We discuss one of the lesser-known, but most esoterically-important, classics of Syriac spiritual literature, the Book of the Holy Hierotheos. Hierotheos was said to have been the teacher of Dionysius the Areopagite, but he wrote in Syriac, and taught a suspiciously-Evagrian practice of ascent to god.
We turn to the questions: What is ‘mystical’ in the Corpus Dionysiacum? What is esoteric? The answers we come up with involve pretty much every aspect of the western esoteric traditions, and, after all the initiatory liturgy, esoteric scriptural hermeneutics, and theandric activity are cleared away, there remains the ascent to ‘the ray of the divine shadow’.
Into the divine darkness of a hyper-non-existent god walks the Pseudo-Dionysios. In this episode we join many esoteric currents from the antique and late-antique past into a new synthesis which will forever shape western esotericism going forward.
We discuss Hierocles of Alexandria, student of Plutarch of Athens made good. He wrote an esoteric commentary on the poem known as the Golden Verses of the Pythagoreans. The poem is full of good advice and the Commentary tells us a lot about the nature and purification of the luminous subtle body.
We continue our discussion of Augustine, turning to Prof Stróżyński's fruitful approach to spiritual practices as recorded (but often ignored) in the texts of Plotinus and Augustine. It emerges that there is a quiet but insistent thread of divinisation ‘hiding’ in the text of the Confessions, and that the human self may be, in a sense, god.
We discuss Marius Victorinus, a fascinating character from the tumultuous Roman scene in the mid fourth century who converted from Platonism to Platonism-plus-Christianity. His life and thought give us a valuable window onto the cultural scene in fourth-century Rome, as well, as some crucial data for the transmission of Platonist ideas into the Latinate middle ages.
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