Additional source material: English translations of Dionysius the Areopagite, Dean Colet, ed. by J. H. Lupton, London, 1869, and J. Parker, Oxford, 1897 (not complete); a new translation into German appeared in the new edition of the Kempten Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, 1912.
(a) Dionysius Areopagita, De Cælesti Hierarchia, III, 2. (MSG, 3:165.)
Dionysius thus defines “Hierarchy”:
He who speaks of a hierarchy indicates thereby a holy order … which in a holy manner works the mysteries of illumination which is appropriate to each one. The order of the hierarchy consists in this, that some are purified and others purify; some are illuminated and others illuminate; some are completed and others complete.
(b) De Cælesti Hierarchia, VI, 2. (MSG, 3:200.)
The heavenly hierarchy.
Theology has given to all heavenly existences new explanatory titles. Our divine initiator divides these into three threefold ranks. The first is that, as he says, which is ever [pg 562] about God, and which, as it is related (Ezek. 1), is permanently and before all others immediately united to Him; for the explanation of the Holy Scripture tells us that the most holy throne and the many-eyed and many-winged ranks, which in Hebrew are called cherubim and seraphim, stand before God in the closest proximity. This threefold order, or rank, our great leader names the one, like, and only truly first hierarchy, which is more godlike and stands more immediately near the first effects of the illuminations of divinity than all others. As the second hierarchy, he names that which is composed of authorities, dominions, and powers, and as the third and last of the heavenly hierarchies he names the order of angels, archangels, and principalities.
(c) De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia, I, 1. (MSG, 3:372.)
The nature of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
That our hierarchy … which is given by God, is God-inspired and divine, a divinely acting knowledge, activity, and completion, we must show from the supernal and most Holy Scriptures to those who through hierarchical secrets and traditions have been initiated into the holy consecration.… Jesus, the most divine and most transcendent spirit, the principle and the being and the most divine power of every hierarchy, holiness, and divine operation, brings to the blessed beings superior to us a more bright and at the same time more spiritual light and makes them as far as possible like to His own light. And through our love which tends upward toward Him, by the love of the beautiful which draws us up to Him, He brings together into one our many heterogeneities; that He might perfect them so as to become a uniform and divine life, condition, and activity, He gives us the power of the divine priesthood. In consequence of this honor we arrive at the holy activity of the priesthood, and so we ourselves come near to the beings over us, that we, so far as we are able, approximate to their abiding and unchangeable holy state and so look up to the blessed and divine brilliancy of [pg 563] Jesus, gaze religiously on what is attainable by us to see, and are illuminated by the knowledge of what is seen; and thus we are initiated into the mystic science, and, initiating, we can become light-like and divinely working, complete and completing.