The Council of Trent and Dionysian Ecclesiastical Hierarchy Available to Purchase

This article examines the acta of the Council of Trent to determine the fate of Dionysian hierarchy for the sixteenth century and virtually the whole modern era. Was the pope to be called the supreme “hierarch” in the Catholic Church, or did that title belong to every bishop, as Dionysius had said? The ambient scholarly and polemical literature on Dionysius among both Catholics and Protestants, humanists and scholastics, considered in its European political context, clarifies how papal hierarchy rose and fell in the discussion. Ultimately, a special papal hierarchical grade or office, vigorously promoted in the council debates, was rejected in the final decree, but hierarchy itself was affirmed along the lines of Thomas Aquinas's minimalist reading of Dionysius's theology, tempering Latin medieval misconceptions of Dionysius nourished by Boniface VIII's Unam Sanctam (1302) and competing theologies of hierarchy.