While the eyes of scholars were thus opened as never before to the
skill of early Church zealots in forging documents useful to
ecclesiasticism, another discovery revealed their equal skill in
forging documents useful to theology.
For more than a thousand years great stress had been laid by
theologians upon the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite,
the Athenian convert of St. Paul. Claiming to come from one so near
the great apostle, they were prized as a most precious supplement
to Holy Writ. A belief was developed that when St. Paul had
returned to earth, after having been "caught up to the third
heaven," he had revealed to Dionysius the things he had seen. Hence
it was that the varied pictures given in these writings of the
heavenly hierarchy and the angelic ministers of the Almighty took
strong hold upon the imagination of the universal Church: their
theological statements sank deeply into the hearts and minds of the
Mystics of the twelfth century and the Platonists of the fifteenth;
and the ten epistles they contained, addressed to St.
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