1. Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus.
(1) With regard to the relations between the General and Particular, we should note Aristotle’s final perplexities and contradictions, arising from his failure to harmonize or to transcend, by means of a new and self-consistent conception, the two currents, the Platonic and the specifically Aristotelian, which make up his thought. For, with him as with Plato, all Knowledge has to do with Reality: hence Reality alone, in the highest, primary sense of the word, can form the highest, primary object of Knowledge; Knowledge will be busy, primarily, with the Essence, the Substance of things. But with him, as against Plato, every substance is unique, whence it would follow that all knowledge refers, at bottom, to the Individual,—individual beings would form, not only the starting-point, but also the content and object of knowledge.—Yet this is what Aristotle, once more at one with Plato, stoutly denies: Science, even where it penetrates most deeply into the Particular, is never directed to individual things as such, but always to General Concepts; and this, not because of our human incapacity completely to know the Individual, as such, but because the General, in spite of the Particular being better known to us, is more primitive and more knowable, as alone possessing that Immutability which must characterize all objects of true knowledge.[373] The true Essence of things consists only in what is thought in their Concept, which concept is always some Universal; yet this Universal exists only in Individual Beings, which are thus declared true Substances: here are two contentions, the possibility of whose co-existence he fails to explain. Indeed at one time it is the Form, at another it is the Individual Being, composed of Form and Matter, which appears as real; and Matter, again, appears both as the Indefinite General and as the Cause of Individual Particularity.[374]
(2) Now Plato had indeed insisted upon ascending to even greater abstraction, unity, and generality, as the sure process for attaining to the truth of things; and had retained what is, for us, a strangely unpersonal, abstract element, precisely in his highest concept, since God here is hardly personal, but the Idea of Good, a Substance distinct from all other things, yet not, on this account, an Individual. Yet Plato’s profoundly aesthetic, social, ethical, above all religious, consciousness forced him to the inconsistency of proclaiming that, as the Sun is higher than the light and the eye, so the Good is higher than (mere) Being and Knowledge; and this Supreme Idea of the Good gives to things their Being, and to the understanding its power of Cognition, and is the Cause of all Rightness and Beauty, the Source of all Reality and Reason, and hence, not only a final, but also an efficient Cause,—indeed the Cause, pure and simple.[375] In the Philebus he tells us explicitly that the Good and the Divine Reason are identical; and in the Timaeus the Demiurge, the World-Former, looks indeed to the Image of the World, in order to copy it: yet the Demiurge is also himself this image which he copies.[376] We thus still have a supreme Multiplicity in Unity as the characteristic of the deepest Reality; and its chief attribute, Goodness, is not the most abstract and aloof, but the most rich in qualities and the most boundlessly self-communicative: “He was good, so he desired that all things should be as like unto himself as possible.”[377] And Aristotle, (although he places God altogether outside the visible world, and attributes to Him there one sole action, the thinking of his own thought, and one quasi-emotion, intellectual joy at this thinking), still maintains, in this shrunken form, the identity of the Good and of the Supreme Reason, Noûs, and a certain Multiplicity in Unity, and a true self-consciousness, within Him.
(3) It is Plotinus who is the first expressly to put the Godhead,—in strict obedience to the Abstractive scheme,—beyond all Multiplicity, hence above the highest Reason itself, for reason ever contains at least the duality of Subject thinking and of Object thought; above Being, for all being has ever a multitude of determinations; and above every part and the totality of All Things, for it is the cause of them all. The Cause is here ever outside the effect, the Unity outside the Multiplicity, what is thought outside of what thinks. The First is thus purely transcendent,—with one characteristic exception: although above Being, Energy, Thought, and Thinking, Beauty, Virtue, Life, It is still the Good; and because of this, though utterly self-sufficing and without action of any kind, It, “as it were,” overflows, and this overflow produces a Second.[378] And only this Second is here the Noûs, possessed of what Aristotle attributes to the First: it is no sheer Unity, “all things are together there, yet are they there discriminated”: it is contemplative Thinking of itself; it is pure and perfect Action.[379]
(4) And Proclus who, through the Pseudo-Dionysius, is the chief mediator between Plato and Plotinus on the one hand, and the Medieval Mystics and Scholastics on the other, is, with his immense thirst for Unity, necessarily absorbed by the question as to the Law according to which all things are conjoined to a whole. And this Law is for him the process of the Many out of the One, and their inclination back to the One; for this process and inclination determine the connection of all things, and the precise place occupied by each thing in that connection. All things move in the circle of procession from their cause, and of return to it; the simplest beings are the most perfect; the most complex are the most imperfect.[380]
2. The Anti-Proclian current, in the Areopagite’s view.
Now in the Pseudo-Dionysius we find an interesting oscillation between genuine Neo-Platonism, which finds Beings perfect in proportion to the fewness and universality of their attributes, although, with it, he inconsistently holds Goodness,—the deepest but not the most general attribute,—to be the most perfect of all; and Aristotelianism at its richest, when it finds Beings perfect according to the multiplicity and depth of their attributes. Dionysius himself becomes aware of the dead-lock thence ensuing. “The Divine name of the Good is extended to things being and to things not being,”—a statement forced upon him by his keeping, with Plato and Plotinus, Goodness as the supreme attribute, and yet driving home, more completely than they, their first principle that Generality and Perfection rise and sink together. “The Name of Being is extended to all things being” and stretches further than Life. “The name of Life is extended to all things living” and stretches further than Wisdom. “The Name of Wisdom is extended,” only, “to all the intellectual, and rational, and sensible.”
But if so, “for what reason do we affirm,” (as he has been doing in the previous sections), “that Life,” the less extended, “is superior to (mere) Being,” the more extended? “and that Wisdom,” though less extended, “is superior to mere Life,” the more extended? And he answers in favour of depth and richness of attributes. “If any one assumed the intellectual to be without being or life, the objection might hold good. But if the Divine Minds,” the Angels, “both are above all other beings, and live above all other living creatures, and think and know above sensible perception and reasoning, and aspire beyond all other existent and aspiring beings, to … the Beautiful and Good: then they encircle the Good more closely.” For “the things that participate more in the one and boundless-giving God, are more … divine, than those that come behind them in gifts.”[381] And with abiding truth he says: “Those who place attributes on That which is above every attribute, should derive the affirmation from what is more cognate to It; but those who abstract, with regard to That which is above every abstraction, should derive the negation from what is further removed from It. Are not, e.g., Life and Goodness more cognate to It than air and stone? And is It not further removed from debauch and anger than from ineffableness and incomprehensibility?”[382]
But more usually Dionysius shows little or no preference for any particular attribution or denegation; all are taken to fall short so infinitely as to eliminate any question as to degrees of failure. “The Deity-Above-All … is neither Soul nor Mind, neither One nor Oneness, neither Deity nor Goodness.”[383] God is thus purely transcendent.