DE DIONYSIO AREOPAGITA

But we return to Arnoldus: From whom, if we ask: Why were the Areopagitic writings, if they are truly of Dionysius, so hidden as soon as they were born that they could not be unearthed and see the light before the four-hundredth year from their birth? By inventing the following color, he strives to render it probable: because, he says, they contained a Mystical Theology and abstruse chapters of revealed doctrine. Therefore, lest they be exposed to the laughter and contempt of heathens, or even the hereticizing bishops of the Church themselves (to speak barbarically with the barbarian Arnoldus), who were already deviating from the Apostolic doctrine by indulging in philosophy and reason, those who had a certain taste of this solid food original: βρώματος κ̀ στερεᾶς τροφῆς hid them. But to pass over other reasons that are now at hand, we offer one thing back to Arnoldus: What writings, I ask, were filled with more and greater mysteries than the codices of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of Paul and other Apostles, the Johannine Apocalypse—in a word, all the writings of the New Testament? For from these, as from a fountain, all other human writings that wished to teach anything about mysteries had to draw. These sacred pages of the New Testament, therefore—these volumes full of mysteries—should have been hidden most of all, according to the opinion of Arnoldus. Yet it is clear from the undoubted testimonies of the Fathers that they were read by individual believers and even by heathens themselves. These were most copiously collected by Jac. Usserius in his Dogmatic History of the Controversy between the Orthodox and Papists concerning Vernacular Scriptures and Sacred Things (which, after his death, was edited by Henr. Whartonus at London in 1690, enriched with notes and a supplement), following the B. Gerhardus (Exeg. Loc. I. §. 489) and Hottingerus in his Analecta (pp. 475–488). And it also appears clearly from the most virulent books of Celsus against the Christians, which Origen deservedly received. Let Arnoldus now gather from these for his Areopagitica, and he will easily understand how miserably he helps the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius with an argument taken from their concealment, unless he obstinately wishes to obstruct his own eyes in the very meridian of truth.