CHAPTER II.
They that pretend to these heights call them the secrets of the kingdom; but they are such which no man can describe; such which God hath not revealed in the publication of the Gospel; such for the acquiring of which there are no means prescribed, and to which no man is obliged, and which are not in any man’s power to obtain; nor such which it is lawful to pray for or desire; nor concerning which we shall ever be called to account.—Jeremy Taylor.
‘I have here,’ said Atherton on the next evening, ‘some notes on the doctrine of this pretended Areopagite—a short summary; shall I read it?’
‘By all means.’
So the following abstract was listened to—and with creditable patience.[[34]]
(1.) All things have emanated from God, and the end of all is return to God. Such return—deification, he calls it—is the consummation of the creature, that God may finally be all in all. A process of evolution, a centrifugal movement in the Divine Nature, is substituted in reality for creation. The antithesis of this is the centripetal process, or movement of involution, which draws all existence towards the point of the Divine centre. The degree of real existence possessed by any being is the amount of God in that being—for God is the existence in all things. Yet He himself cannot be said to exist, for he is above existence. The more or less of God which the various creatures possess is determined by the proximity of their order to the centre.
(2.) The chain of being in the upper and invisible world, through which the Divine Power diffuses itself in successive gradations, he calls the Celestial Hierarchy. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is a corresponding series in the visible world. The orders of Angelic natures and of priestly functionaries correspond to each other. The highest rank of the former receive illumination immediately from God. The lowest of the heavenly imparts divine light to the highest of the earthly hierarchy. Each order strives perpetually to approximate to that immediately above itself, from which it receives the transmitted influence; so that all, as Dante describes it, draw and are drawn, and tend in common towards the centre—God.
The three triads of angelic existences, to whom answer the ranks of the terrestrial hierarchy, betrays the influence of Proclus, whose hierarchy of ideas corresponds, in a similar manner, to his hierarchy of hypostases.
Gower. The system reminds one of those old pictures which are divided into two compartments, the upper occupied by angels and cherubs on the clouds, and the lower by human beings on the earth, gazing devoutly upward at their celestial benefactors.
Atherton. The work of Christ is thrown into the background to make room for the Church. The Saviour answers, with Dionysius, rather to the Logos of the Platonist than to the Son of God revealed in Scripture. He is allowed to be, as incarnate, the founder of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy; but, as such, he is removed from men by the long chain of priestly orders, and is less the Redeemer, than remotely the Illuminator, of the species.
Purification, illumination, perfection,—the three great stages of ascent to God (which plays so important a part in almost every succeeding attempt to systematise mysticism) are mystically represented by the three sacraments,—Baptism, the Eucharist, and Unction. The Church is the great Mystagogue: its liturgy and offices a profound and elaborate system of symbolism.
(3.) The Greek theory, with its inadequate conception of the nature of sin, compels Dionysius virtually to deny the existence of evil. Everything that exists is good, the more existence the more goodness, so that evil is a coming short of existence. He hunts sin boldly from place to place throughout the universe, and drives it at last into the obscurity of the limbo he contrives for it, where it lies among things unreal.
All that exists he regards as a symbolical manifestation of the super-existent. What we call creation is the divine allegory. In nature, in Scripture, in tradition, God is revealed only in figure. This sacred imagery should be studied, but in such study we are still far from any adequate cognizance of the Divine Nature. God is above all negation and affirmation: in Him such contraries are at once identified and transcended. But by negation we approach most nearly to a true apprehension of what He is.
Negation and affirmation, accordingly, constitute the two opposed and yet simultaneous methods he lays down for the knowledge of the Infinite. These two paths, the Via Negativa (or Apophatica) and the Via Affirmativa (or Cataphatica) constitute the foundation of his mysticism. They are distinguished and elaborated in every part of his writings. The positive is the descending process. In the path downward from God, through inferior existences, the Divine Being may be said to have many names;—the negative method is one of ascent; in that, God is regarded as nameless, the inscrutable Anonymous. The symbolical or visible is thus opposed, in the Platonist style, to the mystical or ideal. To assert anything concerning a God who is above all affirmation is to speak in figure, to veil him. The more you deny concerning Him, the more of such veils do you remove. He compares the negative method of speaking concerning the Supreme to the operation of the sculptor, who strikes off fragment after fragment of the marble, and progresses by diminution.
(4.) Our highest knowledge of God, therefore, is said to consist in mystic ignorance. In omni-nescience we approach Omniscience. This Path of Negation is the highway of mysticism. It is by refraining from any exercise of the intellect or of the imagination—by self-simplification, by withdrawal into the inmost, the divine essence of our nature—that we surpass the ordinary condition of humanity, and are united in ecstasy with God. Dionysius does not insist so much on Union as the later mystics, but he believes, at all events, that the eminent saint may attain on earth an indescribable condition of soul—an elevation far transcending the reach of our natural faculties—an approach towards the beatific vision of those who are supposed to gaze directly on the Divine Essence in heaven. His disciple is perpetually exhorted to aspire to this climax of abstraction—above sight, and thought, and feeling, as to the highest aim of man.
Willoughby. What contradictions are here! With one breath he extols ineffable ignorance as the only wisdom; with the next he pretends to elucidate the Trinity, and reads you off a muster-roll of the heavenly hierarchies.
Gower. And are not these, supplemented by the hierarchy of ecclesiastics, his real objects of worship? No man could make an actual God of that super-essential ultimatum, that blank Next-to-Nothingness which the last Neo-Platonists imagined as their Supreme. Proclus could not; Dionysius could not. What then? A reaction comes, which, after refining polytheism to an impalpable unity, restores men to polytheism once more. Up mounts speculation, rocket-like: men watch it, a single soaring star with its train of fire, and, at the height, it breaks into a scattering shower of many-coloured sparks. From that Abstraction of which nothing can be predicated, nothing can be expected. The figment above being is above benignity. So the objects of invocation are gods, demi-gods, dæmons, heroes; or, when baptized, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominions, powers, archangels, angels, saints; in either case, whether at Athens or at Constantinople, the excessive subtilisation of the One contributes toward the worship of the Manifold.
Atherton. The theology of the Neo-Platonists was always in the first instance a mere matter of logic. It so happened that they confounded Universals with causes. The miserable consequence is clear. The Highest becomes with them, as he is with Dionysius, merely the most comprehensive, the universal idea, which includes the world, as genus includes species.[[35]]
Mrs. Atherton. The divinity of this old Father must be a bleak affair indeed—Christianity frozen out.
Gower. I picture him to myself as entering with his philosophy into the theological structure of that day, like Winter into the cathedral of the woods (which an autumn of decline has begun to harm already);—what life yet lingers, he takes away,—he untwines the garlands from the pillars of the trees, extinguishes the many twinkling lights the sunshine hung wavering in the foliage, silences all sounds of singing, and fills the darkened aisles and dome with a coldly-descending mist, whose silence is extolled as above the power of utterance,—its blinding, chill obscureness lauded as clearer than the intelligence and warmer than the fervour of a simple and scriptural devotion.
Atherton. You have described my experience in reading him, though I must say he suggested nothing to me about your cathedral of the woods, &c. His verbose and turgid style, too, is destitute of all genuine feeling.[[36]] He piles epithet on epithet, throws superlative on superlative, hyperbole on hyperbole, and it is but log upon log,—he puts no fire under, neither does any come from elsewhere. He quotes Scripture—as might be expected—in the worst style, both of the schoolman and the mystic. Fragments are torn from their connexion, and carried away to suffer the most arbitrary interpretation, and strew his pages that they may appear to illustrate or justify his theory.
Gower. How forlorn do those texts of Scripture look that you discern scattered over the works of such writers, so manifestly transported from a region of vitality and warmth to an expanse of barrenness. They make the context look still more sterile, and while they say there must be life somewhere, seem to affirm, no less emphatically, that it is not in the neighbourhood about them. They remind me of those leaves from the chestnut and the birch I once observed upon a glacier. There they lay, foreign manifestly to the treeless world in which they were found; the ice appeared to have shrunk from them, and they from the ice; each isolated leaf had made itself a cup-like cavity, a tiny open sarcophagus of crystal, in which it had lain, perhaps for several winters. Doubtless, a tempest, which had been vexing some pleasant valley far down beneath, and tearing at its trees, must have whirled them up thither. Yet the very presence of the captives reproached the poverty of the Snow-King who detained them, testifying as they did to a genial clime elsewhere, whose products that ice-world could no more put forth, than can such frozen speculations as this of Dionysius, the ripening ‘fruits of the Spirit.’
Willoughby. His lurking fatalism and his pantheism were forgiven him, no doubt, on consideration of his services to priestly assumption. He descends from his most cloudy abstraction to assert the mysterious significance and divine potency of all the minutiæ of the ecclesiastical apparatus and the sacerdotal etiquette. What a reputation these writings had throughout the middle age!
Atherton. Dionysius is the mythical hero of mysticism. You find traces of him everywhere. Go almost where you will through the writings of the mediæval mystics, into their depths of nihilism, up their heights of rapture or of speculation, through their over-growth of fancy, you find his authority cited, his words employed, his opinions more or less fully transmitted, somewhat as the traveller in the Pyrenees discerns the fame of the heroic Roland still preserved in the names and in the legends of the rock, the valley, or the flower. Passages from the Areopagite were culled, as their warrant and their insignia, by the priestly ambassadors of mysticism, with as much care and reverence as the sacred verbenæ that grew within the enclosure of the Capitoline by the Feciales of Rome.
Mrs. Atherton. ‘Oh, sweet Fancy, let her loose,’ as Keats says. I think my husband has been learning in Mr. Gower’s school. How far he went to fetch that simile!
Gower. Perhaps he has my excuse in this case, that he could not help it.
Willoughby. Or he may at once boldly put in the plea of Sterne, who in one place lays claim to the gratitude of his readers for having voyaged to fetch a metaphor all the way to the Guinea coast and back.
Atherton. It contributed greatly to the influence of the Areopagite that he became confounded with the Dionysius, or St. Denys, who was adopted as the patron-saint of France.
Kate. A singular fortune, indeed: so that he was two other people besides himself;—like Mrs. Malaprop’s Cerberus, three gentlemen at once.
Gower. I think we have spent time enough upon him. Grievously do I pity the miserable monks his commentators, whose minds, submerged in the mare tenebrosum of the cloister, had to pass a term of years in the mazy arborescence of his verbiage,—like so many insects within their cells in the branches of a great coral.[[37]]
Atherton. Don’t throw away so much good compassion, I dare say it kept them out of mischief.
Willoughby. I cannot get that wretched abstraction out of my head which the Neo-Platonists call deity. How such a notion must have dislocated all their ethics from head to foot! The merest anthropomorphism had been better;—yes, Homer and Hesiod are truer, after all.
Atherton. I grant the gravity of the mischief. But we must not be too hard on this ecclesiastical Neo-Platonism. It does but follow Aristotle here. You remember he considers the possession of virtues as quite out of the question in the case of the gods.
Gower. Is it possible? Why, that is as though a man should lame himself to run the faster. Here is a search after God, in which, at starting, all moral qualities are removed from him; so that the testimony of conscience cannot count for anything;—the inward directory is sealed; the clue burnt. Truly the world by wisdom knew not God!
Willoughby. This unquestionably is the fatal error of Greek speculation—the subordination of morals to the intellectual refinements of an ultra-human spiritualism. Even with Numenius you have to go down the scale to a subordinate god or hypostasis before you arrive at a deity who condescends to be good.
Gower. How much ‘salt’ there must still have been in the mediæval Christianity to survive, as far as it did, the reception of these old ethical mistakes into the very heart of its doctrine!
Atherton. Aristotle reasons thus: how can the gods exhibit fortitude, who have nothing to fear—justice and honesty, without a business—temperance, without passions? Such insignificant things as moral actions are beneath them. They do not toil, as men. They do not sleep, like Endymion, ‘on the Latmian hill.’ What remains? They lead a life of contemplation;—in contemplative energy lies their blessedness.[[38]] So the contemplative sage who energises directly toward the central Mind—the intellectual source and ultimatum, is the true imitator of the divine perfections.
Gower. Transfer this principle to Christianity, and the monk becomes immediately the highest style of man.
Willoughby. And you have a double morality at once: heroic or superhuman virtues, the graces of contemplation for the saintly few,—glorious in proportion to their uselessness; and ordinary virtues for the many,—social, serviceable, and secondary.
Atherton. Not that the schoolman would release his saint altogether from the obligations of ordinary morality; but he would say, this ordinary morality does not fit the contemplatist for heaven—it is but a preliminary exercise—a means to an end, and that end, the transcendence of everything creaturely, a superhuman exaltation, the ceasing from his labours, and swooning as it were into the divine repose.
Willoughby. Then I must put in a word for our mystics. It is not they who corrupted Christian morals by devising this divorce between the virtues of daily life and certain other virtues which are unhuman, anti-terrestrial, hypercreaturely—forgive the word—they drive us hard for language. They found the separation already accomplished; they only tilled with ardour the plot of ground freely allotted them by the Church.
Atherton. Just so; in this doctrine of moral dualism—the prolific mother of mystics—Aquinas is as far gone as Bernard.
Gower. The mention of Bernard’s name makes one impatient to get away from the Greek Church, westward.
Atherton. We may say farewell to Byzantium now. That Greek Church never grew beyond what it was in the eighth and ninth centuries.
Gower. I have always imagined it a dwarf, watching a Nibelungen hoard, which after all never enriches anybody. Nothing but that tedious counting, and keeping tidy, and standing sentinel, for ages.
Atherton. See what good a little fighting does. The Greek Church had its scholastic element—witness John of Damascus; it had its mystical—as we have seen; but neither the one nor the other was ever developed to such vigour as to assert itself against its rival, and struggle for mastery. In the West the two principles have their battles, their armistices, their reconciliations, and both are the better. In the East they are coupled amicably in the leash of antiquity, and dare not so much as snarl.
Willoughby. I suppose the mysticism of the Greek Church was more objective, as the Germans would say,—dependent on its sacramental media and long trains of angelic and human functionaries, handing down illumination; that of the West, subjective.
Atherton. That will be generally true. The eastern mysticism creeps under the sacerdotal vestments, is never known to quit the precincts of church and cloister, clings close to the dalmatica, and lives on whiffs of frankincense. The western is often to be found far from candle, book, and bell, venturing to worship without a priest.
In short, as Gower would antithetically say, the mystic of the East is always a slave, the mystic of the West often a rebel; Symbolism is the badge of the one, Individualism the watch-word of the other.
Gower. How spiteful you are to-night, Atherton. I propose that we break up, and hear nothing more you may have to say.
Note to Page 121.
Aristotle extols contemplation, because it does not require means and opportunity, as do the social virtues, generosity, courage, &c. Plotinus lays still more stress on his distinction between the mere political virtues—which constitute simply a preparatory, purifying process, and the superior, or exemplary—those divine attainments whereby man is united with God. Aquinas adopts this classification, and distinguishes the virtues as exemplares, purgatoriæ and politicæ. He even goes so far as to give to each of the cardinal virtues a contemplative and ascetic turn; designating Prudence, in its highest exercise, as contempt for all things worldly; Temperance is abstraction from the sensuous; Fortitude, courage in sustaining ourselves in the aerial regions of contemplation, remote from the objects of sense; Justice, the absolute surrender of the spirit to this law of its aspiration. He argues that, as man’s highest blessedness is a beatitude surpassing the limits of human nature, he can be prepared for it only by having added to that nature certain principles from the divine;—such principles are the theological or superhuman virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity. See Münscher’s Dogmengeschichte, 2 Abth. 2 Absch. § 136.
In consequence of the separation thus established between the human and the divine, we shall find the mystics of the fourteenth century representing regeneration almost as a process of dehumanization, and as the substitution of a divine nature for the human in the subject of grace. No theologians could have been further removed from Pelagianism; few more forgetful than these ardent contemplatists that divine influence is vouchsafed, not to obliterate and supersede our natural capacities by some almost miraculous faculty, but to restore and elevate man’s nature, to realise its lost possibilities, and to consecrate it wholly, in body and soul—not in spirit, merely—to the service of God.
With one voice both schoolmen and mystics would reason thus:—‘Is not heaven the extreme opposite of this clouded, vexed, and sensuous life? Then we approach its blessedness most nearly by a life the most contrary possible to the secular,—by contemplation, by withdrawment, by total abstraction from sense.’
This is one view of our best preparation for the heavenly world. At the opposite pole stands Behmen’s doctrine, far less dangerous, and to be preferred if we must have an extreme, viz., that the believer is virtually in the heavenly state already—that eternity should be to us as time, and time as eternity.
Between these two stands the scriptural teaching. St. Paul does not attempt to persuade himself that earth is heaven, that faith is sight, that hope is fruition. He groans here, being burdened; he longs to have done with shortcoming and with conflict; to enter on the vision face to face, on the unhindered service of the state of glory. But he does not deem it the best preparation for heaven to mimic upon earth an imaginary celestial repose,—he will rather labour to-day his utmost at the work to-day may bring,—he will fight the good fight, he will finish his course, and then receive the crown.