Abbot Suger and the Dionysian Tradition: An Overview

AUGUSTINE is the bridge between Plotinus’ metaphysics and a properly tChristian foundation for the architecture of revelation in poetry, prayer and stone in the medieval west. As a transitional figure, Augustine drew upon the pagan Platonists of late antiquity, especially Plotinus’ sacramental philosophy of the cosmos, to formulate a theology that makes the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ the means by which the cosmos is sanctified. Augustine did not find in the pagan Platonists a formal theory of the relationship between religious philosophy and historical events. In response, Augustine provided what Thomas Merton has called a “monumental theology of history … built on revelation, developed above all from the inspired pages of St. Paul’s epistles and St. John’s Apocalypse.”

Through Augustine, the religious philosophy of Plotinus had evolved, by the early Middle Ages, into a Christian-Platonism that embraced the conception of a spiritually dynamic cosmos based upon a theology of light. The importance in Christianity of the historical event of Christ separates the Christian from the Hellenic philosophic tradition; with the incarnation, God entered history. Augustine, having read and transformed Plotinus’ metaphysical system, secured the acceptance of Christian-Platonism by the Latin Church, but the Christian concept of history includes, as well, an apocalyptic vision of the end of time, a communal finality when all salvation history will be revealed and fulfilled through Christ. This concept of history has no place in the mysticism of Plotinus; nor do his writings include an articulated concept of Church or an insistence on a system of rites or sacraments. Furthermore, Plotinus never emphasizes a particular building or locus as an appropriate setting for communicating with the divine realm.

The great Gothic churches of the Middle Ages are, perhaps, the most conspicuous examples of how Platonic concepts of light, image, and cosmos had evolved and were fused with the Christian concepts of history and Church.