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In the southern shadow of the Italian Alps, Thomas Gallus (d. 1246), or Thomas of St. Victor, the last of the great medieval Victorine theologians, spent his last twenty-five years commenting on the mysterious collection of late antique writings known today as the Dionysian Corpus. The result was a series of extensive commentaries in which Gallus articulates a distinctive theological vision—an account of the nature of God, the nature of the human soul, and the mystical relation between them, as profound as it was influential. Today, Gallus is regarded as the influential architect of a medieval “affective interpretation” of the Dionysian Corpus, which privileged love over knowledge in the soul’s final encounter with God, and which interpreted Dionysius’ account of divine–human union accordingly. This affective priority has also led some to read him as anti-intellectual, as opposed to rigorous intellectual speculation, and as excluding knowledge from the soul’s ultimate union with God. But Gallus also derives a unique account of the soul from Dionysius, a Dionysian anthropology through which he conceives of a complex, dynamic, and ultimately reciprocal relationship between knowing and loving God, wherein love not only ecstatically exceeds knowledge, but also subsumes it, “affectivizes” it, while at the same time, such affective experience spawns and fecundates deeper intellectual insight and understanding. In the end, through both knowledge and love, the soul spirals eternally into God.

248 "04/14" --- 248 "04/14" Spiritualite. Ascese. Mystique. Theologie ascetique et mystique. Devotion--Middeleeuwen --- 248 "04/14" Spiritualiteit. Ascese. Mystiek. Vroomheid--Middeleeuwen --- Spiritualite. Ascese. Mystique. Theologie ascetique et mystique. Devotion--Middeleeuwen --- Spiritualiteit. Ascese. Mystiek. Vroomheid--Middeleeuwen --- Awareness --- Affect (Psychology) --- Theology --- Intellect --- Religion --- History --- Thomas, --- Religion - History --- Thomas, - Gallus, - -1246