to the monks.97 On monks themselves the Areopagite comments:98
However, the most exalted rank of all those being initiated [tōn teloumenōn] is the sacred order of monks [hē tōn monachōn diakosmēsis], which has been completely purified by its full power and total purity of its own operations, and inasmuch as contemplation of the sacred order [hierourgia] is permissible to it, it has entered into intellectual contemplation and communion [theōria kai koinōnia]. It is entrusted to the perfecting powers of the bishops [hierarchai] and through their divine illuminations and hierarchical traditions is instructed in the sacred works [hierourgiai] of the sacred sacraments that it has contemplated, and led, as much as it can be [analogōs], to the complete perfection of the sacred knowledge of them.
Ascetics, therefore, are regarded as exalted members of the congregation, but their structural and spiritual dependence upon bishops is emphatic.
For Pseudo-Dionysius, the hierarchical ordering of ecclesiastical structures has a strict soteriological function that is extinguished if subverted. This means, for example, that monks cannot exploit alternative paths to the perfection offered through the bishops or appropriate the functions of those clerical ranks above them. Instructive in this regard are the Areopagite’s Letters, a series of dramatic mise-en-scènes that provide examples of the hierarchical principles enshrined within the wider corpus.99 Thus in Letters 8, “To the Monk Demophilus,” he responds to an ascetic who has presumed to dismiss a priest who forgave a penitent sinner and then storm into the sanctuary and there save the eucharist from imminent defilement. The Areopagite offers a stinging rebuke that summarizes much of his thought upon the situation of monks:100
Now hear my words. It is not permissible for a priest to be reproached [euthunesthai] by the deacons who are above you or by the ranks of monks to which you belong, even if he appears to have acted impiously against the divine or might be convicted of having done something else forbidden. For even if there is chaos and disorder [akosmia kai ataxia] of the most divine things and an abandonment of the ordinances and laws, that is no reason to overthrow the God-given order on God’s behalf. . . . Do the sacred symbols [ta hiera sumbola] not also shout this? For the Holy of Holies [ta hagia tōn hagiōn] is not completely removed from all. Instead, the order of those who initiate in sacred things [ho tōn hierotelestōn diakosmos] is close to them, then the order of priests, and following them that of the deacons. To the ranks of monks are reserved the doors of the inner sanctuary, where they are both initiated and remain, not to guard them but rather to preserve order and their recognition of being closer to the people than the priests. From here the holy principle of ordering sacred things [hē tōn hierōn hagia taxiarchia] has ordained them to partake of the divine things, entrusting their distribution to others—that is, of course, those within. For those who are stood symbolically, as it were, at the divine altar see and hear the divine things that are brilliantly revealed to them, and benevolently they come out beyond the divine curtains to the obedient monks [tois hupēkoois therapeutais], to the sacred people, and to the orders being purified, and reveal, according to worthiness, the divine things that were well protected and undefiled, until through your invasion you forced the Holy of Holies, against its will, to be exposed.
Demophilus’s intervention is, therefore, not only a disruption of proper liturgical protocol but a destructive subversion of the entire divine dispensation through which ascetics receive their perfection from the sacraments and bishops set over them.
There is here an emphatic and unambiguous elevation of the eucharist, which is the supreme sacrament, “sacrament of sacraments [teletōn teletē].”101 Thus the Areopagite’s introduction to his exposition on the eucharistic rite:102
But I proclaim that perfection [teleiōsis] in participating in other hierarchical symbols is possible only from the divine-ordered and perfecting gifts [teleiōtikōn dōreōn: i.e., of communion]. For scarcely one of the hierarchic sacraments [teletēs] can be completed [telesthēnai] without the divine eucharist as the summation of each rite [teloumenon], which divinely fashions a gathering to the One of the one being initiated [tou telesthentos] and perfects [telesiourgousēs] his communion with God through the God-granted gift of the perfecting mysteries [tōn teleiōtikōn mustēriōn].
In his subsequent description of the ritual, Pseudo-Dionysius insists on the moral righteousness required of the participants: thus, for the uninitiated, the rite—being a representation of the Last Supper, and a remembrance of Judas’s exclusion from it—“teaches in a pure and at the same time divine manner that the approach to the divine things that is true through habit [kath’ hexin alēthēs] bestows upon those who approach the communion that brings assimilation with them [tēn pros to homoion autōn koinōnian]”;103 whereas for the initiated, “if we desire communion [koinōnia] with him, we must look toward his most divine life in the flesh and in assimilation [aphomoiōsis] to its sacred sinlessness return to the godlike and unblemished state. For thus he will give to us, in a harmonious manner, the communion that brings assimilation [tēn pros to homoion koinōnian].”104 The subsequent distribution of the eucharist is then said to achieve a perfect communion among those who receive and participate in it.105
It must be said that Pseudo-Dionysius is by no means hostile to the ascetic tradition of contemplation—that is, he does not seem to reserve the full contemplation of God for the bishop, even if the latter is, among the Church’s members, the most receptive to divine illumination.106 Instead, the need to contemplate the hidden realities of the outward structures of the Church—and thus, while remaining fixed in one’s place, to be brought into closer union with God through the fulfillment of one’s role in that place, ascending “into the hierarchy rather than up it”—is an imperative placed upon all the faithful.107 The Areopagite’s departure from other representatives of that tradition is, instead, to make the ecclesial liturgy the sole point around which contemplation is oriented and to emphasize the structural (and thus spiritual) subordination of ascetics to clerics.108 His vision is, therefore, expounded from an episcopal perspective, acknowledging monks as preeminent members of the congregation but nevertheless recontextualizing ascetic advancement as an ecclesial endeavor, and thus offering a dramatic correction to the traditional monastic indifference to the structures of the Church as an effective medium of salvation. Indeed, this striking dissonance—between the institutionalized, sacramental, and hierarchical vision of the Areopagite on the one hand, and the individualized, sacramentally minimalist, and antihierarchical vision of Evagrius on the other—perhaps recaptures something of the former’s purpose. If, as has been suggested above, the writings of the Areopagite emerge from the same milieu as that of Stephen bar Sudaili, then his corpus can be appreciated as a direct challenge to an Evagrian “minimalist” conception of ecclesial structures. We may thus appreciate the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus as a corrective to that same conception, in the same manner as the Pseudo-Macarian corpus serves as a corrective to the more extreme Messalian inclination that operated around it.
We must be cautious, therefore, not to overstate the degree of correspondence between the Areopagite’s corpus and Stephen’s Book of the Holy Hierotheos. Indeed, in a challenge to some recent attempts to uncover a hidden Origenism in the Areopagite’s corpus, Emiliano Fiori has in a recent article demonstrated how the divergent attitudes to the sacraments revealed within the two works depend on their divergent cosmologies. Thus the Book, which posits the future restoration of an undifferentiated cosmos, cannot conceive a permanent place for the hierarchical order of the Church, which must be transcended;109 while the Areopagite—who does not in fact commit to the classic Origenist notions of isochristism or apokatastasis—in contrast believes in both a present and a future union in which the righteous retain their individualism and that is realized in and through the hierarchical, sacramental order of the Church.110 Thus the Areopagite is committed not to the abolition of terrestrial hierarchies but rather to their transfiguration.
The most important conclusion from comparison of the two authors,
