Whenever Lutherans or Calvinists mention these writings of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, they assert with such confidence that they are spurious, as if they had been present with the forger when the cuckoo slipped its eggs beneath the curruca. When they are called upon for proofs, they either fall silent and demand that their pronouncements be believed, or else they bring forward arguments that display more audacity than strength, more impudence than prudence: in a word, nothing sound, weighty, or robust.
They have laid hands upon the books, and still they have not been able to show when, by whom, or where this offspring was foisted upon the great Dionysius. Therefore I bring the matter into court; and from the point at which Scaliger, by the law of the Quirites, summoned me to join issue hand to hand, from there I summon him back, and I demand vindication for the tutelary Apostle of France, a Belgian against an Aquitanian.
I decline no judges who are not heretics; nor even them, if they defer to antiquity and have not lost their forehead together with their faith. It would have been easy for me to repel my adversary with a single exception: if our Dionysius is not, and has not for some centuries been, in possession of his book, and therefore did not possess it as his own at the very time when that possession began to be disturbed by adversaries; and if he was not still possessing it now, when Scaliger joined this suit with me.
So far he has brought forward nothing to show why the Areopagite should not prevail under the praetorian interdict Utrubi, or why force should not be forbidden under Uti possidetis. If prescription has ever had force in any matter for the antiquity of a writing and the certainty of its author, it has force especially here, where both the prescription is manifest and it is plain that the objections of the adversaries possess scarcely any probative force.
I am not unaware that the substitution of a child can be proved by conjectures and presumptions that are not especially weighty; but that is accepted in the substitution of a living and actual child because proof is difficult. In the metaphorical substitution of children, that is, of books, there is no place for it, since in books many things are always found which betray fraud: style, subject matter, witnesses cited, narrative, and the indications supplied by other ancient writers.
It is clear from Theodore in the Library of Photius, and also from Hilduin, Hincmar, and Anastasius the Librarian, that certain points of this sort about our Dionysius were once brought forward. But at that time they were so clearly refuted that the Greek and Latin Church long ago gave judgment in favor of Dionysius, and that sentence stood unshaken down to the age of Leo X. Then certain heretics, together with some haughty grammarians, began to unsettle things already received, and to call again into judgment matters virtually decided and established.
It would have been equitable not to hear them on the charge of substitution, since they were protesting from the same causes already once, and more than once, brought into court, after the offspring had long since been adjudged legitimate and after the prescription of the lawful time. Indeed, all crimes are extinguished by the passage of twenty years. By what title, then, or under what color, do the innovators demand to be heard in this case against the sentence of the Roman Pontiffs and the Ecumenical Councils after a course of almost a thousand years?
Tertullian would say that they should be removed by this single prescription, because, after abandoning what had existed before, they afterward chose what had not existed before. He would add that it is perversity of faith not to believe things proved and to presume things not proved. Yet to overcome, or at least to expose, their hardness, as the same author elsewhere advises, I shall not avoid the encounter, lest the short path of prescription be thought a protection for distrust.
There will be two parts. The first will dissolve the arguments of some moment which I have been able to find; and indeed all of Scaliger’s, even those that are of no moment, will come first. The second will contain those reasons by which I hope to convince men who are not obstinate that we have scarcely any book of an orthodox Father confirmed by the unanimous consent of more numerous or weightier witnesses, and assigned to its own author, than these treatises and letters of Dionysius the Areopagite. Thus I cannot deny that I am quite unable to stop wondering at the confidence and effrontery of the adversaries in this controversy.