Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good

by Victor Cousin

We have seen[76] that reason, if one of the principles which govern it be destroyed, cannot lay hold of truth, not even absolute truths of the intellectual and moral order; it refers all universal, necessary, absolute truths, to the being that alone can explain them, because in him alone are necessary and absolute existence, immutability, and infinity. God is the substance of uncreated truths, as he is the cause of created existences. Necessary truths find in God their natural subject. If God has not arbitrarily made them,—which is not in accordance with their essence and his,—he constitutes them, inasmuch as they are himself. His intelligence possesses them as the manifestations of itself. As long as our intelligence has not referred them to the divine intelligence, they are to it an effect without cause, a phenomenon without substance. It refers them, then, to their cause and their substance. And in that it obeys an imperative need, a fixed principle of reason.

Mysticism breaks in some sort the ladder that elevates us to infinite substance: it regards this substance alone, independently[77] of the truth that manifests it, and it imagines itself to possess also the pure absolute, pure unity, being in itself. The advantage which mysticism here seeks, is to give to thought an object wherein there is no mixture, no division, no multiplicity, wherein every sensible and human element has entirely disappeared. But in order to obtain this advantage, it must pay the cost of it. It is a very simple means of freeing theodicea from every shade of anthropomorphism; it is reducing God to an abstraction, to the abstraction of being in itself. Being in itself, it is true, is free from all division, but upon the condition that it have no attribute, no quality, and even that it be deprived of knowledge and intelligence; for intelligence, if elevated as it might be, always supposes the distinction between the intelligent subject and the intelligible object. A God from whom absolute unity excludes intelligence, is the God of the mystic philosophy.

How could the school of Alexandria, how could Plotinus, its founder,[78] in the midst of the lights of the Greek and Latin civilization, have arrived at such a strange notion of the Divinity? By the abuse of Platonism, by the corruption of the best and severest method, that of Socrates and Plato.

The Platonic method, the dialectic process, as its author calls it, searches in particular, variable, contingent things, for what they also have general, durable, one, that is to say, their Idea, and is thus elevated to Ideas, as to the only true objects of intelligence, in order to be elevated still from these Ideas, which are arranged in an admirable hierarchy, to the first of all, beyond which intelligence has nothing more to conceive, nothing more to seek. By rejecting in finite things their limit, their individuality, we attain genera, Ideas, and, by them, their sovereign principle. But this principle is not the last of genera, nor the last of abstractions; it is a real and substantial principle.[79] The God of Plato is not called merely unity, he is called the Good; he is not the lifeless substance of the Eleatics;[80] he is endowed with life and movement;[81] strong expressions that show how much the God of the Platonic metaphysics differs from that of mysticism. This God is the father of the world.[82] He is also the father of truth, that light of spirits.[83] He dwells in the midst of Ideas which make him a true God inasmuch as he is with them.[84] He possesses august and holy intelligence.[85] He has made the world without any external necessity, and for the sole reason that he is good.[86] In fine, he is beauty without mixture, unalterable, immortal, that makes him who has caught a glimpse of it disdain all earthly beauties.[87] The beautiful, the absolute good, is too dazzling to be looked on directly by the eye of mortal; it must at first be contemplated in the images that reveal it to us, in truth, in beauty, in justice, as they are met here below, and among men, as the eye of one who has been a chained captive from infancy, must be gradually habituated to the light of the sun.[88] Our reason, enlightened by true science, can perceive this light of spirits; reason rightly led can go to God, and there is no need, in order to reach him, of a particular and mysterious faculty.

Plotinus erred by pushing to excess the Platonic dialectics, and by extending them beyond the boundary where they should stop. In Plato they terminate at ideas, at the idea of the good, and produce an intelligent and good God; Plotinus applies them without limit, and they lead him into an abyss of mysticism. If all truth is in the general, and if all individuality is imperfection, it follows, that as long as we are able to generalize, as long as it is possible for us to overlook any difference, to exclude any determination, we shall not be at the limit of dialectics. Its last object, then, will be a principle without any determination. It will not spare in God being itself. In fact, if we say that God is a being, by the side of and above being, we place unity, of which being partakes, and which it cannot disengage, in order to consider it alone. Being is not here simple, since it is at once being and unity; unity alone is simple, for one cannot go beyond that. And still when we say unity, we determine it. True absolute unity must, then, be something absolutely indeterminate, which is not, which, properly speaking, cannot be named, the unnamable, as Plotinus says. This principle, which exists not, for a still stronger reason, cannot think, for all thought is still a determination, a manner of being. So being and thought are excluded from absolute unity. If Alexandrianism admits them, it is only as a forfeiture, a degradation of unity. Considered in thought, and in being, the supreme principle is inferior to itself; only in the pure simplicity of its indefinable essence is it the last object of science, and the last term of perfection.

In order to enter into communication with such a God, the ordinary faculties are not sufficient, and the theodicea of the school of Alexandria imposes upon it a quite peculiar psychology.

In the truth of things, reason conceives absolute unity as an attribute of absolute being, but not as something in itself, or, if it considers it apart, it knows that it considers only an abstraction. Does one wish to make absolute unity something else than an attribute of an absolute being, or an abstraction, a conception of human intelligence? Reason could accept nothing more on any condition. Will this barren unity be the object of love? But love, much more than reason, aspires after a real object. One does not love substance in general, but a substance that possesses such or such a character. In human friendships, suppress all the qualities of a person, or modify them, and you modify or suppress the love. This does not prove that you do not love this person; it only proves that the person is not for you without his qualities.

So neither reason nor love can attain the absolute unity of mysticism. In order to correspond to such an object, there must be in us something analogous to it, there must be a mode of knowing that implies the abolition of consciousness. In fact, consciousness is the sign of the me, that is to say, of that which is most determinate: the being who says, me, distinguishes himself essentially from every other; that is for us the type itself of individuality. Consciousness should degrade the ideal of dialectic knowledge, or every division, every determination must be wanting, in order to respond to the absolute unity of its object. This mode of pure and direct communication with God, which is not reason, which is not love, which excludes consciousness, is ecstasy (ἔκστασις). This word, which Plotinus first applied to this singular state of the soul, expresses this separation from ourselves which mysticism exacts, and of which it believes man capable. Man, in order to communicate with absolute being, must go out of himself. It is necessary that thought should reject all determinate thought, and, in falling back within its own depths, should arrive at such an oblivion of itself, that consciousness should vanish or seem to vanish. But that is only an image of ecstasy; what it is in itself, no one knows; as it escapes all consciousness, it escapes memory, escapes reflection, and consequently all expression, all human speech.

This philosophical mysticism rests upon a radically false notion of absolute being. By dint of wishing to free God from all the conditions of finite existence, one comes to deprive him of all the conditions of existence itself; one has such a fear that the infinite may have something in common with the finite, that he does not dare to recognize that being is common to both, save difference of degree, as if all that is not were not nothingness itself! Absolute being possesses absolute unity without any doubt, as it possesses absolute intelligence; but, once more, absolute unity without a real subject of inherence is destitute of all reality. Real and determinate are synonyms. What constitutes a being is its special nature, its essence. A being is itself only on the condition of not being another; it cannot but have characteristic traits. All that is, is such or such. Difference is an element as essential to being as unity itself. If, then, reality is in determination, it follows that God is the most determinate of beings. Aristotle is much more Platonic than Plotinus, when he says that God is the thought of thought,[89] that he is not a simple power, but a power effectively acting, meaning thereby that God to be perfect, ought to have nothing in himself that is not completed. To finite nature it belongs to be, in a certain sense, indeterminate, since being finite, it has always in itself powers that are not realized; this indetermination diminishes as these powers are realized. So true divine unity is not abstract unity, it is the precise unity of perfect being in which every thing is accomplished. At the summit of existence, still more than at its low degree, every thing is determinate, every thing is developed, every thing is distinct, every thing is one. The richness of determinations is a certain sign of the plenitude of being. Reflection distinguishes these determinations from each other, but it is not necessary that it should in these distinctions see the limits. In us, for example, does the diversity of our faculties and their richest development divide the me and alter the identity and the unity of the person? Does each one of us believe himself less than himself, because he possesses sensibility, reason, and will? No, surely. It is the same with God. Not having employed a sufficient psychology, Alexandrian mysticism imagined that diversity of attributes is incompatible with simplicity of essence, and through fear of corrupting simple and pure essence, it made of it an abstraction. By a senseless scruple, it feared that God would not be sufficiently perfect, if it left him all his perfections; it regards them as imperfections, being as a degradation, creation as a fall; and, in order to explain man and the universe, it is forced to put in God what it calls failings, not having seen that these pretended failings are the very signs of his infinite perfection.