Dionysius (tangentially, wimpy angels)

Today is the Eastern feast day of Dionysius the Areopagite.

The classic saints are the most fun. An Athenian, converted by St. Paul, claimed to have seen an eclipse from Egypt when Christ died, may or may not have been martyred by fire in Paris, has mulitple names ... and the dating and authorship of his writing are in doubt.

It seems more likely he was actually beheaded.


From "The Celestial Hierarchy:"

That Divine and Celestial matters are fittingly revealed even through unlike symbols:

"I consider, then, that in the first place we must explain our conception of the purpose of each Hierarchy and the good conferred by each upon its followers; secondly we must celebrate the Celestial Hierarchies as they are revealed in the Scriptures; and finally we must say under what holy figures the descriptions in the sacred writings portray those Celestial Orders, and to what kind of purity we ought to be guided through those forms lest we, like the many, should impiously suppose that those Celestial and Divine Intelligences are many-footed or many-faced beings, or formed with the brutishness of oxen, or the savageness of lions, or the curved beaks of eagles, or the feathers of birds, or should imagine that they are some kind of fiery wheels above the heavens, or material thrones upon which the Supreme Deity may recline, or many-coloured horses, or commanders of armies, or whatever else of symbolic description has been given to us in the various sacred images of the Scriptures."

Old-school angel characterizations are much niftier, too, than our own. The many-eyed, many winged beings of yore evoke much more than the soft, chubby, sandy-blonde she-males that pass for angels today.

I'm a little soft, a touch chubby, and sandy brunette, (but rather masculine, I must say), and I love me, but angels shouldn't look that way.