Dionysius and the Lutheran Tradition

AbstractThis essay presents the largely untold story of the reception of Dionysius in Lutheran thought after Luther himself. This reception was relatively negative with regard to Luther’s early followers Johann Gerhard and Georg Calixtus, although the latter does not think the pseudonymity entirely destroys the value of the mystical writings. Johann Arndt is more sympathetic, deriving a form of natural theology from Dionysius, while Philipp Spener echoes Luther in setting Dionysius against the scholasticism of the papal era. Gottfried Arnold argues from the profundity of the corpus to its antiquity, whereas Anders Nygren, emboldened by the researches of Koch and Stiglmayr, makes Dionysius a showpiece of egocentric and anthropocentric Platonism.