Abstract

The relationship between Bonaventure and Dionysius in scholarship is a little peculiar. Bonaventure's use of hierarchy or other Dionysian tropes and concepts, together with his knowledge of Dionysius, is taken for granted but he is rarely analysed as a reader of Dionysius. Their ideas are compared while their texts, generally, are not. Since so many different Dionysii have been proffered in the last hundred years, from a duplicitous pagan holdout to a cryptic Constantinopolitan scholar to a liturgically-oriented Syrian monk, against just which one Bonaventure might be compared is practically a matter of taste. The profusion of Dionysii makes it all more necessary to crack open the Corpus Dionysiacum to...