Cephalophores

St Denis (Third from left, with head in hands)

Patron Saint of Paris, and oft conflated with Dionysius and Psuedo-Dionysius.

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The Angels look on approvingly. A bit disorienting as Denis has his head in his hands. He's just walked six miles to Montmartre in that condition preaching a sermon all the while. The Angels have a smile on their lips, knowing he has discerned a secret. The scientific materialists will sneer...that old battle of Faith vs. Reason is a stumbling block for them. But Denis knows what he knows. The vertigo that comes with carrying your head in your hands like Diogenes of Sinope's lantern, looking for a real human being being before God as Kierkegard might say. I imagine his sermon being like one of Meister Eckhart's (the German sermons, not the Latin) or the conspiratorial teachings of the 14th century anonymous English monk who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. He would have told St. Anselm to knock it off with the attempts at ontological proof, taking the side of Guanilo and Kierkegard (and here I must make it clear that Guanilo's argument may resort to empiricism, but actually shares the Great Dane's abhorrence of arguing one episteme in the language of another). No, Denis knows that the head goes on speaking logos as the body collapses on a crummy Paris hill.