Three Theologians: Dean Inge, Vladimir Lossky, and Von Balthasar

AbstractThis essay considers the reception of Dionysius in three notable theologians of the twentieth century, each of whom was using mysticism as a basis for apologetic and ecumenical reasoning, although Inge represents the Anglican tradition, Lossky the Orthodox, and Von Balthasar the Roman Catholic. For Inge, Dionysius is a dangerous figure who incorporates into Christian thought the impersonalism of the later Neoplatonists; Lossky sees him, on the contrary, as the exponent of a genuinely Christian apophaticism, prefigured in the Cappadocian Fathers and schematically contrasted by Lossky himself with that of Origen and his successors. Von Balthasar offers a more holistic reading of the Dionysian corpus, taking into account the Celestial and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and thus discovering in its theology an antiphonal conjunction of transcendence and immanence, which gives the death-blow to Origenism and foreshadows the thought of Maximus of Confessor.