ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the marriage of Christian theology and Neoplatonism which takes place in the mystical theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, and some of the problems which arise from this remarkably fruitful liaison. I then traces the line of descent which leads from Dionysius to Žižek, who takes this inheritance and mutates it in ways which are potentially generative for theology and philosophy, both in relation to one another and to desire. Writing in the more exclusively male confines of Eros and Allegory, Denys Turner points out the centrality of eros to Dionysius' Christian-Neoplatonic synthesis. The notion of the simplicity of the One – important both to Plato and to the Neoplatonists – is the idea that all good things – justice, freedom, life, beauty etc. – come together and are identical within the One which gives rise to everything that exists.
