“The spirit had authority over the soul and body, because it was in living communion with God, and from Him it received divine power. When the living communion with God was disrupted, the flow of Divine power was also disrupted. The spirit, left by itself, was not able to rule the soul and body, but was drawn to and itself captured by them.

"When the spiritual needs are met, they teach a person to harmonize with those needs the satisfaction of the other needs, so that neither the needs of the intellect nor the needs of the body interfere with the spiritual life, but, instead, aid it. Then within a person is established complete harmony of all motions and revelations of his life.

A Greek theologian from the end of the fifth century wrote several treatises and commentaries, which were widely circulated at his time in the East and West. Among his treatises is the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which comments on the liturgy as it was prayed in his time in Antioch. This theologian is anonymous, but he wrote under the pseudonym of Dionysus the Areopagite.