The influence of the Areopagite was notoriously immense throughout the Middle Ages,—indeed unchecked,—along its Proclian, Emanational, Ultra-Unitive current,—among the Pantheists from the Christian, Mohammedan and Jewish camps.
(1) Thus Scotus Eriugena (who died in about 877 A.D.) insists: “In strict parlance, the Divine Nature Itself exists alone in all things, and nothing exists which is not that Nature. The Lord and the Creature are one and the same thing.” “It is its own Self that the Holy Trinity loves, sees, moves within us.” One of his fundamental ideas is the equivalence of the degrees of abstraction and those of existence; he simply hypostatizes the logical table.[384] Eriugena was condemned.
(2) But the Pseudo-Aristotelian, really Proclian, Liber de Causis, written by a Mohammedan in about 850 A.D., became, from its translation into Latin in about 1180 A.D. onwards, an authority among the orthodox Scholastics. It takes, as “an example of the (true) doctrine as to Causes, Being, Living-Being, and Man. Here it is necessary that the thing Being should exist first of all, and next Living-Being, and last Man. Living-Being is the proximate, Being is the remote cause of Man; hence Being is in a higher degree the cause of Man than is Living-Being, since Being is the cause of Living-Being, which latter again is the cause of Man.” … “Being, (of the kind) which is before Eternity, is the first cause.… Being is more general than Eternity.… Being of the kind which is with and after Eternity, is the first of created things.… It is above Sense, and Soul, and Intelligence.”[385]
(3) The Mohammedan Avicenna, who died in 1037 A.D., is mostly Aristotelian in philosophy and Orthodox in religious intention, and, translated into Latin, was much used by St. Thomas. Yet he has lapses into pure Pantheism, such as: “The true Being that belongs to God, is not His only, but is the Being of all things, and comes forth abundantly from His Being. That which all things desire is Being: Being is Goodness; the perfection of Being is the perfection of Goodness.”[386]
(4) And the Spanish Jew, Ibn Gebirol (Avicebron), who died about 1070 A.D., is predominantly Proclian, but with a form of Pantheism which, in parts, strikingly foreshadows Spinoza. His masterly Fons Vitae, as translated into Latin, exercised a profound influence upon Duns Scotus. “Below the first Maker there is nothing but what is both matter and form.” “All things are resolvable into Matter and Form. If all things were resolvable into a single root,” (that is, into Form alone), “there would be no difference between that one root and the one Maker.” There exists a universal Matter and a universal Form. The first, or universal Matter, is a substance existing by itself, which sustains diversity, and is one in number: it is capable of receiving all the different kinds of forms. The universal Form is a substance which constitutes the essence of all the different kinds of forms.… By means of the knowledge of this universal Form, the knowledge of every (less general) form is acquired,—is deduced from it and resolved into it.” “Being falls under four categories, answering to: whether it is, what it is, what is its quality, and why it is: but, of these, the first in order of dignity is the category which inquires whether it is at all.”[387] We thus get again the degree of worth strictly identical with the degree of generality.
4. Inconsistencies of Aquinas and Scotus.
(1) St. Thomas, the chief of the orthodox Scholastics, has embodied the entire Dionysian writings in his own works, but labours assiduously—and successfully, as far as his own statements are concerned—to guard against the Pantheistic tendencies special to strict Realism. Yet it is clear, from his frequent warnings and difficult distinctions regarding the double sense of the proposition, “God is sheer Being,” and from the ease with which we find Eckhart, an entirely consistent Realist, lapse into the Pantheistic sense, how immanent is the danger to any severe form of the system.[388] And he fails to give us a thoroughly understandable and consistent account as to the relations between the General and the Particular, between Form and Matter, and between these two pairs of conceptions. Thus “Materia signata,” matter, as bearing certain dimensions, “is the principle of individuation”:[389] yet this quantum is already an individually determined quantity, and this determination remains unexplained. And certain forms exist separately, without matter, in which case each single form is a separate species; as with the Angels and, pre-eminently, with God.—Yet, as already Duns Scotus insisted, Aquinas’ general principle seems to require the non-existence of pure forms as distinct beings, and the partial materiality of all individual beings.[390]
(2) And Duns Scotus teaches, in explicit return to Avicebron, that every created substance consists of matter as well as of form, and that there is but one, First Matter, which is identical in every particular and derivative kind of matter. The world appears to him as a gigantic tree, whose root is this indeterminate matter; whose branches are the transitory substances; whose leaves the changeable accidents; whose flowers, the rational souls; whose fruit are the Angels: and which God has planted and which He tends. Here again the order of Efficacity,—with the tell-tale exception of God,—is identical with that of Generality.[391]
5. Eckhart’s Pantheistic trend.
But it is Eckhart who consistently develops the Pantheistic trend of a rigorous Intellectualism. The very competent and strongly Thomistic Father Denifle shows how Eckhart strictly followed the general scholastic doctrine, as enunciated by Avicenna: “In every creature its Being is one thing, and is from another, its Essence is another thing, and is not from another”; whereas in God, Being and Essence are identical. And Denifle adds: “Eckhart will have been unable to answer for himself the question as to what, in strictness, the ‘Esse’ is, in distinction from the ‘Essentia’; indeed no one could have told him, with precision.… Eckhart leaves intact the distinction between the Essence of God and that of the creature; but, doubtless in part because of this, he feels himself free,—in starting from an ambiguous text of Boetius,—to break down the careful discriminations established by St. Thomas, in view of this same text, between Universal Being, Common to all things extant, and Divine Being, reserved by Aquinas for God alone.”[392] “What things are nearer to each other, than anything that is and Being? There is nothing between them.” “Very Being,” the Being of God, “is the actualizing Form of every form, everywhere.” “In one word,” adds Denifle, “the Being of God constitutes the formal Being of all things.”[393] The degrees of Generality and Abstract Thinkableness are again also the degrees of Reality and Worth: “the Eternal Word assumed to Itself, not this or that human being, but a human nature which existed bare, unparticularized.” “Being and Knowableness are identical.”