This is a line-by-line Latin commentary on the Pseudo-Dionysian treatise on the church's sacraments and orders, written by Thomas Gallus, abbot of the Victorine house of St Andrew at Vercelli, in the last years of his life. It belongs to a larger project: Gallus worked through the whole Dionysian corpus more than once, first in the compressed paraphrase known as the Extractio and then in the fuller Explanationes, of which this is one. The situation that produced it was the arrival of Dionysius in the Latin West as a text people actually intended to use. The translations of Eriugena and John Sarracenus had made the corpus available but not intelligible; the Victorine tradition of Hugh and Richard had made contemplative theology a discipline with vocabulary and stages. Gallus stood at the junction and undertook to explain what Dionysius meant, sentence by sentence, to readers who wanted to pray by it.
His governing move is to read the ecclesiastical hierarchy as an instrument for the hierarchization of the soul. Dionysius describes baptism, the synaxis, the consecration of the ointment, the three clerical orders and the three ranks of those they serve, and the rites for the dead. Gallus takes each as a real and public means by which purification, illumination and perfection are worked in particular persons, so that the visible order of the church is the outward form of an inward ordering that ascends. Behind this lies his most consequential thesis, developed across his Dionysian commentaries: that at the summit of the ascent intellect gives out and love does not. The knowing mind reaches a limit and stops; the highest affection, the apex affectionis, passes beyond into union with God who remains unknown. Gallus maps the soul's grades of ascent onto the angelic orders, so that the hierarchies of heaven, church and interior life are read as one continuous structure, and the sacraments are located within it rather than beside it.
This reading became the standard medieval way of hearing Dionysius. The Middle English Deonise Hid Diuinite renders Gallus's Extractio rather than Dionysius directly; Hugh of Balma and Jean Gerson work in his wake; the whole late medieval conviction that love reaches where knowledge fails has a documentable source here.
Who should read this: those tracing how affective mysticism entered the Latin West, and readers of The Cloud of Unknowing who want to see where its epistemology came from. It is a technical commentary on a technical text, dependent throughout on Dionysian vocabulary, and it will frustrate anyone looking for devotional prose or a freestanding treatment of the sacraments.
Explanation of Dionysius' On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy
by Thomas Gallus
This is a line-by-line Latin commentary on the Pseudo-Dionysian treatise on the church's sacraments and orders, written by Thomas Gallus, abbot of the Victorine house of St Andrew at Vercelli, in the last years of his life. It belongs to a larger project: Gallus worked through the whole Dionysian corpus more than once, first in the compressed paraphrase known as the Extractio and then in the fuller Explanationes, of which this is one. The situation that produced it was the arrival of Dionysius in the Latin West as a text people actually intended to use. The translations of Eriugena and John Sarracenus had made the corpus available but not intelligible; the Victorine tradition of Hugh and Richard had made contemplative theology a discipline with vocabulary and stages. Gallus stood at the junction and undertook to explain what Dionysius meant, sentence by sentence, to readers who wanted to pray by it.
His governing move is to read the ecclesiastical hierarchy as an instrument for the hierarchization of the soul. Dionysius describes baptism, the synaxis, the consecration of the ointment, the three clerical orders and the three ranks of those they serve, and the rites for the dead. Gallus takes each as a real and public means by which purification, illumination and perfection are worked in particular persons, so that the visible order of the church is the outward form of an inward ordering that ascends. Behind this lies his most consequential thesis, developed across his Dionysian commentaries: that at the summit of the ascent intellect gives out and love does not. The knowing mind reaches a limit and stops; the highest affection, the apex affectionis, passes beyond into union with God who remains unknown. Gallus maps the soul's grades of ascent onto the angelic orders, so that the hierarchies of heaven, church and interior life are read as one continuous structure, and the sacraments are located within it rather than beside it.
This reading became the standard medieval way of hearing Dionysius. The Middle English Deonise Hid Diuinite renders Gallus's Extractio rather than Dionysius directly; Hugh of Balma and Jean Gerson work in his wake; the whole late medieval conviction that love reaches where knowledge fails has a documentable source here.
Who should read this: those tracing how affective mysticism entered the Latin West, and readers of The Cloud of Unknowing who want to see where its epistemology came from. It is a technical commentary on a technical text, dependent throughout on Dionysian vocabulary, and it will frustrate anyone looking for devotional prose or a freestanding treatment of the sacraments.