One verse of Acts gives Dionysius the Areopagite a name and a council seat and nothing else. Around the year 500 a body of Greek theological writing appeared under that name — the Divine Names, the Mystical Theology, the Celestial Hierarchy, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy — claiming to be by the Athenian convert, addressed to companions of the apostles, and describing the writer as an eyewitness of the eclipse at the crucifixion. The claim was believed for a thousand years and the consequences were enormous: the works shaped the Eastern doctrine of God's unknowability, gave the West its nine ranks of angels, and were quoted as apostolic by Maximus, John of Damascus, Aquinas and the whole mystical tradition after them. They are not apostolic. They quote Proclus, who died in 485, sometimes verbatim; they describe a liturgy of the fifth century; and no one cites them before 533. Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus said so in the Renaissance and the attribution collapsed. The writer is now called Pseudo-Dionysius, which is an awkward name for one of the most influential authors in Christian history. This dataset keeps the Athenian convert of Acts 17 as the person he is, records what was attributed to him and by whom, and does not put the corpus on his works shelf — an author with the wrong name attached is a fact about transmission, not about him.
Ecclesiastical History