The Corpus Areopagiticum

Four treatises and ten letters under the name of the Athenian converted by St Paul: On the Divine Names, The Mystical Theology, The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. The Mystical Theology is eleven pages long and is the source of the whole apophatic vocabulary of the East, ending in a series of denials that deny even the denials. The Celestial Hierarchy is where the nine ranks of angels come from. The authorship was questioned as early as the sixth century and is now dated around 500, which the Orthodox tradition has absorbed without difficulty: what carried it was St Maximus the Confessor, whose scholia read it in a way no Origenist or Monophysite could use.