St. Dionysius the Areopagite

The judge of the Areopagus who believed when St Paul preached in Athens, and by tradition the first bishop of that city and a martyr. The writings that carry his name, on the divine names, the mystical theology, and the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, shaped the whole apophatic tradition of the East and much of the West besides. Modern scholarship dates them to around the year 500, four centuries after the man in Acts, and the Church has not found that a reason to set them aside: The scholia of John of Scythopolis, handed down under the name of St Maximus the Confessor, and Maximus’s own interpretation secured their Orthodox reading, and it is in that reading that they are received. The saint is kept on his own day, and the corpus stands on its own authority. Feast: October 3.