**''Solids''

**''Liquids''

However, one should be a bit cautious about taking pseudo-Dionysius' model too concretely, as the gospel truth (to use the expression quite literally). The author himself was a fairly early advocate of [[apophatic theology]], which insists on only describing God in the negative. Still, many have accused the writer of wavering somewhere in between Orthodoxy and Neoplatonism, a pagan Greek philosophical system; such critics say that the three groupings of three in the angelic hierarchy derive from the Neoplatonic tendency to divide beings into triads. Furthermore, the comparison of the celestial with the earthly breaks down if one takes into account modern science, which tells us of a fourth category of matter, plasma, plus the fact that Einstein considered time another, fourth dimension, and modern string theorists (whose scientific validity is still very debatable) propose somewhere between 10 and 26 dimensions in the physical universe. All said and done, this is not to entirely discredit pseudo-Dionysius, who has been much esteemed by numerous [[Church Fathers]] and theologians up to the present day.