• Dionysius the Areopagite, who was converted by St. Paul. Acts 17:34:⁠— “Howbeit, certain men clave unto him, and believed; among the which was Dionysius the Areopagite.” A book attributed to him, on the “Celestial Hierarchy,” was translated into Latin by Johannes Erigena, and became in the Middle Ages the textbook of angelic lore. “The author of those extraordinary treatises,” says Milman, History of Latin Christianity , VIII 189, “which, from their obscure and doubtful parentage, now perhaps hardly maintain their fame for imaginative richness, for the occasional beauty of their language, and their deep piety⁠—those treatises which, widely popular in the West, almost created the angel-worship of the popular creed, and were also the parents of Mystic Theology and of the higher Scholasticism⁠—this Poet-Theologian was a Greek. The writings which bear the venerable name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the proselyte of St. Paul, first appear under a suspicious and suspected form, as authorities cited by the heterodox Severians in a conference at Constantinople. The orthodox stood aghast: how was it that writings of the holy convert of St. Paul had never been heard of before? that Cyril of Alexandria, that Athanasius himself, were ignorant of their existence?