St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral on Manhattan’s Upper East Side does more than intrude on the surrounding Gilded Age luxury apartments. Her onion domes are prophecies of the resurrection to come. “When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be,” asserts the apostle (1 Corinthians 15:37). In the same way, our bodies will rise just as surely as a neglected kitchen onion will sprout. This isn’t an excessively pious observation. I had a good excuse to think that way. I arrived at St. Nicholas toward the end of a funeral. A man about my age announced from the lectern, in a broken voice, that he had been an altar boy in that very church. He then read from 1 Corinthians 15 with a quiet, trembling force that shook the interior and everyone who bothered to listen.

During what remained of the service, I lost myself in several wall paintings—a Nativity, an Anastasis, a Dormition. They were painted in a realistic style, testifying to Orthodoxy’s capitulation to Western aesthetics before it rediscovered its own tradition, but they pleased nonetheless. I even crossed myself Orthodox-style before a few of them, hoping as an Anglican to blend in. Stillness, however, knows no confessional boundaries. As the Jewish artist Marc Chagall once put it, “My heart was quiet with the icons.”

My next stop was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an exciting if unsettling prospect. I did not want to leave behind the atmosphere of this church as I went. The images here had reference points, the saints in heaven; museum images, euthanized by curatorial pretenses of neutrality, seem to stop with themselves. I eyed the candlelit image of a saint whose name I recognized. This icon was more recent and was painted in the traditional style that was revived in the twentieth century. I had read about this holy person in history books and knew well his classic texts. The lines around the saint’s eyes and cheeks became an enveloping whirlpool, and I wondered what it would be like to visit the museum with such a wise companion: How would he fare at the Met?

Right then, a black-robed figure appeared behind me. I had not noticed him before. I imagined he must be a visiting monk, but there was something . . . different about him, more deeply distant. I wouldn’t describe his presence as disturbing, but it was certainly unfamiliar—and accompanied by what seemed like an interior current of wind. Unsettled, I turned to depart. As I exited the church and descended the staircase, the monk—who had evidently followed my exit—spoke.

“May I ask your assistance?” he inquired. He was precisely the type of figure I was hoping to converse with, but I was not about to interrupt a worship service, so his question pleased me. I anticipated a frank conversation across confessional lines. I would ask him about Russian politics, while he in turn would question my implicit subscription to decadent American values. Tempering each other’s assumptions, we would find ourselves mutually enriched. But I was in for far more than an ecumenical exchange.

“Is the liturgy outside time?” the monk inquired with a sly smile, eyeing me from under the hood of his cassock. Silver-bearded and olive-skinned, he appeared to be about sixty. I was in no place to offer what I presumed was an actual Russian monk any type of mystical guidance, so his question puzzled me. Yet he did not seem entirely Russian. His olive skin belied something more Mediterranean than Slavic.

I knew my liturgical theory, how the smoke of incense and prayers of the faithful summon the communion of saints, past and present—maybe even future ones as well. Does not the Easter Vigil proclaim “This is the night” even though the actual night of Holy Saturday, chronologically speaking, came thousands of years before? Is not God, the maker of time, outside time altogether? So, after furrowed consideration, I replied, “Yes, the liturgy is outside time.” And he followed this with a simple sentence: “So am I.”

The possibility that this monk had lost his mind certainly occurred to me, but this concern did little to limit my interest in the encounter, for he was especially amiable. Even if he was not in his right mind, at least I would come away with a story. “So who are you?” I asked him.

“Dionysius the Areopagite,” he replied. “I was converted by Paul at the Areopagus, and I have been permitted to visit your epoch, which is why I require a guide.”

As any serious student of church history knows, the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite—whose conversion by the apostle Paul is recorded in the seventeenth chapter of the book of Acts—do not survive (if there even were any). But a Syrian monk, claiming to be this ancient convert, wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite around AD 500. Generations were fooled—so scholars have come to believe—by the authenticity of these documents, which have been called the most successful forgery in late antiquity. Or so we assumed.

Looking at the figure in front of me, in a flash I realized something that no one had bothered to consider—namely, that the work of Dionysius the Areopagite may have been no forgery after all; instead the author of these documents was the actual Dionysius, the very man converted by Paul, travelling in time from the first to the fifth century. And now he had gone and done it again. Unfortunately, no one would believe me if I told them that I had just resolved a scholarly controversy that has embroiled Christendom for fifteen hundred years, so I couldn’t do anything with this information. But it was satisfying nonetheless.

Hoping to give him the best orientation to my century possible, I made my way toward Central Park accompanied, however difficult it was for me to believe, by Dionysius the Areopagite himself.

“Does God give this privilege to saints frequently?” I asked him as we sauntered.

“So far as I know I am the only one.”

“Why has this gift been given to you?”

“This also escapes me.”

“So you’re really the author of the Mystical Theology?” I asked.

“That is correct,” my companion said. “I travelled to the turn of the sixth century to write that treatise, hoping to keep the church from splitting during the Miaphysite controversy.”

“Too little too late,” I replied, knowing that the division between Coptic and Orthodox Christianity was not prevented by Dionysius’s mitigations. “I’m afraid not much can be done to rectify any of our more recent schisms either,” I informed him. “For instance, a rival Russian Orthodox Cathedral existed for a time just a few blocks from this one. They’ve since reunited, but Orthodoxy is wracked inconflict today as well.” I then pointed out the Brick Presbyterian church, and Park Avenue Methodist Church after that. Just as I was about to explain how they differed from the Roman Catholic Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola on the next block, I hesitated. Dionysius, I realized, did not seem all that interested in such disputes.

I could sense a presence radiating from the monk that put me at ease. I slipped into a reassuring silence that most walking companions are incapable of bearing. But if I’m honest, while in his presence I also felt more conscious of my shortcomings and sins. We passed shops and dogs, and more dogs. So many dogs. Each of them looked at my guest with something approximating human affection. As we turned one corner, a schnauzer and cocker spaniel were lost in a high-pitched barking battle. But as we approached, Dionysius had the effect of a tranquilizer. The schnauzer nearly bowed at his feet, which did not seem to surprise him.

As we neared Central Park, Dionysius (how strange it feels to call him that) was cheered by the greenery. We entered the park and made our way through blooming trees of pink and white. As we approached the obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle, behind the Met’s Temple of Dendur enclosed in glass, he led me to take a seat. We looked at the new skyscrapers, as trim and thin as the super-rich aspire to be. They were narrow and triumphant like the obelisk. “I remember these forms from the ancient world,” he said, pointing to the obelisk. “Why are they here?”

“It was nineteenth-century Manhattan trying to flex some muscle,” I told him, “just as Rome and London did when they brought Egyptian obelisks to those cities.” Seeing he wanted more, I guided him to the monument’s corresponding signage and read to him the inscription. “The king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Thutmosis III, the golden Hours, content with victory, Who smiteth the rulers of the nations—Hundreds of thousands . . .” Dionysius interrupted me.

“I doubt he was content with victory, or with the notice of hundreds of thousands more since this monument was brought here.” Dionysius turned to the enclosed temple behind me.

“What’s in the cage?” he asked me, looking at the Temple of Dendur behind the Metropolitan Museum’s glass.

“They brought much more than obelisks to New York,” I told him.

“Can we enter it?” he asked me. Having learned that fewer words were necessary by this point, I rose, Dionysius followed, and we made our way around the structure to the grand staircase of the Met.

I then did what any informed person in my situation would have. I took Dionysius to the classical wing, where I expected, as an Athenian, he would feel most at home. We passed the kouros statues, a relief of the rites of Eleusis, the massive column of the Temple of Artemis, a sarcophagus carved with sumptuous images of Bacchus, statues of Hercules, the three graces—a greatest hits assemblage of classical sculpture. Eyeing the sunlit gallery teeming with ancient statues, Dionysius spoke again.

“Are these sculptures worshipped?”

“Not exactly,” I replied. “They are gathered here under the auspices of a thing called ‘Art.’ It is certainly not what the original sculptors and patrons had in mind, but I suppose it’s better than letting them crumble.” My companion eyed the onlookers, concluding that their rapid glances at the objects, or replications of them made by hand-held devices, ensured that none of these images was very much of a threat. We took a seat on an observational bench.

“I remember images like this in Athens, when Paul first made his appeal to me,” Dionysius said. “The apostle was relatively unkempt, as was—to speak truthfully—his speech. Luke edited him considerably. But it was Paul’s very humility that convinced me. I had had my fill of beautiful orations, where the skills of the orator mattered more than the truths about which they spoke. This is why Damaris and I consulted with him afterward. Paul was tired but was cheered that his message had been received. We met with him that night in the small Athenian home where he was staying with his supporters and friends. I had long been interested in the doctrine of the Jews. By that point in my life the doctrine of Plato had lost most of its appeal for me. The Platonists’ sense of cosmic Oneness was attractive but sterile. Paul’s message was comparatively coarse—but coursing with life. Risen life. When he added to it the dimension of the Messiah who conquered death itself, I was enamoured.”

My silence conveyed to my companion that I wanted him to continue.

“As we spoke over lamplight, Paul encouraged me not to forsake my learning but to combine it with the message he had been given, and which he had now given to me. I was well trained at Plato’s Academy, but it was not what it once had been. The unseemly ambition of jousting scholars had made it like a rotting pear. In Paul’s message, all the freshness I once had known somehow returned. I combined the Platonic One with the fuller Triune revelation of love. I had never imaged that the One could be so transcendent as to become reality itself.”

“Is that not pantheism?” I asked.

“Not in the least,” he replied. “To equate God with reality was the mistake of the Greeks from whom I departed. The Platonists made the peras (‘limit’ in your tongue) and apeiria (‘unbounded infinity’) qualities in the universe itself. But to suggest God is beyond physical reality is only to make the opposite mistake. After my baptism, I came to see that those qualities were borne by God. God is no being among beings; God can only be. This is why, in my writings, I proclaimed the God who is wholly beyond all our mental categories, yet who imbues them at the same time. He is closer to each thing than each thing can be to itself, yet he is not those things. He is not a facet of Being. Rather, Being is a facet of him. No Greek had ever conceived this.”

As he said this, a pulsing crest of sunlight invaded the gallery.

We rose and walked upstairs toward the rooms of medieval icons, icons that Dionysius’s writings did so much to inspire. But these did not bring him the delight I had expected they would. Eyeing the gallery of images that once enhanced Christian altarpieces, he said to me, “I’m beginning to see that our faith is among the items that have been caged.”

“True,” I conceded. “But as you saw at St. Nicholas, not all the churches are in museums. And if they weren’t in here, these paintings might be lost to history, and probably few would see them.”

He seemed satisfied with this. We approached a painting by Raphael with the Father depicted in the upper register as a bearded man. The notion that the first person of the Trinity was incarnate did not sit well with my companion, but he seemed less offended than he was amused. “He has every shape and structure yet is formless,” Dionysius reminded me, and we moved on.

Exiting the Renaissance galleries, we found ourselves immersed in the art of Romanticism, face to face with a series of all-out nudes. Again I expected my companion to be offended, and I almost apologized to him, but eros did not seem to surprise him. “To look without lust is the essence of chastity,” he told me with avuncular affection. “God is beguiled by goodness, by love, and by yearning,” Dionysius told me with radiant affection. “He is enticed away from this transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself.”

“So you don’t consider the museum some kind of pagan temple?” I asked him as we found our way to the impressionists. He replied immediately, with as much urgency as a man of his calm could manage. God, he said, “is the superabundant source in itself of the beauty of every beautiful thing. Beauty bids all things to itself (whence it is called ‘beauty’) and gathers everything into itself.” As we stood before the muscular radiance emanating from the canvasses of Cézanne, all of this was instantly confirmed. “He is all things in all things,” my companion told me as apples and a pot of primrose transfixed us. “And he is no thing among things,” he told me as we wrenched ourselves away. The still lifes seemed as holy as the icons in the church where we had begun.

This remark prompted me to take my companion to the modern galleries, where he appeared even more content. As we approached a Rothko, we both sat in quiet silence. After a few minutes Dionysius spoke: “God is beyond every denial. He does not possess this kind of existence and not that. No. He is all things, since he is the cause of all things. He is at rest and astir, is neither resting nor stirring.” Moving past the Rothko toward the postmodern galleries—deliberate failures of artistic will—I wondered if he might be disheartened, but Dionysius was a quick study. “The failure of images,” he told me, “is far more promising than their success. Perfect ignorance is the knowledge of him who is over all that is known.” I thought then of the words of an art historian, one who was inspired by Dionysius’s writings himself: “Unreasonable figures better raise our minds than those fashioned in the resemblance of their object.”

Still, I knew this tour could not end there. We wended our way to my favourite place in the museum, the small Byzantine-style chapel underneath the grand stairway, a sure refuge from optical harassment. Here the display nearly became a chapel. Here the icons, ensconced behind an ancient templon, did point beyond themselves to the heavenly realities they signified. My companion sensed this and responded accordingly, raising his hands to pray.

His prayer, pronounced in rhythmic cadences, closely resembled a song: “Supernal Triad, Deity above all essence, knowledge and goodness; Guide of Christians to Divine Wisdom; direct our path to the ultimate summit of your mystical knowledge, most incomprehensible, most luminous and most exalted, where the pure, absolute and immutable mysteries of theology are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their Darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories surpassing all beauty.”

I was concerned about the gathering crowd, and about what almost appeared to be light emitting from his skin. But when he finished the security guards relaxed. They figured he was another monk, such as the ones that are more frequently welcomed into the exhibitions of late, as secularism’s custodial grip loosens at last. In the lull that followed the conclusion of Dionysius’s oration, the onlookers seemed like they didn’t know what to do. Clap? Bow? A few were clearly moved; others proceeded toward the gift shop.

We exited the museum and found a spot to sit on the steps. Sensing that I wanted to speak, Dionysius interrupted me in advance. “The higher we soar in contemplation,” he told me, “the more limited become our expressions of that which is purely intelligible. When plunging into the Darkness that is above the intellect, we pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute silence of thoughts and of words.” These final remarks were imbued with a tone of hopeful exasperation. The prayer had evidently taken something out of him. Much as I would have wished to prolong it, I sensed our meeting had come to an end. I thanked him, and the great Athenian sage made his way down the Met’s grand front steps, the same steps whose ascent—at the annual Met Gala—marks the apogee of my culture’s pretense and conceit. He ambled along Fifth Avenue toward the Guggenheim, perhaps returning to St. Nicholas. What more important task awaited him was not my business. Or maybe the task was me.

All the dogs fell silent as he passed.

Special thanks to the non-fictional Fr. Silouan Justiano of the St. Dionysius the Areopagite Monastery on Long Island for kind permission to use his icon for this fictional piece.