpus as the object of Perczel’s reconstruction do have very elaborated theological views, but we do not know any landmark of his life on the earth, outside his Platonic world of ideas. Perczel produces, so to say, some kind of Platonic idea of the author rather than an image of a man in blood and flesh. This forms to me an enough ground not to accept his reconstruction even on the level of ideas.
Beside this ground to “not to accept,” there is some ground to reject. According to Perczel, the author of the Corpus is an Origenist representing the kind of Origenism condemned by the Constantinople councils of 543 and 553 and very close to that of the Book of Hierotheos. His Christology was that of the strict Chalcedonians, influenced by Theodore of Mopsuestia, that is, crypto-Nestorian from the “neo-Chalcedonian” point of view. (Indeed, let us add, it would be difficult to imagine any Origenist Christology that would be not, in some sense, “Nestorian”; cf. Lourié 1997, 2000 for the 6th – 9th centuries material).
Karl Pinggéra in a recent article (2008) addressed the whole cycle of Perczel on the Origenism of the Corpus. In particular, he explained, once more, a sharp distinction between the latter and the Book of Hierotheos which is really Origenistic and falling under the 6th century condemnations of the Origenism. Here I am not in position to enterprise a similar analysis of Perczel’s Christological studies of the Corpus. It seems to me enough now to note that the legacy of the Antiochean theologians of the 4th century (among whom the figure of Theodore of Mopsuestia was the leading) has never been usurped by the open or “crypto-” Nestorians. It was shared by them with the Monophysites, especially Severus of Antioch. For instance, in Severus’ treatment of the humanity of Christ before resurrection there were obvious parallels with Nestorian (and, of course, Theodore of Mopsuestia’s) treatment of the humanity of Christ, and such facts were pointed out by the Julianists. I suspect that Perczel’s criteria, be they applied to Severus of Antioch, would reveal him as a crypto-Nestorian. In fact, this is the methodology already applied to Severus by Julian of Halicarnassus, and so, it is far from being senseless.
In some way, all of them—Theodore of Mopsuestia, “open” and “crypto-” Nestorians, and Severus—considered the humanity of Christ as the part of Christ that forms, in some way, another subject in Christ beside God (in the case of Severus, such was his doctrine of the corruptibility of the body of Christ, rejected, in this sense, by both Chalcedonians and later Severians; cf. Grillmeier 1991, Lourié 1997, 2006). All the species of Origenists were in the same camp. In the opposite camp, however, there was a tradition to rethink and reuse the passages of earlier “two subject Christology” authors in a “one subject Christology” sense. I do not see how to unravel such tangles without landmarks put on the ground of the real historical earth.
Instead of the critics of every detail of Perczel’s Christological conclusions I will limit myself to the history of only one but absolutely key term of Dionysius’ allegedly crypto-Nestorian Christology, θεανδρικὴ ἐνέργεια (see chapter “Philological approach” below).