These, then, are the three legions which the great general, the son of Julius, brought into battle line. He would only have added, declaiming with Phosphorus, that most rigid rhetorician: “I come to you, excellent citizens of Leiden, from battle, with my victory, with your happiness, increased, glorious, fortunate, greatest, triumphant.”
At once the merry schoolmen of the Luciferian household would have cried out: “Iu, iu! Pheu, pheu! Well done, rock of the Loyolites! Well done, dreadful scourge of the Jesuits!” I easily persuade myself of this, because I see a man of much reading singing in tune with Joseph in his Notes on book 4 of Arnobius. There, digressing from his proposed brevity in order to discuss this Dionysius, and with the other side unheard, he adjudges the case to the adversary.
He is moved by no firm reason. It is merely because this Dionysius calls bishops “hierarchs” and “divine,” which Socrates once criticized, and because he calls the altar a thysiasterion, words which he wants to have been taken from the rites of the Gentiles; finally, because Dionysius treats expressly of monks. From these premises, in place of a consequence, he gathers this corollary on page 289: “These and other things of the same kind caused the persona to be taken away from this man.”
Rather, I fear that by writing these and other things of the same kind, which perhaps others will collect, he has taken the persona away from himself. But what are those other Dionysian things of the same kind? I cannot divine them. Until he brings them out, I shall count them as nothing. I answer the three that he adduces.
Dionysius could expressly mention monks, as I showed in chapters 2 and 3. Those other words were used by the Gentiles. What then? Did the ancient Christians not use many words of the Gentiles? I would be most tedious if I hammered at a syllable here. They used even the flesh, bread, and wine of the Gentiles, profane and not offered in sacrifice. If the use of those words was the use of that time, at the beginning of the Church, then these very words have the flavor of antiquity.
Bishops are no less presidents of true sacred rites than the priests of the Gentiles were presidents of false ones. Why should the name “divine” offend more in those men most closely joined to God than when we read in the Pandects of “divine brothers,” “divine Hadrian,” and in the Code of “Divine Justinian,” “divine rescripts,” and the like?
The Jews had the thysiasterion, and Saint Luke used the word for an altar in chapter 1:11; John used it of the Christian altar in Revelation 6:9 and 8:3; and Paul in 1 Corinthians 9:13 and 10:18, and Hebrews 13:10. Are those books therefore supposititious to John, Paul, and Luke? What then? Does the name thysiasterion fit our altar less than those of the Gentiles or the Hebrews? The Gentiles offer sacrilegious victims; the Jews, figurative and shadowy ones. We offer the true victim of the immaculate Lamb, foreshadowed by those. Do you not assent to blessed Andrew when he affirms this and to the Church when she proposes it to be believed by faith? Dionysius, in naming it so, walked in the footsteps of his divine teacher.