Tales from an under-stimulated age

"The Pseudo-Dionysius's works were a triumph of the Neoplatonist imagination. In an age of science like our own, they seem wildly fanciful. The lists of seraphim, cherubim, thrones, powers, and the other grades of angelic beings seem like an elaborate fantasy game. However, in an age of faith like the early Middle Ages, with monastic imaginations starved for new stimuli, they were a stunning revelation.

--Arthur Herman, The Cave and the Light : Plato versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization (New York : Random House, 2013), pgs. 213-214.