Cusa 2021 by Wayne J Hankey
Cusa Twenty-one, Unknown to itself, no longer I: Bonaventure
“My soul chooses hanging and my bone... more Cusa Twenty-one, Unknown to itself, no longer I: Bonaventure
“My soul chooses hanging and my bones death.” (Job 7, 15; The Mind’s Journey into God, VII, 6)
Charles Stang has brought us to reflections on the union of apophatic theology and apophatic anthropology in Dionysius. We have extended them to Plotinus, Augustine, and Eriugena. Bonaventure’s Journey into God is the most complete possible union of these correlative negations. With him Dionysian theological and human negation is assimilated to the Crucifixion mysticism of St Francis.
According to the Gospel Passion narratives, during the interrogations of Christ the authorities give the titles which are also accusations: Are you the Son of God? Are you a king? Jesus replies: “You have said it.” “You say that I am.” Thus Saints Matthew, Mark, and Luke. “‘King’ is your word.” “Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” Thus St John. The union we have been exploring between our knowledge and ignorance of God and our knowledge and ignorance of ourselves is at the centre of the Passion. Apprehending or denying God, we expose and commit ourselves. Bach’s settings of the Passions make this inescapable. More radically Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Journey into God which culminates in our death in the death of God does the same.
Bonaventure’s Journey into God is the most complete union of apophatic theology and apophatic anthropology possible. The ascent along the wings of the Dionysian Seraphim is by mirrorings of the Divine below our souls, at the level of our souls, and above our souls. These mirrorings are what we are. We are nothing in ourselves. Pushed and pulled up step by step one to another we are drawn into ever more intense, necessary, and complete contradiction.
Bonaventure brings us, by way of Dionysius quoted at length where he is one with Proclus, to uncomprehending knowledge of Incomprehensible Divine Intellect, the One-Being. After that there is “learned ignorance” (to use Cusa’s term) of the Nothingness of the One-Nonbeing. Uncomprehending knowledge and learned ignorance compel us into what is Beyond both: Eloquent Silence. These are moments of Divinity as the Neoplatonists discovered God. Dionysian Trinitarian mysticism embraces them all in their extremity and contradiction. Bonaventure unites Dionysius with the Crucifixion mysticism of St Frances.
Who embraces the One-Nonbeing cries with Job and Bonaventure: “My soul chooses hanging and my bones death.”
Cusa Twenty, Unknown to itself, no longer I: Dionysius
This meditation returns us to and takes up... more Cusa Twenty, Unknown to itself, no longer I: Dionysius
This meditation returns us to and takes up from “Cusa Seventeen: Unknown to itself, no longer I, Being Possessed versus the Novelistic Self: Plotinus, Eriugena, Augustine.” The intervening meditations contribute to this one. Because it depends so much on the work of Charles Stang, I have made him a coauthor.
Charles Stang’s book Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I” enables us to take what we have learned from the high metaphysics of the De Li Non Aliud to the personal. It does this in a way unfamiliar to us: the “I” is displaced. In order to make God’s revelation in and to St Paul present and active now, a fifth century author assumes the identity of Dionysius the Areopagite, Paul’s first century convert. That is the “Pseudonymity” of Stang’s title.
What of the “Apophasis”? What of the negation? Complete negation, i.e. not only negative propositions but getting beyond negation and affirmation? This is “super” or “hyper” negation; the negation Dionysius takes over from Proclus and Damascius, the kind of positive or double negation Eriugena developed.
Looking at the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite through St Paul quoted constantly in them, Stang answers endlessly troubling questions about that corpus in a convincing way. He writes:
Paul provides our author an apostolic account of apophatic anthropology, that is, he witnesses to the apophasis of his own self as he suffers union with the divine. Our author in a sense apprentices himself to the Paul who suffers a blinding vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3–9), the Paul who stands atop the Areopagus and insists that we worship the ‘‘unknown God’’ ‘‘through unknowing’’ [agnoountes] (Acts 17:23), the Paul who was caught up to the third heaven (2 Cor 12:2). Our author assumes the identity of a disciple of Paul not merely for these extraordinary moments of intimacy with the divine, but because Paul reveals that such intimacy comes at the cost of his kataphatic self, the self whom he knows and has known his whole life, the self that cannot break free from its sobriety, the self who bears a name, or even two (Saul and Paul). Paul understands that this ‘‘said’’ self must be ‘‘unsaid,’’ suffer the ecstatic intrusion of the divine, and suffer the incumbent loss so as to know salvation. But our author’s decision to write under a pseudonym may be even more relevant to the apophasis of the self. The author does not merely sign the name of Paul’s disciple Dionysius the Areopagite to his corpus. He goes much further and literally assumes the identity of this figure from the past. He writes not treatises but letters addressed to other apostles and disciples; he imagines himself into this apostolic community, to the point that he is present at the Dormition of Mary; he counsels John sequestered on Patmos. And yet all the while the author is also somehow in the fifth century: quoting—sometimes at great length—from Proclus’ works, treading dangerously close to contemporary Christological controversies, describing the ceremonials of Byzantine churches rather than the home churches of the New Testament. The author is, in other words, ‘‘neither himself nor someone else,’’ neither the monk from Syria scholars assume him to be nor the Athenian archon under whose name he writes. Like the ecstatic God with whom he seeks to suffer union, as a writer he simultaneously remains where he is and stretches outside himself. (‘‘Being Neither Oneself nor Someone Else’’, pp. 69-70)
There is much more of great value in these and other works by Stang and they will remain with us as we press on through Bonaventure to the De Li Non Aliud in our consideration of “Unknown to itself, no longer I.”
Advancing from not other “which cannot be participated in” or named to creation as participation ... more Advancing from not other “which cannot be participated in” or named to creation as participation in God by all things so that God is self-creating requires several steps. We return to our beginning point: the Non other is self-defining, defining itself and all else. Thus it is not an other, a essence, but is instead what Aristotle refused to allow, the Essence of essences. Arriving at such a fundamental requires over coming Aristotle’s insistence on the law of non contradiction and a shift from his denial that infinity exists because it would be endless quantitative extension. Cusa returns to the Platonic infinity of self relation and self contradiction. The infinity of God is his self generation.
One essence and many forms or ideas is replaced by the Essence of essences. It is crucial to understand the distinction between these two forms of infinity and that God as infinite is the Essence of essences. These two notions go together for Cusa: God as infinite in the Platonic sense is not a particular essence but is the Essence of essences and the Essence of essences is creative activity.
By the same logic God is the Vision of visions. That God sees himself and his creation in one single vision goes with his self-creation. The seeing is defining and seeing and defining are creation.
God is the Goodness which moves God in creating and what God creates is good.
Along this same mode of thinking by which the infinite is thought but is not comprehended ,Cusa moves from the Spirit of spirits to Divine self-creation: “the Spirit which is God makes the quiddities [or essences] of things not from another but from itself.”
Nicholas of Cusa’s philosophical theology is marked as radical by his positive reception of the t... more Nicholas of Cusa’s philosophical theology is marked as radical by his positive reception of the thought of John Scottus Eriugena (c. 810-880). Of him the great 20th century Neoplatonist scholar, philosopher, and theologian Jean Trouillard (1907-1984) judged: “In the first part of the ninth century he undertook to construct a Christian theological synthesis employing the Neoplatonic problematic. His will for orthodoxy was only equalled by the penetration with which he reinvented the greater part of the theses of Neoplatonism largely forgotten.” Fr Trouillard estimated that after Eriugena such a profoundly authentic retrieval of the doctrines developed in the pagan Platonic schools of late Antiquity from Plotinus (205-270) to Damascius (480-c550) would not be created again in the Middle Ages until Maître Eckhart (1260-1328) and Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) —both, directly or indirectly, under Eriugena’s influence.
Eriugena’s own radical thinking comes out in his willingness to draw the conclusion of monotheism that God is self-creating, that God Himself is the nothingness from which God creates. For understanding Cusa the following features of Eriugena’s great system, the Periphyseon, Concerning Nature, are useful.
1. Drawing upon Gregory of Nyssa, Eriugena came to understand human nature in such a way, that, more than being “that in which all things could be found (inerat),” it became “that in which all things are created (condita est)” Peri. IV 807A). The human is the workshop of creation (Peri. II 531AB, III 733B, V 893BC); it is the medium in which God creates himself and the universe of beings out of his own nothingness precisely because, uniquely among beings, the human possesses all the forms of knowing and ignorance, including sensation. Because everything is through human perception, there are no absolute objects. As in earlier Platonic systems, the forms have become not only thoughts, but forms of apprehension in various kinds of subject; as Plotinus puts it, “all things come from contemplations and are contemplations” (Enneads III 8 [30] 7, 1-2).
2. Placing, defining, knowing, creating
Eriugena’s treatment of place is revealing. Place exists only in the mind, “for if every definition is in art, and all art is in the mind, every place, since place is definition, will necessarily be nowhere else except in the mind” (Peri. I 475B). To define is to place, to know, and to create. Cusa follows Eriugena closely in this. For Eriugena, being (OUCIA ) is not as such knowable. Rather, the defined, the limited, is the knowable. Beings are known as defined, circumscribed by the accidental categories. Without place, God cannot define himself in human reason, but, by this defining, everything comes to be. Defining is placing, circumscription, within God, as the “place of places” (Peri. III 643C). “Only God is infinite; everything else is limited by “where” and “when”, that is, place and time.” Time and place are creatures, but “are prior, not temporally, but in respect to creation, to all things that are in the universe”. “What contains is prior to that which is contained, in the way that the cause precedes the effect” (Peri. I 482C).
3. The Nothingness from which God creates is himself
From two fundamental notions: God creates himself, and God is nothing, Eriugena draws the conclusion that the nothing from which God creates is himself. Unsurprisingly, Alumnus is troubled both by the premises and by the conclusion. The result is a long treatise on nothing, half of Book III and the midpoint of Periphyseon (Peri. III 634-688). Because there is no other from which the universe can be made, Nutritor concludes that “God is the nothing of the things which are and which are not” (Peri. III 687B), not as privative, like matter, but, as infinitely full.
Infinite nothingness is not left behind when God creates. Because the human soul is immediately one with its divine starting point, it shares its infinite nothingness, and its sublime ignorance of what it is.
4. Jean Trouillard on the Divine and Human Nothingness. From two fundamental notions: God creates himself, and God is nothing, Eriugena draws the conclusion that the nothing from which God creates is himself. Unsurprisingly, Alumnus is troubled both by the premises and by the conclusion. The result is a long treatise on nothing, half of Book III and the midpoint of Periphyseon (Peri. III 634-688). Because there is no other from which the universe can be made, Nutritor concludes that “God is the nothing of the things which are and which are not” (Peri. III 687B), not as privative, like matter, but, as infinitely full.
Infinite nothingness is not left behind when God creates. Because the human soul is immediately one with its divine starting point, it shares its infinite nothingness, and its sublime ignorance of what it is.
Cusa Seventeen, Unknown to itself, no longer I: Plotinus, Eriugena, Augustine
I. Being Possessed ... more Cusa Seventeen, Unknown to itself, no longer I: Plotinus, Eriugena, Augustine
I. Being Possessed versus the Novelistic Self
Charles Stang’s Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I” (Oxford University Press, 2012) will help us draw conclusions about ourselves which follow from our understanding of the Non-other and God before Intellect in Cusa’s De Li Non Aliud. This judgement of Dr Stang gives my focus: “What Paul provides Dionysius is the insistence that this ascent to ‘the unknown God’ delivers a self that is, like the divine to which it aspires, cleared away of its own names, unsaid, rendered unknown to itself—in other words, no longer I” (p. 3). Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus and their followers tell us repeatedly that apprehending the One is not a matter of naming something. Instead a philosophical and religious transformation on our part is required, a purification, a unification, an awakening of the One in us so that we are gathered toward the One. Stang brings out that, with Dionysius, the maximum theologian for Cardinal Nicholas, the unknown One is for the unknown self.
The person who knows the unknown God is unknown to his or her self; she is no longer I and is open to St Paul’s “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” What Nicholas says at the end of Chapter 1 points the way: “Although I have read [Non-other in] no one, nevertheless Dionysius (more than the others) seems to have come the closest [to it]. For, in all the things which he expresses in various ways, he elucidates Non-other. But when he comes to the end of his Mystical Theology, he maintains that the Creator is neither anything nameable nor any other thing whatever. Yet, he says this in such way that he there appears not to be setting forth any important point—although, for one who is attentive, he expressed the secret of Non-other, which secret he everywhere exhibited in one way or another.”
In fact, this nothingness of the self when facing the Unknown God is “everywhere exhibited” in Ancient and Medieval theology. We shall look at some ways in which this self “rendered unknown to itself” is opened to God and the Divine Cosmos. I am contrasting this unknown self, which does not possess itself but is possessed by God, to what I am calling the modern “Novelistic Self” which we currently assume.
The novel as a literary form is new, about 300 years old and belongs to modernity. In it everything is relative to a story a revealing self tells. Frequently, these stories are, at least in part, autobiographical. These selves project and populate a world, which, for better and for worse, is theirs. As we shall see this is the perspective neither of St Paul, nor of Dionysius, nor of the De Li Non Aliud. With them, instead of the I of the possessing self there is the possessed; we are not our own.
II. Eriugena: The Unknown self of the Unknown God
III. Plotinus: The One gives itself to be mine
IV. Augustine: God and the Cosmic Possess and Move Us
Ultimately the two sides coincide: the Human sees, and rests, in God, and God sees, and rests, in the Human. The Sabbath Rest of God is the human rest, Augustine’s end: “The seventh day has no evening and has no ending. You sanctified it to abide everlastingly. After your ‘very good’ works, which you made while remaining yourself in repose, you ‘rested the seventh day’ (Gen. 2: 2–3). This utterance in your book foretells for us that, after our works, which, because they are your gift to us, are very good, we also may rest in you for the sabbath of eternal life.” (13.xxxvi)
Our life is not ours. We are in the Principium and in the End and we are being pulled, pushed and shaped along the steps in between. We are in Spirit’s cosmic conversion. That is Augustine’s confession.
Next we shall look at this No Longer I in Dionysius, Bonaventure and the De Li Non Aliud.
Cusa Sixteen: Attending to Invisible Light
I. Attending to the Invisible
The deepest philosophi... more Cusa Sixteen: Attending to Invisible Light
I. Attending to the Invisible
The deepest philosophical – theological analysis in the De Li Non Aliud , the most difficult problems, and the way forward through them, all appear in its treatment of how we see and do not see the invisible light by which all else is seen. Invisible light is the unknowable Non-Other for the others we see. Considering it, we bring the background we assume into the foreground. From the beginning the explicit aim of the De Li Non Aliud is carrying the unconsciously presupposed and everywhere present but unrecognised into explicit reflective unknowing knowing. The learned ignorance of Not Other is the paradoxical seeing of invisible light. Because it cannot be directly seen or known, I have introduced the language of “attending” and “apprehending.”
From its start, the De Li Non Aliud is about learning to see the invisible.
NICHOLAS: The few things which I have stated are easily investigated. Among them you will find Not-other. And if with all your might you turn the acute gaze of your mind toward Not-other (mentis aciem ad li ‘non aliud’ convertis), you will see with me the definition which defines itself and everything.
FERDINAND: Teach us how to do it; for what you assert is important, though not yet plausible. (Chapter 2, p. 4)
What is to be seen but not seen must be present as the basis of knowing, but it is not immediately known. Were it to be known in the way what it makes visible is seen, the visible would be hidden by it. The purpose of seeing, its “terminus”, the other, cannot be the cause and means of seeing, its “principium”. The negation, Not other, is prior.
FERDINAND: I see that what you say is surely so. For other, which is the end (terminus) of vision, cannot be the beginning (principium) of seeing. For since other is not other than other, surely it presupposes Not other, without which it would not be other. Therefore, every signification that is other than the signification of “Not other” terminates in something other than in the Beginning (in alio quam in principio terminatur). (Chapter 2, p. 7.)
The crucial comparison to light appears early in the Tetralogy. It is an essential revealed enigma.
NICHOLAS: The theologians state that God shines forth to us more clearly in the enigma (aenigmate) of light, since we ascend to intelligible things by means of perceptible things (per sensibilia scandimus ad intelligibilia). [A principle taken from Dionysius; see below in Section II.] Surely, Light itself, which is God (Lux … ipsa, quae Deus), is prior to other light, howsoever nameable, and is prior to all other. Now, that which is seen prior to other is not other. Therefore, since that Light is Not-other and is not a nameable light, it shines forth in sensible light. But sensible light is in some way conceived to be related to sensible seeing as the Light which is Not-other [is related] to all the things which can be mentally seen. But we know from experience that sensible sight sees nothing without sensible light and that visible color is only the delimiting, or defining, of sensible light—as [the example of] a rainbow shows. Thus, sensible light is the beginning (sensibilis lux principium est) of both being and knowing what is visible and perceptible. Thus, we surmise that the Beginning of being is also the Beginning of knowing. (principium essendi esse et principium cognoscendi). [This statement takes us back to the vision of the Sun – Good in Plato’s Republic ] (Chapter 3, p. 8.)
Like the Non Other, that by which we see is not, and cannot be, the direct object of sight and is ignored. Importantly our seeking what is Not other in an other (a particular) is attributed here to our condition. We are each of us “an other” (cum ipse sit aliud). The light which is not other by which other is seen must be antecedent. There is no light subsequent to the light by which we see by which we could look for it.
When it [Non-Other] is sought as an other [particular thing], it is not at all considered as it is. For the Principle (principium), which always precedes what is sought and without which what is sought cannot at all be sought (quod quaesitum semper antecedit, et sine quo quaesitum minime quaeri potest), is not [itself] something properly sought. Now, everyone who seeks seeks to find the Principle, if, as Paul says, this is possible. [Paul in Acts 17, 27: “He is not far from each of us.”] But since it cannot be found as it is in itself (veluti in sese est), the one seeking it before any other thing rightly seeks it in another (ipsum sane quaerit in alio), since he himself is an other (cum ipse sit aliud). Similarly, light—which in itself is invisible with respect to human sight (as is illustrated in the case of pure sunlight)—is looked for in what is visible. Indeed, it is not even necessary to look for light, which presents itself antecedently (for otherwise it would be incomprehensible, since we would have to look for it with light). Therefore, light is sought in what-is-visible, where it is perceived; thus, in this way it is seen at least gropingly.( Chapter 3, p. 10).
II. Why the Invisible Light is both seen and cannot be seen
...
It is time to take all this metaphysics to the personal. We saw above that what we see is essentially connected to what kind of being we are. I wrote: Importantly our seeking what is Not other in an other (a particular) is attributed here to our condition. We are each of us “an other” (cum ipse sit aliud).” This consideration brings us to Charles Stang’s book Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I”: “What Paul provides Dionysius is the insistence that this ascent to ‘the unknown God’ delivers a self that is, like the divine to which it aspires, cleared away of its own names, unsaid, rendered unknown to itself—in other words, no longer I” (p. 3). We shall take this up in subsequent posts starting with “Being Possessed versus the Novelistic Self.”
“GOD IS KNOWN THROUGH KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE.”
Understanding philosophical and theological texts... more “GOD IS KNOWN THROUGH KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE.”
Understanding philosophical and theological texts from the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance West requires grasping that knowing and not knowing, being and non being have diverse and mutually relative forms. Moreover, in the movement between them they can reverse character. What increases knowledge in one direction of movement may plunge you into blindness when moving in the other direction. What plunges the searcher into blindness when moving in one direction may enlighten when moving in the other. The essential beginning points for understanding the diverse and mutually relative forms of knowing and non knowing, being and non being are Parmenides’ The Way of Truth, Plato’s allegories of the Line, the Cave, and the Sun in the Republic and his hypotheses concerning unity, being and non being in his Parmenides dialogue.
A. KNOWING GOES WITH BEING
B. THE EQUATION OF BEING WITH KNOWING AND IGNORANCE WITH NON BEING BREAKS DOWN
C. THE KINDS OF NON BEING AND THE KINDS OF IGNORANCE ARE IN GOD AND IN OUR LEARNED IGNORANCE OF GOD.
Dionysius gives Cusa’s teaching: “God is known in all things and apart from all things. And God is known through knowledge and ignorance.” In the same chapter: “In all things He is all things, and in nothing He is nothing.” (Chapter 14, p. 65.)
Cusa Fourteen: “Inspired impulse” is necessary.
At the beginning of Chapter Two of the De Li Non ... more Cusa Fourteen: “Inspired impulse” is necessary.
At the beginning of Chapter Two of the De Li Non Aliud Ferdinand, representing Aristotle, was drawn to translated LOGOS or VERBUM in the first verses of St John’s Gospel as “reason” or “rational ground” (see Cusa Twelve). In Cusa Thirteen we looked at a coming together of Plato and Dionysius in Cusa’s tetralogue. Philosophy and revelation are united. This seems characteristic of Cusa. Why? Answering this brings us to the necessity of “Inspired impulse.”
How do we approach the nothingness of the Divine One? With great difficulty. Our soul is “incompetent” and philosophy keeps falling back when it strives to grasp it. It encounters “dread” when it holds to nothingness. Plotinus describes the approach of the soul to the One:
The soul reaching towards the formless finds itself incompetent to grasp where nothing bounds it or to take the impression where the impinging reality is diffuse; in sheer dread of holding to nothingness, it slips away. The state is painful; often it seeks relief by retreating from all this vagueness to the region of sense, there to rest on solid ground, just as the sight distressed by the minute rests with pleasure on the bold. (MacKenna).
The mystics and contemporary philosophers like Heidegger tell us the same.
In consequence there must both be philosophical reaching up and givenness from above working below: “inspired impulse” and the strengthening of what is in us which matches our goal. “Because union is not only the end but also the beginning, ‘inspired impulse,’ is necessary to rouse the power of the One in the soul so that she is converted towards God.”
Our Capacity is strengthened when What is from Above and What from Below operate together.
Cusa would have read the next passage in Proclus’ commentary on the Parmenides dialogue of Plato, the acme of theology for Platonists:
And how are we to make this One and flower of the soul shine forth unless we first of all activate our intellect? For the activity of the intellect leads the soul towards a state and activity of calm. And how are we to achieve perfect intellectual activity if we do not travel there by means of logical conceptions, using demonstrative power in our preliminary assumptions, whereas we need intellectual activity in our investigations of being (for the orders of being are denied of the One), and we need inspired impulse in our consciousness of that which transcends all beings, in order that we may not slip unawares from our negations into Not-Being and its invisibility by reason of our indefinite imagination, but rousing up the One within us and, through this, warming the soul (cf. Phaedrus 251b) we may connect ourselves to the One itself and, as it were, find mooring, taking our stand above everything intelligible within ourselves and dispensing with every other one of our activities, in order that we may consort with it alone and perform a dance around it, leaving behind all the intellections of the soul which are directed to secondary things. Let this, then, be the manner of our discourse, logical, intellectual, and inspired, for in this way one might take the grasp that one should of the present hypothesis.”
What we seek is already given to us in our very constitution. Without activating the different aspects of our God given nature, we cannot come to God. Unless we connect what we are where we are with what is above, we shall keep falling away into the secondary.
In consequence philosophy must teach what Sacred Scripture teaches and Sacred Scripture must teach what philosophy teaches. This is what we see in De Li Non-Aliud. It aims to strengthen our capacity for vision and attention. We shall come to see what is before our eyes.
We look at a second coming together of philosophy and revelation in the De Li Non-Aliud: the agre... more We look at a second coming together of philosophy and revelation in the De Li Non-Aliud: the agreement of Dionysius and Plato. For Nicholas of Cusa, Dionysius is “the greatest of the theologians (theologorum maximus).” He passes on the divinely inspired teaching of St Paul, who, on the road to Damascus was blinded by “a light from heaven” (Acts 9.3&8, Acts 22,6 & 11, and Acts 26, 12-18). In that blinding light heavenly mysteries were disclosed to him. He wrote in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4: “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven … and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.” In consequence he was able to preach the “Unknown God” (Acts 17, 23) in a sermon on the Athenian Areopagus by which a “Dionysius” was converted. In Chapter 20, Cusa writes much as Festugière did about what Plato saw and how he was followed by Proclus. Cusa knows what is common between Proclus and Dionysius.
91. PETER: Just as Dionysius says that the one which exists is posterior to the unqualifiedly One, so also Proclus makes [the same point] in referring to Plato.
NICHOLAS: Perhaps all the sages wanted to make the same point about the first principle of things [primum principium rerum] and various of them expressed it variously. But Plato—whom Proclus so greatly exalts (as if he were a humanified god) and who was always looking to what is anterior—endeavored to see the substance of things before everything nameable. Hence, since he saw that a thing which is corporeal and divisible cannot exist from itself and cannot conserve itself (because of its weakness and fluxibility): prior to any material object he saw the soul, and prior to the soul he saw intellect, and prior to intellect he saw the One.
92. Now, what is posterior exists by means of participation in what is prior. Hence, what is the first (by participation in the first all things are what they are) is seen prior to intellect; for it is not at all the case that all things participate in intellect. Therefore, intellect does not attain to “what is earlier, or older, than intellect itself” (Platonic Theology, II, 4)—to use his words. Wherefore, I think that Plato mentally viewed the substance, or the beginning (principium), of things by way of revelation—in the manner in which the Apostle tells the Romans that God has revealed Himself to them (Romans I, 19). I understand this revelation by means of a likeness to light, which through itself presents itself to sight. It is not seen or known in any other way than it reveals itself, since it is invisible, because it is higher than, and antecedent to, everything visible. In his letters Plato very briefly declares that these matters are thus—saying that God eventually manifests Himself to one who seeks Him steadfastly and very vigilantly. (Proclus, too, repeats these [views] in his Commentary on the Parmenides.) Therefore, since [Plato] believes these [views] to be true, he says that the soul—which contemplates itself and enfolds within itself (in the way a soul does) the things posterior [to itself]—beholds, as in a living mirror, all the things which participate in its life and which through it live and exist vitally. And because these things are in the soul, the soul, by means of the resemblance to itself, ascends upward toward the things which are prior [to it]—just as Proclus cites these [doctrines] in his theology. (Platonic Theology, IV, 16).
So what Plato saw when he looked to the Good above the Forms was revelation. This is the revelation on which philosophy depends. That revelation matches the one on which Dionysius’ quasi Scriptural writings also depend. Our question about the unity of philosophy and revelation in the De Li Non-Aliud now becomes one about the forms of revelation and how they are related.
Neoplatonism was the “nursing mother” of Christianity in its formative centuries, and its home un... more Neoplatonism was the “nursing mother” of Christianity in its formative centuries, and its home until the last few centuries, because it united philosophy—our striving toward truth and God—and revelation—God’s illumination, God’s gift or grace. The two were distinct but bound up together, mutually implicated. Currently, up to date Christians and secular philosophers keep them separate. Nicholas of Cusa and his Neoplatonic predecessors, pagan and Christian, judged that separated from revelation and religion, philosophy got lost, and faith separated from philosophy lacked the means of understanding its depths, its symbols or “enigmas”. The union of philosophy and revelation in the De Li Non-Aliud comes out strongly in its treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity.
On the one hand “The mystery of the Trinity (Trinitatis secretum) … is received by faith and by the gift of God; [it] by far exceeds and precedes all sensing.” On the other hand, the unfolded definition of the of the self-defining Not-Other is the best statement of the Trinity.
FERDINAND: First of all, one who is desirous of knowledge (scientiae) asks where a reason (ratio) should be found [for maintaining] that the trine and one God is signified by “Not-other,” since Not-other precedes all number.
NICHOLAS: All things are seen from what has been said—seen on the basis of a single rational consideration (unica ratione). You have seen this to be [the consideration] that the Beginning, which is signified by “Not-other,” defines itself (principium per ‘non aliud’ significatum se ipsum definit). Therefore, let us behold its unfolded definition: viz., that Not-other is not other than Not-other (‘non aliud’ est non aliud quam non aliud). If the same thing repeated three times is the definition of the First, as you recognize [it to be], then assuredly the First is triune—and for no other reason than that it defines itself (se ipsum definit). If it did not define itself, it would not be the First; yet, since it defines itself, it shows itself to be triune. Therefore, you see that out of the perfection there results a trinity which, nevertheless, (since you view it prior to other) you can neither number nor assert to be a number. For this trinity is not other than oneness, and [this] oneness is not other than trinity. For the trinity and the oneness are not other than the simple Beginning (simplex | principium ) which is signified by “Not-other.”
FERDINAND: I see perfectly well that the necessity of the perfection of the First—viz., that it defines itself—demands that it be triune before other and before number. For those things which presuppose the First do not confer any perfection on it. But since you have elsewhere and often—especially in Learned Ignorance—attempted in some way to explicate this divine richness in other terms, it will suffice if you now add a few [points] to these others.
19. NICHOLAS: The mystery of the Trinity (Trinitatis secretum), which is received by faith and by the gift of God, by far exceeds and precedes all sensing. Nevertheless, by the means by which we investigate God in the present life, this mystery cannot be elucidated in any other way or any more precisely (praecisius) than you have just heard. Now, those who name the Trinity Father and Son and Holy Spirit approach [it] less precisely (minus praecise quidem appropinquant).
Translate “Word” as Reason or “rational ground” and Beginning as Causing source in John I.1 & 2.
“In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God: and the Word was God (in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum). The same was in the beginning with God (hoc erat in principio apud Deum).” When Verbum or Word is translated as “Reason” or “rational ground,” and Principium is translated as “causing source,” we get: “In the Causing source was reason and reason was with God and the rational ground was God.” Then Ferdinand’s philosophical reflection: “since what is originated has nothing from itself but has from the Beginning (principio) whatever it is, assuredly the Beginning (principium) is the reason of being, or the definition of what is originated” teaches the same as John I.1 & 2. Thus, inspired Scripture and philosophy teach the same.
Cusa Eleven From Aristotelian Reason to its Platonic Prior in larger and smaller letters.
Under... more Cusa Eleven From Aristotelian Reason to its Platonic Prior in larger and smaller letters.
Understanding structure on the large scale helps us penetrate arguments in a smaller scale. “In the Republic (II, 368d) Socrates proposes that, by looking at justice in the polis, where it may be found in large letters, he and his interlocutors might see it better in the soul, where it is written in small letters. Something like this relation between larger and smaller forms of the same seems to hold in the De Li Non Aliud. The work as a whole and Chapters Eighteen to Twenty-four, on the one hand, and Chapter One by itself, on the other hand, move through and from Aristotelian reason to what in Plato, Proclus, and Dionysius is prior to intellect. What we have learned about this movement in the work as a whole, in Chapters Eighteen to Twenty-four enables us to understand better what is happening on a small scale in Chapter One.”
Here we examine minutely Chapter One in order to see some of big structure in smaller letters.
In the Republic (II, 368d) Socrates proposes that by looking at justice in the polis, where it m... more In the Republic (II, 368d) Socrates proposes that by looking at justice in the polis, where it may be found in large letters, he and his interlocutors might see it better in the soul, where it is written in small letters. Something like this relation between larger and smaller forms of the same seems to hold in the De Li Non Aliud. The work as a whole, Chapters Eighteen to Twenty-four, and Chapter One by itself, move through and from Aristotelian reason to what in Plato, Proclus, and Dionysius is prior to intellect. What we have already learned about this movement in the work as a whole, in Chapters Eighteen to Twenty-four enables us to understand better what is happening in Chapter One.
Our aim is to find in Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa’s On the Not Other a direction to the vision of God, literally, a direction to how we can mirror God. Like many other great works in the philosophical and theological tradition, it is an itinerarium, a way, or journey to God and into God: e.g. Plato’s Symposium, Plato’s Alcibiades, Origen’s De Principiis, Augustine’s Confessions, Boethius’ Consolation, the Dionysian Corpus, Proclus’ Elements of Theology, Eriugena’s Periphyseon, Anselm’s Proslogion, Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God. The journey has a different structure in each of these and in each of them the structure and the content are bound up together because the structure gives meaning, relevance and truth to the content.
Consider for a moment some of the great differences in structure. In Augustine an autobiographical “confession” leads to and is given meaning by two interpretations of the first books of Genesis. The Elements of Theology’s downward comprehension of everything is modelled on Euclid’s geometrical treatises. Its 211 propositions move by logical deductions through the cosmos from the unchanging One above eternity to the individual soul immersed in the ever changing world of material and temporal becoming. The Dionysian Corpus (Divine Names, Celestial Hierarchy, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Mystical Theology, Letters) as a whole and in its parts enacts in Christian terms the triadic remaining (all is in God), exitus (all goes out from God), return (all comes back to the source from which it emerged) structure systematized by Proclus. Eriugena’s Periphyseon is an interpretation of the Genesis account of creation (a “Hexameron”) turned into a cosmic philosophical theology. Bonaventure’s ascending Itinerarium mentis in Deum moves by way of mirrorings up the six fold wings of the Isaiah’s (Chapter 6) Seraphim as understood by Dionysius. In its last two steps it passes through ever sharper and more necessary contradictions. It arrives at the paradoxical luminous darkness and living death of Dionysian union with God.
These structures contain contradiction in fact and sometimes in principle. For example, Anselm’s Proslogion deduces both that God cannot be thought not to be and that God is above being known; both of these have necessary places in Anselm’s journey along a way to God which conforms to God’s way of being. Bonaventure and Cusa are explicit that contradiction is necessary to the movement of reason beyond reason and into God. For Cusa this requires leaving Aristotle behind. For Aquinas the reality of the Persons of the Trinity is demanded by the fact that they are God’s essence opposed to itself when being given and received.
Aquinas’ Summa theologiae is a paradigmatic example of the union of structure and content.
Next in Cusa Eleven “From Aristotelian Reason to its Platonic Prior in larger and smaller letters” we shall look at Chapter One in detail finding the overall structure at the beginning.
The First is seen prior to intellect. Reflections from Proclus.
“Now, what is posterior exists by... more The First is seen prior to intellect. Reflections from Proclus.
“Now, what is posterior exists by means of participation in what is prior. Hence, what is the first (by participation in the first, all things are what they are) is seen prior to intellect; for it is not at all the case that all things participate in intellect. Therefore, intellect does not attain to ‘what is earlier, or older, than intellect itself’ (Proclus, Platonic Theology, II, 4)—to use Proclus’ words. Wherefore, I think that Plato mentally viewed the substance, or the beginning (principium), of things by way of revelation—in the manner in which the Apostle tells the Romans that God has revealed Himself to them (Romans I. 20). I understand this revelation by means of a likeness to light, which through itself presents itself to sight. It is not seen or known in any other way than it reveals itself, since it is invisible, because it is higher than, and antecedent to, everything visible.” (Cusa, On Not-other, Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 20, page 92).
The Biblical reference is to this passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans which I quote from the Vulgate: “Invisibilia enim ipsius a creatura mundi per ea quae facta sunt intellecta conspiciuntur sempiterna quoque eius virtus et divinitas (For the invisible things of him, His eternal power also and divinity, from the creation of the world are clearly seen [conspiciuntur], being understood [intellecta] through the things that are made [facta].)” It is cited endlessly by the Christian philosophical theologians like Augustine, Eriugena, and Aquinas as a revelation that creation makes the divine invisible known, it “presents itself to sight.” The question in the De Li Non Aliud is as to how we see the invisible which is presenting itself to sight? How do we see the invisible divinity by which we see? You will note that for Proclus this requires divine aid and our transformation. We must “operate logically and intellectually and at the same time with divine inspiration.” We must “rouse up the One of the soul.” What has the Non-Aliud to do with that?
I. Plato’s Parmenides.
II. Proclus’ Commentary on the Parmenides dialogue of Plato
III. Cusa in the Mystical Tradition
“I think that Plato mentally viewed the substance, or the beginning (principium), of things by way of revelation—in the manner in which the Apostle tells the Romans that God has revealed Himself to them (Romans I, 19). I understand this revelation by means of a likeness to light, which through itself presents itself to sight. It is not seen or known in any other way than it reveals itself, since it is invisible, because it is higher than, and antecedent to, everything visible.”
It is clear that Nicholas of Cusa wished to raise us to seeing the invisible before Intellect and that Non-Aliud leads to that. What is not yet clear is the manner of this seeing and how we come to it. Certainly it requires the unification of religious and philosophical revelation. In our reading of Cusa we shall consider this further.
The paper of which this is the first part contrasts the reception of Dionysius and Proclus during... more The paper of which this is the first part contrasts the reception of Dionysius and Proclus during the Latin Middle Ages with their reception in twentieth-century Christian thought. The medievals, including Eriugena, Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, and many others, as a rule refuse to divide religion from philosophy and they distinguish or unite thinkers by their teaching rather than by their confessional adherence. Hence they see no need to set Dionysius in opposition to non-Christian philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Proclus, or to repudiate the latter in favor of the former. By contrast, Vladimir Lossky and Jean-Luc Marion, with their shared background in Étienne Gilson, celebrate Dionysius in opposition to the non-Christian Neoplatonists, whom they polemically misrepresent as reducing God to conceptual categories. These twentieth-century figures evince a sectarian religious narrowness that blinds them to the textual and philosophical community of Dionysius with his non-Christian sources. I give details of the translation and reception of Proclus and Procline Platonism from Boethius and Eriugena to Cusa.
Translating Proclus in Cusa’s On the Not Other
Cusa Seven
This week we move from Aristotle to the... more Translating Proclus in Cusa’s On the Not Other
Cusa Seven
This week we move from Aristotle to the Platonists. The move is complex. The De Li Non-Aliud is dependent on our seeing through symbols or aenigmas. As in St Paul and St Bonaventure, what is seen is reflected in us as mirrors which must be polished and directed. What we come to is always present to us. The problem is to discern what we see. Aristotle, on the one hand, and Plato, Proclus and Dionysius, on the other hand, are 1) symbols, 2) participants in the dramatic Tetralogue through its members, and 3) represent bodies of doctrines and ways of knowing and unknowing. In general Aristotle represents and is Philosophy proceeding by Reason, the Platonists represent and are Theology proceeding by what is beyond Intellect. I shall write more about Aristotle soon. In the meantime we must move on to the Platonists.
“ ‘I [the Abbot] am busy] with the Parmenides and with Proclus’s Commentary [thereon]; Peter [is occupied] with this same Proclus’s Theology of Plato, which he is translating from Greek into Latin’ (Cusa, On Not-other, Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 1, page 1). “You have read in the Commentary on the Parmenides that God is called both Good and One. [Proclus] proves them to be the same since they pervade (penetrant) all things.” (Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 23, page 106). It might be said that the occasion and the possibility of Cusa’s De Li Non-Aliud is the translation of another work of the Greek pagan philosopher Proclus into Latin and its penultimate Chapter (23) starts with a reference to a Proclean work mentioned at the beginning. Proclus is a kind of Alpha and Omega of the De Li Non-Aliud. What works of Proclus did Cusa know at least in part? Who translated them? What were the most authoritative sources of Proclus’ doctrines for the Latin medieval theologians and philosophers? What difference does it make that they came before translations of his own works?”
I. Translating: the Medieval Essential
Understanding Western Latin Medieval Religion, Philosophy, and Theology is difficult not only because it depends on linguistic translations: from Greek and Syriac to Arabic and from Arabic to Latin, as well as translations from Greek to Latin and Hebrew to Latin, but also because its religious, philosophical, and theological cultures are translations. These cultural translations require taking what is primary, here the religion of Israel and the philosophy and religion of the Greeks, and translating them for each other. The first translation of these primals was into the Second Temple Judaism, the Judaism of the Septuagint from which Christianity developed. Philo of Alexandria seemed as much a Church Father as he was a great Jewish theologian and exegete of Scripture. His works were so pervasive and important for the development of Christianity, that, although a faithful Jew all his life, he was nonetheless depicted as a Christian bishop.
The second translation of these primals was also Jewish: the new Jewish religion which the Rabbis developed after the destruction by the Romans of the Second Temple. At the same time, the primals were translated into Christianity, and then, later, into Islam. Both of these are secondary religions, dependent on earlier ones. In all these translations, the new theologies and spiritualities were united with Hellenic philosophy as transformed in Late Antiquity into forms we call Neoplatonic and Peripatetic. In consequence our reflections on Aristotle in the De Li Non-Aliud began with the effects of the ‘last wave’ of his coming to the Latin West in the Middle Ages via translations.
In “Non Aliud Gloss III: Who and What is Aristotle in Cusa’s De Li Non-Aliud?” I wrote:
In the Twelfth and Thirteenth centuries the Latin speaking Christianity of Western Europe (‘Catholic’ Christianity) was confronted with a new intellectual reality, terrifying in its totality. … The sciences of Aristotle appeared in the Latin West as: ‘a total philosophical corpus, where all of Hellenistic thought, profoundly Neoplatonized, had slipped—sometimes surreptitiously.’ Philosophy returned to Latin primarily through waves of translations of this Neoplatonized Aristotle from Arabic. The last great wave of Aristotle’s works arrived among the Latins … mistakenly including the largely Proclean Liber de causis, misidentified as the theological pinnacle of Aristotle’s philosophy …
In 1268, a translation of a genuine work of Proclus, his Elements of Theology, enabled Aquinas, and those who, like Cusa, followed him, to sort out identities and differences. This led in the De Li Non-Aliud to the limitation and reduction of Aristotle as we see in Chapters Eighteen and Nineteen. This limitation, and these Chapters, lead in Chapters Twenty to Twenty-four, the conclusion of the Tetralogy, to theological considerations of Plato and Proclus, of Proclus and Dionysius, and of Plato, Proclus and Dionysius. Raising the soul to this concluding Platonic theology is the goal of our treatise. “ ‘I [the Abbot Balbus] am busy] with the Parmenides and with Proclus’s Commentary [thereon]; Peter [is occupied] with this same Proclus’s Theology of Plato, which he is translating from Greek into Latin’.” These translations not only liberate Aristotle (or Philosophy limited by reason) from Proclus (or Theology beyond the reach of Intellect), but also the other side: Proclus and Theology are also freed. The aim is to get beyond Intellect:
"What is the first (by participation in the first all things are what they are) is seen prior to intellect; for it is not at all the case that all things participate in intellect. Therefore, intellect does not attain to 'what is earlier, or older, than intellect itself'.” (Platonic Theology, II, 4) [Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 20, page 92).]
To that liberation we shall attend on another occasion. Now I want us to consider two matters. A) what of Proclus had already penetrated the philosophy and theology of the Latin West before the Latins possessed translations of Proclus’ own works –this you will find in my “What is Neoplatonism? And What Does Aquinas Take from Neoplatonism?” of W.J. Hankey, Aquinas’ Neoplatonism in the Summa Theologiae on God. A Short Introduction, ( South Bend, Indiana: St Augustine’s Press, 2019), 5-21. I give a modified version below. B) The translation and reception of Proclus’ own works–this you will find in “Translating Proclus from Eriugena to Nicholas of Cusa,” which is Section I of W.J. Hankey, “Misrepresenting Neoplatonism in Contemporary Christian Dionysian Polemic: Eriugena and Nicholas of Cusa versus Vladimir Lossky and Jean-Luc Marion,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82:4 (2008): 683–703, pages 683-694, which I shall post tomorrow.
“Most of the De Li Non-Aliud is a dialogue between Cardinal Cusa and Ferdinand who is represented... more “Most of the De Li Non-Aliud is a dialogue between Cardinal Cusa and Ferdinand who is represented as studying the ‘genius’ of Aristotle. Then, close to its conclusion, in Chapters Eighteen and Nineteen, Aristotle’s accomplishments as a philosopher are spoken of in a condescending way and set within limits. What is said to be wrong or limited in Aristotle’s philosophy? Why is this not exhibited right at the beginning? Why, instead, is an Aristotelian (or ‘peripatetic’) allowed to occupy such a large place in the work? Why is Aristotle’s philosophical approach necessary to De Li Non-Aliud?”
I. Ferdinand, Aristotle, Philosophy, and Reason
When Abbot John Andrea Vigevius, introduces himself and the other participants in the tetralogy, Ferdinand’s studies stand out as different from those of the other three. Two others are studying texts by Plato and by his great successor in the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens, namely, Proclus. The Abbot and Peter Balbus of Pisa, later a bishop, are working on them. The most influential and authoritative Christian continuer of the Proclean tradition, Dionysius the Areopagite, the “greatest theologian” (Cusa, On Not-other, Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 20, page 90) is being studied by Cardinal Nicholas himself. Unlike the others, Ferdinand Matin of Portugal is not a priest; he is the personal physician of the Cardinal. As a physician he must be empirical and rational, appropriately, therefore, he “is surveying the genius of Aristotle” (Hopkins-Hankey, Chap. 1, p. 1), who might be called a scientist. Aristotle is “the greatest and most acute Peripatetic” (Chap. 18, p. 83), in contrast to Platonists. He is the chief of Frederick’s “teachers, the philosophers” (Chap. 1, p. 2), in contrast to theologians.
It seems that philosophy is governed by reason. Right at the beginning, Nicholas (Cardinal Cusa) imposes as a condition of dialogue with Ferdinand: “that unless you are compelled by reason (nisi compellaris ratione), you will reject as light (levia) everything you will hear from me” (ibid.) At first “reason” is given the character of Aristotelian science. In answer to the question:” What is it that most of all makes us know?” Ferdinand answers “Definition.” (Chap. 1, p. 3). Aristotelian sciences depend on accurate definitions of the substances they concern. They arrive at definitions and then deduce from them.
It is a surprise, given not only Ferdinand’s differences from the other three, but also the subject of the tetralogy and the method of the Cardinal’s questioning, that most of the four part discussion is a dialogue between Nicholas and Ferdinand. Moreover, intensifying the surprise, two Chapters, Eighteen and Nineteen, close to the concluding Twenty-fourth chapter, describe Aristotle’s accomplishments as a philosopher in a most condescending way. Eighteen and Nineteen set his genius or virtue within limits which diminish them. What is it about Aristotle as his philosophy is understood by Cusa that both requires his dominating presence and equally sets limits to how high his thought reaches?
II. How and as What Aristotle Arrived among the Medieval Latins & the Role of Albert the Great
III. Separating Aristotle and Dionysius: Thomas Aquinas starts a way to Cusa
Cusa Five: Is “Non-Aliud” the name of God?
In the initial chapters of Nicholas of Cusa’s Direct... more Cusa Five: Is “Non-Aliud” the name of God?
In the initial chapters of Nicholas of Cusa’s Directio speculationis seu De Li Non Aliud, the questions of whether there are a name or names of God and whether “Non-Aliud” is God’s name recur repeatedly. Is Not-Other God? Or is Not-Other a way of coming to vision of God? I adduce relevant texts from the beginning of the Tetralogy and comment on them. Here are the headings:
A). God is neither anything nameable nor any other being whatever
B) Not-Other’s character as a name of God and how it is not a name of God
C. Because we are each a particular other, we seek that by which every particular other exists as if it were like us. Thus we seek as if it were a particular other what cannot be sought because, in fact, it is before everything sought and that without which nothing can be sought. Non-Other is of this kind: i.e. before everything sought and that without which nothing can be sought.
D. God and Not-Other both have no opposites.
E. Not-Other is like God in not being nameable by any name.
Nicholas of Cusa, On Not-other (Directio speculationis seu De Li Non Aliud)
Nicholas of Cusa, De... more Nicholas of Cusa, On Not-other (Directio speculationis seu De Li Non Aliud)
Nicholas of Cusa, De Li non-aliud, trans. in Nicholas of Cusa on God as Not Other: A Translation and an Appraisal of De li non-aliud, 3rd ed., Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1987).
The translation by Jasper Hopkins is frequently a paraphrase or controversial interpretation. I have modified it and supplied Latin where this may be useful.
Cusa Three: Persons, Double Negation, Dionysius, Super
Like the “supers,” about which I shall say... more Cusa Three: Persons, Double Negation, Dionysius, Super
Like the “supers,” about which I shall say something shortly, “non-aliud,” i.e. “not other,” is a double negation and its logical power comes from that. By “double negation,” I mean a negation which has been negated. It is (in Latin) a “nec non,” in English a “not no.” This is not, as it would usually be, an affirmation. Rather, Non-aliud is a process which gets beyond (or before) thought and being, beyond (or before) affirmation and negation, beyond (or before) being and non-being.
This “Beyond” (Epekeina) is for those in the Platonic tradition the highest state. It takes us back to the Analogy of the Sun at the top of the Divided Line, or at the culmination of the ascent from the Cave, in Plato’s Republic.
[509b] The sun, I presume you will say, not only furnishes to visibles the power of visibility but it also provides for their generation and growth and nurture though it is not itself generation οὐ γένεσιν.” “Of course not.” “In like manner, then, you are to say that the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the good their being known γιγνώσκεσθα, but their very being and existence τὸ εἶναί τε καὶ τὴν οὐσίαν is derived to them from it, though the good itself is not being οὐκ οὐσίας ὄντος τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ but transcends being ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας in dignity and surpassing power.”
Nicholas of Cusa’s primary source for the double negative logic in its “super” form is the Proclean tradition mediated most authoritatively by Dionysius the Areopagite, but there is another form. Without any evidence of mixture with Proclus and Dionysius, this comes to him from Anselm. Bonaventure picks it up from Anselm and mixes it with Dionysian “super” theology.
Anselm’s “proof” for the existence of God depends upon God being defined as “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” This formula, like “non-aliud,” is a process. Anselm’s process of comparison negates what is thought: it is not a positive conception. It is not the greatest idea nor the idea of the greatest. The ignorant person denies the existence of a God s/he thinks s/he understands. By this negation the ignorant discovers that than which nothing greater can be thought must exist and that it is impossible to think its non existence. It is a before or a beyond in the way non-aliud is.
Dionysius and “Super”
We read the following in Cusa, On Not-other, Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 4, page 11:
All theologians have recognized that God is something greater than can be conceived [see Anselm Proslogion and Bonaventure Itinerarium]; and hence they affirmed that He is super-substantial (‘supersubstantialem,’ Dionysius Areopagita De div. nom. I), and above every name (‘supra omne nomen,’ Ibid.) and the like. In the case of God they have not expressed to us one thing by “super,” another by “without,” another by “in,” another by “non,” and [another] by “before”; for it is the same thing for God to be supersubstantial Substance, Substance without substance, insubstantial Substance, non-substantial Substance, and Substance before substance. Regardless of what words you use: since that of which you speak is not other than the self-same thing(non aliud sit quam idem ipsum), it is evident that Not-other is simpler and prior and is inexpressible and unutterable in [any] other[terms].
It is clear that in Cusa we have, just as we had in Bonaventure, a mixture of double negation as it is found in Anselm and as it is found in the “super” language of Dionysius.
Dionysius developed with radical consistency the logic of “nec non,” double negation. “Super” or “supra” belongs to this and is the opposite of “super” in “Superman.” It is not the expansion or extension of the same but the contrary of that. The given is denied, and the denied is negated, to bring us to the Beyond. That from which we begin: esse, deity, manifestation, splendor, good is negated. God’s esse, deity, manifestation, splendor, good are not as we know them nor are they as we are constructed to know. But then this negation is itself negated to give that from which we began, but in an entirely new form, one which includes its opposite. “Learned Ignorance” is an example. Dionysius is full of forms of that: “superluminous darkness of a silence teaching secretly,” “a darkness which is super-resplendent,” “superessential beam of the divine darkness.” Inclusive opposition or embracing self-contradiction is appropriate to God and to what will unite us to God.
The figure of the beyond as “super,” double negation, the “nec non” (and in Cusa the “non-aliud”) is developed in the Platonic tradition which Dionysius references: “him who is above all essence and knowledge.” This is the Epekeina, the Beyond of Plato’s Republic VI, 509b-c.
To understand the process which is non-aliud, double negation, or super speech as in “He is super-substantial (‘supersubstantialem,’ Dionysius Areopagita De div. nom. I), and above every name (‘supra omne nomen,’ Ibid.),” we need to think about the affirmative which is denied.
In Dionysius naming, hymning (or praising), and creation go together. The Divine Names are “hymned”; theology is a religious act. Creation happens by the divine speech (God said “Let there be light” etc.) and our hymning the divine names creates the world in us. Two fundamental forms of this are symbolic theology, with Scriptural names from “eyes” and “hands” to “rock” and “worm,” and conceptual theology, with names from “good” and “wise” to “perfect” and “one.” In Dionysius this positive naming of God belongs to the creation of the sensible, corporal world, and then to the conceptual intellectual world. These namings belong to the exitus, the going out. By way of Eriugena, Cusa will be very radical at this point. However, we do not need to explore this yet.
There is a similar coming into being and movement in Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Journey into God. For Bonaventure, we first mirror God’s vestiges in the external sensible world below mind, and then mind mirrors what belongs to it, and then mind looks up to Intellect above it. For both theologians, God is in these vestiges, images, and likeness, and without God they do not exist. So Bonaventure finds that God is in them by Essence, Power, Wisdom, and Goodness. Evidently however, God is also not any of them or all of them, whether sensible, rational, or intellectual. God must be denied of them. This denial is essential to reditus, return.
The denial or negation varies. At the highest point the negation becomes total: “leave behind your senses and intellectual activities, sensible and invisible things, all nonbeing and being.” Here is the opening of the Mystical Theology of Dionysius: “Trinitas, superessentialis et superdeus.” Here at the Epekeina, the Beyond, there is the highest “supra”: silence. There “New, absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of theology are hidden in the superluminous darkness of a silence teaching secretly.”
Convergences between Platonism and the Abrahamic Religions Parts 3, 4 & 5 Adapted for the De Li N... more Convergences between Platonism and the Abrahamic Religions Parts 3, 4 & 5 Adapted for the De Li Non Aliud Reading Group 2021
Perspectives and Directions:
Light illuminates but blinds eyes accustomed to darkness. Darkness defeats eyes used to light but strengthens weak ones. The invisible enables visibility. That by which we see must be unseen—otherwise we would see only it.
This Powerpoint has been modified by additions to the texts from Plato and by adding material on and from Parmenides’ The Way of Truth and Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. Much has been deleted. The intention of additions and deletions is to give a greater number of the kinds of knowing in the Platonic tradition in order to assist your analysis, to bring out the kinds and functions of not knowing, and to emphasise the roles of not knowing and nothingness in philosophy, theology, and religion.
Plato is not perfectly consistent in describing the kinds of knowing and not knowing. In consequence reconciling his own texts with one another, and then extending the schema to include subsequent thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus, Bonaventure, and Cusa requires making difficult judgments.
If Fr Festugière is right, and I think he is, in the Platonic tradition not knowing goes together with knowing for at least two reasons. One is that knowing is also ignorance and alternates with ignorance. Another is that something other than knowing is operative: the desires or love for beauty, and the desires or love for the good beyond beauty, and union beyond good are also present. Alternatively or simultaneously there may be suffering in the sense of affectivity. The one who ascends is struck by or possessed by what is given. Dionysius writes of this pathos.
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Cusa 2021 by Wayne J Hankey
“My soul chooses hanging and my bones death.” (Job 7, 15; The Mind’s Journey into God, VII, 6)
Charles Stang has brought us to reflections on the union of apophatic theology and apophatic anthropology in Dionysius. We have extended them to Plotinus, Augustine, and Eriugena. Bonaventure’s Journey into God is the most complete possible union of these correlative negations. With him Dionysian theological and human negation is assimilated to the Crucifixion mysticism of St Francis.
According to the Gospel Passion narratives, during the interrogations of Christ the authorities give the titles which are also accusations: Are you the Son of God? Are you a king? Jesus replies: “You have said it.” “You say that I am.” Thus Saints Matthew, Mark, and Luke. “‘King’ is your word.” “Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” Thus St John. The union we have been exploring between our knowledge and ignorance of God and our knowledge and ignorance of ourselves is at the centre of the Passion. Apprehending or denying God, we expose and commit ourselves. Bach’s settings of the Passions make this inescapable. More radically Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Journey into God which culminates in our death in the death of God does the same.
Bonaventure’s Journey into God is the most complete union of apophatic theology and apophatic anthropology possible. The ascent along the wings of the Dionysian Seraphim is by mirrorings of the Divine below our souls, at the level of our souls, and above our souls. These mirrorings are what we are. We are nothing in ourselves. Pushed and pulled up step by step one to another we are drawn into ever more intense, necessary, and complete contradiction.
Bonaventure brings us, by way of Dionysius quoted at length where he is one with Proclus, to uncomprehending knowledge of Incomprehensible Divine Intellect, the One-Being. After that there is “learned ignorance” (to use Cusa’s term) of the Nothingness of the One-Nonbeing. Uncomprehending knowledge and learned ignorance compel us into what is Beyond both: Eloquent Silence. These are moments of Divinity as the Neoplatonists discovered God. Dionysian Trinitarian mysticism embraces them all in their extremity and contradiction. Bonaventure unites Dionysius with the Crucifixion mysticism of St Frances.
Who embraces the One-Nonbeing cries with Job and Bonaventure: “My soul chooses hanging and my bones death.”
This meditation returns us to and takes up from “Cusa Seventeen: Unknown to itself, no longer I, Being Possessed versus the Novelistic Self: Plotinus, Eriugena, Augustine.” The intervening meditations contribute to this one. Because it depends so much on the work of Charles Stang, I have made him a coauthor.
Charles Stang’s book Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I” enables us to take what we have learned from the high metaphysics of the De Li Non Aliud to the personal. It does this in a way unfamiliar to us: the “I” is displaced. In order to make God’s revelation in and to St Paul present and active now, a fifth century author assumes the identity of Dionysius the Areopagite, Paul’s first century convert. That is the “Pseudonymity” of Stang’s title.
What of the “Apophasis”? What of the negation? Complete negation, i.e. not only negative propositions but getting beyond negation and affirmation? This is “super” or “hyper” negation; the negation Dionysius takes over from Proclus and Damascius, the kind of positive or double negation Eriugena developed.
Looking at the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite through St Paul quoted constantly in them, Stang answers endlessly troubling questions about that corpus in a convincing way. He writes:
Paul provides our author an apostolic account of apophatic anthropology, that is, he witnesses to the apophasis of his own self as he suffers union with the divine. Our author in a sense apprentices himself to the Paul who suffers a blinding vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3–9), the Paul who stands atop the Areopagus and insists that we worship the ‘‘unknown God’’ ‘‘through unknowing’’ [agnoountes] (Acts 17:23), the Paul who was caught up to the third heaven (2 Cor 12:2). Our author assumes the identity of a disciple of Paul not merely for these extraordinary moments of intimacy with the divine, but because Paul reveals that such intimacy comes at the cost of his kataphatic self, the self whom he knows and has known his whole life, the self that cannot break free from its sobriety, the self who bears a name, or even two (Saul and Paul). Paul understands that this ‘‘said’’ self must be ‘‘unsaid,’’ suffer the ecstatic intrusion of the divine, and suffer the incumbent loss so as to know salvation. But our author’s decision to write under a pseudonym may be even more relevant to the apophasis of the self. The author does not merely sign the name of Paul’s disciple Dionysius the Areopagite to his corpus. He goes much further and literally assumes the identity of this figure from the past. He writes not treatises but letters addressed to other apostles and disciples; he imagines himself into this apostolic community, to the point that he is present at the Dormition of Mary; he counsels John sequestered on Patmos. And yet all the while the author is also somehow in the fifth century: quoting—sometimes at great length—from Proclus’ works, treading dangerously close to contemporary Christological controversies, describing the ceremonials of Byzantine churches rather than the home churches of the New Testament. The author is, in other words, ‘‘neither himself nor someone else,’’ neither the monk from Syria scholars assume him to be nor the Athenian archon under whose name he writes. Like the ecstatic God with whom he seeks to suffer union, as a writer he simultaneously remains where he is and stretches outside himself. (‘‘Being Neither Oneself nor Someone Else’’, pp. 69-70)
There is much more of great value in these and other works by Stang and they will remain with us as we press on through Bonaventure to the De Li Non Aliud in our consideration of “Unknown to itself, no longer I.”
One essence and many forms or ideas is replaced by the Essence of essences. It is crucial to understand the distinction between these two forms of infinity and that God as infinite is the Essence of essences. These two notions go together for Cusa: God as infinite in the Platonic sense is not a particular essence but is the Essence of essences and the Essence of essences is creative activity.
By the same logic God is the Vision of visions. That God sees himself and his creation in one single vision goes with his self-creation. The seeing is defining and seeing and defining are creation.
God is the Goodness which moves God in creating and what God creates is good.
Along this same mode of thinking by which the infinite is thought but is not comprehended ,Cusa moves from the Spirit of spirits to Divine self-creation: “the Spirit which is God makes the quiddities [or essences] of things not from another but from itself.”
Eriugena’s own radical thinking comes out in his willingness to draw the conclusion of monotheism that God is self-creating, that God Himself is the nothingness from which God creates. For understanding Cusa the following features of Eriugena’s great system, the Periphyseon, Concerning Nature, are useful.
1. Drawing upon Gregory of Nyssa, Eriugena came to understand human nature in such a way, that, more than being “that in which all things could be found (inerat),” it became “that in which all things are created (condita est)” Peri. IV 807A). The human is the workshop of creation (Peri. II 531AB, III 733B, V 893BC); it is the medium in which God creates himself and the universe of beings out of his own nothingness precisely because, uniquely among beings, the human possesses all the forms of knowing and ignorance, including sensation. Because everything is through human perception, there are no absolute objects. As in earlier Platonic systems, the forms have become not only thoughts, but forms of apprehension in various kinds of subject; as Plotinus puts it, “all things come from contemplations and are contemplations” (Enneads III 8 [30] 7, 1-2).
2. Placing, defining, knowing, creating
Eriugena’s treatment of place is revealing. Place exists only in the mind, “for if every definition is in art, and all art is in the mind, every place, since place is definition, will necessarily be nowhere else except in the mind” (Peri. I 475B). To define is to place, to know, and to create. Cusa follows Eriugena closely in this. For Eriugena, being (OUCIA ) is not as such knowable. Rather, the defined, the limited, is the knowable. Beings are known as defined, circumscribed by the accidental categories. Without place, God cannot define himself in human reason, but, by this defining, everything comes to be. Defining is placing, circumscription, within God, as the “place of places” (Peri. III 643C). “Only God is infinite; everything else is limited by “where” and “when”, that is, place and time.” Time and place are creatures, but “are prior, not temporally, but in respect to creation, to all things that are in the universe”. “What contains is prior to that which is contained, in the way that the cause precedes the effect” (Peri. I 482C).
3. The Nothingness from which God creates is himself
From two fundamental notions: God creates himself, and God is nothing, Eriugena draws the conclusion that the nothing from which God creates is himself. Unsurprisingly, Alumnus is troubled both by the premises and by the conclusion. The result is a long treatise on nothing, half of Book III and the midpoint of Periphyseon (Peri. III 634-688). Because there is no other from which the universe can be made, Nutritor concludes that “God is the nothing of the things which are and which are not” (Peri. III 687B), not as privative, like matter, but, as infinitely full.
Infinite nothingness is not left behind when God creates. Because the human soul is immediately one with its divine starting point, it shares its infinite nothingness, and its sublime ignorance of what it is.
4. Jean Trouillard on the Divine and Human Nothingness. From two fundamental notions: God creates himself, and God is nothing, Eriugena draws the conclusion that the nothing from which God creates is himself. Unsurprisingly, Alumnus is troubled both by the premises and by the conclusion. The result is a long treatise on nothing, half of Book III and the midpoint of Periphyseon (Peri. III 634-688). Because there is no other from which the universe can be made, Nutritor concludes that “God is the nothing of the things which are and which are not” (Peri. III 687B), not as privative, like matter, but, as infinitely full.
Infinite nothingness is not left behind when God creates. Because the human soul is immediately one with its divine starting point, it shares its infinite nothingness, and its sublime ignorance of what it is.
I. Being Possessed versus the Novelistic Self
Charles Stang’s Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I” (Oxford University Press, 2012) will help us draw conclusions about ourselves which follow from our understanding of the Non-other and God before Intellect in Cusa’s De Li Non Aliud. This judgement of Dr Stang gives my focus: “What Paul provides Dionysius is the insistence that this ascent to ‘the unknown God’ delivers a self that is, like the divine to which it aspires, cleared away of its own names, unsaid, rendered unknown to itself—in other words, no longer I” (p. 3). Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus and their followers tell us repeatedly that apprehending the One is not a matter of naming something. Instead a philosophical and religious transformation on our part is required, a purification, a unification, an awakening of the One in us so that we are gathered toward the One. Stang brings out that, with Dionysius, the maximum theologian for Cardinal Nicholas, the unknown One is for the unknown self.
The person who knows the unknown God is unknown to his or her self; she is no longer I and is open to St Paul’s “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” What Nicholas says at the end of Chapter 1 points the way: “Although I have read [Non-other in] no one, nevertheless Dionysius (more than the others) seems to have come the closest [to it]. For, in all the things which he expresses in various ways, he elucidates Non-other. But when he comes to the end of his Mystical Theology, he maintains that the Creator is neither anything nameable nor any other thing whatever. Yet, he says this in such way that he there appears not to be setting forth any important point—although, for one who is attentive, he expressed the secret of Non-other, which secret he everywhere exhibited in one way or another.”
In fact, this nothingness of the self when facing the Unknown God is “everywhere exhibited” in Ancient and Medieval theology. We shall look at some ways in which this self “rendered unknown to itself” is opened to God and the Divine Cosmos. I am contrasting this unknown self, which does not possess itself but is possessed by God, to what I am calling the modern “Novelistic Self” which we currently assume.
The novel as a literary form is new, about 300 years old and belongs to modernity. In it everything is relative to a story a revealing self tells. Frequently, these stories are, at least in part, autobiographical. These selves project and populate a world, which, for better and for worse, is theirs. As we shall see this is the perspective neither of St Paul, nor of Dionysius, nor of the De Li Non Aliud. With them, instead of the I of the possessing self there is the possessed; we are not our own.
II. Eriugena: The Unknown self of the Unknown God
III. Plotinus: The One gives itself to be mine
IV. Augustine: God and the Cosmic Possess and Move Us
Ultimately the two sides coincide: the Human sees, and rests, in God, and God sees, and rests, in the Human. The Sabbath Rest of God is the human rest, Augustine’s end: “The seventh day has no evening and has no ending. You sanctified it to abide everlastingly. After your ‘very good’ works, which you made while remaining yourself in repose, you ‘rested the seventh day’ (Gen. 2: 2–3). This utterance in your book foretells for us that, after our works, which, because they are your gift to us, are very good, we also may rest in you for the sabbath of eternal life.” (13.xxxvi)
Our life is not ours. We are in the Principium and in the End and we are being pulled, pushed and shaped along the steps in between. We are in Spirit’s cosmic conversion. That is Augustine’s confession.
Next we shall look at this No Longer I in Dionysius, Bonaventure and the De Li Non Aliud.
I. Attending to the Invisible
The deepest philosophical – theological analysis in the De Li Non Aliud , the most difficult problems, and the way forward through them, all appear in its treatment of how we see and do not see the invisible light by which all else is seen. Invisible light is the unknowable Non-Other for the others we see. Considering it, we bring the background we assume into the foreground. From the beginning the explicit aim of the De Li Non Aliud is carrying the unconsciously presupposed and everywhere present but unrecognised into explicit reflective unknowing knowing. The learned ignorance of Not Other is the paradoxical seeing of invisible light. Because it cannot be directly seen or known, I have introduced the language of “attending” and “apprehending.”
From its start, the De Li Non Aliud is about learning to see the invisible.
NICHOLAS: The few things which I have stated are easily investigated. Among them you will find Not-other. And if with all your might you turn the acute gaze of your mind toward Not-other (mentis aciem ad li ‘non aliud’ convertis), you will see with me the definition which defines itself and everything.
FERDINAND: Teach us how to do it; for what you assert is important, though not yet plausible. (Chapter 2, p. 4)
What is to be seen but not seen must be present as the basis of knowing, but it is not immediately known. Were it to be known in the way what it makes visible is seen, the visible would be hidden by it. The purpose of seeing, its “terminus”, the other, cannot be the cause and means of seeing, its “principium”. The negation, Not other, is prior.
FERDINAND: I see that what you say is surely so. For other, which is the end (terminus) of vision, cannot be the beginning (principium) of seeing. For since other is not other than other, surely it presupposes Not other, without which it would not be other. Therefore, every signification that is other than the signification of “Not other” terminates in something other than in the Beginning (in alio quam in principio terminatur). (Chapter 2, p. 7.)
The crucial comparison to light appears early in the Tetralogy. It is an essential revealed enigma.
NICHOLAS: The theologians state that God shines forth to us more clearly in the enigma (aenigmate) of light, since we ascend to intelligible things by means of perceptible things (per sensibilia scandimus ad intelligibilia). [A principle taken from Dionysius; see below in Section II.] Surely, Light itself, which is God (Lux … ipsa, quae Deus), is prior to other light, howsoever nameable, and is prior to all other. Now, that which is seen prior to other is not other. Therefore, since that Light is Not-other and is not a nameable light, it shines forth in sensible light. But sensible light is in some way conceived to be related to sensible seeing as the Light which is Not-other [is related] to all the things which can be mentally seen. But we know from experience that sensible sight sees nothing without sensible light and that visible color is only the delimiting, or defining, of sensible light—as [the example of] a rainbow shows. Thus, sensible light is the beginning (sensibilis lux principium est) of both being and knowing what is visible and perceptible. Thus, we surmise that the Beginning of being is also the Beginning of knowing. (principium essendi esse et principium cognoscendi). [This statement takes us back to the vision of the Sun – Good in Plato’s Republic ] (Chapter 3, p. 8.)
Like the Non Other, that by which we see is not, and cannot be, the direct object of sight and is ignored. Importantly our seeking what is Not other in an other (a particular) is attributed here to our condition. We are each of us “an other” (cum ipse sit aliud). The light which is not other by which other is seen must be antecedent. There is no light subsequent to the light by which we see by which we could look for it.
When it [Non-Other] is sought as an other [particular thing], it is not at all considered as it is. For the Principle (principium), which always precedes what is sought and without which what is sought cannot at all be sought (quod quaesitum semper antecedit, et sine quo quaesitum minime quaeri potest), is not [itself] something properly sought. Now, everyone who seeks seeks to find the Principle, if, as Paul says, this is possible. [Paul in Acts 17, 27: “He is not far from each of us.”] But since it cannot be found as it is in itself (veluti in sese est), the one seeking it before any other thing rightly seeks it in another (ipsum sane quaerit in alio), since he himself is an other (cum ipse sit aliud). Similarly, light—which in itself is invisible with respect to human sight (as is illustrated in the case of pure sunlight)—is looked for in what is visible. Indeed, it is not even necessary to look for light, which presents itself antecedently (for otherwise it would be incomprehensible, since we would have to look for it with light). Therefore, light is sought in what-is-visible, where it is perceived; thus, in this way it is seen at least gropingly.( Chapter 3, p. 10).
II. Why the Invisible Light is both seen and cannot be seen
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It is time to take all this metaphysics to the personal. We saw above that what we see is essentially connected to what kind of being we are. I wrote: Importantly our seeking what is Not other in an other (a particular) is attributed here to our condition. We are each of us “an other” (cum ipse sit aliud).” This consideration brings us to Charles Stang’s book Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I”: “What Paul provides Dionysius is the insistence that this ascent to ‘the unknown God’ delivers a self that is, like the divine to which it aspires, cleared away of its own names, unsaid, rendered unknown to itself—in other words, no longer I” (p. 3). We shall take this up in subsequent posts starting with “Being Possessed versus the Novelistic Self.”
Understanding philosophical and theological texts from the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance West requires grasping that knowing and not knowing, being and non being have diverse and mutually relative forms. Moreover, in the movement between them they can reverse character. What increases knowledge in one direction of movement may plunge you into blindness when moving in the other direction. What plunges the searcher into blindness when moving in one direction may enlighten when moving in the other. The essential beginning points for understanding the diverse and mutually relative forms of knowing and non knowing, being and non being are Parmenides’ The Way of Truth, Plato’s allegories of the Line, the Cave, and the Sun in the Republic and his hypotheses concerning unity, being and non being in his Parmenides dialogue.
A. KNOWING GOES WITH BEING
B. THE EQUATION OF BEING WITH KNOWING AND IGNORANCE WITH NON BEING BREAKS DOWN
C. THE KINDS OF NON BEING AND THE KINDS OF IGNORANCE ARE IN GOD AND IN OUR LEARNED IGNORANCE OF GOD.
Dionysius gives Cusa’s teaching: “God is known in all things and apart from all things. And God is known through knowledge and ignorance.” In the same chapter: “In all things He is all things, and in nothing He is nothing.” (Chapter 14, p. 65.)
At the beginning of Chapter Two of the De Li Non Aliud Ferdinand, representing Aristotle, was drawn to translated LOGOS or VERBUM in the first verses of St John’s Gospel as “reason” or “rational ground” (see Cusa Twelve). In Cusa Thirteen we looked at a coming together of Plato and Dionysius in Cusa’s tetralogue. Philosophy and revelation are united. This seems characteristic of Cusa. Why? Answering this brings us to the necessity of “Inspired impulse.”
How do we approach the nothingness of the Divine One? With great difficulty. Our soul is “incompetent” and philosophy keeps falling back when it strives to grasp it. It encounters “dread” when it holds to nothingness. Plotinus describes the approach of the soul to the One:
The soul reaching towards the formless finds itself incompetent to grasp where nothing bounds it or to take the impression where the impinging reality is diffuse; in sheer dread of holding to nothingness, it slips away. The state is painful; often it seeks relief by retreating from all this vagueness to the region of sense, there to rest on solid ground, just as the sight distressed by the minute rests with pleasure on the bold. (MacKenna).
The mystics and contemporary philosophers like Heidegger tell us the same.
In consequence there must both be philosophical reaching up and givenness from above working below: “inspired impulse” and the strengthening of what is in us which matches our goal. “Because union is not only the end but also the beginning, ‘inspired impulse,’ is necessary to rouse the power of the One in the soul so that she is converted towards God.”
Our Capacity is strengthened when What is from Above and What from Below operate together.
Cusa would have read the next passage in Proclus’ commentary on the Parmenides dialogue of Plato, the acme of theology for Platonists:
And how are we to make this One and flower of the soul shine forth unless we first of all activate our intellect? For the activity of the intellect leads the soul towards a state and activity of calm. And how are we to achieve perfect intellectual activity if we do not travel there by means of logical conceptions, using demonstrative power in our preliminary assumptions, whereas we need intellectual activity in our investigations of being (for the orders of being are denied of the One), and we need inspired impulse in our consciousness of that which transcends all beings, in order that we may not slip unawares from our negations into Not-Being and its invisibility by reason of our indefinite imagination, but rousing up the One within us and, through this, warming the soul (cf. Phaedrus 251b) we may connect ourselves to the One itself and, as it were, find mooring, taking our stand above everything intelligible within ourselves and dispensing with every other one of our activities, in order that we may consort with it alone and perform a dance around it, leaving behind all the intellections of the soul which are directed to secondary things. Let this, then, be the manner of our discourse, logical, intellectual, and inspired, for in this way one might take the grasp that one should of the present hypothesis.”
What we seek is already given to us in our very constitution. Without activating the different aspects of our God given nature, we cannot come to God. Unless we connect what we are where we are with what is above, we shall keep falling away into the secondary.
In consequence philosophy must teach what Sacred Scripture teaches and Sacred Scripture must teach what philosophy teaches. This is what we see in De Li Non-Aliud. It aims to strengthen our capacity for vision and attention. We shall come to see what is before our eyes.
91. PETER: Just as Dionysius says that the one which exists is posterior to the unqualifiedly One, so also Proclus makes [the same point] in referring to Plato.
NICHOLAS: Perhaps all the sages wanted to make the same point about the first principle of things [primum principium rerum] and various of them expressed it variously. But Plato—whom Proclus so greatly exalts (as if he were a humanified god) and who was always looking to what is anterior—endeavored to see the substance of things before everything nameable. Hence, since he saw that a thing which is corporeal and divisible cannot exist from itself and cannot conserve itself (because of its weakness and fluxibility): prior to any material object he saw the soul, and prior to the soul he saw intellect, and prior to intellect he saw the One.
92. Now, what is posterior exists by means of participation in what is prior. Hence, what is the first (by participation in the first all things are what they are) is seen prior to intellect; for it is not at all the case that all things participate in intellect. Therefore, intellect does not attain to “what is earlier, or older, than intellect itself” (Platonic Theology, II, 4)—to use his words. Wherefore, I think that Plato mentally viewed the substance, or the beginning (principium), of things by way of revelation—in the manner in which the Apostle tells the Romans that God has revealed Himself to them (Romans I, 19). I understand this revelation by means of a likeness to light, which through itself presents itself to sight. It is not seen or known in any other way than it reveals itself, since it is invisible, because it is higher than, and antecedent to, everything visible. In his letters Plato very briefly declares that these matters are thus—saying that God eventually manifests Himself to one who seeks Him steadfastly and very vigilantly. (Proclus, too, repeats these [views] in his Commentary on the Parmenides.) Therefore, since [Plato] believes these [views] to be true, he says that the soul—which contemplates itself and enfolds within itself (in the way a soul does) the things posterior [to itself]—beholds, as in a living mirror, all the things which participate in its life and which through it live and exist vitally. And because these things are in the soul, the soul, by means of the resemblance to itself, ascends upward toward the things which are prior [to it]—just as Proclus cites these [doctrines] in his theology. (Platonic Theology, IV, 16).
So what Plato saw when he looked to the Good above the Forms was revelation. This is the revelation on which philosophy depends. That revelation matches the one on which Dionysius’ quasi Scriptural writings also depend. Our question about the unity of philosophy and revelation in the De Li Non-Aliud now becomes one about the forms of revelation and how they are related.
On the one hand “The mystery of the Trinity (Trinitatis secretum) … is received by faith and by the gift of God; [it] by far exceeds and precedes all sensing.” On the other hand, the unfolded definition of the of the self-defining Not-Other is the best statement of the Trinity.
FERDINAND: First of all, one who is desirous of knowledge (scientiae) asks where a reason (ratio) should be found [for maintaining] that the trine and one God is signified by “Not-other,” since Not-other precedes all number.
NICHOLAS: All things are seen from what has been said—seen on the basis of a single rational consideration (unica ratione). You have seen this to be [the consideration] that the Beginning, which is signified by “Not-other,” defines itself (principium per ‘non aliud’ significatum se ipsum definit). Therefore, let us behold its unfolded definition: viz., that Not-other is not other than Not-other (‘non aliud’ est non aliud quam non aliud). If the same thing repeated three times is the definition of the First, as you recognize [it to be], then assuredly the First is triune—and for no other reason than that it defines itself (se ipsum definit). If it did not define itself, it would not be the First; yet, since it defines itself, it shows itself to be triune. Therefore, you see that out of the perfection there results a trinity which, nevertheless, (since you view it prior to other) you can neither number nor assert to be a number. For this trinity is not other than oneness, and [this] oneness is not other than trinity. For the trinity and the oneness are not other than the simple Beginning (simplex | principium ) which is signified by “Not-other.”
FERDINAND: I see perfectly well that the necessity of the perfection of the First—viz., that it defines itself—demands that it be triune before other and before number. For those things which presuppose the First do not confer any perfection on it. But since you have elsewhere and often—especially in Learned Ignorance—attempted in some way to explicate this divine richness in other terms, it will suffice if you now add a few [points] to these others.
19. NICHOLAS: The mystery of the Trinity (Trinitatis secretum), which is received by faith and by the gift of God, by far exceeds and precedes all sensing. Nevertheless, by the means by which we investigate God in the present life, this mystery cannot be elucidated in any other way or any more precisely (praecisius) than you have just heard. Now, those who name the Trinity Father and Son and Holy Spirit approach [it] less precisely (minus praecise quidem appropinquant).
Translate “Word” as Reason or “rational ground” and Beginning as Causing source in John I.1 & 2.
“In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God: and the Word was God (in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum). The same was in the beginning with God (hoc erat in principio apud Deum).” When Verbum or Word is translated as “Reason” or “rational ground,” and Principium is translated as “causing source,” we get: “In the Causing source was reason and reason was with God and the rational ground was God.” Then Ferdinand’s philosophical reflection: “since what is originated has nothing from itself but has from the Beginning (principio) whatever it is, assuredly the Beginning (principium) is the reason of being, or the definition of what is originated” teaches the same as John I.1 & 2. Thus, inspired Scripture and philosophy teach the same.
Understanding structure on the large scale helps us penetrate arguments in a smaller scale. “In the Republic (II, 368d) Socrates proposes that, by looking at justice in the polis, where it may be found in large letters, he and his interlocutors might see it better in the soul, where it is written in small letters. Something like this relation between larger and smaller forms of the same seems to hold in the De Li Non Aliud. The work as a whole and Chapters Eighteen to Twenty-four, on the one hand, and Chapter One by itself, on the other hand, move through and from Aristotelian reason to what in Plato, Proclus, and Dionysius is prior to intellect. What we have learned about this movement in the work as a whole, in Chapters Eighteen to Twenty-four enables us to understand better what is happening on a small scale in Chapter One.”
Here we examine minutely Chapter One in order to see some of big structure in smaller letters.
Our aim is to find in Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa’s On the Not Other a direction to the vision of God, literally, a direction to how we can mirror God. Like many other great works in the philosophical and theological tradition, it is an itinerarium, a way, or journey to God and into God: e.g. Plato’s Symposium, Plato’s Alcibiades, Origen’s De Principiis, Augustine’s Confessions, Boethius’ Consolation, the Dionysian Corpus, Proclus’ Elements of Theology, Eriugena’s Periphyseon, Anselm’s Proslogion, Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God. The journey has a different structure in each of these and in each of them the structure and the content are bound up together because the structure gives meaning, relevance and truth to the content.
Consider for a moment some of the great differences in structure. In Augustine an autobiographical “confession” leads to and is given meaning by two interpretations of the first books of Genesis. The Elements of Theology’s downward comprehension of everything is modelled on Euclid’s geometrical treatises. Its 211 propositions move by logical deductions through the cosmos from the unchanging One above eternity to the individual soul immersed in the ever changing world of material and temporal becoming. The Dionysian Corpus (Divine Names, Celestial Hierarchy, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Mystical Theology, Letters) as a whole and in its parts enacts in Christian terms the triadic remaining (all is in God), exitus (all goes out from God), return (all comes back to the source from which it emerged) structure systematized by Proclus. Eriugena’s Periphyseon is an interpretation of the Genesis account of creation (a “Hexameron”) turned into a cosmic philosophical theology. Bonaventure’s ascending Itinerarium mentis in Deum moves by way of mirrorings up the six fold wings of the Isaiah’s (Chapter 6) Seraphim as understood by Dionysius. In its last two steps it passes through ever sharper and more necessary contradictions. It arrives at the paradoxical luminous darkness and living death of Dionysian union with God.
These structures contain contradiction in fact and sometimes in principle. For example, Anselm’s Proslogion deduces both that God cannot be thought not to be and that God is above being known; both of these have necessary places in Anselm’s journey along a way to God which conforms to God’s way of being. Bonaventure and Cusa are explicit that contradiction is necessary to the movement of reason beyond reason and into God. For Cusa this requires leaving Aristotle behind. For Aquinas the reality of the Persons of the Trinity is demanded by the fact that they are God’s essence opposed to itself when being given and received.
Aquinas’ Summa theologiae is a paradigmatic example of the union of structure and content.
Next in Cusa Eleven “From Aristotelian Reason to its Platonic Prior in larger and smaller letters” we shall look at Chapter One in detail finding the overall structure at the beginning.
“Now, what is posterior exists by means of participation in what is prior. Hence, what is the first (by participation in the first, all things are what they are) is seen prior to intellect; for it is not at all the case that all things participate in intellect. Therefore, intellect does not attain to ‘what is earlier, or older, than intellect itself’ (Proclus, Platonic Theology, II, 4)—to use Proclus’ words. Wherefore, I think that Plato mentally viewed the substance, or the beginning (principium), of things by way of revelation—in the manner in which the Apostle tells the Romans that God has revealed Himself to them (Romans I. 20). I understand this revelation by means of a likeness to light, which through itself presents itself to sight. It is not seen or known in any other way than it reveals itself, since it is invisible, because it is higher than, and antecedent to, everything visible.” (Cusa, On Not-other, Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 20, page 92).
The Biblical reference is to this passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans which I quote from the Vulgate: “Invisibilia enim ipsius a creatura mundi per ea quae facta sunt intellecta conspiciuntur sempiterna quoque eius virtus et divinitas (For the invisible things of him, His eternal power also and divinity, from the creation of the world are clearly seen [conspiciuntur], being understood [intellecta] through the things that are made [facta].)” It is cited endlessly by the Christian philosophical theologians like Augustine, Eriugena, and Aquinas as a revelation that creation makes the divine invisible known, it “presents itself to sight.” The question in the De Li Non Aliud is as to how we see the invisible which is presenting itself to sight? How do we see the invisible divinity by which we see? You will note that for Proclus this requires divine aid and our transformation. We must “operate logically and intellectually and at the same time with divine inspiration.” We must “rouse up the One of the soul.” What has the Non-Aliud to do with that?
I. Plato’s Parmenides.
II. Proclus’ Commentary on the Parmenides dialogue of Plato
III. Cusa in the Mystical Tradition
“I think that Plato mentally viewed the substance, or the beginning (principium), of things by way of revelation—in the manner in which the Apostle tells the Romans that God has revealed Himself to them (Romans I, 19). I understand this revelation by means of a likeness to light, which through itself presents itself to sight. It is not seen or known in any other way than it reveals itself, since it is invisible, because it is higher than, and antecedent to, everything visible.”
It is clear that Nicholas of Cusa wished to raise us to seeing the invisible before Intellect and that Non-Aliud leads to that. What is not yet clear is the manner of this seeing and how we come to it. Certainly it requires the unification of religious and philosophical revelation. In our reading of Cusa we shall consider this further.
Cusa Seven
This week we move from Aristotle to the Platonists. The move is complex. The De Li Non-Aliud is dependent on our seeing through symbols or aenigmas. As in St Paul and St Bonaventure, what is seen is reflected in us as mirrors which must be polished and directed. What we come to is always present to us. The problem is to discern what we see. Aristotle, on the one hand, and Plato, Proclus and Dionysius, on the other hand, are 1) symbols, 2) participants in the dramatic Tetralogue through its members, and 3) represent bodies of doctrines and ways of knowing and unknowing. In general Aristotle represents and is Philosophy proceeding by Reason, the Platonists represent and are Theology proceeding by what is beyond Intellect. I shall write more about Aristotle soon. In the meantime we must move on to the Platonists.
“ ‘I [the Abbot] am busy] with the Parmenides and with Proclus’s Commentary [thereon]; Peter [is occupied] with this same Proclus’s Theology of Plato, which he is translating from Greek into Latin’ (Cusa, On Not-other, Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 1, page 1). “You have read in the Commentary on the Parmenides that God is called both Good and One. [Proclus] proves them to be the same since they pervade (penetrant) all things.” (Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 23, page 106). It might be said that the occasion and the possibility of Cusa’s De Li Non-Aliud is the translation of another work of the Greek pagan philosopher Proclus into Latin and its penultimate Chapter (23) starts with a reference to a Proclean work mentioned at the beginning. Proclus is a kind of Alpha and Omega of the De Li Non-Aliud. What works of Proclus did Cusa know at least in part? Who translated them? What were the most authoritative sources of Proclus’ doctrines for the Latin medieval theologians and philosophers? What difference does it make that they came before translations of his own works?”
I. Translating: the Medieval Essential
Understanding Western Latin Medieval Religion, Philosophy, and Theology is difficult not only because it depends on linguistic translations: from Greek and Syriac to Arabic and from Arabic to Latin, as well as translations from Greek to Latin and Hebrew to Latin, but also because its religious, philosophical, and theological cultures are translations. These cultural translations require taking what is primary, here the religion of Israel and the philosophy and religion of the Greeks, and translating them for each other. The first translation of these primals was into the Second Temple Judaism, the Judaism of the Septuagint from which Christianity developed. Philo of Alexandria seemed as much a Church Father as he was a great Jewish theologian and exegete of Scripture. His works were so pervasive and important for the development of Christianity, that, although a faithful Jew all his life, he was nonetheless depicted as a Christian bishop.
The second translation of these primals was also Jewish: the new Jewish religion which the Rabbis developed after the destruction by the Romans of the Second Temple. At the same time, the primals were translated into Christianity, and then, later, into Islam. Both of these are secondary religions, dependent on earlier ones. In all these translations, the new theologies and spiritualities were united with Hellenic philosophy as transformed in Late Antiquity into forms we call Neoplatonic and Peripatetic. In consequence our reflections on Aristotle in the De Li Non-Aliud began with the effects of the ‘last wave’ of his coming to the Latin West in the Middle Ages via translations.
In “Non Aliud Gloss III: Who and What is Aristotle in Cusa’s De Li Non-Aliud?” I wrote:
In the Twelfth and Thirteenth centuries the Latin speaking Christianity of Western Europe (‘Catholic’ Christianity) was confronted with a new intellectual reality, terrifying in its totality. … The sciences of Aristotle appeared in the Latin West as: ‘a total philosophical corpus, where all of Hellenistic thought, profoundly Neoplatonized, had slipped—sometimes surreptitiously.’ Philosophy returned to Latin primarily through waves of translations of this Neoplatonized Aristotle from Arabic. The last great wave of Aristotle’s works arrived among the Latins … mistakenly including the largely Proclean Liber de causis, misidentified as the theological pinnacle of Aristotle’s philosophy …
In 1268, a translation of a genuine work of Proclus, his Elements of Theology, enabled Aquinas, and those who, like Cusa, followed him, to sort out identities and differences. This led in the De Li Non-Aliud to the limitation and reduction of Aristotle as we see in Chapters Eighteen and Nineteen. This limitation, and these Chapters, lead in Chapters Twenty to Twenty-four, the conclusion of the Tetralogy, to theological considerations of Plato and Proclus, of Proclus and Dionysius, and of Plato, Proclus and Dionysius. Raising the soul to this concluding Platonic theology is the goal of our treatise. “ ‘I [the Abbot Balbus] am busy] with the Parmenides and with Proclus’s Commentary [thereon]; Peter [is occupied] with this same Proclus’s Theology of Plato, which he is translating from Greek into Latin’.” These translations not only liberate Aristotle (or Philosophy limited by reason) from Proclus (or Theology beyond the reach of Intellect), but also the other side: Proclus and Theology are also freed. The aim is to get beyond Intellect:
"What is the first (by participation in the first all things are what they are) is seen prior to intellect; for it is not at all the case that all things participate in intellect. Therefore, intellect does not attain to 'what is earlier, or older, than intellect itself'.” (Platonic Theology, II, 4) [Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 20, page 92).]
To that liberation we shall attend on another occasion. Now I want us to consider two matters. A) what of Proclus had already penetrated the philosophy and theology of the Latin West before the Latins possessed translations of Proclus’ own works –this you will find in my “What is Neoplatonism? And What Does Aquinas Take from Neoplatonism?” of W.J. Hankey, Aquinas’ Neoplatonism in the Summa Theologiae on God. A Short Introduction, ( South Bend, Indiana: St Augustine’s Press, 2019), 5-21. I give a modified version below. B) The translation and reception of Proclus’ own works–this you will find in “Translating Proclus from Eriugena to Nicholas of Cusa,” which is Section I of W.J. Hankey, “Misrepresenting Neoplatonism in Contemporary Christian Dionysian Polemic: Eriugena and Nicholas of Cusa versus Vladimir Lossky and Jean-Luc Marion,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82:4 (2008): 683–703, pages 683-694, which I shall post tomorrow.
I. Ferdinand, Aristotle, Philosophy, and Reason
When Abbot John Andrea Vigevius, introduces himself and the other participants in the tetralogy, Ferdinand’s studies stand out as different from those of the other three. Two others are studying texts by Plato and by his great successor in the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens, namely, Proclus. The Abbot and Peter Balbus of Pisa, later a bishop, are working on them. The most influential and authoritative Christian continuer of the Proclean tradition, Dionysius the Areopagite, the “greatest theologian” (Cusa, On Not-other, Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 20, page 90) is being studied by Cardinal Nicholas himself. Unlike the others, Ferdinand Matin of Portugal is not a priest; he is the personal physician of the Cardinal. As a physician he must be empirical and rational, appropriately, therefore, he “is surveying the genius of Aristotle” (Hopkins-Hankey, Chap. 1, p. 1), who might be called a scientist. Aristotle is “the greatest and most acute Peripatetic” (Chap. 18, p. 83), in contrast to Platonists. He is the chief of Frederick’s “teachers, the philosophers” (Chap. 1, p. 2), in contrast to theologians.
It seems that philosophy is governed by reason. Right at the beginning, Nicholas (Cardinal Cusa) imposes as a condition of dialogue with Ferdinand: “that unless you are compelled by reason (nisi compellaris ratione), you will reject as light (levia) everything you will hear from me” (ibid.) At first “reason” is given the character of Aristotelian science. In answer to the question:” What is it that most of all makes us know?” Ferdinand answers “Definition.” (Chap. 1, p. 3). Aristotelian sciences depend on accurate definitions of the substances they concern. They arrive at definitions and then deduce from them.
It is a surprise, given not only Ferdinand’s differences from the other three, but also the subject of the tetralogy and the method of the Cardinal’s questioning, that most of the four part discussion is a dialogue between Nicholas and Ferdinand. Moreover, intensifying the surprise, two Chapters, Eighteen and Nineteen, close to the concluding Twenty-fourth chapter, describe Aristotle’s accomplishments as a philosopher in a most condescending way. Eighteen and Nineteen set his genius or virtue within limits which diminish them. What is it about Aristotle as his philosophy is understood by Cusa that both requires his dominating presence and equally sets limits to how high his thought reaches?
II. How and as What Aristotle Arrived among the Medieval Latins & the Role of Albert the Great
III. Separating Aristotle and Dionysius: Thomas Aquinas starts a way to Cusa
In the initial chapters of Nicholas of Cusa’s Directio speculationis seu De Li Non Aliud, the questions of whether there are a name or names of God and whether “Non-Aliud” is God’s name recur repeatedly. Is Not-Other God? Or is Not-Other a way of coming to vision of God? I adduce relevant texts from the beginning of the Tetralogy and comment on them. Here are the headings:
A). God is neither anything nameable nor any other being whatever
B) Not-Other’s character as a name of God and how it is not a name of God
C. Because we are each a particular other, we seek that by which every particular other exists as if it were like us. Thus we seek as if it were a particular other what cannot be sought because, in fact, it is before everything sought and that without which nothing can be sought. Non-Other is of this kind: i.e. before everything sought and that without which nothing can be sought.
D. God and Not-Other both have no opposites.
E. Not-Other is like God in not being nameable by any name.
Nicholas of Cusa, De Li non-aliud, trans. in Nicholas of Cusa on God as Not Other: A Translation and an Appraisal of De li non-aliud, 3rd ed., Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1987).
The translation by Jasper Hopkins is frequently a paraphrase or controversial interpretation. I have modified it and supplied Latin where this may be useful.
Like the “supers,” about which I shall say something shortly, “non-aliud,” i.e. “not other,” is a double negation and its logical power comes from that. By “double negation,” I mean a negation which has been negated. It is (in Latin) a “nec non,” in English a “not no.” This is not, as it would usually be, an affirmation. Rather, Non-aliud is a process which gets beyond (or before) thought and being, beyond (or before) affirmation and negation, beyond (or before) being and non-being.
This “Beyond” (Epekeina) is for those in the Platonic tradition the highest state. It takes us back to the Analogy of the Sun at the top of the Divided Line, or at the culmination of the ascent from the Cave, in Plato’s Republic.
[509b] The sun, I presume you will say, not only furnishes to visibles the power of visibility but it also provides for their generation and growth and nurture though it is not itself generation οὐ γένεσιν.” “Of course not.” “In like manner, then, you are to say that the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the good their being known γιγνώσκεσθα, but their very being and existence τὸ εἶναί τε καὶ τὴν οὐσίαν is derived to them from it, though the good itself is not being οὐκ οὐσίας ὄντος τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ but transcends being ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας in dignity and surpassing power.”
Nicholas of Cusa’s primary source for the double negative logic in its “super” form is the Proclean tradition mediated most authoritatively by Dionysius the Areopagite, but there is another form. Without any evidence of mixture with Proclus and Dionysius, this comes to him from Anselm. Bonaventure picks it up from Anselm and mixes it with Dionysian “super” theology.
Anselm’s “proof” for the existence of God depends upon God being defined as “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” This formula, like “non-aliud,” is a process. Anselm’s process of comparison negates what is thought: it is not a positive conception. It is not the greatest idea nor the idea of the greatest. The ignorant person denies the existence of a God s/he thinks s/he understands. By this negation the ignorant discovers that than which nothing greater can be thought must exist and that it is impossible to think its non existence. It is a before or a beyond in the way non-aliud is.
Dionysius and “Super”
We read the following in Cusa, On Not-other, Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 4, page 11:
All theologians have recognized that God is something greater than can be conceived [see Anselm Proslogion and Bonaventure Itinerarium]; and hence they affirmed that He is super-substantial (‘supersubstantialem,’ Dionysius Areopagita De div. nom. I), and above every name (‘supra omne nomen,’ Ibid.) and the like. In the case of God they have not expressed to us one thing by “super,” another by “without,” another by “in,” another by “non,” and [another] by “before”; for it is the same thing for God to be supersubstantial Substance, Substance without substance, insubstantial Substance, non-substantial Substance, and Substance before substance. Regardless of what words you use: since that of which you speak is not other than the self-same thing(non aliud sit quam idem ipsum), it is evident that Not-other is simpler and prior and is inexpressible and unutterable in [any] other[terms].
It is clear that in Cusa we have, just as we had in Bonaventure, a mixture of double negation as it is found in Anselm and as it is found in the “super” language of Dionysius.
Dionysius developed with radical consistency the logic of “nec non,” double negation. “Super” or “supra” belongs to this and is the opposite of “super” in “Superman.” It is not the expansion or extension of the same but the contrary of that. The given is denied, and the denied is negated, to bring us to the Beyond. That from which we begin: esse, deity, manifestation, splendor, good is negated. God’s esse, deity, manifestation, splendor, good are not as we know them nor are they as we are constructed to know. But then this negation is itself negated to give that from which we began, but in an entirely new form, one which includes its opposite. “Learned Ignorance” is an example. Dionysius is full of forms of that: “superluminous darkness of a silence teaching secretly,” “a darkness which is super-resplendent,” “superessential beam of the divine darkness.” Inclusive opposition or embracing self-contradiction is appropriate to God and to what will unite us to God.
The figure of the beyond as “super,” double negation, the “nec non” (and in Cusa the “non-aliud”) is developed in the Platonic tradition which Dionysius references: “him who is above all essence and knowledge.” This is the Epekeina, the Beyond of Plato’s Republic VI, 509b-c.
To understand the process which is non-aliud, double negation, or super speech as in “He is super-substantial (‘supersubstantialem,’ Dionysius Areopagita De div. nom. I), and above every name (‘supra omne nomen,’ Ibid.),” we need to think about the affirmative which is denied.
In Dionysius naming, hymning (or praising), and creation go together. The Divine Names are “hymned”; theology is a religious act. Creation happens by the divine speech (God said “Let there be light” etc.) and our hymning the divine names creates the world in us. Two fundamental forms of this are symbolic theology, with Scriptural names from “eyes” and “hands” to “rock” and “worm,” and conceptual theology, with names from “good” and “wise” to “perfect” and “one.” In Dionysius this positive naming of God belongs to the creation of the sensible, corporal world, and then to the conceptual intellectual world. These namings belong to the exitus, the going out. By way of Eriugena, Cusa will be very radical at this point. However, we do not need to explore this yet.
There is a similar coming into being and movement in Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Journey into God. For Bonaventure, we first mirror God’s vestiges in the external sensible world below mind, and then mind mirrors what belongs to it, and then mind looks up to Intellect above it. For both theologians, God is in these vestiges, images, and likeness, and without God they do not exist. So Bonaventure finds that God is in them by Essence, Power, Wisdom, and Goodness. Evidently however, God is also not any of them or all of them, whether sensible, rational, or intellectual. God must be denied of them. This denial is essential to reditus, return.
The denial or negation varies. At the highest point the negation becomes total: “leave behind your senses and intellectual activities, sensible and invisible things, all nonbeing and being.” Here is the opening of the Mystical Theology of Dionysius: “Trinitas, superessentialis et superdeus.” Here at the Epekeina, the Beyond, there is the highest “supra”: silence. There “New, absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of theology are hidden in the superluminous darkness of a silence teaching secretly.”
Perspectives and Directions:
Light illuminates but blinds eyes accustomed to darkness. Darkness defeats eyes used to light but strengthens weak ones. The invisible enables visibility. That by which we see must be unseen—otherwise we would see only it.
This Powerpoint has been modified by additions to the texts from Plato and by adding material on and from Parmenides’ The Way of Truth and Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. Much has been deleted. The intention of additions and deletions is to give a greater number of the kinds of knowing in the Platonic tradition in order to assist your analysis, to bring out the kinds and functions of not knowing, and to emphasise the roles of not knowing and nothingness in philosophy, theology, and religion.
Plato is not perfectly consistent in describing the kinds of knowing and not knowing. In consequence reconciling his own texts with one another, and then extending the schema to include subsequent thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus, Bonaventure, and Cusa requires making difficult judgments.
If Fr Festugière is right, and I think he is, in the Platonic tradition not knowing goes together with knowing for at least two reasons. One is that knowing is also ignorance and alternates with ignorance. Another is that something other than knowing is operative: the desires or love for beauty, and the desires or love for the good beyond beauty, and union beyond good are also present. Alternatively or simultaneously there may be suffering in the sense of affectivity. The one who ascends is struck by or possessed by what is given. Dionysius writes of this pathos.
“My soul chooses hanging and my bones death.” (Job 7, 15; The Mind’s Journey into God, VII, 6)
Charles Stang has brought us to reflections on the union of apophatic theology and apophatic anthropology in Dionysius. We have extended them to Plotinus, Augustine, and Eriugena. Bonaventure’s Journey into God is the most complete possible union of these correlative negations. With him Dionysian theological and human negation is assimilated to the Crucifixion mysticism of St Francis.
According to the Gospel Passion narratives, during the interrogations of Christ the authorities give the titles which are also accusations: Are you the Son of God? Are you a king? Jesus replies: “You have said it.” “You say that I am.” Thus Saints Matthew, Mark, and Luke. “‘King’ is your word.” “Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” Thus St John. The union we have been exploring between our knowledge and ignorance of God and our knowledge and ignorance of ourselves is at the centre of the Passion. Apprehending or denying God, we expose and commit ourselves. Bach’s settings of the Passions make this inescapable. More radically Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Journey into God which culminates in our death in the death of God does the same.
Bonaventure’s Journey into God is the most complete union of apophatic theology and apophatic anthropology possible. The ascent along the wings of the Dionysian Seraphim is by mirrorings of the Divine below our souls, at the level of our souls, and above our souls. These mirrorings are what we are. We are nothing in ourselves. Pushed and pulled up step by step one to another we are drawn into ever more intense, necessary, and complete contradiction.
Bonaventure brings us, by way of Dionysius quoted at length where he is one with Proclus, to uncomprehending knowledge of Incomprehensible Divine Intellect, the One-Being. After that there is “learned ignorance” (to use Cusa’s term) of the Nothingness of the One-Nonbeing. Uncomprehending knowledge and learned ignorance compel us into what is Beyond both: Eloquent Silence. These are moments of Divinity as the Neoplatonists discovered God. Dionysian Trinitarian mysticism embraces them all in their extremity and contradiction. Bonaventure unites Dionysius with the Crucifixion mysticism of St Frances.
Who embraces the One-Nonbeing cries with Job and Bonaventure: “My soul chooses hanging and my bones death.”
This meditation returns us to and takes up from “Cusa Seventeen: Unknown to itself, no longer I, Being Possessed versus the Novelistic Self: Plotinus, Eriugena, Augustine.” The intervening meditations contribute to this one. Because it depends so much on the work of Charles Stang, I have made him a coauthor.
Charles Stang’s book Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I” enables us to take what we have learned from the high metaphysics of the De Li Non Aliud to the personal. It does this in a way unfamiliar to us: the “I” is displaced. In order to make God’s revelation in and to St Paul present and active now, a fifth century author assumes the identity of Dionysius the Areopagite, Paul’s first century convert. That is the “Pseudonymity” of Stang’s title.
What of the “Apophasis”? What of the negation? Complete negation, i.e. not only negative propositions but getting beyond negation and affirmation? This is “super” or “hyper” negation; the negation Dionysius takes over from Proclus and Damascius, the kind of positive or double negation Eriugena developed.
Looking at the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite through St Paul quoted constantly in them, Stang answers endlessly troubling questions about that corpus in a convincing way. He writes:
Paul provides our author an apostolic account of apophatic anthropology, that is, he witnesses to the apophasis of his own self as he suffers union with the divine. Our author in a sense apprentices himself to the Paul who suffers a blinding vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3–9), the Paul who stands atop the Areopagus and insists that we worship the ‘‘unknown God’’ ‘‘through unknowing’’ [agnoountes] (Acts 17:23), the Paul who was caught up to the third heaven (2 Cor 12:2). Our author assumes the identity of a disciple of Paul not merely for these extraordinary moments of intimacy with the divine, but because Paul reveals that such intimacy comes at the cost of his kataphatic self, the self whom he knows and has known his whole life, the self that cannot break free from its sobriety, the self who bears a name, or even two (Saul and Paul). Paul understands that this ‘‘said’’ self must be ‘‘unsaid,’’ suffer the ecstatic intrusion of the divine, and suffer the incumbent loss so as to know salvation. But our author’s decision to write under a pseudonym may be even more relevant to the apophasis of the self. The author does not merely sign the name of Paul’s disciple Dionysius the Areopagite to his corpus. He goes much further and literally assumes the identity of this figure from the past. He writes not treatises but letters addressed to other apostles and disciples; he imagines himself into this apostolic community, to the point that he is present at the Dormition of Mary; he counsels John sequestered on Patmos. And yet all the while the author is also somehow in the fifth century: quoting—sometimes at great length—from Proclus’ works, treading dangerously close to contemporary Christological controversies, describing the ceremonials of Byzantine churches rather than the home churches of the New Testament. The author is, in other words, ‘‘neither himself nor someone else,’’ neither the monk from Syria scholars assume him to be nor the Athenian archon under whose name he writes. Like the ecstatic God with whom he seeks to suffer union, as a writer he simultaneously remains where he is and stretches outside himself. (‘‘Being Neither Oneself nor Someone Else’’, pp. 69-70)
There is much more of great value in these and other works by Stang and they will remain with us as we press on through Bonaventure to the De Li Non Aliud in our consideration of “Unknown to itself, no longer I.”
One essence and many forms or ideas is replaced by the Essence of essences. It is crucial to understand the distinction between these two forms of infinity and that God as infinite is the Essence of essences. These two notions go together for Cusa: God as infinite in the Platonic sense is not a particular essence but is the Essence of essences and the Essence of essences is creative activity.
By the same logic God is the Vision of visions. That God sees himself and his creation in one single vision goes with his self-creation. The seeing is defining and seeing and defining are creation.
God is the Goodness which moves God in creating and what God creates is good.
Along this same mode of thinking by which the infinite is thought but is not comprehended ,Cusa moves from the Spirit of spirits to Divine self-creation: “the Spirit which is God makes the quiddities [or essences] of things not from another but from itself.”
Eriugena’s own radical thinking comes out in his willingness to draw the conclusion of monotheism that God is self-creating, that God Himself is the nothingness from which God creates. For understanding Cusa the following features of Eriugena’s great system, the Periphyseon, Concerning Nature, are useful.
1. Drawing upon Gregory of Nyssa, Eriugena came to understand human nature in such a way, that, more than being “that in which all things could be found (inerat),” it became “that in which all things are created (condita est)” Peri. IV 807A). The human is the workshop of creation (Peri. II 531AB, III 733B, V 893BC); it is the medium in which God creates himself and the universe of beings out of his own nothingness precisely because, uniquely among beings, the human possesses all the forms of knowing and ignorance, including sensation. Because everything is through human perception, there are no absolute objects. As in earlier Platonic systems, the forms have become not only thoughts, but forms of apprehension in various kinds of subject; as Plotinus puts it, “all things come from contemplations and are contemplations” (Enneads III 8 [30] 7, 1-2).
2. Placing, defining, knowing, creating
Eriugena’s treatment of place is revealing. Place exists only in the mind, “for if every definition is in art, and all art is in the mind, every place, since place is definition, will necessarily be nowhere else except in the mind” (Peri. I 475B). To define is to place, to know, and to create. Cusa follows Eriugena closely in this. For Eriugena, being (OUCIA ) is not as such knowable. Rather, the defined, the limited, is the knowable. Beings are known as defined, circumscribed by the accidental categories. Without place, God cannot define himself in human reason, but, by this defining, everything comes to be. Defining is placing, circumscription, within God, as the “place of places” (Peri. III 643C). “Only God is infinite; everything else is limited by “where” and “when”, that is, place and time.” Time and place are creatures, but “are prior, not temporally, but in respect to creation, to all things that are in the universe”. “What contains is prior to that which is contained, in the way that the cause precedes the effect” (Peri. I 482C).
3. The Nothingness from which God creates is himself
From two fundamental notions: God creates himself, and God is nothing, Eriugena draws the conclusion that the nothing from which God creates is himself. Unsurprisingly, Alumnus is troubled both by the premises and by the conclusion. The result is a long treatise on nothing, half of Book III and the midpoint of Periphyseon (Peri. III 634-688). Because there is no other from which the universe can be made, Nutritor concludes that “God is the nothing of the things which are and which are not” (Peri. III 687B), not as privative, like matter, but, as infinitely full.
Infinite nothingness is not left behind when God creates. Because the human soul is immediately one with its divine starting point, it shares its infinite nothingness, and its sublime ignorance of what it is.
4. Jean Trouillard on the Divine and Human Nothingness. From two fundamental notions: God creates himself, and God is nothing, Eriugena draws the conclusion that the nothing from which God creates is himself. Unsurprisingly, Alumnus is troubled both by the premises and by the conclusion. The result is a long treatise on nothing, half of Book III and the midpoint of Periphyseon (Peri. III 634-688). Because there is no other from which the universe can be made, Nutritor concludes that “God is the nothing of the things which are and which are not” (Peri. III 687B), not as privative, like matter, but, as infinitely full.
Infinite nothingness is not left behind when God creates. Because the human soul is immediately one with its divine starting point, it shares its infinite nothingness, and its sublime ignorance of what it is.
I. Being Possessed versus the Novelistic Self
Charles Stang’s Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I” (Oxford University Press, 2012) will help us draw conclusions about ourselves which follow from our understanding of the Non-other and God before Intellect in Cusa’s De Li Non Aliud. This judgement of Dr Stang gives my focus: “What Paul provides Dionysius is the insistence that this ascent to ‘the unknown God’ delivers a self that is, like the divine to which it aspires, cleared away of its own names, unsaid, rendered unknown to itself—in other words, no longer I” (p. 3). Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus and their followers tell us repeatedly that apprehending the One is not a matter of naming something. Instead a philosophical and religious transformation on our part is required, a purification, a unification, an awakening of the One in us so that we are gathered toward the One. Stang brings out that, with Dionysius, the maximum theologian for Cardinal Nicholas, the unknown One is for the unknown self.
The person who knows the unknown God is unknown to his or her self; she is no longer I and is open to St Paul’s “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” What Nicholas says at the end of Chapter 1 points the way: “Although I have read [Non-other in] no one, nevertheless Dionysius (more than the others) seems to have come the closest [to it]. For, in all the things which he expresses in various ways, he elucidates Non-other. But when he comes to the end of his Mystical Theology, he maintains that the Creator is neither anything nameable nor any other thing whatever. Yet, he says this in such way that he there appears not to be setting forth any important point—although, for one who is attentive, he expressed the secret of Non-other, which secret he everywhere exhibited in one way or another.”
In fact, this nothingness of the self when facing the Unknown God is “everywhere exhibited” in Ancient and Medieval theology. We shall look at some ways in which this self “rendered unknown to itself” is opened to God and the Divine Cosmos. I am contrasting this unknown self, which does not possess itself but is possessed by God, to what I am calling the modern “Novelistic Self” which we currently assume.
The novel as a literary form is new, about 300 years old and belongs to modernity. In it everything is relative to a story a revealing self tells. Frequently, these stories are, at least in part, autobiographical. These selves project and populate a world, which, for better and for worse, is theirs. As we shall see this is the perspective neither of St Paul, nor of Dionysius, nor of the De Li Non Aliud. With them, instead of the I of the possessing self there is the possessed; we are not our own.
II. Eriugena: The Unknown self of the Unknown God
III. Plotinus: The One gives itself to be mine
IV. Augustine: God and the Cosmic Possess and Move Us
Ultimately the two sides coincide: the Human sees, and rests, in God, and God sees, and rests, in the Human. The Sabbath Rest of God is the human rest, Augustine’s end: “The seventh day has no evening and has no ending. You sanctified it to abide everlastingly. After your ‘very good’ works, which you made while remaining yourself in repose, you ‘rested the seventh day’ (Gen. 2: 2–3). This utterance in your book foretells for us that, after our works, which, because they are your gift to us, are very good, we also may rest in you for the sabbath of eternal life.” (13.xxxvi)
Our life is not ours. We are in the Principium and in the End and we are being pulled, pushed and shaped along the steps in between. We are in Spirit’s cosmic conversion. That is Augustine’s confession.
Next we shall look at this No Longer I in Dionysius, Bonaventure and the De Li Non Aliud.
I. Attending to the Invisible
The deepest philosophical – theological analysis in the De Li Non Aliud , the most difficult problems, and the way forward through them, all appear in its treatment of how we see and do not see the invisible light by which all else is seen. Invisible light is the unknowable Non-Other for the others we see. Considering it, we bring the background we assume into the foreground. From the beginning the explicit aim of the De Li Non Aliud is carrying the unconsciously presupposed and everywhere present but unrecognised into explicit reflective unknowing knowing. The learned ignorance of Not Other is the paradoxical seeing of invisible light. Because it cannot be directly seen or known, I have introduced the language of “attending” and “apprehending.”
From its start, the De Li Non Aliud is about learning to see the invisible.
NICHOLAS: The few things which I have stated are easily investigated. Among them you will find Not-other. And if with all your might you turn the acute gaze of your mind toward Not-other (mentis aciem ad li ‘non aliud’ convertis), you will see with me the definition which defines itself and everything.
FERDINAND: Teach us how to do it; for what you assert is important, though not yet plausible. (Chapter 2, p. 4)
What is to be seen but not seen must be present as the basis of knowing, but it is not immediately known. Were it to be known in the way what it makes visible is seen, the visible would be hidden by it. The purpose of seeing, its “terminus”, the other, cannot be the cause and means of seeing, its “principium”. The negation, Not other, is prior.
FERDINAND: I see that what you say is surely so. For other, which is the end (terminus) of vision, cannot be the beginning (principium) of seeing. For since other is not other than other, surely it presupposes Not other, without which it would not be other. Therefore, every signification that is other than the signification of “Not other” terminates in something other than in the Beginning (in alio quam in principio terminatur). (Chapter 2, p. 7.)
The crucial comparison to light appears early in the Tetralogy. It is an essential revealed enigma.
NICHOLAS: The theologians state that God shines forth to us more clearly in the enigma (aenigmate) of light, since we ascend to intelligible things by means of perceptible things (per sensibilia scandimus ad intelligibilia). [A principle taken from Dionysius; see below in Section II.] Surely, Light itself, which is God (Lux … ipsa, quae Deus), is prior to other light, howsoever nameable, and is prior to all other. Now, that which is seen prior to other is not other. Therefore, since that Light is Not-other and is not a nameable light, it shines forth in sensible light. But sensible light is in some way conceived to be related to sensible seeing as the Light which is Not-other [is related] to all the things which can be mentally seen. But we know from experience that sensible sight sees nothing without sensible light and that visible color is only the delimiting, or defining, of sensible light—as [the example of] a rainbow shows. Thus, sensible light is the beginning (sensibilis lux principium est) of both being and knowing what is visible and perceptible. Thus, we surmise that the Beginning of being is also the Beginning of knowing. (principium essendi esse et principium cognoscendi). [This statement takes us back to the vision of the Sun – Good in Plato’s Republic ] (Chapter 3, p. 8.)
Like the Non Other, that by which we see is not, and cannot be, the direct object of sight and is ignored. Importantly our seeking what is Not other in an other (a particular) is attributed here to our condition. We are each of us “an other” (cum ipse sit aliud). The light which is not other by which other is seen must be antecedent. There is no light subsequent to the light by which we see by which we could look for it.
When it [Non-Other] is sought as an other [particular thing], it is not at all considered as it is. For the Principle (principium), which always precedes what is sought and without which what is sought cannot at all be sought (quod quaesitum semper antecedit, et sine quo quaesitum minime quaeri potest), is not [itself] something properly sought. Now, everyone who seeks seeks to find the Principle, if, as Paul says, this is possible. [Paul in Acts 17, 27: “He is not far from each of us.”] But since it cannot be found as it is in itself (veluti in sese est), the one seeking it before any other thing rightly seeks it in another (ipsum sane quaerit in alio), since he himself is an other (cum ipse sit aliud). Similarly, light—which in itself is invisible with respect to human sight (as is illustrated in the case of pure sunlight)—is looked for in what is visible. Indeed, it is not even necessary to look for light, which presents itself antecedently (for otherwise it would be incomprehensible, since we would have to look for it with light). Therefore, light is sought in what-is-visible, where it is perceived; thus, in this way it is seen at least gropingly.( Chapter 3, p. 10).
II. Why the Invisible Light is both seen and cannot be seen
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It is time to take all this metaphysics to the personal. We saw above that what we see is essentially connected to what kind of being we are. I wrote: Importantly our seeking what is Not other in an other (a particular) is attributed here to our condition. We are each of us “an other” (cum ipse sit aliud).” This consideration brings us to Charles Stang’s book Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I”: “What Paul provides Dionysius is the insistence that this ascent to ‘the unknown God’ delivers a self that is, like the divine to which it aspires, cleared away of its own names, unsaid, rendered unknown to itself—in other words, no longer I” (p. 3). We shall take this up in subsequent posts starting with “Being Possessed versus the Novelistic Self.”
Understanding philosophical and theological texts from the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance West requires grasping that knowing and not knowing, being and non being have diverse and mutually relative forms. Moreover, in the movement between them they can reverse character. What increases knowledge in one direction of movement may plunge you into blindness when moving in the other direction. What plunges the searcher into blindness when moving in one direction may enlighten when moving in the other. The essential beginning points for understanding the diverse and mutually relative forms of knowing and non knowing, being and non being are Parmenides’ The Way of Truth, Plato’s allegories of the Line, the Cave, and the Sun in the Republic and his hypotheses concerning unity, being and non being in his Parmenides dialogue.
A. KNOWING GOES WITH BEING
B. THE EQUATION OF BEING WITH KNOWING AND IGNORANCE WITH NON BEING BREAKS DOWN
C. THE KINDS OF NON BEING AND THE KINDS OF IGNORANCE ARE IN GOD AND IN OUR LEARNED IGNORANCE OF GOD.
Dionysius gives Cusa’s teaching: “God is known in all things and apart from all things. And God is known through knowledge and ignorance.” In the same chapter: “In all things He is all things, and in nothing He is nothing.” (Chapter 14, p. 65.)
At the beginning of Chapter Two of the De Li Non Aliud Ferdinand, representing Aristotle, was drawn to translated LOGOS or VERBUM in the first verses of St John’s Gospel as “reason” or “rational ground” (see Cusa Twelve). In Cusa Thirteen we looked at a coming together of Plato and Dionysius in Cusa’s tetralogue. Philosophy and revelation are united. This seems characteristic of Cusa. Why? Answering this brings us to the necessity of “Inspired impulse.”
How do we approach the nothingness of the Divine One? With great difficulty. Our soul is “incompetent” and philosophy keeps falling back when it strives to grasp it. It encounters “dread” when it holds to nothingness. Plotinus describes the approach of the soul to the One:
The soul reaching towards the formless finds itself incompetent to grasp where nothing bounds it or to take the impression where the impinging reality is diffuse; in sheer dread of holding to nothingness, it slips away. The state is painful; often it seeks relief by retreating from all this vagueness to the region of sense, there to rest on solid ground, just as the sight distressed by the minute rests with pleasure on the bold. (MacKenna).
The mystics and contemporary philosophers like Heidegger tell us the same.
In consequence there must both be philosophical reaching up and givenness from above working below: “inspired impulse” and the strengthening of what is in us which matches our goal. “Because union is not only the end but also the beginning, ‘inspired impulse,’ is necessary to rouse the power of the One in the soul so that she is converted towards God.”
Our Capacity is strengthened when What is from Above and What from Below operate together.
Cusa would have read the next passage in Proclus’ commentary on the Parmenides dialogue of Plato, the acme of theology for Platonists:
And how are we to make this One and flower of the soul shine forth unless we first of all activate our intellect? For the activity of the intellect leads the soul towards a state and activity of calm. And how are we to achieve perfect intellectual activity if we do not travel there by means of logical conceptions, using demonstrative power in our preliminary assumptions, whereas we need intellectual activity in our investigations of being (for the orders of being are denied of the One), and we need inspired impulse in our consciousness of that which transcends all beings, in order that we may not slip unawares from our negations into Not-Being and its invisibility by reason of our indefinite imagination, but rousing up the One within us and, through this, warming the soul (cf. Phaedrus 251b) we may connect ourselves to the One itself and, as it were, find mooring, taking our stand above everything intelligible within ourselves and dispensing with every other one of our activities, in order that we may consort with it alone and perform a dance around it, leaving behind all the intellections of the soul which are directed to secondary things. Let this, then, be the manner of our discourse, logical, intellectual, and inspired, for in this way one might take the grasp that one should of the present hypothesis.”
What we seek is already given to us in our very constitution. Without activating the different aspects of our God given nature, we cannot come to God. Unless we connect what we are where we are with what is above, we shall keep falling away into the secondary.
In consequence philosophy must teach what Sacred Scripture teaches and Sacred Scripture must teach what philosophy teaches. This is what we see in De Li Non-Aliud. It aims to strengthen our capacity for vision and attention. We shall come to see what is before our eyes.
91. PETER: Just as Dionysius says that the one which exists is posterior to the unqualifiedly One, so also Proclus makes [the same point] in referring to Plato.
NICHOLAS: Perhaps all the sages wanted to make the same point about the first principle of things [primum principium rerum] and various of them expressed it variously. But Plato—whom Proclus so greatly exalts (as if he were a humanified god) and who was always looking to what is anterior—endeavored to see the substance of things before everything nameable. Hence, since he saw that a thing which is corporeal and divisible cannot exist from itself and cannot conserve itself (because of its weakness and fluxibility): prior to any material object he saw the soul, and prior to the soul he saw intellect, and prior to intellect he saw the One.
92. Now, what is posterior exists by means of participation in what is prior. Hence, what is the first (by participation in the first all things are what they are) is seen prior to intellect; for it is not at all the case that all things participate in intellect. Therefore, intellect does not attain to “what is earlier, or older, than intellect itself” (Platonic Theology, II, 4)—to use his words. Wherefore, I think that Plato mentally viewed the substance, or the beginning (principium), of things by way of revelation—in the manner in which the Apostle tells the Romans that God has revealed Himself to them (Romans I, 19). I understand this revelation by means of a likeness to light, which through itself presents itself to sight. It is not seen or known in any other way than it reveals itself, since it is invisible, because it is higher than, and antecedent to, everything visible. In his letters Plato very briefly declares that these matters are thus—saying that God eventually manifests Himself to one who seeks Him steadfastly and very vigilantly. (Proclus, too, repeats these [views] in his Commentary on the Parmenides.) Therefore, since [Plato] believes these [views] to be true, he says that the soul—which contemplates itself and enfolds within itself (in the way a soul does) the things posterior [to itself]—beholds, as in a living mirror, all the things which participate in its life and which through it live and exist vitally. And because these things are in the soul, the soul, by means of the resemblance to itself, ascends upward toward the things which are prior [to it]—just as Proclus cites these [doctrines] in his theology. (Platonic Theology, IV, 16).
So what Plato saw when he looked to the Good above the Forms was revelation. This is the revelation on which philosophy depends. That revelation matches the one on which Dionysius’ quasi Scriptural writings also depend. Our question about the unity of philosophy and revelation in the De Li Non-Aliud now becomes one about the forms of revelation and how they are related.
On the one hand “The mystery of the Trinity (Trinitatis secretum) … is received by faith and by the gift of God; [it] by far exceeds and precedes all sensing.” On the other hand, the unfolded definition of the of the self-defining Not-Other is the best statement of the Trinity.
FERDINAND: First of all, one who is desirous of knowledge (scientiae) asks where a reason (ratio) should be found [for maintaining] that the trine and one God is signified by “Not-other,” since Not-other precedes all number.
NICHOLAS: All things are seen from what has been said—seen on the basis of a single rational consideration (unica ratione). You have seen this to be [the consideration] that the Beginning, which is signified by “Not-other,” defines itself (principium per ‘non aliud’ significatum se ipsum definit). Therefore, let us behold its unfolded definition: viz., that Not-other is not other than Not-other (‘non aliud’ est non aliud quam non aliud). If the same thing repeated three times is the definition of the First, as you recognize [it to be], then assuredly the First is triune—and for no other reason than that it defines itself (se ipsum definit). If it did not define itself, it would not be the First; yet, since it defines itself, it shows itself to be triune. Therefore, you see that out of the perfection there results a trinity which, nevertheless, (since you view it prior to other) you can neither number nor assert to be a number. For this trinity is not other than oneness, and [this] oneness is not other than trinity. For the trinity and the oneness are not other than the simple Beginning (simplex | principium ) which is signified by “Not-other.”
FERDINAND: I see perfectly well that the necessity of the perfection of the First—viz., that it defines itself—demands that it be triune before other and before number. For those things which presuppose the First do not confer any perfection on it. But since you have elsewhere and often—especially in Learned Ignorance—attempted in some way to explicate this divine richness in other terms, it will suffice if you now add a few [points] to these others.
19. NICHOLAS: The mystery of the Trinity (Trinitatis secretum), which is received by faith and by the gift of God, by far exceeds and precedes all sensing. Nevertheless, by the means by which we investigate God in the present life, this mystery cannot be elucidated in any other way or any more precisely (praecisius) than you have just heard. Now, those who name the Trinity Father and Son and Holy Spirit approach [it] less precisely (minus praecise quidem appropinquant).
Translate “Word” as Reason or “rational ground” and Beginning as Causing source in John I.1 & 2.
“In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God: and the Word was God (in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum). The same was in the beginning with God (hoc erat in principio apud Deum).” When Verbum or Word is translated as “Reason” or “rational ground,” and Principium is translated as “causing source,” we get: “In the Causing source was reason and reason was with God and the rational ground was God.” Then Ferdinand’s philosophical reflection: “since what is originated has nothing from itself but has from the Beginning (principio) whatever it is, assuredly the Beginning (principium) is the reason of being, or the definition of what is originated” teaches the same as John I.1 & 2. Thus, inspired Scripture and philosophy teach the same.
Understanding structure on the large scale helps us penetrate arguments in a smaller scale. “In the Republic (II, 368d) Socrates proposes that, by looking at justice in the polis, where it may be found in large letters, he and his interlocutors might see it better in the soul, where it is written in small letters. Something like this relation between larger and smaller forms of the same seems to hold in the De Li Non Aliud. The work as a whole and Chapters Eighteen to Twenty-four, on the one hand, and Chapter One by itself, on the other hand, move through and from Aristotelian reason to what in Plato, Proclus, and Dionysius is prior to intellect. What we have learned about this movement in the work as a whole, in Chapters Eighteen to Twenty-four enables us to understand better what is happening on a small scale in Chapter One.”
Here we examine minutely Chapter One in order to see some of big structure in smaller letters.
Our aim is to find in Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa’s On the Not Other a direction to the vision of God, literally, a direction to how we can mirror God. Like many other great works in the philosophical and theological tradition, it is an itinerarium, a way, or journey to God and into God: e.g. Plato’s Symposium, Plato’s Alcibiades, Origen’s De Principiis, Augustine’s Confessions, Boethius’ Consolation, the Dionysian Corpus, Proclus’ Elements of Theology, Eriugena’s Periphyseon, Anselm’s Proslogion, Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God. The journey has a different structure in each of these and in each of them the structure and the content are bound up together because the structure gives meaning, relevance and truth to the content.
Consider for a moment some of the great differences in structure. In Augustine an autobiographical “confession” leads to and is given meaning by two interpretations of the first books of Genesis. The Elements of Theology’s downward comprehension of everything is modelled on Euclid’s geometrical treatises. Its 211 propositions move by logical deductions through the cosmos from the unchanging One above eternity to the individual soul immersed in the ever changing world of material and temporal becoming. The Dionysian Corpus (Divine Names, Celestial Hierarchy, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Mystical Theology, Letters) as a whole and in its parts enacts in Christian terms the triadic remaining (all is in God), exitus (all goes out from God), return (all comes back to the source from which it emerged) structure systematized by Proclus. Eriugena’s Periphyseon is an interpretation of the Genesis account of creation (a “Hexameron”) turned into a cosmic philosophical theology. Bonaventure’s ascending Itinerarium mentis in Deum moves by way of mirrorings up the six fold wings of the Isaiah’s (Chapter 6) Seraphim as understood by Dionysius. In its last two steps it passes through ever sharper and more necessary contradictions. It arrives at the paradoxical luminous darkness and living death of Dionysian union with God.
These structures contain contradiction in fact and sometimes in principle. For example, Anselm’s Proslogion deduces both that God cannot be thought not to be and that God is above being known; both of these have necessary places in Anselm’s journey along a way to God which conforms to God’s way of being. Bonaventure and Cusa are explicit that contradiction is necessary to the movement of reason beyond reason and into God. For Cusa this requires leaving Aristotle behind. For Aquinas the reality of the Persons of the Trinity is demanded by the fact that they are God’s essence opposed to itself when being given and received.
Aquinas’ Summa theologiae is a paradigmatic example of the union of structure and content.
Next in Cusa Eleven “From Aristotelian Reason to its Platonic Prior in larger and smaller letters” we shall look at Chapter One in detail finding the overall structure at the beginning.
“Now, what is posterior exists by means of participation in what is prior. Hence, what is the first (by participation in the first, all things are what they are) is seen prior to intellect; for it is not at all the case that all things participate in intellect. Therefore, intellect does not attain to ‘what is earlier, or older, than intellect itself’ (Proclus, Platonic Theology, II, 4)—to use Proclus’ words. Wherefore, I think that Plato mentally viewed the substance, or the beginning (principium), of things by way of revelation—in the manner in which the Apostle tells the Romans that God has revealed Himself to them (Romans I. 20). I understand this revelation by means of a likeness to light, which through itself presents itself to sight. It is not seen or known in any other way than it reveals itself, since it is invisible, because it is higher than, and antecedent to, everything visible.” (Cusa, On Not-other, Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 20, page 92).
The Biblical reference is to this passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans which I quote from the Vulgate: “Invisibilia enim ipsius a creatura mundi per ea quae facta sunt intellecta conspiciuntur sempiterna quoque eius virtus et divinitas (For the invisible things of him, His eternal power also and divinity, from the creation of the world are clearly seen [conspiciuntur], being understood [intellecta] through the things that are made [facta].)” It is cited endlessly by the Christian philosophical theologians like Augustine, Eriugena, and Aquinas as a revelation that creation makes the divine invisible known, it “presents itself to sight.” The question in the De Li Non Aliud is as to how we see the invisible which is presenting itself to sight? How do we see the invisible divinity by which we see? You will note that for Proclus this requires divine aid and our transformation. We must “operate logically and intellectually and at the same time with divine inspiration.” We must “rouse up the One of the soul.” What has the Non-Aliud to do with that?
I. Plato’s Parmenides.
II. Proclus’ Commentary on the Parmenides dialogue of Plato
III. Cusa in the Mystical Tradition
“I think that Plato mentally viewed the substance, or the beginning (principium), of things by way of revelation—in the manner in which the Apostle tells the Romans that God has revealed Himself to them (Romans I, 19). I understand this revelation by means of a likeness to light, which through itself presents itself to sight. It is not seen or known in any other way than it reveals itself, since it is invisible, because it is higher than, and antecedent to, everything visible.”
It is clear that Nicholas of Cusa wished to raise us to seeing the invisible before Intellect and that Non-Aliud leads to that. What is not yet clear is the manner of this seeing and how we come to it. Certainly it requires the unification of religious and philosophical revelation. In our reading of Cusa we shall consider this further.
Cusa Seven
This week we move from Aristotle to the Platonists. The move is complex. The De Li Non-Aliud is dependent on our seeing through symbols or aenigmas. As in St Paul and St Bonaventure, what is seen is reflected in us as mirrors which must be polished and directed. What we come to is always present to us. The problem is to discern what we see. Aristotle, on the one hand, and Plato, Proclus and Dionysius, on the other hand, are 1) symbols, 2) participants in the dramatic Tetralogue through its members, and 3) represent bodies of doctrines and ways of knowing and unknowing. In general Aristotle represents and is Philosophy proceeding by Reason, the Platonists represent and are Theology proceeding by what is beyond Intellect. I shall write more about Aristotle soon. In the meantime we must move on to the Platonists.
“ ‘I [the Abbot] am busy] with the Parmenides and with Proclus’s Commentary [thereon]; Peter [is occupied] with this same Proclus’s Theology of Plato, which he is translating from Greek into Latin’ (Cusa, On Not-other, Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 1, page 1). “You have read in the Commentary on the Parmenides that God is called both Good and One. [Proclus] proves them to be the same since they pervade (penetrant) all things.” (Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 23, page 106). It might be said that the occasion and the possibility of Cusa’s De Li Non-Aliud is the translation of another work of the Greek pagan philosopher Proclus into Latin and its penultimate Chapter (23) starts with a reference to a Proclean work mentioned at the beginning. Proclus is a kind of Alpha and Omega of the De Li Non-Aliud. What works of Proclus did Cusa know at least in part? Who translated them? What were the most authoritative sources of Proclus’ doctrines for the Latin medieval theologians and philosophers? What difference does it make that they came before translations of his own works?”
I. Translating: the Medieval Essential
Understanding Western Latin Medieval Religion, Philosophy, and Theology is difficult not only because it depends on linguistic translations: from Greek and Syriac to Arabic and from Arabic to Latin, as well as translations from Greek to Latin and Hebrew to Latin, but also because its religious, philosophical, and theological cultures are translations. These cultural translations require taking what is primary, here the religion of Israel and the philosophy and religion of the Greeks, and translating them for each other. The first translation of these primals was into the Second Temple Judaism, the Judaism of the Septuagint from which Christianity developed. Philo of Alexandria seemed as much a Church Father as he was a great Jewish theologian and exegete of Scripture. His works were so pervasive and important for the development of Christianity, that, although a faithful Jew all his life, he was nonetheless depicted as a Christian bishop.
The second translation of these primals was also Jewish: the new Jewish religion which the Rabbis developed after the destruction by the Romans of the Second Temple. At the same time, the primals were translated into Christianity, and then, later, into Islam. Both of these are secondary religions, dependent on earlier ones. In all these translations, the new theologies and spiritualities were united with Hellenic philosophy as transformed in Late Antiquity into forms we call Neoplatonic and Peripatetic. In consequence our reflections on Aristotle in the De Li Non-Aliud began with the effects of the ‘last wave’ of his coming to the Latin West in the Middle Ages via translations.
In “Non Aliud Gloss III: Who and What is Aristotle in Cusa’s De Li Non-Aliud?” I wrote:
In the Twelfth and Thirteenth centuries the Latin speaking Christianity of Western Europe (‘Catholic’ Christianity) was confronted with a new intellectual reality, terrifying in its totality. … The sciences of Aristotle appeared in the Latin West as: ‘a total philosophical corpus, where all of Hellenistic thought, profoundly Neoplatonized, had slipped—sometimes surreptitiously.’ Philosophy returned to Latin primarily through waves of translations of this Neoplatonized Aristotle from Arabic. The last great wave of Aristotle’s works arrived among the Latins … mistakenly including the largely Proclean Liber de causis, misidentified as the theological pinnacle of Aristotle’s philosophy …
In 1268, a translation of a genuine work of Proclus, his Elements of Theology, enabled Aquinas, and those who, like Cusa, followed him, to sort out identities and differences. This led in the De Li Non-Aliud to the limitation and reduction of Aristotle as we see in Chapters Eighteen and Nineteen. This limitation, and these Chapters, lead in Chapters Twenty to Twenty-four, the conclusion of the Tetralogy, to theological considerations of Plato and Proclus, of Proclus and Dionysius, and of Plato, Proclus and Dionysius. Raising the soul to this concluding Platonic theology is the goal of our treatise. “ ‘I [the Abbot Balbus] am busy] with the Parmenides and with Proclus’s Commentary [thereon]; Peter [is occupied] with this same Proclus’s Theology of Plato, which he is translating from Greek into Latin’.” These translations not only liberate Aristotle (or Philosophy limited by reason) from Proclus (or Theology beyond the reach of Intellect), but also the other side: Proclus and Theology are also freed. The aim is to get beyond Intellect:
"What is the first (by participation in the first all things are what they are) is seen prior to intellect; for it is not at all the case that all things participate in intellect. Therefore, intellect does not attain to 'what is earlier, or older, than intellect itself'.” (Platonic Theology, II, 4) [Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 20, page 92).]
To that liberation we shall attend on another occasion. Now I want us to consider two matters. A) what of Proclus had already penetrated the philosophy and theology of the Latin West before the Latins possessed translations of Proclus’ own works –this you will find in my “What is Neoplatonism? And What Does Aquinas Take from Neoplatonism?” of W.J. Hankey, Aquinas’ Neoplatonism in the Summa Theologiae on God. A Short Introduction, ( South Bend, Indiana: St Augustine’s Press, 2019), 5-21. I give a modified version below. B) The translation and reception of Proclus’ own works–this you will find in “Translating Proclus from Eriugena to Nicholas of Cusa,” which is Section I of W.J. Hankey, “Misrepresenting Neoplatonism in Contemporary Christian Dionysian Polemic: Eriugena and Nicholas of Cusa versus Vladimir Lossky and Jean-Luc Marion,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82:4 (2008): 683–703, pages 683-694, which I shall post tomorrow.
I. Ferdinand, Aristotle, Philosophy, and Reason
When Abbot John Andrea Vigevius, introduces himself and the other participants in the tetralogy, Ferdinand’s studies stand out as different from those of the other three. Two others are studying texts by Plato and by his great successor in the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens, namely, Proclus. The Abbot and Peter Balbus of Pisa, later a bishop, are working on them. The most influential and authoritative Christian continuer of the Proclean tradition, Dionysius the Areopagite, the “greatest theologian” (Cusa, On Not-other, Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 20, page 90) is being studied by Cardinal Nicholas himself. Unlike the others, Ferdinand Matin of Portugal is not a priest; he is the personal physician of the Cardinal. As a physician he must be empirical and rational, appropriately, therefore, he “is surveying the genius of Aristotle” (Hopkins-Hankey, Chap. 1, p. 1), who might be called a scientist. Aristotle is “the greatest and most acute Peripatetic” (Chap. 18, p. 83), in contrast to Platonists. He is the chief of Frederick’s “teachers, the philosophers” (Chap. 1, p. 2), in contrast to theologians.
It seems that philosophy is governed by reason. Right at the beginning, Nicholas (Cardinal Cusa) imposes as a condition of dialogue with Ferdinand: “that unless you are compelled by reason (nisi compellaris ratione), you will reject as light (levia) everything you will hear from me” (ibid.) At first “reason” is given the character of Aristotelian science. In answer to the question:” What is it that most of all makes us know?” Ferdinand answers “Definition.” (Chap. 1, p. 3). Aristotelian sciences depend on accurate definitions of the substances they concern. They arrive at definitions and then deduce from them.
It is a surprise, given not only Ferdinand’s differences from the other three, but also the subject of the tetralogy and the method of the Cardinal’s questioning, that most of the four part discussion is a dialogue between Nicholas and Ferdinand. Moreover, intensifying the surprise, two Chapters, Eighteen and Nineteen, close to the concluding Twenty-fourth chapter, describe Aristotle’s accomplishments as a philosopher in a most condescending way. Eighteen and Nineteen set his genius or virtue within limits which diminish them. What is it about Aristotle as his philosophy is understood by Cusa that both requires his dominating presence and equally sets limits to how high his thought reaches?
II. How and as What Aristotle Arrived among the Medieval Latins & the Role of Albert the Great
III. Separating Aristotle and Dionysius: Thomas Aquinas starts a way to Cusa
In the initial chapters of Nicholas of Cusa’s Directio speculationis seu De Li Non Aliud, the questions of whether there are a name or names of God and whether “Non-Aliud” is God’s name recur repeatedly. Is Not-Other God? Or is Not-Other a way of coming to vision of God? I adduce relevant texts from the beginning of the Tetralogy and comment on them. Here are the headings:
A). God is neither anything nameable nor any other being whatever
B) Not-Other’s character as a name of God and how it is not a name of God
C. Because we are each a particular other, we seek that by which every particular other exists as if it were like us. Thus we seek as if it were a particular other what cannot be sought because, in fact, it is before everything sought and that without which nothing can be sought. Non-Other is of this kind: i.e. before everything sought and that without which nothing can be sought.
D. God and Not-Other both have no opposites.
E. Not-Other is like God in not being nameable by any name.
Nicholas of Cusa, De Li non-aliud, trans. in Nicholas of Cusa on God as Not Other: A Translation and an Appraisal of De li non-aliud, 3rd ed., Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1987).
The translation by Jasper Hopkins is frequently a paraphrase or controversial interpretation. I have modified it and supplied Latin where this may be useful.
Like the “supers,” about which I shall say something shortly, “non-aliud,” i.e. “not other,” is a double negation and its logical power comes from that. By “double negation,” I mean a negation which has been negated. It is (in Latin) a “nec non,” in English a “not no.” This is not, as it would usually be, an affirmation. Rather, Non-aliud is a process which gets beyond (or before) thought and being, beyond (or before) affirmation and negation, beyond (or before) being and non-being.
This “Beyond” (Epekeina) is for those in the Platonic tradition the highest state. It takes us back to the Analogy of the Sun at the top of the Divided Line, or at the culmination of the ascent from the Cave, in Plato’s Republic.
[509b] The sun, I presume you will say, not only furnishes to visibles the power of visibility but it also provides for their generation and growth and nurture though it is not itself generation οὐ γένεσιν.” “Of course not.” “In like manner, then, you are to say that the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the good their being known γιγνώσκεσθα, but their very being and existence τὸ εἶναί τε καὶ τὴν οὐσίαν is derived to them from it, though the good itself is not being οὐκ οὐσίας ὄντος τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ but transcends being ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας in dignity and surpassing power.”
Nicholas of Cusa’s primary source for the double negative logic in its “super” form is the Proclean tradition mediated most authoritatively by Dionysius the Areopagite, but there is another form. Without any evidence of mixture with Proclus and Dionysius, this comes to him from Anselm. Bonaventure picks it up from Anselm and mixes it with Dionysian “super” theology.
Anselm’s “proof” for the existence of God depends upon God being defined as “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” This formula, like “non-aliud,” is a process. Anselm’s process of comparison negates what is thought: it is not a positive conception. It is not the greatest idea nor the idea of the greatest. The ignorant person denies the existence of a God s/he thinks s/he understands. By this negation the ignorant discovers that than which nothing greater can be thought must exist and that it is impossible to think its non existence. It is a before or a beyond in the way non-aliud is.
Dionysius and “Super”
We read the following in Cusa, On Not-other, Hopkins-Hankey, Chapter 4, page 11:
All theologians have recognized that God is something greater than can be conceived [see Anselm Proslogion and Bonaventure Itinerarium]; and hence they affirmed that He is super-substantial (‘supersubstantialem,’ Dionysius Areopagita De div. nom. I), and above every name (‘supra omne nomen,’ Ibid.) and the like. In the case of God they have not expressed to us one thing by “super,” another by “without,” another by “in,” another by “non,” and [another] by “before”; for it is the same thing for God to be supersubstantial Substance, Substance without substance, insubstantial Substance, non-substantial Substance, and Substance before substance. Regardless of what words you use: since that of which you speak is not other than the self-same thing(non aliud sit quam idem ipsum), it is evident that Not-other is simpler and prior and is inexpressible and unutterable in [any] other[terms].
It is clear that in Cusa we have, just as we had in Bonaventure, a mixture of double negation as it is found in Anselm and as it is found in the “super” language of Dionysius.
Dionysius developed with radical consistency the logic of “nec non,” double negation. “Super” or “supra” belongs to this and is the opposite of “super” in “Superman.” It is not the expansion or extension of the same but the contrary of that. The given is denied, and the denied is negated, to bring us to the Beyond. That from which we begin: esse, deity, manifestation, splendor, good is negated. God’s esse, deity, manifestation, splendor, good are not as we know them nor are they as we are constructed to know. But then this negation is itself negated to give that from which we began, but in an entirely new form, one which includes its opposite. “Learned Ignorance” is an example. Dionysius is full of forms of that: “superluminous darkness of a silence teaching secretly,” “a darkness which is super-resplendent,” “superessential beam of the divine darkness.” Inclusive opposition or embracing self-contradiction is appropriate to God and to what will unite us to God.
The figure of the beyond as “super,” double negation, the “nec non” (and in Cusa the “non-aliud”) is developed in the Platonic tradition which Dionysius references: “him who is above all essence and knowledge.” This is the Epekeina, the Beyond of Plato’s Republic VI, 509b-c.
To understand the process which is non-aliud, double negation, or super speech as in “He is super-substantial (‘supersubstantialem,’ Dionysius Areopagita De div. nom. I), and above every name (‘supra omne nomen,’ Ibid.),” we need to think about the affirmative which is denied.
In Dionysius naming, hymning (or praising), and creation go together. The Divine Names are “hymned”; theology is a religious act. Creation happens by the divine speech (God said “Let there be light” etc.) and our hymning the divine names creates the world in us. Two fundamental forms of this are symbolic theology, with Scriptural names from “eyes” and “hands” to “rock” and “worm,” and conceptual theology, with names from “good” and “wise” to “perfect” and “one.” In Dionysius this positive naming of God belongs to the creation of the sensible, corporal world, and then to the conceptual intellectual world. These namings belong to the exitus, the going out. By way of Eriugena, Cusa will be very radical at this point. However, we do not need to explore this yet.
There is a similar coming into being and movement in Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Journey into God. For Bonaventure, we first mirror God’s vestiges in the external sensible world below mind, and then mind mirrors what belongs to it, and then mind looks up to Intellect above it. For both theologians, God is in these vestiges, images, and likeness, and without God they do not exist. So Bonaventure finds that God is in them by Essence, Power, Wisdom, and Goodness. Evidently however, God is also not any of them or all of them, whether sensible, rational, or intellectual. God must be denied of them. This denial is essential to reditus, return.
The denial or negation varies. At the highest point the negation becomes total: “leave behind your senses and intellectual activities, sensible and invisible things, all nonbeing and being.” Here is the opening of the Mystical Theology of Dionysius: “Trinitas, superessentialis et superdeus.” Here at the Epekeina, the Beyond, there is the highest “supra”: silence. There “New, absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of theology are hidden in the superluminous darkness of a silence teaching secretly.”
Perspectives and Directions:
Light illuminates but blinds eyes accustomed to darkness. Darkness defeats eyes used to light but strengthens weak ones. The invisible enables visibility. That by which we see must be unseen—otherwise we would see only it.
This Powerpoint has been modified by additions to the texts from Plato and by adding material on and from Parmenides’ The Way of Truth and Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. Much has been deleted. The intention of additions and deletions is to give a greater number of the kinds of knowing in the Platonic tradition in order to assist your analysis, to bring out the kinds and functions of not knowing, and to emphasise the roles of not knowing and nothingness in philosophy, theology, and religion.
Plato is not perfectly consistent in describing the kinds of knowing and not knowing. In consequence reconciling his own texts with one another, and then extending the schema to include subsequent thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus, Bonaventure, and Cusa requires making difficult judgments.
If Fr Festugière is right, and I think he is, in the Platonic tradition not knowing goes together with knowing for at least two reasons. One is that knowing is also ignorance and alternates with ignorance. Another is that something other than knowing is operative: the desires or love for beauty, and the desires or love for the good beyond beauty, and union beyond good are also present. Alternatively or simultaneously there may be suffering in the sense of affectivity. The one who ascends is struck by or possessed by what is given. Dionysius writes of this pathos.
In its journey the human soul embraces, passes through, and dies to all that is and is not, so that, ultimately, it possesses nothing, especially not itself. Itinerarium is a process of desiring, asking, receiving, knowing, positing, negating, unknowing, purifying, exercising, exceeding, transgressing, passage, wondering, ignorance, countering, strengthening opposition, transcending. All is undertaken for the sake of the might and weakness necessary to being overwhelmed and wholeheartedly surrendering to death in the Deity beyond deity, and in the Nothingness of Excess beyond Being and Non-Being. In sum, embracing all and possessing nothing, this Christianity is the opposite of globalised Western Christendom.
Raised to Intellect above it, in and through the gaze of the dual Cherubim on the Being Itself and the Good Itself of God, humanity looks down on the Mercy Seat, Jesus Christ. There it sees the divine-human / infinite –finite extremes united. In that union it is raised up, restored to its cosmic place. However, the human does not possess the union, it is possessed by it: “When, finally, in the sixth stage, our mind reaches that point where it contemplates in the First and Supreme Principle and in the ‘mediator of God and men’ (I Timothy 2, 3), Jesus Christ, those things whose likenesses can in no way be found in creatures and which surpass all penetration by the human intellect—when the mind has done all this, it must still, in beholding these things, transcend and pass over (transcendat et transeat) not only this sense world but even itself (semetipsam). In this passing over (transit), Christ is the ‘way and the door’ (John 14, 6); Christ is the ladder and the vehicle, like the Mercy Seat placed above the ark of God, and ‘the mystery (sacramentum) hidden from eternity’ (Ephesians 3, 9).” On both sides, world and self, fact is countered or dissolved, so nothing stands in the path of transformation.
To answer this question, and to conclude our meditations on the text of the Itinerarium, we have Paul Rorem, The Dionysian Mystical Theology(Fortress, 2015), 112-3 and 136-7. A Lutheran Minister, Professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, and the leading expert on the liturgical character of the Dionysian corpus. Tomorrow we shall reflect on the what we have learned from our reading of Bonaventure about what philosophy, theology, and Christianity are and how they proceed.
Dr Rorem responds to Luther’s criticism (echoed by many others) of the Dionysian corpus as lacking Jesus Christ. He shows how, without supposing any ground for criticism, Bonaventure supplies the lack by the context in which he places the mystical union.
Luther understood himself and his emphasis on Christ crucified not as innovative but as firmly grounded in the Christian tradition, including medieval authors such as Bernard [of Clairvaux] and Bonaventure. Early and late, he praised them both for their focus on the incarnation … Bonaventure builds on the foundations of Bernard’s twelfth-century contemporary Hugh of St Victor … After quoting The Mystical Theology regarding the “divine darkness,” Bonaventure concludes: “Let us, then, die and enter into the darkness; let us impose silence on our cares, our desires, and our imaginings. With Christ crucified let us pass out of this world to the Father.” As a good Franciscan, Bonaventure naturally would emphasize Christ crucified. But to do so as an interpretation of the “divine darkness” in the Mystical Theologyis to supplement the Areopagite precisely where Luther aimed his critique. Neither darkness nor negative theology are ever linked to the cross of Christ in the Dionysian corpus. Bonaventure is not criticizing Dionysius here, but [by the context in which he places his Mystical Theology] he is synthesizing the presumably apostolic negative theology with the Franciscan focus on the suffering Christ.…
Bonaventure follows the Pauline kenosis from the divine down to the “human form” all the way to the “point of death,” and he does so with an explicit move from the Dionysian apophatic to a Franciscan focus on Christ crucified. At the culmination of The Soul’s Journey into God, Bonaventure turns apophatic in his own way. Passing over into God in ecstatic contemplation, as Francis did, means that “all our intellectual activities must be left behind and the height of our affection must be totally transferred and transformed into God.” Here Bonaventure has integrated love into unknowing, following the Victorines.
Yet there is more. He explicitly quotes The Mystical Theology at some length, noting that through the “ecstasy of a pure mind, leaving behind all things and freed from all things, you will ascend to the superessential ray of the divine darkness of death with Christ crucified …”
Bonaventure turns the Dionysian apophatic to a Christological proclamation. Moving beyond Maximus the Confessors’ focus on the incarnation, Bonaventure stressed the culmination of the incarnation in the cross, following the Pauline “kenosis’ to the end.
There are many more things to note in respect to what Bonaventure does. They include a reach back to Philo’s Moses by way of Gregory of Nyssa’s contribution to Dionysius’ negative theology. There is also an anticipation of the future in the way the Cardinal de Bérulle, in many ways the founder of modern Catholic Christocentric theology and spirituality and its seminary culture, will do again to Dionysius what Bonaventure did. However, the one I stress is that the reciprocity between entering mystical darkness and identifying with Christ crucified brings death as non-being into God. Neoplatonic philosophical theology is relentlessly with us all the way.
Mystical Darkness, and its correlative Learned Ignorance, are consequences of the Divine Nothingness. Being is knowable. Non-being is not. What is beyond Being and Non-being as the God of Dionysius, Eriugena, Bonaventure, and of the Hellenic Neoplatonists who taught them, is both known and not known in the Superluminous Darkness.
Bonaventure pushes us up a ladder built by Dionysius from uncomprehending knowledge of Incomprehensible Divine Intellect, the One-Being, to ignorance of the Nothingness of the One-Nonbeing, and Beyond both to Eloquent Silence. These are moments of Divinity as the Neoplatonists discovered God. Yesterday (Itinerarium49) we saw how Dionysian Trinitarian mysticism embraces them all in their extremity and contradiction. Who embraces the One-Nonbeing cries with Job and Bonaventure: “My soul chooses hanging and my bones death.”
Clearly, the Dionysian philosophical, theological, mystical cosmos is not simply identical with that of any, or indeed of anything common to all, of his pagan Neoplatonic sources. He declares this sharply and clearly with the opening word of the culminating treatise of his system: “Trinitas.” But then, immediately, as if to show the inspired Platonism through which he will understand and enter the great Divine mystery, he writes “superessentialis et superdeus.” (Throughout, conformably to our purposes, I shall use Bonaventure’s text). I hope that by our reflections on “supra” and double negation, we have begun to acquire a sense for the splendid complexity of this theological figure. We have through it, the positive, the negative, and what is beyond both. A word is required about the positive, both in Dionysius and in Bonaventure.
In Dionysius naming, hymning (or praising), and creation go together. The Divine Names are “hymned”; theology is a religious act. Creation happens by the divine speech (God said “Let there be light” etc.) and our hymning the divine names creates the world in us. Two fundamental forms of this are symbolic theology, with Scriptural names from eyes and hands to rock and worm, and conceptual theology, with names from goodness and wisdom to perfect and one. This positive naming of God in Dionysius belongs to the creation of the sensible, corporal world, and then to the conceptual intellectual world. There is a similar coming into being and movement in Bonaventure’s Itinerarium. We first mirror God’s vestiges in the external sensible world below mind, and then mind mirrors what belongs to it and looks up to Intellect above it. For both theologians, God is in these vestiges, images, and likeness, and without God they do not exist. So Bonaventure finds that God is in them by Essence, Power, Wisdom, and Goodness. Evidently, God is also not any of them or all of them, whether sensible, rational, or intellectual. God must be denied of them.
The denial or negation varies. It begins by moving on to other manifestations and also to higher manifestations. These are affirmations in reality, thought, and speech. For example, moving on from vestiges, God is found mirrored in the soul’s operations of memory, intelligence, and choice. These higher affirmations, which imply negations or limitations of their priors, will themselves be negated in the same way when we get at last to the names and being of God as Ipsum Esse (Being itself) and Ipsum Bonum (Good itself). This kind of negation is by the mind’s progress up the six steps of its journey. This “supra,” or going above, is a negation which produces affirmations.
At the highest affirmative level, which Bonaventure explored in Books V and VI, each affirmation produces a countering negation: a contradiction or the coincidence of opposites. Here too we are still thinking and speaking. However, the extreme contradiction, the Incarnation, pushes us out of this process of affirmation and negation, and of negation by affirmation. “Finally, in the sixth stage, our mind reaches that point where it contemplates in the First and Supreme Principle and in the ‘mediator of God and men’, Jesus Christ, those things whose likenesses can in no way be found in creatures and which surpass all penetration by the human intellect—when the mind has done all this, it must still, in beholding these things, transcend and pass over (transcendat et transeat) not only this sense world but even itself (semetipsam).”
At this point the negation becomes total: “leave behind your senses and intellectual activities, sensible and invisible things, all nonbeing and being.” Here is “Trinitas, superessentialis et superdeus.” Here at the Epekeina, the Beyond, there is the highest “supra”: silence. There “New, absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of theology are hidden in the superluminous darkness of a silence teaching secretly.”
When writing in a previous meditation about the passages quoted from the Mystical Theology , I said “although Bonaventure did not know this the quotations carry the theology of the great pagan philosopher – theologians: Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and the last of the ‘successors’ of Plato at his third Academy in Athens, Damascius.” It is precisely because they are all needed to enable the Christianizing of Neoplatonism by Dionysius that he gathers in so many. When the Cherubim look down at the Mercy Seat Christianity appears as an extreme encompassing which passes beyond what any of the great Neoplatonic systems alone can embrace. Their work is bridging the extremes from the Ineffable to matter, but Dionysius needs what all can give. The subtle philosophical analysis and laborious precise philology of great scholars: Salvatore Lilla, John Dillon, Werner Beierwaltes, Cristina D’Ancona, H.D. Saffrey, Y. D’Andia, Stanislas Breton, Andrew Louth, Jean Trouillard, Carlos Steel, Stephen Gersh, Paul Rorem, Istvan Perczel, Timothy Riggs, David Butorac, Sarah Wear, and several more, have gone into sorting out what each contributes. I cannot detail this here.
There is a consensus about some of what this Christianizing requires. First is: a) both a more negative theology than that of Proclus. This brings in the Ineffable God beyond the One at which Iamblichus and Damascius point: “transcending yourself and all things.” And b) there is with it a positive Trinitarian emanation within God. Thus, the Henad / Gods of Proclus, the self-giving activity of the One of Plotinus, and God as the “to be” of Porphyry are drawn in: “Everything shines forth and fills to overflowing invisible intellects with the splendors of invisible goods that surpass all good.” c) Third, from Plato’s Parmenides , the One Non-Being and the One-Being (the Plotinian Intellect) come together. Thus, being & non being, knowing & ignorance are surpassed: “in this state of unknowing be restored, insofar as is possible, to unity with him who is above all essence and knowledge.” d) The Unresolved contradiction to which these opposed necessities bring us is most striking in Damascius, and Dionysius probably found it there: “a darkness which is super-resplendent” & the “superessential beam of the divine darkness.” e) As a result the greatest came to silence: “silence teaching secretly in the utmost obscurity which is above all manifestation.” That this is crucial for Bonaventure is clear.
The Itinerarium starts with peace: I invoke the Father “through his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, that … he may enlighten the eyes of our soul to guide our feet in the way of that peace which surpasses all understanding; which peace our Lord Jesus Christ proclaimed …” With Book VII we seem to have arrived at what we set out for: “We have passed through contemplations that are like the six steps of the true Solomon's throne, by which we arrive at peace, where the true man of peace rests in a peacemaking mentality as in the interior Jerusalem.” (VII, 1) However, then, except for statements of what must be done so that we can pass over to rest, there is nothing more about peace.
We can contrast this to Augustine’s Confessions, also an itinerarium seeking rest for the restless heart. Its final Book (Thirteen) brings us to the interpenetration of the Divine and the human by which they share the rest of the Sabbath. The Divine and the human mutually establish one another for Augustine by their reciprocal mirroring. In contrast, the human self which might possess peace has been passed beyond for Bonaventure along with the being of the God who might mirror it. Bonaventure tells us that the mind “must … transcend and pass over (transcendat et transeat) not only this sense world but even itself (semetipsam).” Again, he says “all intellectual activities must be left behind and the height of our affection (apex affectus) must be totally transferred and transformed into God (totus transferatur et transformetur in Deum).” Then he quotes Dionysius. The Areopagite makes clear that this into God is a passage beyond “all nonbeing and being”: “leave behind your senses and intellectual activities, sensible and invisible things, all nonbeing and being (omne non ens et ens).
Dionysius developed the logic of “nec non,” double negation. “Super” or “supra” belongs to this and is the opposite of “super” in “Superman.” It is not the expansion or extension of the same but the contrary of that. The given is denied, and the denied is negated, to bring us to the Beyond. That from which we begin: esse, deity, manifestation, splendor, good is negated. God’s esse, deity, manifestation, splendor, good are not as we know them nor are they as we are constructed to know. But then this negation is itself negated to give that from which we began but in an entirely new form, one which includes its opposite. “Learned Ignorance” is an example. The quotation from Dionysius is full of forms of that: “superluminous darkness of a silence teaching secretly,” “a darkness which is super-resplendent,” “superessential beam of the divine darkness.” Inclusive opposition or embracing self-contradiction is appropriate to God and to what will unite us to God. This Bonaventure taught repeatedly in Books V & VI.Bonaventure gives us a strong sampling of the Dionysian negative theology, e.g. “leaving behind all things and freed from all things.” Let us accept that in it Dionysius is genuinely following the St Paul whose sermon declaring the “Unknown God,” worshipped by the Athenians is the occasion of his conversion. In that case, neither of these extreme explanations will do. After all Paul quotes from the Hellenic poets in support of his message. He presupposes a truth common to him and his pagan audience, known independently of Christian revelation, one of which he speaks similarly in the first chapter of Romans. Along this line, Charles Stang suggests: “Might our author, steeped in Neoplatonism as he surely is, be taking on the role of a convert of St Paul precisely to make the point that the riches of Neoplatonism do not constitute ‘foreign divinities’ (Acts 17, 18) but rather an incipient faith?” In the conclusion of his article, Stang brings Dionysius’ use of a pseudonym into the content, just as I think we should: “Our pseudonymous author offers an account of what it is to be properly human in relation to God—namely, no longer an ‘I’, neither yourself nor someone else, because you are now both yourself and Christ. And, in the very telling, he performs an exercise aiming to render his own self cleft open, split, doubled and thereby deified.” [Charles M. Stang, “Dionysius, Paul and the Significance of the Pseudonym,” Modern Theology 24 (2009): 13 & 23.]
This is not incompatible with the notion that as a monk Bishop of Athens, taking Dionysius as his name in religion, he adopts the teaching of the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens as part of Athens’ spiritual heritage. In any case, like his approximate contemporary, Boethius, Dionysius seems to assume what many in late Antiquity did: there is one truth and diverse means by which we come to it. We shall proceed along that line of thought in tomorrow’s meditation.
We shall approach this through a series of questions. The first is one we have already asked: Why after the introduction is the peace supposed to be described in this Book never mentioned again? This question leads to the next: What is the theology governing the quotations from the Mystical Theology? This philosophical theology is central for Bonaventure’s mysticism, although he transforms it. What do they derive from their pagan sources? How does placing the Platonic theology within Dionysius’ work transform it? Again how does placing Dionysius in Bonaventure’s text here change it? Finally, what does this continuity and difference between pagan and Christian, Greek Patristic and Medieval Latin tell us about philosophy, theology, and Christianity? These questions we shall consider this week.
“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. …
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
The Little Gidding is the last of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets.
“The end is where we start from”.
Philosophically this is merely a statement from Aristotle’s analysis of causality. What acts to bring form or change to what can receive them is the end sought, the goal desired. The Neoplatonists restored Plato’s Good as the source of being and knowing. They insisted that the Good moved as a beginning as well as an end. So Bonaventure the Dionysian Proclean taught that the Good is self-diffusive. The Platonic Good is self-moving and out of that inherent activity it moves all else in all modes: the divine self-diffusion is natural and voluntary, free and necessary, given and owed. Movement from both ends, so to speak, is conceivable. Aristotelian Neoplatonists like Thomas Aquinas spent much labour on working this out. Bonaventure seems not to have been much concerned with this reconciliation and we shall follow him in this unconcern now. However, as we take the last step in our Itinerarium, and move from the six days of labour to the mystical rest of the Sabbath, a question arises.
The union with the First, God as the One or the Good, we call mystical, is not a special experience. Rather it is the basis of our existence. Experiencing the union apart from our living our lives out of it is special, but the reality which makes the experience possible is not. In his Exposition of the Divine Names of Dionysius, and at the beginning of his Summa theologiae, Aquinas outlines the ontological structure. It is 1) remaining (“all things are contained in God, in Deo continentur omnia),” In De divinis nominibus, cap. 13, l. 3), 2 going-out, exitus, 3)return, reditus, “all things are converted to God, ad Deum convertuntur omnia),” ibid.); a circle, by which all things come out from and return back to their source.
Bonaventure will know at least one itinerarium which names at the beginning the end which it seeks. Augustine’s Confessions starts with rest for the restless heart: “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” Thirteen books later, like Bonaventure’s Itinerarium, it arrives at the Sabbath rest. At the end of the journey, humans know and love by the Holy Spirit of God, and God knows, loves, works, and rests in the human: “The seventh day has no evening and has no ending. You sanctified it to abide everlastingly. After your ‘very good’ works, which you made while remaining yourself in repose, you ‘rested the seventh day’ (Gen. 2: 2–3). This utterance in your book foretells for us that after our works which, because they are your gift to us, are very good, we also may rest in you for the sabbath of eternal life.” ““There also you will rest in us, just as now you work in us. Your rest will be through us, just as now your works are done through us.” Peace does the same in Bonaventure’s Itinerarium.
It begun: “I invoke the Father “through his Son , our Lord Jesus Christ, that by the intercession of the most holy Virgin Mary, the mother of the same God and Lord, Jesus Christ, and through the intercession of blessed Francis, our leader and father, he may enlighten the eyes of our soul to guide our feet in the way of that peace which surpasses all understanding; which peace our Lord Jesus Christ proclaimed and gave to us; of this our father Francis preached again; at the beginning and end of every sermon he announced peace; in every greeting he wished for peace; in every contemplation he sighed for ecstatic peace—like a citizen of that Jerusalem of which that Man of Peace, who was peaceable with those who hated peace, Pray for the things that belong to the peace of Jerusalem.” The first chapter of the last Book begins: “We have, therefore, passed through these six considerations . They are like the six steps of the true Solomon's throne, by which we arrive
at peace, where the true man of peace rests in a peaceful mind as in the interior Jerusalem.” But then we read no more of peace. Why?
Both downward contemplations, and the doctrine itself, are the completion of series of theological contradictions, or coincidences of opposites, which are inherent in the Essence of God and in the Personal Emanations producing the Trinity. The God-Man is the extremity of theological contradiction and juxtaposition of opposites, and thus Deus – Homo reveals the Incomprehensible God. That is to say, God is made known and is also known as Incomprehensible.
So far as the duality of Intellect is productive of perspective and opposition (as symbolized in the Cherubim facing one another across the Mercy Seat), and of contradiction, Intellect points to a prior origin of these Illuminations. This prior is manifest when, out of Dionysius (and Proclus), Bonaventure characterizes the Good as Self-diffusive. Ultimately, the Self-diffusive Good is God. To be supremely Self-diffusive Good, as God must be, Self-diffusive Good generates the emanations within Divinity (the Trinity) and those from it (the work of Creation and Reparation). Book VI, proceeding from the vision of the Cherub who gazes on Good Itself, imposes the priority of The Self-diffusive Good on our minds and from its maximal self-diffusion we are drawn a second time to the Mercy Seat, the God-Man.
If the first look down at the God –Man brings us back to the Incomprehensible encompassing which God is, the second downward look brings us to the “wonderful exaltation” of the human. The icon here is not the Babe in the Manger. In contrast the icon is Adam restored as Image of God. Jesus Christ as the Second Adam (Romans 5, 14 & I Corinthians 15, 45-49) restores the integrity of Humanity and the perfection of Creation. Through the Deus-Homo, we return to Eden and the sixth day of creation: “when, as if on the sixth day of creation, it sees the human made to the image of God.”
Properly our minds know God in all things, and know all things in the eternal reasons of God. Recollect Bonaventure’s statement in Book III: “When the mind considers itself, it rises through itself as through a mirror to the contemplation of the Blessed Trinity” (III, 5). Professor Etienne Gilson judged: “St Bonaventure never conceived any other ideal of knowledge than the recovery for fallen man of something of the knowledge of Adam.” (The Philosophy of St Bonaventure [Cluny, 2020], p. 366, see 316.) Christ as the Deus –Homo is the medium of recreation: “So our soul could not be perfectly lifted up from these things of sense to see itself and the Eternal Truth in itself unless Truth, assuming human nature in Christ, had become a ladder, restoring the first ladder that had been broken in Adam.” (IV, 2).
Crucially, the result is cosmic: “When our mind contemplates in Christ the Son of God, who is the image of the invisible God by nature, our humanity so wonderfully exalted, so ineffably united, when at the same time it sees united the first and the last, the highest and the lowest, the circumference and the center, ‘the Alpha and the Omega’ (Apocalypse 1, 8), the caused and the cause, the Creator and the creature, i.e., ‘the book written within and without’ (Apocalypse 5, 1; Ezekiel 2, 9), it now reaches something perfect.” Nowadays when we look down at the helpless infant in the manger, preachers exhort us to see what God is for us in human poverty, desolation, and weakness. Bonaventure would have us see something close to the opposite of this.
Yes, as we learned yesterday, in Jesus Christ, the Mercy Seat, “the most actual [is joined] with the one who suffered supremely and died, the most perfect and immense [is joined] with the lowly.” However, what is wondered at and adored is the two together: “the First and the Last.” The Divine Infinity Incarnate is not a falling down. The Incarnation is “not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by the assumption of the Manhood into God.” God made flesh is not to be pitied. That would be blasphemy (as Robert Crouse denounced it). In consequence, we see the Infinite Power to save here. In the reality of the Deus – Homo humanity does, and in us by our identification with it, we can do and do do what we were made to do. The creation is made fresh again. We arrive at completion, at perfection. Only by having fulfilled our cosmic role in the six days of work, can we pass to the seventh day of Rest. Of this rest as beginning and end, we shall speak to conclude our Meditations.
C.S. Lewis in what I regard as his most useful book, Reflections on the Psalms, explains why Psalm 110 is set for Christmas in the liturgies of the Western Church. I hope the foregoing will have made what on the face of it is puzzling, evident.
Above all what we gather is to see God and to come to God in Advent and Christmas, in the Incarnation. Western Christianity shifted its focus in early Modernity and that shift has become increasingly narrow and exclusive since then. There is almost nothing of the theological orientation of preModern Christianity left. The new perspective is so total that we do not even notice the degree to which in it God has retreated to the background. In contrast, with Bonaventure God reappears. God is mirrored in all the interlocking mirrors by which we have travelled. Paradoxically, however, this is the appearance, the theophany, of the Incomprehensible.
Today’s text is itself a gathering from the Divine self-contradictions, the theological coincidences of opposites of the previous parts of Books V & VI. Our journey has progressed in these Books through setting up and moving through them. You will recollect “the divine Being is both first and last, eternal and most present, utterly simple and the greatest or boundless, totally present everywhere and nowhere contained.” These are the contradictions inherent to the Essence of God which we developed step by step in Book V when following the gaze of the Cherubim who sees Ipsum Esse when he looks toward the eternal “invisibilia” of God. Now the Cherubim whose mirroring of God has shined forth as these amazing embraces of opposites is urged to look down at the Mercy Seat, the symbol of Jesus Christ, over which he shadows. There also the Cherub will see opposites drawn together. Divine – Human life is lived there as contradiction.
In the God – Human “there is joined the First Principle with the last, God with man, who was formed on the sixth day [the last day of creation]; the eternal is joined with temporal man, born of the Virgin in the fullness of time, the most simple with the most composite, the most actual with the one who suffered supremely and died [actuality is the opposite of the passivity of suffering], the most perfect and immense with the lowly [observe in the Merode Altarpiece how Mary is seated], the supreme and all-inclusive one with a composite individual [a particular] distinct from others, that is, the man Jesus Christ.”
The key to a change of mind by us is to see that the extreme opposites can be united in Jesus Christ because this opposition, this internal contradiction, this otherness within the identity, is God’s. Jesus Christ came “that they may know you, the only true God,” and to join us into the ceaselessly dynamic life of God.
This is the Incarnation as described in the old “Creed of St Athanasius”: “Licet Deus sit et homo, non duo tamen, sed unus est Christus. Unus autem non conversione divinitatis in carnem, sed assumptione humanitatis in Deum (Although he is God and Man; yet he is not two, but one Christ. One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by assumption of the Manhood into God.)”
Aquinas comments: “The goal of this science to which we should advance will be that in knowing the causes of things we do not wonder about their effects. … This science is speculative and free. It is not a human possession but a divine one. … Its goal is the first and universal causes of things, about which it also makes investigations and establishes the truth. By the knowledge of these it reaches this goal, namely, that there should be no wonder because the causes of things are known.” Wonder is the right starting point, but the goal is “no wonder.” Evidently Bonaventure is up to something very different.
Bonaventure keeps pushing us to ever greater degrees of wonder and evidently not so that we can move on from wonder. His aim is made clear here. He wants to draw us into wondering contemplation as our perpetual state. We are to be suspended in wonder. He begins with how this can be: knowledge is not the same as comprehension. Theology, knowledge of God, is endless because knowledge of God cannot be comprehension. We can and must know God. Bonaventure has shown us over and over again that the knowledge of God is the basis of all other completed knowing. Ipsum Esse is that from which, in which, and to which knowledge of every particular comes out, stands and arrives. Ipsum Bonum is the basis of all desire. Ipsum Bonum, the good self-diffusing so as to be communicated to all, is that from which, in which, and to which desire of every particular comes out, stands and arrives. Ipsum Esse and Ipsum Bonum comprehend all. Ipsum Esse and Ipsum Bonum are known and desired in all and are themselves never comprehended by us. Knowing by ever greater degrees of wonder is the continual manifestation of the character of our journey, of its progress, of its success and of its limits. Suspension is one of the names of this.
Bonaventure’s means for inducing theological wonder in a knowing which cannot comprehend what it knows is inherent contradiction, or self-generated coincidence of opposites: “supreme communicability with a character proper to each Person, supreme consubstantiality with plurality of hypostases, supreme identity of nature side by side with distinct Personality, supreme coequality with order, supreme coeternity with emanation, supreme mutual intimacy together with emanation of different Persons.” The kind of contradiction which would turn reason, and those who limit knowing by the rational, against Divinity described like this, is embraced as the way up to the suspension, or “excess,” which is our goal. “Excess” and “transgression,” terms well known among the Postmoderns opposing the rational metaphysics they judge constitutes Modernity, are common places of the Bonaventurian Itinerarium.
In Books V & VI, we are contemplating God as mirrored in intellects above our minds, specifically His likeness in two Cherubim of Glory. In these two Books we discover that, with Bonaventure, as with Neoplatonists generally (but in different ways), Intellect, although absolutely necessary to the essence of God, and the way to God, is not itself final. The duality of Intellect as well as Intellect’s self-opposition in these two Books brings this out. Restless opposition is so deeply embedded in the nature of Intellect that, as we saw in Book V, concepts internally generate their contraries—they are not imposed from outside.
Intellect’s duality leads to theology as the coincidence of opposites. The Itinerarium of mind becomes passage by ever more extreme contradictions until from God as One and God as Three it arrives at God as One AND Three (the Trinity). From this the journey goes on to God as Infinite AND Finite (the Incarnation). The passage we are meditating on today forces us to recognize the determining and governing Prior pushing this progress, the Good. The ceaseless generosity of the Good, its activity as self-diffusion, is First; the Divine Persons and Creation, follow. Dionysius made clear that the self-diffusive Good takes us back to the Sun as the goal of the ascent from the Cave in Plato’s Republic. In the analogy of the Sun there, the shining of the Good is the source of being and knowing. There are steps in Plotinus, Porphyry, and Augustine, Proclus, Dionysius, and Philip the Chancellor in between, but Bonaventure is an heir of the tradition in which the Good is the providential source and consummating goal.
The prominence Bonaventure gives to the juxtaposition and mutuality of opposites at the highest level of theology: “natural and voluntary,” “free and necessary,” “given and owed” hides the logic distinguishing and connecting these moments. It is, as I indicated when treating Aquinas, the necessity by which the voluntary comes into being. The first “emanation,” or “procession,” the exitus which is the basis of all the others, is the coming forth of the Son, that is the expressed LOGOS, Word or Knowledge from the Father. It is necessary—God must know—and natural—it is a begetting, and is called, “generation.” The Father and the Son are opposed as what gives and what receives. These are opposite modes of the communicated Essence. The Son receives his being as infinite Essence from the giving Father. In this reciprocal difference of giving and receiving, they are mutually opposed and mutually united. The projection of the one toward and into the other out of difference we call “love.” This “emanation,” or “procession” by love, the second exitus, is a natural and necessary relation of these two knowing “Persons.” It is called the “spiration” (breathing) of Spirit, specifically the “Holy Spirit.”
Thus the Divine Essence is given and received within itself by Knowledge and Love, and, by these, its infinite Power acts. The Trinity as a whole acts in the third “emanation,” “procession,” or exitus, Creation. In it, God acts outside himself by the knowledge and love which are God’s personality, that is to say God acts voluntarily. Voluntary emanation by a willing Knowledge and a knowing Love is a consequence of the necessary emanations.
God must be diffusive in the way which belongs to God, that is in the best way, the way “that than which no better can be thought.” This cannot be the voluntary diffusion which is creation, i.e. the diffusion which presupposes knowledge and love, because a diffusion of equal and infinite substances equal to the giver is higher than a diffusion of what is less than itself. A diffusion “in which the diffusing good communicates to another his entire substance and nature” is better and prior. “Therefore, there must be eternally in the highest good an active and consubstantial production, and a hypostasis as noble as the producer, as is the case with one who produces by way of generation [Father begets His Son, the Word of Knowledge] and of breathing [‘spiration’ of Love from the Father and the Son].” “The highest communicability of the good,” that is, the Good as what is most completely communicated and what things have in common is the root of both the Trinitarian God and what Divinity creates.
The divine self-diffusion is natural and voluntary, free and necessary, given and owed.
Because of the immediately apparent religious importance of what is in fact a rigorous deduction (like those of Bonaventure’s model Anselm) theological, scholarly, and translation issues and controversies are piled high on these short passages. Some of our texts take pains to hide the questions. Regrettably, the form of our meditations does not permit our going through the issues or the vast multilingual scholarship. Nonetheless, they have all been confronted. Interpreting Bonaventure I have followed the same principle I use with Augustine: I believe he is doing what he says he is doing even when it is against our current expectations and demands.
Bonaventure is one with Aquinas, who on the emanation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is equally contrary to our current expectations and demands. In our text, the necessity of goodness determines personality. The greatest of the scholars on Bonaventure’s authoritative and fundamental idea taken from Dionysius, mediating Proclus, is as clear as Dionysius is himself: the infinite giving of the immense Divine fullness is without calculation and without the freedom identified with choice. Free interactions between divine and human individuals are not the basis of all else. Bonaventure’s God is not shaped to match late modern models of individual freedom. Bonaventure’s concerns are not those of present day theology. Indeed, they tend in the opposite direction.
What determines for him? What he calls two “modes” or “grades” of contemplating (contemplandi) the “invisible and eternal things of God” (V, 1). The “invisibilia et aeterna” are exactly what St Paul in Romans 1, 20 says can be known from the creation. Consequently, as with earlier parts of theItinerarium, philosophy does not seem to be excluded, when we turn our mirrors above ourselves. The first of these modes concerns the “essential attributes of God (essentialia Dei)”; the second concerns “what is proper to the Persons (propria personarum).” (V, 1) It is crucial to note from the beginning that, like the Cherubim on the Ark, the objects of these modes are opposed to each other. The Essence of God, absolute Unity which one mode sees, opposes the multiplicity, the Three subsistent Persons, which the other mode sees. In Book VI we raise our eyes to the Good “so that the second Cherubim may be placed across from the first” (VI,1).The Christian God is what each of the two Cherubim see joined together. The Trinity, one and three, is a coincidence of opposites, an eternal contradiction. This is what Intellect contemplates when each of the two Cherubim includes in his own vision what is seen by the other.
Both of these two modes mirror in our souls the mirroring of the invisible and eternal God in angelic Intellect above. Our minds have what they see specified by Sacred Scripture and authoritative theology. Our First mode “looks chiefly to the Old Testament which most of all proclaims the unity of the Essence.” It has its Greek theologian in the Platonic tradition in St John Damascene (7thcentury) “who, following Moses [in Exodus 3.14], said that ‘He Who Is’ is God’s primary name.” (V, 2) The Cherubim of this Intellectual mode contemplates God as “ipsum esse,” subsistent Being Itself.
Our Second mode looks chiefly to the New Testament which determines the plurality of Persons, by commanding to baptize “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” It has as its Greek theologian in the Platonic tradition St Dionysius the Areopagite, regarded by Bonaventure as Paul’s convert and the medium of his mystical vision. Dionysius, “following Christ, says that good is God’s primary name.” (V, 2) The deep problems and possibilities—the latter all exploited by Bonaventure, --come when this “ipsum bonum” is specified: “good is said to be self-diffusive (bonum dicitur diffusivum sui).” (VI, 2) Universally at this point Dionysius is cited. As I have said, a large number of questions and problems then occur. We shall deal with some today.
I start from the easiest: these words “good is said to be self-diffusive,” are quoted over and over again in the Latin West but are not actually to be found in the texts we have from Dionysius. In fact, “bonum dicitur diffusivum sui” is a formula of Philip the Chancellor (c. 1160-1236). Archdeacon of Noyon, theologian, poet, and composer, he was Chancellor of Notre Dame de Paris from 1217 until his death. His greatest work as a theologian was theSumma de Bono. His formula, though not the exact words of Dionysius, is an accurate condensation of the Dionysian doctrine in the places cited,On the Heavenly Hierarchy, IV, I,On the Divine Names, IV, I, and elsewhere. The Good is an immense fullness which gives ceaselessly in accord with its nature. Its infinite giving, or self-diffusion, extends all the way out to sensible things, creating, sustaining, and enriching them. By the necessity goodness imposes on Providence, everything is given as much as it is capable of receiving. What is the problem with that?
If you are a Platonist without qualification, “simpliciter,” nothing. God can only to good and in doing good is free because Divinity thus conforms to and realizes its own nature. Socrates argues in the Republic (379b):“the good is not the cause of all things, but of the good only? Assuredly. Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men.” The Platonic doctrine that God does only good descends to Dionysius via Proclus. The substance of divinity is goodness, by that nature it exercises providence towards what is below it, but this does not compromise its transcendence (see Proclus, Elements of Theology, propositions 12 & 13, 121 & 122).
For a spiritual being to act according to its nature is freedom. As long as the model of freedom does not come from rationally calculating and choosing individuals, which it clearly does not generally for ancients and mediaevals in this tradition, no alarms sound. However, this freedom is the freedom of spiritual beings. Dionysius was not always careful to make this indubitably clear. At Matthew 5, 45, the Father’s good providence is compared by Christ to the shining of the sun and the rain: “He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” At On the Divine Names IV, 1, Dionysius compares God’s not exercising reasoning and choice to the sun, which just by its existence gives light (PG 693B). Aquinas feels obliged to comment: that the sun does not have intellect or will and so does not act through them, however, “the Divine esse (being) is to will and to understand itself, and therefore what it does through its own being it does through intellect and will.”
This is doubtless necessarily said and Bonaventure would agree. The necessity of goodness in God is not a physical necessity. Nonetheless, it is prior to Intellect and Love in God. They are Trinitarian Persons and Bonaventure argues that they come forth according to the necessity of self-diffusive goodness. On this we shall think further in the next Meditation.
However, Plato does exactly what Parmenides says cannot be done, he unites immovable Being with its opposite the ceaselessly moving pure flux of Heracleitus. In the Cratylus, Socrates reports: “Heracleitus says that all things move and nothing remains still, and he likens the universe to the current of a river, saying that you cannot step twice into the same stream.”[402b] In the Theaetetus, Socrates explains becoming: “Nothing is one and invariable, and you could not rightly ascribe any quality whatsoever to anything, but, if you call it large, it will also appear to be small, and light if you call it heavy, and everything else in the same way, since nothing whatever is one, either a particular thing or of a particular quality; but it is out of movement and motion and mixture with one another that all those things become which we wrongly say ‘are’—wrongly, because nothing ever is, but is always becoming. And on this subject all the philosophers, except Parmenides, may be marshalled in one line—Protagoras and Heracleitus and Empedocles.”[152d-e] The Platonic meeting of Being and Becoming appears here in the quotation from the Consolation of Boethius repeating Plato’s Timaeus: “while remaining stable, it gives motion to all things.”
Evidently then Platonic philosophy must embrace opposition and contradiction. Bonaventure celebrates, marvels at, and elevates us by finding Being to be self-contradictory. This emerges in a further step of his meditation on Ipsum Esse, Being Itself. 1) First, he separated Simple Esse from nonbeing and conditioned being (V, 3), and, then 2) deduced its predicates: “primary, eternal, utterly simple, most actual, most perfect, and supremely one.” (V, 5) These are more or less all contained in the passage fromThe Way of Truth quoted above. 3) Third, Bonaventure showed how the predicates imply one another, e.g. “since it is first and eternal, it is not made from other things; therefore it is utterly simple” (V, 6). 4) He now shows how they produce their opposites. This is not showing that the opposites are there, so to speak, confronting one another. Rather, he makes them emerge from each other. This belongs to what I call the self-differentiation of simple Esse, a logic I maintain is also Aquinas’ and which makes Esse ultimately Trinitarian and Incarnational in the Summa theologiae, just as it is in the Itinerarium.
How does Bonaventure do this? The inference must be worked out in each case, but there are logical figures used repeatedly. They are received from the Neoplatonic tradition including Aristotle. The self-relation of simple Esse has a result: “Because it is first, it does all things for itself; and therefore, it must necessarily be the ultimate end.” Aristotle contributes the axiom that division weakens, and unity strengthens, so the simplest is the greatest in power: “the more power is unified, so much the more it is infinite.” From Plotinus via Dionysius the character of the simple One unites transcendence with immanence. Because the Simple is not itself a thing of some kind (it would then be something, and therefore two: itself and what it is), it can be in and the power, being, and cause of everything else: “It is all-inclusive precisely because it is supremely one. For what is supremely one is the universal principle of all multiplicity.” Borrowing from Augustine, Bonaventure works with the analysis of time and eternity as forms of the present: “It is most present precisely because it is eternal. For because it is eternal, it does not flow from another, nor lack anything on its own part, nor pass from one state into another; therefore, it has neither past nor future, but only present being.” Each of the juxtapositions of the opposed has a reason.
What, however, is the purpose of the enterprise as a whole? Two results are evident. First and overall, the ground of the inclusive love of God is shown; Being Itself generates the unity of opposites. They pass into one another. Second, knowledge of God progresses into the deepest mysteries and yet God is not comprehended. Indeed, God becomes more and more incomprehensible.
Bonaventure’s method for most of this journey is relentless, ever deepening meditation. Chapter V is a meditation on ipsum esse, Being Itself. Crucially, exactly like Aquinas’ meditation on the same name of God in Summa theologiae, I.3 “On the Simplicity of God,” what appears as a simple idea turns out to be an internal relation and self-differentiation. “Being itself (ipsum esse) ... exists through itself (per se) and by itself (a se)”—turning the rhetorical question into an affirmation. The prepositions “per” and “a”, “through” and “by” are tiny but nonetheless with huge implications. What seems simply to be the fact of being is a self-relation mediated through and by itself. There is something going on in that infinitive to be (esse). This was already apparent at its origins as a name for God with Porphyry. It was then a “telescoping,” a pushing together of levels, a concentration of activities. This identity—ipsum esse is the maximum identity / simplicity—turns out in Aquinas to include difference as the self-differentiation or self-othering which are the Trinity and the Incarnation. Bonaventure thinks the same but brings out the otherness in the identity in an alternative way.
The first step in this ever deeping meditation by which Being Itself opens up resembles, probably intentionally, a deduction in the second half of Book III of The Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius. Later we shall find a quotation from the same part of the Consolation (III, meter 9) and at prose 12. The deduction and the idea quoted are identified with the “well rounded sphere” of Parmenides. In consequence, I am identifying V, 5&6 with the great Pre-Socratic philosopher. This is more appropriate than Bonaventure knew. Parmenides is the author of the first philosophical itinerarium, his “The Way of Truth.” A sample of the deductions in Consolations III, will suffice: “‘Well, we consider happiness something good, don’t we?’‘ Yes, the supreme good.’ ‘… Absolute sufficiency is judged to be the same as happiness, and so too are power, reverence, glory and pleasure. …’ … ‘It is clear that the other properties are classed under good. …’ ‘The chief point and reason, therefore, for seeking all things is goodness. …’ ‘Goodness is the chief point upon which the pursuit of everything hinges and by which it is motivated. …’ ‘We are agreed that the reason for desiring things is happiness. So that it is patently obvious that the good itself and happiness are identical.’ ‘But we have shown that God and happiness are one and the same thing.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘We may safely conclude, then, that God is to be found in goodness itself and nowhere else’.” What we have been through in Itinerarium III and IV comes to mind when we read this, as well as what is above here.
The remainder of the Itinerarium will seem strange and difficult because of its deduction of contradictions and the movement of thought by means of them. However, if we proceed slowly step by step, taking the time and intellectual imagination to enter into an unusual world, all will be well.
The first step is to think the pure and simple per se (through itself alone) character of ipsum esse, Being as self-sufficient. We let that thinking move so that our mind is carried to predicates of very Being Itself: primary, eternal, utterly simple, most actual, most perfect and supremely one. It will be important for each of us to perform the exercise of thinking each move in V, 5 above, because the next step follows from it.
Next we must get inside each of these ideas so as to see what they infer and what is impossible. If we rise to Intellect here we will be able to see that “these things are so certain that their opposites cannot be conceived” and that “one of these necessarily implies the other.” What is simply itself is first in its series because it does not depend on another which comes before it and out of which or by which it is made. Not being made makes it eternal. Thought of as first and eternal without composition out of or by something else, it is again seen to be simple. To be mixed with something else is to be made potential to some external otherness. Denying potentiality in Simple Being, thought infers the complete actuality of what is fully itself. Imagination, patience, taking time will do the required work for this stage of our journey.
Today I shall look with you at V, 4 continuing the reflections on perspective and mirroring from “Itinerarium 36: Cherubim of glory stand over the ark overshadowing the Mercy Seat.”
Yesterday, considering the two Cherubim into whose Intellectual visions we have now entered, we were impressed with how Bonaventure holds to the Neoplatonic judgment that Intellect is dual and cannot be ultimate. There is a simple One -Good beyond it. Equally impressive is the difference between the two Cherubic visions. They both gaze fixedly at the invisible and eternal things of God. They both see the Trinitarian God but one sees Being and the unity of the Divine Essence, the other sees Good and the diffusion of the three Persons (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). The visions are contradictory. When they look at each other and each gaze includes its opposite, the two sides come together, but they come together as the coincidence of opposites or as contradiction. In an original, protracted, and stunning way, Bonaventure will multiply, intensify, and advance the contradictions within each vision, between them, and beyond them. Contradiction is the way forward. We shall need to think about why this is. However, before proceeding in this way, Bonaventure requires us to reflect on our capacity and incapacity for knowledge which emerges in our confusion between light and darkness. We see the greatest light as darkness. The most eminent philosophers from Plato and Aristotle, to Proclus and Dionysius and Martin Heidegger have thought deeply about this. Here Bonaventure brings Aristotle and Dionysius together on it.
The problems with human knowing are many and profound. One of which we are especially aware at present is destroying our political societies and other institutions. A result of the trinitarian union of knowledge and love in God and the soul is that we can see what we want to see and refuse to know what we dislike. Of course, the largest money makers at present are organizing the information we receive so as to exploit this potential for evil. They arrange for you te see only what you want to see.
This is a matter of how we turn our mirrors. We are responsible for that. There us another factor. Bonaventure warned at the beginning that, unless the mirror which is our mind was cleaned and polished, it might be destroyed by the flashes of light striking it. As we learned in Book IV, purification is required for illumination. We learned earlier that the sciences and disciplines of perception and thought strengthen the mind for advance towards God known in the great universals: happiness, beauty, truth, essence, eternity, power. Without purification and strengthening, our minds are as capable of the Divine Light as the eyes of bats are for the full sunshine of day. Nothingness by defect looks like Nothingness by excess. Emptiness looks like the fullness which contains everything. Pure light, which the prism shows to contain all the colours, seems to be nothing. The last thing we come to see and thank is the knowing by which our reason receives its light. Turning to it, and being lifted by it, is the converting pivot at the centre of Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine testified that God guided him in this by the writings of the Platonists. Bonaventure’s Augustinian Platonism in Book III, builds on this and advances beyond it by way of Dionysius.
Up, Overshadowing, Gazing fixedly, Looking Across, Looking Down.
It became clear at the end of Book IV that the images in the Itinerarium are as much part of the content as they are in Sacred Scriptures. In that step, our souls were required to become hierarchical by conformity to the Seraphim, whose image is the framing hierarchical structure of the work and of our journey. In accord with the Seraphic structure inwardly and outwardly, we enter the last two stages of Divine Illumination by passing into the Cherubim of glory on the Ark of the Covenant who overshadow the Mercy Seat. That is to say, looking at the outward frame and its inward significance together, we enter the twinned Intellect which Seraphic Love incorporates as the absolute necessity for love’s Perfecting Union with God.
In the Dionysian frame, the last triad: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, always “assist.” This is the old sense of “assist” as in “assist at Mass”; it means “be present.” Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones are always in the immediate Divine presence. However, because the higher contains the lower, the Cherubim are within the Seraphim as the highest of the three. Equally, Justice, the Thrones, are within Love and Intellect and depend on them.
For the Cherubim of Book VI, the last Book of the illuminations, “the Good is God's primary name.” By the self-diffusive Good which Love seeks and realizes in the Seraphim, we pass beyond illumined knowledge into union, described in Book VII. Union abandons mind because it cannot exist with self-conscious.
What does our passage into and by way of Cherubic Intellect signify? I turn to the actions of the image to start answering that question. Our mind turns Up to it. The Cherubim mutually Overshadow. Each Gazes fixedly. Then, each Looks Across to see its opposed counter vision. Then, finally, each Looks Down at the Mercy Seat.
Intellect, NOUS, is a more unified knowing than the Reason which is proper to soul. Intellect is self-sufficient activity, always moving, but always also perfect, complete. For Aristotle, soul or reason aspires to Intellect as being the self-sufficient, happy, eternal life of God. Plotinus follows Aristotle in this but with a crucially important caveat: there is a higher form of spiritual life than Intellect. The One – Good is Epikeina, beyond. Intellect shows its inferiority by its derivation from the One-Good. It is the reflection of the One-Good upon itself, and, as reflection and derived, it is two, not one.
As you can see, Bonaventure’s Cherubic Intellect resembles Plotinus’ NOUS—although certainly not by direct knowing imitation. Moreover, what moves Bonaventure cannot have come from Augustine, who is closer in this to Aristotle—Divine Being-Intellect-Love is final for Augustine. Rather, Bonaventure, like his contemporary Aquinas, is thinking within the unification of Augustine, Dionysius, and Aristotle which evolved after Anselm. That fundamentally Neoplatonic unification is manifest in complementary ways in Albert the Great, Aquinas, and Bonaventure. The overall systematic structure in all three, comes from Proclus at work through and under the high authority of Dionysius. Dionysius – Proclus are strongest in Bonaventure; Dionysius – Proclus provide the mystical conclusion of our journey in Book VII.
The Cherubic Intellect of Glory Overshadow the Mercy Seat because they are a matched pair. Each of the two Gazes fixedly. Since both “assist”; they both see the invisible and eternal things of God. Stunningly, looking at the same, they each see something radically different. One sees Being and Unity. The other sees the Good and the Three. Both Being and Good are each the highest and most proper name of God, but from different perspectives. The preservation of Perspective until Union is a mark of the deep Neoplatonism of Bonaventure, and is another way of speaking about mirroring. All is Theophany, or mirroring, of the One-Good. The mirrors reflecting into our human mirror are the perspectival visions of the invisible and eternal things of God by the Cherubim of glory.
Their visions are opposed but complementary. Therefore, they naturally move on to look across at each other and to match the other’s gaze. They know, are amazed at, and enjoy the other’s vision in a coincidence of opposites. Books V and VI both first devote themselves to the fixed Gaze of each Cherubim. Then, both move on to develop contrariety and contradiction in what each Cherubim sees. This starts the amazement, or wonder, which is magnified when each looks across at the other and brings the opposed vision into his own.
Finally both Look Down at the Mercy Seat which is the Incarnate Christ. The God-Man is the maximum of contradiction. The exercise of Cherubic dual vision prepares for looking to it, but there is no vision beyond it. What is beyond “exceeds the perspicacity of human intellect” (VII, 1). The Epikeina transcends self and all things.
The beginning is with Bonaventure’s Augustinian Trinity because how God is understood must of necessity determine everything else. As with Latin (or “Western”) Christianity after Eriugena in the 9th century generally, Augustine is placed within a Dionysian framework (here explicit and complete with the Seraphim). This produces the most creative tension within Western theology and spirituality, one we must reflect upon seriously and at length as we move further on our Itinerarium. It does not erase Augustine’s centrality. I refer you to Itinerarium 33 from which I take this mutual mirroring of God and the soul: “‘The three aspects of our soul I mean are being, knowing, willing (esse, nosse, velle). For I am and I know and I will. Knowing and willing I am. I know that I am and I will. I will to be and to know. … Let him who is capable of so doing contemplate how inseparable in life they are: one life, one mind, and one essence, yet ultimately there is distinction, for they are inseparable, yet distinct’ (Conf., 13.xi.12). Absolutely, that is, in God and as God, Being is inseparable from knowing and loving. To love and be love, God first thinks or says Himself as thought, word, idea, order, reason (LOGOS means all these). What is is lovable as goodness known.”
To grasp the importance of God as Being which thinks itself as Word and in which the uttered and the speaker unite with each other in Love, consider the alternatives. What is is unknowable, or evil, or just stuff either opposed to love or entrapping us who love and know. We are embattled or smothered aliens. The decline of Christianity generally, and of the Platonic-Aristotelian doctrinal, intellectual, aesthetic, liturgical, and spiritual centre of Christianity particularly, has had terrible consequences. It has shifted the human view of the world and self consciousness to the alternatives, especially in the former pinnacles of Western Christianity. It seems that nothing is worse for us than our tradition corrupted or forgotten.
Bonaventure’s quotation from St Bernard enables us to link the order of the Divine Trinity with the Angelic Hierarchy: “God loves in the Seraphim as charity, knows in the Cherubim as truth, is seated in the Thrones as equity, reigns in the Dominations as majesty, rules in the Principalities as principle (cause), guards in the Powers as salvation, acts in the Virtues as strength, reveals in the Archangels as light, assists in the Angels as piety.” The descending order is Love, Truthful Knowledge, Equitable Justice, Majestic Rule, Saving Power, Strong Action, Revealing Light, Dutiful Care. Therefore, Rule, Power, Action are below, and subordinate to, and contained within love and truth. Ascending there is no union or ecstasy in Love except by passage through Truthful Knowledge.
Even if the sources of Bonaventure’s theology are different—as different as Augustine and Dionysius or Plotinus and Proclus—they come to the same: will and knowledge are inseparable in what ultimately is. Great mystics, Pagan, Jewish, Christians, Islamic agree: there is no immediate passage from feeling or power to God. Further, the love by which we are one with God is not unthinking, undisciplined, amoral feeling beyond good and evil, no one passes to the flaming Seraphic unifying Love except through the duality of Cherubic Intellect. Books V and VI of the Itinerarium teach this and will lead us this way. The genius of the Rood Screen at Barton Turf holds: Loving Seraphim to the left, Contemplating Cherubim to the right as we pass to the altar and perfection.
The primal spiritual structure coming from the Mysteries: purification, illumination, perfection, gives form to both philosophical and religious ascent in the West (as well as elsewhere). Evidently, the two ascents correspond. One goes by way of the Cherubim—intellect—to the Seraphim—love. The other goes by way of illumination to perfection, the ecstatic union of the soul with the immortal divine. As with the Christian sacraments which continue or renew the Mysteries, knowing and union, although not identical, go together. The baptised “returns” the Apostles’ Creed, either personally or through their godparents. So the sacrament of Baptism is called “faith.” In Holy Communion the union with Christ at the right hand of the Father is by faith and inward vision. Aquinas wrote and believers sing: “Faith our outward sense befriending makes our inward vision clear.” What are we to make of “purification”?
Purification or purgation is understood very widely and diversely. Moses Maimonides in The Guide of the Perplexed I.34 gives as one of the five reasons why “instruction should not begin with Divine Science, but should at first be restricted to pointing out what is fitted for notice and what may be made manifest to the multitude: It has been proved that moral conduct is a preparation for intellectual progress, and that only a man whose character is pure, calm and steadfast, can attain to intellectual perfection: that is, acquire correct conceptions.” With Plotinus purification includes submission to the needs of ordered human community in the laws of the polis and moral life. This is preliminary. The good human being “will altogether separate himself, as far as possible from his lower nature and will not live the life of the good man which civic virtue requires. He will leave that behind, and choose another, the life of the gods: for it is to them, not to the good men, that we are to be made like.” (Ennead 1.2.7, 23-28) With Augustine, I judge purification includes purging fantasy and imagination in the arts and in our understanding of the natural world. Thus purification includes the disciplines of the sciences and the strengthening of mind for knowing what is universal and incorporeal. I estimate that Aquinas would agree. With Bonaventure purification employs the law of Moses and the tropological sense of Scripture, “which purifies for an upright life.”
Purification is rational discipline which is the beginning of Intellect. Love moves us to know and then carries us beyond knowledge to union. Ecstatic Perfection is at the end of a journey in which all the steps are required.
The oldest form of religion among us, extending from Neolithic times to the present, is the Mysteries. The most famous of these among the Greeks were the Eleusinian. Although secret, we now know a good deal about them. By a symbolic enactment of death and resurrection, the initiated have a great experience of life overcoming death and of union with Immortality, the primary attribute of God for the Hellenes. Since the 4th century Christians have sung (and still sing) in Greek and Latin words Homer might have prayed: Hagios O Theos, Hagios Ischyros, Hagios Athanatos (Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal), as they venerate the Cross on Good Friday. By the Mysteries the terror of death is overcome.
St Paul treats Baptism in these terms in the Epistle to the Romans. In fact, Judaism (with Philo), Christianity (with St Paul, Origen, and Clement of Alexandria), and Platonism (with Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus)—to speak only of primary founders—all represent the greatest theological and spiritual truths through language and forms taken over from the Mysteries. Probably Bonaventure’s most explicit, consistent, and authoritative source (quasi-Scriptural for him) was St Dionysius the Areopagite. Remember that for him, Dionysius was St Paul's convert on the Areopagus, the first bishop of Athens who handed on what Paul saw in the mystical elevation given at his conversion. Individuals could and did repeat them and moved from lower to higher mysteries; this too the Christians adopted.
The structure of the Mysteries was this three-fold: purification, illumination (with correlative secrets), perfection (or union). In the normative Christian sacramental pattern, initiation begins with Baptism and perfection of union is Holy Communion. Remnants of the old structure are most clear in the liturgies of Eastern Orthodoxy. Those not fully initiated are (in principle) excluded after the “liturgy of the catechumens.” Before the Creed, the sacred symbol of faith, is recited the Deacon cries “The Doors. The Doors.” They are symbolically closed so that the secret is not disclosed to the uninitiated. Plotinus has the same concern. He upholds in respect to the One “the command given in the Mysteries here below not to disclose to the uninitiated.” (Ennead VI.9,10).
Dionysius On the Celestial Hierarchy, Chapter III: What is Hierarchy, and what is the use of Hierarchy?
“Hierarchy is, in my opinion, a holy order, a state of understanding, and an activity which, as closely as possible approximates to the Divine. It is lifted up to the imitation of God in proportion to the illuminations given it.
The Beauty of God—so simple, so good, and so much the source of all perfection—is wholly free from dissimilarity. It reaches out to grant to every being, according to its capacity, a share in its own Light; and in the most divine Mysteries perfects them in accordance with the unchangeable fashioning of those who are being perfected harmoniously to Itself.
The aim of Hierarchy is the greatest possible assimilation to and union with God. It has God as leader in all understanding and action. To become like Him, so far as is possible, it intently contemplates the Divine Beauty. Also, it molds and perfects its members to be images of God in all respects, to be clear and spotless mirrors, reflecting the ray of the primordial Light, and indeed of God himself. Being mystically filled with the gift of Light, it ensures that each member passes it on generously again, according to the Divine Law, upon those below itself.
For it would be wrong for those granting initiation in the holy Mysteries, or indeed for those sacredly initiated, ever to do anything or even to exist against the sacred orderings of him who is the source of all perfection. Nor must they deviate from them if they seek to behold, as far as is allowed, the Splendor of God and to be transformed into the likeness of those Divine Intelligences.
Therefore he who speaks of Hierarchy implies a certain perfectly holy Order in the likeness of the First Divine Beauty, ministering the sacred mystery of its own illuminations in hierarchical order and wisdom, being in due measure conformed to its own Principle. For each of those who is allotted a place in the Divine Order finds his perfection in being uplifted, according to his capacity, towards the Divine Likeness; and what is still more divine, he becomes, as the Scriptures say, a ‘fellow-worker with God,’ and shows forth the Divine Activity revealed as far as possible in himself. For the holy constitution of the Hierarchy ordains that some members are purified, others purify; some members are enlightened, others enlighten; some members are perfected, others make perfect; for in this way the divine imitation will fit each one.
Inasmuch as the Divine Beatitude (to speak in human terms) is exempt from all dissimilarity, and is full of Eternal Light, perfect, in need of no perfection, purifying, illuminating, perfecting, being Himself the holy Purification, Illumination and Perfection, above purification, above light, supremely perfect, Himself the origin of perfection and the cause of every Hierarchy, He transcends in excellence all holiness.”
The parishioners of St Michael and All Angels, Barton Turf in the Norfolk countryside, have had more than 500 years to think about the structure of spirit manifest and active in the angelic hierarchy. We may suppose that many of them did and do. We could do worse than join their meditations.
The hierarchy is disposed on either side of the rood screen through which these rural people pass on the way to and from Holy Communion. Such passage as well as the sheer beauty of the paintings would draw attention and admiration. On the left side (liturgical North), the order (beginning at the door through the Screen) is Seraphim, Dominations, Virtues, Powers (in military armour) followed by two female saints. On the right side (liturgical South) the order (beginning at the door through the Screen) is Cherubim, Principalities, Thrones (carrying the scales of Justice), Archangels (in military armour), Angels, followed by St Barbara. Thus, on the one side all is subordinated to Love and on the other all is subordinated to truthful Intellect. Power, strength, majesty, rule are contained within charitable Love and high Intelligence.
We were presented with an even higher order or hierarchy in “Itinerarium 29: If God is a perfect spirit, he has memory, understanding, and will.” We read: “From memory, intelligence comes forth as its offspring, because we understand only when the likeness which is in the memory emerges at the sharp point of the intellect in the form of a word. From memory and intelligence love is breathed forth as their mutual bond. These three-the generating mind, the word and love-are in the soul as memory, understanding, and will, which are consubstantial, coequal and equally everlasting, and interpenetrate each other.”
(III, 5) Since “memory” contains all, it is sometimes named “being,” in Latin “esse,” just as understanding in the infinitive is “nosse” and will “velle”. So the Trinity is esse, nosse, velle. Recall Augustine: “The three aspects of our soul I mean are being, knowing, willing (esse, nosse, velle). For I am and I know and I will. Knowing and willing I am. I know that I am and I will. I will to be and to know. (sum enim et scio et volo: sum sciens et volens, et scio esse me et velle, et volo esse et scire). In these three, therefore, let him who is capable of so doing contemplate how inseparable in life they are: one life, one mind, and one essence, yet ultimately there is distinction, for they are inseparable, yet distinct” (Conf., 13.xi.12). Absolutely, that is in God and as God, Being is inseparable from knowing and loving. To love and be love God first thinks or says Himself as thought, word, idea, order, reason (LOGOS means all these). What is is lovable as goodness known.
To grasp what is at stake consider what it would mean about God, about what ultimately structures, determines, causes and acts if the parishioners at Barton Turf were presented with the following hierarchy. On the left side would be, in order, Dominations, Virtues, Powers (in military armour). On the right side would be, in order, Principalities, Thrones, Archangels (in military armour), Angels. Then reform the Trinity to match: Force, Power, Will. The ultimate will then be the Will to Power. Many at present substitute “The Force” for the Christian and Platonic God. They find themselves in the war of all against all which they will and make. That cannot be a city of peace, Jerusalem, indeed, it cannot be a city at all.
“Our spirit is made hierarchical so that it may continue upward to the degree that it is conformed to the heavenly Jerusalem.” Following St Dionysius the Areopagite, those who commissioned and painted the hierarchy on the Rood Screen of Barton Turf got it right. On the one side all is subordinated to Love and on the other all is subordinated to truthful Intellect. Power, strength, majesty, rule are contained within charitable Love and high Intelligence. Bonaventure will continue to lead us into conformity with this hierarchy in Books V & VI.
These senses are proper to spirit, give deep pleasure in Intellect, and descend from it into the joys and necessities of the life of physical body. In Ennead V.3 (1 &3), asking how the senses came to be, Plotinus wrote that divine Intellect contains what descends from it into soul, this includes the senses. Intellect “lacks nothing and can never lack.” “In its extension and unfolding, it is able to present succession while yet it is simultaneous; this is because it contains the cause of all as inherent to itself.” Intellect is inclusive. So the human in Intellect is not simply intellect, sense-perception being an addition made upon his entry into birth. Plotinus describes union with the One – Good in the language of erotic sensuality, just as Jews and Christians do (and here Bonaventure does) when they use the Canticle of Canticles, the poetry of the haram, to describe union with God. Sense inheres in the One and Intellect.
Plotinus’ spiritual senses came to Anselm and Bonaventure via Hippo; in the Confessions we find:
There is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God—a light, voice, odour, food, embrace of my inner man, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God. (Conf., 10.6.10) [See Martin Sastri, “The Influence of Plotinian Metaphysics in St. Augustine’s Conception of the Spiritual Senses,” Dionysius 24 (2006): 99–124.]
Augustine reappears in Anselm’s Proslogion. In Chapter 1 the seeker recalls the plenitude Adam enjoyed in Eden and asks for its restoration—what, as we saw, Bonaventure also seeks. “I set out hungry to look for You; I beseech You, Lord, do not let me depart from You fasting.” The language is both figurative and literal. In Chapter 6, God is called “summe sensibilis,” in a continuum for which the extremes are God and animals with humans in between. The continuity is possible because knowing contains perceiving although the inverse is false. The demand that integral humanity enjoy God sensibly is matched in Chapter 17 by a list of the sensible qualities of God: “You have in Yourself, Lord, in Your own ineffable manner” beauty, harmony, fragrance, flavor, softness.
The confrontation of the seeker searching for the satisfaction of every right desire and the sensible God, who, as in Chapter 1 is everywhere and is not in fact perceived even after this quest, produces utter misery. “We all lost that which, when we wish to look for it, we do not know; that which, when we look for it, we do not find; that which, when we find it, is not what we are looking for” (Cap. 18). The desperate way forward is that God relieve the seeker of himself: “Releva me de me ad te.” “Lift me up from myself.” God reveals himself when the human lifts itself, and is lifted, in prayer, which issues from despair.
We cannot deal here with Anselm’s solution, although it passes, in much more complete, fully elaborated, and extreme forms, into the Itinerarium. Instead I draw your attention to four aspects of Bonaventure here. Two I have already mentioned. 1) One is perfectionism. Spiritual movement concerns absolute certainty, complete satisfaction, the entirety of happiness and fulfilment for body, sense, mind, spirit, desire, knowing, will. 2) Two is the extremity of demand: the traveler on this journey does not to seek to get along with what will do. We must seek certainty, perfection, the highest, the infinite. Robert Crouse commenting on St Mary’s “Magnificat” united it with Aristotelian Magnanimity and urged that our problem was not that we asked for too much but for too little. There is none of that littleness with the Minister-General of the “Little Brothers” (what St Francis called his companions).
3) Three follows on Two. Because we demand the absolutes they must come from above us. They cannot come out of us. The finite cannot produce infinity, the divided unity, the changing immutability, the temporal eternity. Remind yourself of the arguments in “Itinerarium 26: Unless Being-in-itself is known no particular substance can be fully known,” and “Itinerarium 27: Our intellect is conjoined with the eternal truth,” especially those by Descartes. We are not stuck on the down side of a barrier constructed by the condition of bodily existence. We have intellectual illumination and spiritual senses which reach the upper side. “Jerusalem above is free. She is our Mother." She is our home.
4) Four as we move beyond the human image, we pass towards ecstasy. Bonaventure speaks of ecstatic love, affective experience, mental excessus, admiration, and exultation. This is our future on this journey.
The First Obligation of the Political Authority in the Ancient World is Prayer: if the Ruler is not a Priest as such, the ruler’s first obligation is to ordain the practice of true religion.
“Prayer is the only way by which it seems men can talk with God and join themselves to the inaccessible light before they attain it….Cut off and separated from its source, the human race, as you [Philosophy] were singing now, will be destined to grow weak and exhausted.” (Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 5.III)
Thus the archons [magistrates] (including a descendent of the old royal family the archon Basileus) are priests in Athens; in Jerusalem, the High Priest is a ruler, and, when kings are not directly the High Priest, they attempt to seize or control the office, in Rome, the Emperor takes the title of Pontifex Maximus , and becomes uniquely, not only a priest, but a member of the many priestly colleges of pagan Rome. The Roman Popes and the Christian Emperors take the same title. The Christian Sacred Secular Emperors and Kings as Ordained by God. Their rule includes care for the Church. The constitution of the Christian Roman Empire inaugurated by Constantine depended on a likeness between Jesus Christ as the divine-human mediator and the Emperor as carrying out his work on earth as Viceroy (or Vicar). Constantine was a “general bishop,” (see text of Bishop Eusebius further in this lecture) in respect to the Church, and the governing authority, saving and preserving work, the sacrifice and priesthood, and the shepherding of Christ, all derive in an earthy form to the Christian Emperor. Part of the Emperor’s work of presenting a pure sacrifice is ridding the Empire and Church of pagans, unbelievers, and Christian heretics; first of all Arians. So we have an Imperial Church and a Christian Empire. The King or Emperor is not directly consecrated as a priest or bishop so as to perform their sacred acts in the liturgy. However, as we shall see, they were anointed, wore sacred vestments, they presided over church councils, debated and decided theological questions, and , in fact, many of them preached in church, both in ancient and medieval times.
The Papal Sacred Power
Along with the North Africans (outstandingly Augustine) and the Celtics making Latin Christianity, the other most important factors in defining Roman Catholicism have to do with the assumption of secular power by the Pope and bishops in the Latin West (what I call the “Secular Sacred”) and the co-relative establishment of a “Sacred Secular”, that is the Imperial and Regal power claiming that its authority also comes from God.
The Papal claims, the “Secular Sacred”, unknown in the Christian East, and the consequent struggles with the “Sacred Secular” (what we usually call the secular), give a dynamic to Catholicism which is altogether distinctive.
Popes, Bishops, and Abbots and Abbesses.
In the West, owing to the transfer of the Imperial capital from Rome to Constantinople, the Pope took both the sacred and the secular power. The Pope’s claims are represented in his use of the obelisks once associated with the Egyptian divine Pharaoh and the divine pagan Roman Emperor as Pontifex Maximus (high priest). The Popes as heads of the Priestly Order claim both swords (sacred and secular). They tried to include the secular authorities within their rule. In fact, they often did.
Its creed : “Suffered under Pontius Pilate. Was crucified, dead, and buried.”
Its most important missionary and the writer of its earliest Scripture, Paul of Tarsus, was a Roman citizen and clearly had received important elements of a Greco-Roman education.
It is a Hellenistic religion with a stress on individual salvation in contrast to Israel or the Kingdom of God. Its fundamental doctrine is bodily (individual) resurrection. 1 Corinthians 15.14 “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith also is in vain.”
It images, and to a considerable degree, understands and preaches, its Saviour and his message through Hellenistic myths and art.
Christ as Philosopher Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 3: “It remains one of the most momentous linguistic convergences in the entire history of the human mind and spirit that the New Testament happens to have been written in Greek ... the Greek of Socrates and Plato.” It is equally important that the “Old Testament” which was at first the only Scripture of the Christians was primarily the LXX.
Prophets and Sibyls: Christianity represents itself as the fulfillment of both pagan inspiration (Sibyls and poets) and Jewish prophecy, combining the wisdom of Sibyls from East and West, and Virgil with King David, the psalmist, and Prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel.h. Temples become churches
i. Ambiguous Attitude to the State: “Let every soul be in subjection to the higher authorities.” (Romans)
“Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues.” (Revelation).
j. Adoption of the Basilica, the Royal Hall of the Basileus, the Priest King.
k. Domes. The greatest Roman architectural development is also taken over.
l. The organization of the Church shadows that of the Empire. The “diocesan” and urban organization of the Church reproduces the administrative organization of the Empire. When, after Constantine, the bishops become imperial officials, they use coercion to enforce Christianity and Orthodoxy.
m. At the apex of this system in the Latin West the Pope of Rome
n. At the apex of this system in the Greek East, the Christian Emperor unites in himself the sacred and secular. Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, In Praise of Constantine, III: “invested as he [Constantine] is with a semblance of heavenly sovereignty, he directs his gaze above, and frames his earthly government according to the pattern of that Divine original, feeling strength in its conformity to the monarchy of God.” The pattern for the Christian emperor used here by derives from the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus by way of Moses in Philo.o. Theotokos: the Motherhood of God
p. Coping with a plethora of spirits: “Jews and Christians in the biblical period and Late Antiquity believed in a panoply of supernatural beings who partook in divine power and glory. While both groups claimed to be monotheistic, evidence from the Hebrew Bible, early postbiblical Jewish literature, and the New Testament demonstrates that divine qualities were found not only in the creator of the universe, but in a host of other beings known by various names.”
q. The Christian problem about whether deity is itself multiplied: the Trinity
Council of Nicaea in 325, presided over by the unbaptised Emperor Constantine, as Pontifex Maximus, dealt with the divinity of the Son and the Council Constantinople in 381 dealt with the Spirit but both solutions required a great influx of Hellenic metaphysics. The Nicene Creed, which resulted from the Church Council over which Constantine presided, proclaims that the Son is “God, of God; Light, of Light; Very God, of very God; Begotten, not made; Being of one substance with the Father.” The Son is homoousios NOT homoiousios, the “same,” NOT “like” substance of the Father, so a philosophical concept comes to define the Incarnation, the essential Christian doctrine defining the relation of the divine and the human. Another philosophical concept that of hypostasis, (υποστασεως) spiritual subsistence or person comes to define what the divine beings are. These notions are essential for the Christian doctrine of God as Trinity and as incarnate. Only in this way could the Church solve the problem of the many gods. In consequence, Catholic or Orthodox Christianity cannot exist without philosophy.
r. One possible result of this is that so far as the doctrine of god is concerned, philosophy and scripture can be understood to think the same, at least up to a point. Augustine, Confessions 7.9.13. …. [T]hou didst procure for me…certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin. And therein I found, not indeed in the same words, but to the selfsame effect, enforced by many and various reasons that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” A perpetual debate is inaugurated within Christian thought between theologians and philosophers who want to draw the two sides together as much as possible (e.g. Eriugena, Anselm, Hegel, Michel Henry) and those who want to clearly delimit them (e.g. Aquinas, Kant, Jean-Luc Marion).
s. All powerful creative, guiding and converting light. The notion of conversion is assimilated to or derives from the Platonic notion of illumination by a turn toward the light and ultimately to the Sun, the image of the Good. The Church names Jesus with the same title given to the Father in the LXX. This Jesus is the Cosmic Christ, the Eternal Word, the Son begotten by the Father as his equal, and because of this equality “Almighty, O PANTO KRATOR,” the Creator of all things. Christ is “the light of the cosmos” and “the light of life.” Life and knowing belong together as they do in the whole Platonic tradition.
t. Finally, as in Plato and the Neoplatonists, the ultimate is incomprehensible. Republic VI, 509b-c: the beyond, epekeina, the Good is compared to the Sun which is the source of being and knowing but beyond (epekeina) both. In Sicilian churches, and generally through ancient and medieval Christianity, despite the overwhelming multitude of images, there is a very remarkable restraint, an outstanding absence: you will find no representation of God the Father. The Father remains invisible, even when the story of the creation is being told. God the Son, the eternal Word, the Almighty who is also the crucified, performs all the acts of creation. The absence and the presence together enable them to manifest Christianity as a religious system within the Platonic tradition.
Caliph al-Ma’mun, who acceded to power in 813 founded an academy in Baghdad called the House of Wisdom and placed Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-’Ibadi, a Nestorian Christian with an excellent command of Greek, in charge.
Almost all the translators of Greek and Syrian texts into Arabic were Christians. Despite some pressure to convert to Islam, evidently this project depends on a Convivencia involving Muslims and Christians, both Orthodox and heretical (the Nestorians were regarded in the Byzantine Empire as heretical). It is significant that there are large and learned Jewish communities in the same regions, partly because of the captivity and exile there of Jews beginning in 722 B.C.E. and partly owing to the move of the Jewish center eastward from the Mediterranean after the destruction of the Temple by the Roman Empire in 70 C.E. They too are involved in the great translation.
It is important to note both that Arabic develops internally and as a cross cultural language because of its role in as the language of the Quran and Islam, as the koine of Islamic rule, and as the new language of science and intellectual culture and that, in its interaction with Arabic, Hebrew, which from about 200 CE had ceased to be used except as a language of liturgy and religious commentary, being replaced by Greek, Aramaic and Arabic, became again a language of personal expression. The convivencia in Spain was crucial to this, there Hebrew became again a language of new poetry.
A Jewish culture in Arabic in Babylon
A development similar to constructing a Christian culture in Arabic takes place among Jews. A great head of the Jewish community in Babylon, Saadya Gaon (died 942) produced a complete translation of the Torah into Arabic as well as an Arabic commentary on the text. His Book of Doctrines and Beliefs was published in Arabic and places him as a Jewish developer of Islamic kalam. This is where Maimonides puts him as one of the mutakallimun. Kalam or dialectical theology is a phenomenon which Maimonides correctly regards as initiated in late antiquity (c6th century) among Christians like John Philoponus and picked up by Islamic and Jewish theologians. Moses Maimonides (died 1204) wrote in both Hebrew and Arabic; two of his three major works are in Arabic: the Guide of the Perplexed and the Commentary on the Mishnah. His Guide of the Perplexed had to be translated from Arabic into Hebrew.
Jewish Translators and their Hebrew translations.
Jews played a crucial role in the great translation project both in Toledo and elsewhere and were the means of the survival of some ancient texts. They were often intermediaries in the complex translation process, but they also made translations for themselves. The most important example of the later was a result of the persecution of Jews under the Almohad Islamic regime in Spain in the 12th century. Some Jewish families took “refuge in Christian Provence. There they translated what they considered the most important texts in the Arabic language … into Hebrew. Some of them owe their survival to this translation. Thus, for example, Themistius… [some of whose Greek commentaries on Aristotle] have survived in their entirety only in a Hebrew translation done from an Arabic original that is now either entirely lost or only fragmentary. Similarly, nearly all the texts of Averroes exist in manuscript form in Hebrew, while the Arabic text of more than one is lost, as is the case, for example, of his commentary on the Republic of Plato.”1 It was here also under the auspices of the most prominent family of translators, the Tibbons, that Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed was translated into Hebrew (1204). These translators, who concentrated on philosophical works, were responsible for the development of Jewish philosophy in the lands of Northwestern European Christians. 1 (R. Brague, Eccentric Culture. A Theory of Western Civilization, trans. S. Lester [South Bend: St Augustine’s Press, 2002], 48-49.)
The Priority of Reason: A Jewish and Christian
inheritance from Philosophy in Arabic
All of the participants (Al Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Al Ghazali, Maimonides, Aquinas) in the debate about creation, temporal or eternal, revealed or known by philosophical reason which included Maimonides, whether, like al-Ghazali, they want to limit the rôle of
philosophy to an instrumental one, or whether, like al-Farabi, Avicenna (d. 1037), and
Averroes, they want philosophy and religion to have the same content in different forms (with the priority given to philosophy because it thinks in concepts what religion
possesses in metaphors and symbols), or whether, like Moses Maimonides and Aquinas, they want a position in between, giving a substantial knowledge to Philosophy, but limiting its scope, all who held any of these three positions agreed on two
fundamental principles. These are universally held: First, religion needs philosophy and cannot have a true form without it.
Second, whatever philosophy demonstrates with proper rational certainty is true, and, if the scriptures, whether these be the Torah or the Bible or the Koran, seem to contradict this demonstrated truth, they must be interpreted allegorically so as to conform to what philosophy shows.
A project crossing Religious Differences and Diverse Purposes
This massive translation project, first into Arabic and then into Persian, depended on the prior translation of Greek philosophy into Syriac for the use of by Syrian Orthodox and Nestorian Christians: F.E. Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam (New York: NY University Press, 1965), 57: “The Eastern translation of Aristotle began about A.D. 450, not, however, into Arabic, but into Syriac.”
Dimitri Gutas, From Greek to Arabic Philosophy 1 : “In the Syriac tradition of the Hellenized Christian Arameans... the philosophical curriculum was received for paedagogic purposes— … reflecting the later attitude to Greek learning of the eastern Christian churches. Certain Greek texts were translated into Syriac, while others were preserved.
The translated texts were preponderantly logical—essentially, the first four books of the Aristotelian Organon (Categories, De Interpretatione, Prior and Posterior Analytics), with one book, the Pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo, providing information about ancient cosmological ideas, and another, albeit by a Christian author, Nemesius of Emessa’s De natura hominis, supplementing it with ancient theories on the subject of its title.
The aim was better to train students—seminarians, presumably—in the composition of rational arguments and the analysis of language, in the drafting of rhetorical discourse for intra- and inter-faith debates by means of logic, and in the proper understanding of the philosophical ideas in the theology of the Greek church fathers…. This was philosophical education in the service of religion, not of independent inquiry into reality, a practice, … which had become extinct.”
1 A paper delivered to the Classics Department Dalhousie University in 2013.
he Abbasid Translation of Greek into Arabic
After 750 C.E. the Abbasid successors to the Umayyad caliphs build Baghdad and move the capital there from Damascus. In Baghdad the great work of assimilating Hellenic culture to Islam is undertaken in earnest.
“[F]rom about the middle of the eighth century to the end of the tenth, almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek books that were available throughout the Eastern Byzantine Empire and Near East were translated into Arabic…: astronomy and alchemy and the rest of the occult sciences; the subjects of the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and theory of music; the entire field of Aristotelian philosophy throughout its history: metaphysics, ethics, physics, zoology, botany, and especially logic—the Organon; all the health sciences: medicine, pharmacology, and veterinary science; and various other marginal genres of writings, such as Byzantine handbooks on military science (the tactica), popular collections of wisdom sayings, and even books on falconry.” Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th centuries ) (New York: Routledge, 1998),1.
From Arabic to Latin in Toledo
After the Christian reconquest of Toledo in 1085,
it becomes the most important center for the
translation of the enormous treasure of philosophical, mathematical, medical, technological, and scientific
literature produced or translated in Arabic into Latin.
The Translators there required an intimate
Convivencia of Jews, Muslims, and Christians from
several nations. Its productivity was enormous and
Christian Europe acquired much of its higher
education from this activity. For example,
Gerard of Cremona (1114-1189) was so staggered
by what he discovered in Toledo, that he learned
Arabic. Working in Toledo from 1167, he is responsible
for the translation of at least 70 major works; including
the massive Canon of Medicine by Avicenna, still a
normative textbooks in the medical schools of Europe in the 17th century. Gerard rendered into Latin a work which became known as the Liber de causis. This was an Arabic compilation and monotheistic modification, in the manner of Pseudo-Dionysius whose works were known in Baghdad, where the Liber was confected, of material largely from Proclus. The translation into Latin of the philosophical and scientific corpus in Arabic, initiated by the translation from Greek to Arabic under the Abbasids, was essential to creating the Medieval Latin universities.
Two Preliminary Considerations
Two features structure my consideration of Arabic as a Christian Koine. Both derive from a single fact: Arabic became a common language of universal communication and culture because it was and is the language of Islam. Its first followers conquered an enormous part of the Hellenistic world with great rapidity and then spread West, East, and South. Those who first adopted Islam, The Prophet and his immediate followers, spoke Arabic. The revelation they carried in the Qur'an, in principle untranslatable, and the normative traditions of the first followers of The Prophet were in Arabic. Islam is even more Arabic than Christianity is Greek.
A. In consequence, first, it will be both difficult and necessary to distinguish the language and the religion. This comes out in questions like what to call the philosophy which developed within this Arabic Islamic world. It has been too often called “Islamic Philosophy” but clearly “Philosophy in Arabic” is more accurate, and takes account of the facts that one of its greatest works, The Guide of the Perplexed, was written by Jew, Moses Maimonides, to aid those who wished both to follow the Law of Moses and philosophical science, & that the greatest philosopher in the Islamic world Ibn Sina (Avicenna) also wrote in Persian. Just as there is Jewish philosophy in Arabic, so there can be, and is, Christianity in Arabic.B. Second, the early Islamic caliphates developed two very different relations to the culture of the Hellenistic world which so rapidly was conquered or fell into their regimes. The second, the Umayyad Caliphate (661-751 C.E.), behaved in the pattern of ancient empires generally, as Bickerman describes it: “Ancient empires were neither willing nor able to change the traditional structures of the subject cities, villages, and tribes.” There were cultural borrowings but no determined endeavour to convert or transform on either side. The role of the family of John of Damascus, the Great Mosque in Damascus, the Dome of the Rock, the great Mosque of Cordoba and the Alhambra will serve as symbols and examples of these pattern.
With the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258 C.E.), there is a fundamental change. The Caliphs move the capital from Damascus, dominated by Christians, and create a new capital in Baghdad, designed to open up a space for interchange, and there begin the great translation project of Hellenistic learning into Arabic. There philosophy is reborn. The translation movement, the rebirth of philosophy, and Arabic as a common language of science for Moslems, Jews, and Christians will serve as symbols and examples of the second pattern. In it there is a real interpenetration of cultures.
Even more surprising than the role played in the creation of Latin Catholic Christendom by the church in North Africa is the role played by the Celts in Ireland, Scotland and Wales in preserving Christianity in Northern Europe. Celtic Christianity, which seems to have had links with the East at least as far as Syria and Egypt from very early times, was adsorbed by the Anglo-Saxon Church with its Roman foundations, forms, and loyalties. The northerners from off the coast of Europe then played a crucial role in educating and evangelizing the north of the continent, spreading there Latin and Greek learning and the Roman liturgy and obedience. Because this story is largely the interaction of two monasticisms, I introduce the characteristic monasticism of the Latins, that founded by St Benedict, as well as that of the Celts who initially adapted Egyptian forms. The acme of the Irish education and formation of Latin Christianity came with Eriugena,
Eriugena’s great system, the Periphyseon (On Nature), embraced as nature does, all that is and is not. Formed from the deepest Neoplatonic philosophical –theological principles, it became a new basis of Latin theology. Such a profoundly authentic retrieval of the doctrines developed in the pagan Platonic schools of late Antiquity from Plotinus to Damascius was not be created again in the Middle Ages until Maître Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa—both, directly or indirectly, under Eriugena’s influence. His accomplishment is the more remarkable because made almost entirely without access to non-Christian authors, by drawing out philosophy largely from theological writings.
After Boethius, Eriugena was the first to unite the Greek and Latin Platonisms of late Antiquity; this enabled his reconciliation of Latin and Greek Christian theology within a Latin system. The Latin Fathers, preeminently Augustine, crucially Boethius, and importantly Ambrose, were Eriugena’s beginning. His reconciliation was accomplished by extending the primarily Plotinian Platonism of the Latin Fathers in the direction of notions from Iamblichus, Syrianus, Proclus, and Damascius transmitted by the Greeks, especially Dionysius and Gregory of Nyssa. In the Latin Middle Ages, when the Plotinian Platonism of Augustine met the later, conveyed with quasi-Biblical authority by Dionysius, “this highest theologian,” the latter determined the systematic structure within which ideas were placed. Eriugena thus established the pattern which would prevail among the Latin medievals after Anselm. Augustine is contained within a Neoplatonic system fundamentally Proclean and by Dionysius. This describes the systems of both Aquinas and Bonaventure.
Eriugena knew Origen’s De Principiis (On First Principles); his work came to play a like role for Latins, who were thus carried beyond Augustine.
When Christians set about converting their fellow Jews to recognise “Jesus is Lord” (the first creed), they did so by preaching in a Jewish place of worship with a Greek name (synagogue) and they preached, worshipped, and wrote in Greek. The first specifically Christian Scriptures were the Epistles (Greek for “letter”) of St Paul, who was the citizen of a Greek speaking polis in the Roman Empire, and thus a Roman citizen.
The greatest Greek language Jewish philosopher, theologian, interpreter of Scripture was Philo of Alexandria. Most forms of the enormous developments of theology and spirituality which Christians owed to Greek philosophy were started by Philo. Normative Eastern Christianity (Orthodoxy) is still Greek (the self-recognising Orthodox Churches are those in communion with the Patriarch of Istanbul [Constantinople]). Latin Christianity (Catholicism) has Uniate Greek Churches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Catholic_Church) to an Aramaic Judaism is added one in the koine of the new empire, Greek. After 200 CE Hebrew will cease to be used in ordinary Jewish life, having been replaced by Aramaic, Greek and, eventually, Arabic. It will be revived through its interaction with Arabic within the Islamic Caliphate.
Judaism realises its universality in the Second Temple period and the character it assumes then, first in Aramaic and then in Greek, is the basis for the coming into being of Christianity in its wake. Aramaic was the koine, common language across cultures, as English is today, of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and its continuations, including the Persian. Syriac is a development.
The other three koines we shall encounter in these lectures are Greek, Arabic, and, the specific language of “Catholicism”, Latin.
Second Temple Judaism
The worship of Yahweh in his temple in Jerusalem is restored and maintained because God has anointed a Persian King of Kings as his Chosen.
A Diaspora (Jews remaining faithful outside the land of Israel) becomes Essential to Judaism
Others (Persians, Greeks, Romans) uphold Jewish worship in the Land of Israel
There must be Worship outside Judea
Therefore there is both Temple and synagogue (“synagogue” is Greek). The first Christian missionaries, preached “Jesus” in the synagogues. Jesus is depicted reading the Torah in the synagogue.
Israel has an ambiguous relation to the Gentiles (Cyrus is the Lord’s anointed).
Universality, Particularity, and Missionary activity
Religion and Rule: true religion may depend upon and be supported by a Gentile ruler.
God is Beyond Being and Knowing. Republic VI, 509b-c (Lee, p. 309): the epekeina, the Good compared to the Sun which is the source of being and knowing but beyond (epekeina) both. See Acts XVII.23 and 34 on the unknown God, I John 1.5 (God light without darkness), James 1.17 (God unchanging light), I Timothy 6.16 (dwells in light unapproachable whom no human hath seen nor can see). The profoundly and widely influential Christian philosophical and mystical theologian Dionysius the Areopagite (6th century) stresses this view of God as do the Islamic mystics—he derived much of his teaching from Plato mediated by Philo (1st century), Plotinus (2nd century) , and Proclus (4th century) . Al-Ghazali (11th century) is an important Islamic heir of this tradition.
Where is God between the Sun and the Line? Ancient and mediaeval philosophical theology in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition places the divine both at the Beyond (ἐπέκεινα) thought and being, and at their identity. Polytheists use both, and monotheists can modify what goes in one place by the other.
My very rough diagram maps followers of Plato who are also to some degree followers of Aristotle, Neoplatonists like Plotinus, Dionysius, & al-Ghazali, place God in the epekeina above thought and being. Aristotle, & Middle Platonists like Augustine, place the divine in the self-thinking thought (“nous” [Latin “intellectus”]) which unifies Thought and Being. In between is the God of the Neoplatonised Peripatetics like Maimonides, Aquinas & al-Farabi. Those not confined by monotheism, e.g. Proclus, Plotinus and Plato, decline deity, as they also decline being, knowing, and unity. In any case a hierarchy results. The epekeina (beyond) denies that The First is a particular being. Rather the divine is the nothingness of infinite being.
Aquinas’ Aristotelian-Augustinian God at the identity of thought and being is modified in an apophatic direction, most influentially by Dionysius the Areopagite and Albert the Great. If we were to start at the top, moving from the apophatic to the kataphatic, we would get a continuity beginning with Plotinus (†270), Iamblichus (†330), Proclus (†485), Dionysius Areopagita (6th century), followed by al-Ghazali (†1111), Nicholas Cusanus (†1464). Perhaps a line is crossed with Moses Maimonides (†1204) and Avicenna (†1037); in any case, with them, and with Augustine (†430), Boethius (†526), Aquinas (†1274), al-Farabi (†950), and Averroes (†1198), we have the height of divinity as Aristotle’s self-thinking thought. Plato’s schema allows and contains this arrangement.
q. The Christian problem about whether deity is itself multiplied: the Trinity
Council of Nicaea in 325, presided over by the unbaptised Emperor Constantine, as Pontifex Maximus, dealt with the divinity of the Son and the Council Constantinople in 381 dealt with the Spirit but both solutions required a great influx of Hellenic metaphysics. The Nicene Creed, which resulted from the Church Council over which Constantine presided, proclaims that the Son is “God, of God; Light, of Light; Very God, of very God; Begotten, not made; Being of one substance with the Father.” The Son is homoousios NOT homoiousios, the “same,” NOT “like” substance of the Father, so a philosophical concept comes to define the Incarnation, the essential Christian doctrine defining the relation of the divine and the human. Another philosophical concept that of hypostasis, (υποστασεως) spiritual subsistence or person comes to define what the divine beings are. These notions are essential for the Christian doctrine of God as Trinity and as incarnate. Only in this way could the Church solve the problem of the many gods. In consequence, Catholic or Orthodox Christianity cannot exist without philosophy.r. One possible result of this is that so far as the doctrine of god is concerned, philosophy and scripture can be understood to think the same, at least up to a point. Augustine, Confessions 7.9.13. …. [T]hou didst procure for me…certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin. And therein I found, not indeed in the same words, but to the selfsame effect, enforced by many and various reasons that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” A perpetual debate is inaugurated within Christian thought between theologians and philosophers who want to draw the two sides together as much as possible (e.g. Eriugena, Anselm, Hegel, Michel Henry) and those who want to clearly delimit them (e.g. Aquinas, Kant, Jean-Luc Marion).
All powerful creative, guiding and converting light. The notion of conversion is assimilated to or derives from the Platonic notion of illumination by a turn toward the light and ultimately to the Sun, the image of the Good. The Church names Jesus with the same title given to the Father in the LXX. This Jesus is the Cosmic Christ, the Eternal Word, the Son begotten by the Father as his equal, and because of this equality “Almighty, O PANTO KRATOR,” the Creator of all things. Christ is “the light of the cosmos” and “the light of life.” Life and knowing belong together as they do in the whole Platonic tradition.
The West (Royal) Portal of Chartres shows a marked change from northern Romanesque forms: an opening of space: the jamb statutes move out from their pillars (but remain under canopies and take along their solidarity with the sacred), visible order is more important, thus space is cleared so that hierarchy and arrangement are seen, the redeemed natural—a sacred secular like the royal power—and grace are distinguished in theory and separated in space. The movement to the North Portal both intensifies these developments and adds both a naturalism and a determination to represent and convey strong human passion.
First the bodies acquire bulk, then they move upon their own centres—as in the Angel Pillar and later jamb statutes in Strasbourg, or the figure of Lady Uta in the Cathedral at Naumburg, or the Angel of the Annunciation at Reims, regaining the “S curve” of life which figures lost in Late Antiquity—, and finally, having turned, they begin to interact with one another, building a common sacred space and, across it, exhibiting all the pathos of human exchange—as in the depictions of the Visitation which we view first on the North Portal and follow through to Giotto, as well as in the Dormition at Strasbourg and the Lamentation of Giotto. Even where the bulk of nature does not give weight—as in the “International Gothic Style” represented here by Simone Martini—the demand that emotion be conveyed prevails.
I return to Constantinople and the development within Eastern Christianity of an intense openness to the pathos of human life. The first group of images are from the Church of the Chora Monastery in Constantinople, the Kariye Camii, which has the largest surviving cycle of mosaics devoted to the Virgin Mother. These were executed between 1315 and 1321. It is significant that there are two great cycles of mosaics in the Chora church : one devoted to the life of Christ (exonarthax), the other to the life of the Theotokos (esonarthax). They mirror one another so that corresponding scenes are created in one in order to match the other. Duccio, Maesta, Siena, 1308-11 In the “International Gothic Style” there is a determination to convey feeling—see Mary Magdalene at the foot of the Cross. Duccio’s Maestà exhibits the crucial role played by Byzantine sacred art in the Latin developments. An hour spent in any church of medieval Venice will reveal the connection and remind us, not only that the Latin West copied the Greek iconographic forms, but also that the move to naturalism and to the depiction of pathos, even in the Divine Son, happened also in the East.
In what follows I shall first look at the character of Greco-Roman syncretism (including Christianity) and of the iconographical connections between Hellenism and Christianity. I shall then will move on to the history of the dogma of the Theotokos or Mater dei within Christianity. There I shall be especially guided by Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996).
Part B Charlemagne to Pope Boniface VIII
With COMPLEXITY Greek Christianity, Arabic Islam, French Norman Catholicism, Pope and Empire form the Sacred Secular in Sicily.The Norman rulers of Sicily, who succeeded Islamic ones and employed Islamic architects, seem to have picked up ways of depicting their own sacred secularity from Islamic models, just as Muslim rulers had imitated the Byzantine sacred emperor (Basileus), and, since they were Latin Christians and the Pope claimed Sicily as his own, the Pope, Peter and Paul must have their due.
In this lecture via Henry VIII, Elizabeth I of England, Louis XV and Napoleon we come to a terminus of this western tradition with the American republic. Carrying further French revolutionary developments, in its conception of the separation of church and state, for the USA all the other forms of religion are private matters of individual. The cult is of the state itself, and the President is the priest. No other sacred institution counters or checks this imperium.
The First Obligation of the Political Authority in the Ancient World is Prayer: if the Ruler is not a Priest as such, the ruler’s first obligation is to ordain the practice of true religion.
“Prayer is the only way by which it seems men can talk with God and join themselves to the inaccessible light before they attain it….Cut off and separated from its source, the human race, as you [Philosophy] were singing now, will be destined to grow weak and exhausted.” (Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 5.III)
Thus the archons [magistrates] (including a descendent of the old royal family the archon Basileus) are priests in Athens; in Jerusalem, the High Priest is a ruler, and, when kings are not directly the High Priest, they attempt to seize or control the office, in Rome, the Emperor takes the title of Pontifex Maximus , and becomes uniquely, not only a priest, but a member of the many priestly colleges of pagan Rome. The Roman Popes and the Christian Emperors take the same title.
The Papal Sacred Power
Along with the North Africans (outstandingly Augustine) and the Celtics making Latin Christianity, the other most important factors in defining Roman Catholicism have to do with the assumption of secular power by the Pope and bishops in the Latin West (what I call the “Secular Sacred”) and the co-relative establishment of a “Sacred Secular”, that is the Imperial and Regal power claiming that its authority also comes from God.
The Papal claims, the “Secular Sacred”, unknown in the Christian East, and the consequent struggles with the “Sacred Secular” (what we usually call the secular), give a dynamic to Catholicism which is altogether distinctive.
Popes, Bishops, and Abbots and Abbesses.
In the West, owing to the transfer of the Imperial capital from Rome to Constantinople, the Pope took both the sacred and the secular power. The Pope’s claims are represented in his use of the obelisks once associated with the Egyptian divine Pharaoh and the divine pagan Roman Emperor as Pontifex Maximus (high priest). The Popes as heads of the Priestly Order claim both swords (sacred and secular). They tried to include the secular authorities within their rule. In fact, they often did.
Origin in Palestine, a province of the Roman Empire …
Its creed : “Suffered under Pontius Pilate. Was crucified, dead, and buried.”
Its most important missionary and the writer of its earliest Scripture, Paul of Tarsus, was a Roman citizen and clearly had received important elements of a Greco-Roman education.
It is a Hellenistic religion with a stress on individual salvation in contrast to Israel or the Kingdom of God. Its fundamental doctrine is bodily (individual) resurrection. 1 Corinthians 15.14 “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith also is in vain.”
It images, and to a considerable degree, understands and preaches, its Saviour and his message through Hellenistic myths and art.
Christ as Philosopher Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 3: “It remains one of the most momentous linguistic convergences in the entire history of the human mind and spirit that the New Testament happens to have been written in Greek ... the Greek of Socrates and Plato.” It is equally important that the “Old Testament” which was at first the only Scripture of the Christians was primarily the LXX.
Prophets and Sibyls: Christianity represents itself as the fulfillment of both pagan inspiration (Sibyls and poets) and Jewish prophecy, combining the wisdom of Sibyls from East and West, and Virgil with King David, the psalmist, and Prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel.
Etc
In diverse ways, for all the thinkers we have considered, the simple, that is unreflective vision, is first. Reflective self-knowledge, which is called intellect, is subsequent. Reason and its labor with the two-fold givenness of sensation and intellect is third. The simple, in which self-consciousness is lost or given up for the sake of love’s fulfillment, is prior. It is the ground and foundation and also the goal. Explain this through the analysis of some of the texts we have discussed.
2. Theology and Theurgy: thinking God and doing God. Many, perhaps almost all, late ancient and medieval texts we study are, in one way or another, journeys, itineraria, in and to the divine for those who enter them appropriately. This is true, for example, of the treatises of Plotinus, as Augustine discovered, of Augustine’s Confessions and De Trinitate, of the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology of Dionysius, of the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, of the Periphyseon of Eriugena, of the Proslogion of Anselm, of the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum of Bonaventure, and of the Summa theologiae of Aquinas. This means that coming to God in thought (theology) goes with becoming one with the divine by entering the divine activity by a doing (theurgy), which, as doing, is not a knowing. The not knowing belongs to both form and content. Iamblichus worked out why both are needed.
Using some texts we have considered in class (and suitable others from ancient and medieval philosophy if you wish) explain why and how knowing and not knowing God and doing God go together and are mutually necessary to entering and understanding the texts you chose to examine.
3. Founding the Human. Both pagans in Late Antiquity and Christians then and in the Middle Ages establish the human vis-à-vis the divine. It is with them that Western Humanism begins. Analyze some of the texts we have treated in our Seminar so as to show that this judgement is correct or mistaken.
Is Augustine's search in Confessions X to find how the idea of God got into his intellect, a form of Plotinus' position that the One is beyond intellect and is incompatible with its self-reflectivity?
Principal points.
I have added some material from my “‘Complectitur Omnem’: Divine and Human Happiness in Aristotle and in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae” and eliminated some of what is duplicated elsewhere.
My “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos” and this paper on Aquinas’ de Deo, are related as the way up and the way down to and from the divine principle which is both end and beginning. In this manner Aquinas understood Heraclitus’ ancient law which, without knowing its source, Aquinas quoted with approval at the beginning of the last Part of his Summa contra Gentiles: “eadem est via qua descenditur et ascenditur” [the way up and the way down are the same.]Where they differ brings us to a treatment in Aquinas of the logic of identity in its most abstract form, that belonging to the structure of being itself.
Coming between Augustine and Aquinas, and dividing the medieval Doctor from the patristic Bishop, are Thomas’ two other greatest non-Scriptural authorities, Aristotle and Dionysius the Areopagite; the latter was, for Aquinas, “a quasi-biblical author,” whose texts have extraordinary weight. They are reconciled to each other through Proclus and, because of the Liber de causis, both convey the teaching of the divine Diadochos [Proclus] authoritatively. The Quinque Viae [Five Ways] demonstration is a derivation from Aristotle’s four causes modified in the Peripatetic-Neoplatonic developments. It leads first to a knowledge of God taken up in a treatment of the divine substance through a Proclean-Dionysian circuit of the divine names. Thus, the pinnacle of Being, known in a philosophical ascent and placed, following Dionysius, within a revealed theological structure, is the foundation from which we move step by step to Augustine’s Trinity. The Summa theologiae progresses from Ipsum Esse subsistens [Very Being (the infinite to be) Itself] to the Trinity, as a process of being’s self-disclosure of its identity as self-related othering.
The updated version contains crucial material from Hankey, “‘Complectitur Omnem’: Divine and Human Happiness in Aristotle and in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae,” Kronos VII (2018): 187–205 and Dwight Crowell, “Thomas Aquinas’ Attribution of Participation to Aristotle,” Dionysius 37 (2019): 134–64.
I have excerpted and edited it. The full version is found in Dionysius 37 (2019): 134–64 which I have sent out to the class and is mounted on the Brightspace for it. The references will be found there.
Dwight Crowell’s principal point is that Aquinas both finds participation through pros hen homonymy in Aristotle and, in an important way, is right to do so. However, the difference of how the human and the divine function in it is crucial for the central question of our seminar. Reading the article is hard work but it is well worth the trouble.
1. In the Platonic tradition, which for our purposes includes Aristotle and the Peripatetics, activities of knowing and ignorance are relative to the objects which they constitute or which are constituted by them, and are also relative to one another. Intellection grounds reasoning, but humans come to intellectual understanding and intuition through reasoning. In the same tradition, intellect is proper to God and reason to humans.
Discuss the implications of these positions for the nature of the divine and the human, and for the difference between them and their connection. The texts of other ancient and medieval philosophers may be considered in your essay, but crucial texts of Aristotle, Boethius, and Aquinas on the intellectual foundation of reasoning, and the coordinate dependence of humans on reason as the way to the highest kinds of intelligence, must be considered in your answer.
OR
2. For Aristotle human knowing begins from undefined or confused wholes, separates the elements of the whole, and completes itself by understanding the kinds and structure of the connection of what has been divided. The introduction to the Physics and Book II of the Metaphysics may be consulted to get a sense for this logic in Aristotle. Further investigation would require very difficult study of this Prior and Posterior Analytics . Thinking and theology proceed in the same way for Aquinas, but, because of the influence of Proclus on him, the moments in this process are different and the result is more completely systematic. Discuss how this procedure works in Aristotle and Aquinas in respect to the concerns of this Seminar, its assumptions and implications, and the differences between its functioning in Aquinas and Aristotle.
The texts of other ancient and medieval philosophers may be considered in your essay, but crucial texts of Aristotle and Aquinas, including the structure of Thomas’ Summa theologiae, must be considered in your answer.
My method in this seminar will differ from what I usually do: I shall not work with members on discerning the logic and argument of a single text. In fact, we shall read no text completely. Instead we shall look at portions of several texts from Plato, Aristotle, Philo of Alexandria, Plotinus, Augustine, Boethius, Eriugena, and Aquinas as embedded in my interpretations of them (and the interpretations of a few others) in order to discern the character of an historical development. The following contain most of my argument and most of the texts we shall examine:
1. “Placing the human: Reason as Participation in Divine Intellect for Boethius and Aquinas,” Res philosophica 93, no. 4 (October 2018): 583–615.
2. “’Complectitur Omnem’: Divine and Human Happiness in Aristotle and in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae,” Kronos VII (2018): 187–205.
The following brings these two together and shows the importance of Aquinas’ use of the idea of participation to establish the human in relation to the divine.
3. Dwight Crowell, “Thomas Aquinas’ Attribution of Participation to Aristotle,” Dionysius 37 (2019): 134–64. This volume of Dionysius is posted on the Brightspace.
***
4. “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos,” Dionysius 35 (2017): 61–98, exposes the interconnection of the human and divine. Usefully read with “Between and Beyond Augustine and Descartes: More than a Source of the Self,” Augustinian Studies 32:1 (2001): 65–88, especially, pp. 7-12 of the posted text and with “Re-evaluating E.R. Dodds’ Platonism,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (2007): 499–541, especially 521-23 on the shift to the human in Late Antiquity.
5. “Ratio, Preces, Intuitus: Prayer’s Mediation in Boethius’ Consolation,” Praying and Contemplating: Religious and Philosophical Interactions in Late Antiquity, Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 71–96, examines how the characteristic form of human knowing and willing is restored after its absorption into the Divine.
6. “John Scottus Eriugena,” Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, 2010. Eriugena’s is the most profound humanism ever developed philosophically and theologically, see especially, pp. 10-13 of the posted text. Usefully read with “Augustine, Denys, Eriugena and the Western turn to the World,” Hermathena 165 (Winter, 1998): 9–70, especially 39-45 of the posted text, and “Jean Trouillard: Authentic Neoplatonism in a French Seminary.”
7. God in Himself, Aquinas’ Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summa Theologiae, Oxford Theological Monographs / Oxford Scholarly Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 / 2000), Introduction, is a brief assertion and contextualization of Aquinas’ humanism.
8. “God’s Indwelling: Aquinas’ Platonist Systematization of Aristotelian Participation,” for Participation in the Divine, edited Douglas Hedley and Evan King, Notre Dame University Press, in press. Aquinas unites the human to the divine through the notion of participation. Understanding how participation functions in Aquinas is crucial. Usefully read when you are reading Dwight Crowell, “Thomas Aquinas’ Attribution of Participation to Aristotle.”
9. “The Conversion of God in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae: Being’s Trinitarian and Incarnational Self Disclosure,” Dionysius 35 (2017): 132–170, demonstrates how the human moves the Summa theologiae and explicates the Divine.
Everything necessary for the class will be posted on its Brightspace site, but participants will find it useful to have a copy of the collected dialogues of Plato, Aristotle’s De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, the Enneads of Plotinus, the Confessions of Augustine, the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, portions of the Periphyseon of Eriugena, and the Summa theologiae of Aquinas.
The contemporary context is essential to defining the subject of this Winter’s seminar on Aquinas’ Humanism. In consequence, although this context cannot be the direct subject of the seminar, I must say something about it at the beginning.
The unavoidable situation of our search for the place of the human is the fact, now established with the highest level of certainty of which modern hypothetical natural science is capable, that human activity has created a global warming, which, unless reversed, within less than a century, will have destroyed the conditions of civilized human life, and probably of human life itself. It also appears that humanity is not capable of, or not willing to, exert the corporate, primarily political will, which alone can counter this, and so, either by will, or the absence of it, humanity is self-destructing.
I conclude my comparisons of Persons and Henads: Finally, the Persons and the Henads have in common that their numbers are finite. However, the number of the Henads is indefinite and remains unknown to us. Because the Persons are relations emerging from perfect or internal activities, of which there are only two in intellectual beings, knowing and loving, the Trinity is fixed at three with certainty. The relation between being, knowing and loving is the conversion, i.e. remaining, exitus, reditus, which structures being for Proclus. Thus, at this point, as well as many others, Aquinas’ Neoplatonism draws the finite into the infinite and the structure of human subjectivity into the divine. Through this flattening and by this mutual interconnection, his Trinity becomes a monotheism. Fatefully, what limits and characterizes its members is a subjectivity it shares with humans.
Finally, the Persons and the Henads have in common that their numbers are finite. However, the number of the Henads is indefinite and remains unknown to us. Because there are only two internal activities in intellectual beings, knowing and loving, the Trinity is fixed by their three relations. The trinitarian conversion on itself of being, knowing and loving in Aquinas, is a form of the remaining, exitus, reditus, which structures all being for Proclus. Thus, at this point, as well as many others, Aquinas’ Neoplatonism draws the finite into the infinite and the structure of human subjectivity into the divine. Through this flattening, and by this mutual interconnection, his Trinity becomes a monotheism. Fatefully, what limits and characterizes its members is a subjectivity it shares with humans.
The difference with which I have concluded is gigantic and requires much reflection, especially now that the culture which succeeded Hellenic Neoplatonism and drew it within itself is on the point of destroying the conditions of human life. Also requiring reflection are the similarities between the ways both theologians make the transition from unity to the many. More is at work here than mere influence. Have we to do with theological necessities or Platonic ones or both? Must multiplicity begin within divinity itself? Robert Crouse explicates Augustine’s assertion of this requisite, and judges the matching Proclean modes as incapable of success. Aquinas’ inclusion of Augustine within a Proclean structure must from this point of view be regarded not only as unnecessary but, indeed, as mistaken. However, if as Jean Trouillard and others judge, the move to Proclus beyond what they regard as Augustine’s anthropomorphic Trinity is necessary to protect the Divine transcendence, then is not the necessity in a different place? There are few questions more urgently in need of investigation than these.
4. “Ratio, Preces, Intuitus: Prayer’s Mediation in Boethius’ Consolation,” Praying and Contemplating: Religious and Philosophical Interactions in Late Antiquity, Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 71–96. Examines how the characteristic form of human knowing and willing is restored after its absorption into the Divine.
5. “John Scottus Eriugena,” Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, 2010. The most profound humanism ever developed philosophically and theologically, see especially, pp. 10-13 of the posted text. Usefully read with “Augustine, Denys, Eriugena and the Western turn to the World,” Hermathena 165 (Winter, 1998): 9–70, especially 39-45 of the posted text, and “Jean Trouillard: Authentic Neoplatonism in a French Seminary.”
6. God in Himself, Aquinas’ Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summa Theologiae, Oxford Theological Monographs / Oxford Scholarly Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 / 2000), Introduction. Brief assertion and contextualization of Aquinas’ humanism.
7. “God’s Indwelling: Aquinas’ Platonist Systematization of Aristotelian Participation,” for Participation in the Divine, edited Douglas Hedley and Evan King, Notre Dame University Press, in press. Aquinas unites the human to the divine through the notion of participation. Understanding how participation functions in Aquinas is crucial.
8. “The Conversion of God in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae: Being’s Trinitarian and Incarnational Self Disclosure,” Dionysius 35 (2017): 132–170. Demonstrates how the human moves the Summa theologiae and explicates the Divine.
Combining Metaphysics I,1 and XII, 7, De Anima III, 5, and Nicomachean Ethics, X, 7 and 8, in their most straight-forward sense, and as Aquinas understood them, those fundamentals are the following. Happiness belongs to intellect. God’s substance is the perfect actuality of self-thinking thought and, therefore, God is by nature eternally happy. Although the human is not intellectual substance, because it by nature knows and desires to know, it can be perfectly happy and is, in fact, perfectly happy to the degree that its life is the life of divine intellect.
“Complectitur” confronts us, however, with a profoundly important difference between the medieval Latin Christian theologian and his Hellenic master, separated by a millennium and a half of philosophical, theological, and religious change. What belongs to the effect of the divine causation has been separated out from God and is then explicitly drawn back in. The principal source for the logic at work in this movement in Aquinas comes about midway along the journey from Aristotle: Proclean remaining, exitus, reditus. This was authoritatively communicated to Aquinas through the Dionysian Corpus and the Liber de causis, attributed to St Paul’s convert and Aristotle respectively, before he read The Elements of Theology, translated in 1268. This Neoplatonic structure of all except the One, Aquinas unites with Aristotle as he understands him and profoundly modifies both.
In celebrating the centenary of the Encyclical Aeterni Patris, we are doing honour to the act by which Leo XIII harnessed the massive intellectual energies of the Roman Church to the revival of St. Thomas’ philosophy and theology. Pope’s purposes were not primarily historical but contemporary, not theoretical but rather practical and political. Pope Leo was looking for a philosophy and theology which would serve two contrary purposes. Namely, it should, on the one hand, enable the Church to speak to an intellectual world in which science and philosophy had become independent and even opposed to ecclesiastical theology, and, on the other, it should bring philosophy, and the political and social life thought to be based thereon, back within the control of and into subordination to ecclesiastical theology and authority. The scholasticism which was to provide for these aims must allow philosophy to be separated from theology but subordinated to it. It was recognized that of the various scholastic systems only Thomas’ would serve—the earlier and the more conservative mediaeval systems fused philosophy and theology too immediately, the later ones asserted the incompatibility of the two or the autonomy of reason or both. It was quickly recognized moreover that to do this the Aristotelian aspects of Thomas’ thought must be emphasized and the Platonic elements played down. The article looks at the various neo-Thomist schools in relation to this Leonine project and largely against them makes a case for the Platonism of Aquinas. The role of the domination of Heidegger in 20th century philosophy is examined.It concludes : But we are unjust to Thomas if we are blind to the systematizing Platonism of his thought because of our own interests and it may also be that Pope Leo’s purposes need reexamination even while we celebrate his great Encyclical because of which Thomas has been kept before our eyes.
For VIII Congresso Tomistico Internazionale nel centenario dell’ Enciclica “Aeterni Patris” di Leone XIII held in Rome, September, 1980; published in S. Tommaso nella storia del pensiero, Atti dell’ VIII Congresso Tomistico Internazionale, 8 vol., ed. A. Piolanti, viii, Studi Tomistici 17 (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1982), 39-52.
Neoplatonism
Aquinas’s Neoplatonic Doctrines
Chapter Two: Aquinas’s History of Philosophy. Is Aquinas a Neoplatonist?
Aquinas as Student of the History of Philosophy
Is Aquinas a Neoplatonist?
Chapter Three: Sacred Teaching. Preliminary Considerations in the First Question of the Summa Theologiae
Whether besides the Philosophical Disciplines Another Teaching is Necessary
A Theologian in the “City of Philosophers”
From the Divine Names of Dionysius to the Summa Theologiae
Chapter Four: From Impassibility to Self-Affectivity. The Trinitarian Metaphysics of Esse in Thomas’s Summa Theologiae
The Moving Circles of Theology
The Scholarship and Thomas’s Method
Chapter Five: The Metaphysics of Pure Being
The Structure
From Motion to Its End
1. What the quinque viae show
2. The circle described by the names of the divine essence
From the Circle of the Essential Names to the Divine Operations
1. How God is known by us, and how God is named by us
2. The operations of the essence
3. Widening and strengthening of internal difference
4. The determining principles in respect to knowledge and will in the First
5. The operations of the essence of intellect and will together (simul intellectum et voluntatem)
From the Self-Reflexivity of Knowing and Willing to Motionless Motion
1. God as other to himself
2. Motionless motion: reconciling Plato and Aristotle
3. From motionless motion to the self-affectivity of real relations, persons, in God
4. Concerning God’s power and happiness: three breaks, a summation, and a transition
Chapter Six: From the Relations of Giving and Reception in the Essence to the Creature
The Trinitarian Processions of Ipsum Esse Subsistens
Real Relation and Opposition in the Essence
The Bond of the Ecstatic Spirit
Conclusion: Thomas’s Trinitarian Metaphysics of Esse and His Neoplatonism
Oxford Handbook to Dionysius the Areopagite
Edited Mark Edwards, Dimitrios Pallis, George Steiris
“Dionysius nearly everywhere follows Aristotle as will be evident to anyone diligently examining his books.”
For this judgement, the great Thomist scholar Marie-Dominque Chenu supposed Aquinas “to have been duped by certain external resemblances.” However, if, in fact, there are dupes here, the first was Albertus Magnus. From his great teacher, Albert, the Dionysian Peripatetic, Aquinas, for whom the Areopagite remained a quasi-Biblical authority but identified as a Platonist, learned the fundamental congruence of the doctrines of the greatest philosophical authority, Aristotle, and his match in the higher realm of theology, Dionysius.
I. Albert, the Dionysian Peripatetic
A. Dionysius and Aristotle juxtaposed in Cologne
Aquinas had been initiated by Albert into what Alain de Libera called “The ‘way’ of Dionysian peripateticism,” when, from 1245/46 to 1251/52, Thomas was his student, first in Paris and, then, crucially, from 1248, in Cologne. In the advanced studium the Dominicans directed Albert to establish there, “the greatest Dionysian commentator of the XIIIth century,” exposited the entire Dionysian corpus and began his explanations of the works attributed to Aristotle. Evidence that Thomas studied both authors with him are manuscripts of Albert’s commentaries on the Dionysian corpus and of his lectures on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. For the former, we have Thomas’ autographs, written out for Albert as his assistant. Thus “he copied the whole set of Albert’s [Dionysian] commentaries by hand” and also inserted annotations. For the Ethics, we have a reportatio by Thomas. Importantly for the differences which evolved between their ways of thinking, Albert did not start his paraphrastic expositions of the Aristotelian corpus until the one devoted to the Physics in 1251/52. Soon after that, Thomas left for Paris. Burger stresses that “when Albert was commenting on the texts of Aristotle, and finally on the Liber de causis, Thomas was in Paris and in Italy. So their ways, like their thinking, were separated.”
“In the autumn of 1251, or at the latest 1252, [Aquinas] commenced his career of teaching at the University of Paris by cursive reading of two books of the Bible.” These lectures qualified him to comment on the Sentences, obtain the licentia docendi, the status of magister, and a chair. Thomas’ Sentences Commentary is his largest theological system. Commenting on the second Book Thomas made his observation about Dionysius following Aristotle, “during the academic year 1252-53” or the next, when he was still strongly under the influence of Albert.
The Introit for today: the Sunday in the Octave of the Nativity.
We concluded our reading of The Place of the Lion in the same way which our reflections on The Mountain and the Valley ended. We asked a question, which happens to be also that of my Seminar in the Classics Department this Winter Term. Can we move from the theocentrism (God centeredness) of the Ancient World to the anthropocentrism (human centeredness) of the late Ancient, Medieval and Modern worlds, especially the Christian versions of these, without a solipsistic humanism? In that narcissism the human destroys itself, because it has lost its place in the cosmic harmony and conforms to no pattern or reality outside itself. The alternative posed by the so-called Creed of St Athanasius “Not by the conversion of Godhead into flesh but by the taking of humanity into God” gives the question this form: Can we avoid the divinization of the earthly human world which kills it by making infinite demands on the finite? Or will we convert the Godhead into flesh and lose both God and the flesh? The evidence before us in human caused global warming, a consequence of our way of life which depends on infinitizing desire and posits nature as endless means, gives “no” as the answer. Living within a cosmic harmony is denied, scorned or hated.
Complementarity: Difference in community as the necessity of balance, truth, knowledge and reason in the Positive Way
The other and perhaps primary—it is the first we meet—complementarity in friendship is that between Anthony and Quentin. In the penultimate Chapter, “The Place of Friendship,” strong statements are made about the necessity of human complementary difference for the Positive Way to God. As we shall see shortly, the Negative Way, the one of Richardson, is the flight of the alone to the alone (Plotinus), but it has a correlative. Just as the Trinitarian Father has a Son, his Image and Likeness.
Anthony reflects on friendship. He finds there not an illusion of togetherness but an eternal reality enacted in time, a way to God. Experiencing in friendship the reality of knowing in common is essential. Thus we think and speak the universals by which only we are able to communicate with one another, and which are necessities of the Affirmative Way to God. The Negative and the Positive Ways, Unicorn and Eagle: Their Connection the Human-Divine Pantocrator .Richardson follows the Negative Way of which Dionysius the Areopagite (6th century) is the pre-eminent and most influential authority on this Way for Christians. He derived his doctrine from the greatest pagan philosophical theologian of Late Antiquity (and perhaps of all time), Proclus. Eriugena, who translated the works of the Areopagite from Greek into Latin, bases the fundamentals of his system in those writings. Charles Williams founds what underlies The Place of the Lion in Dionysius and Eriugena.
Besides what I sent you already explaining this here is something more, briefly, simplifying, and generalizing.
1. Within the Platonic tradition, including Aristotle, who calls himself a Platonist, and most of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic Philosophical Theology from Philo and Origen through to Nicholas of Cusa at the end of the Middle Ages, as well as good continuers into modernity, e.g. Hegel (with qualifications) creation is a relation in the creature to the Creator. Talking about creation in terms of discrete choices by or acts of will of the Creator belongs to apologetic (or "Kalam"), not to genuine Philosophy or Philosophical Theology, pagan or Abrahamic. It was started among some late Ancient Christian (6th century) theologians and picked up by Jews and Moslems.
This is Maimonides' account in the Guide of the Perplexed, I.71, where this kind of anthropomorphic theology is associated with John Philoponus. Both Maimonides and Augustine criticize the failure to move from imagination to intellect in such a representation of God.
2. Eriugena, in accord with Plotinus, Proclus, and Dionysius the Areopagite, moves beyond the general refusal to call God a being to making "Nothingness by excess [not defect]" the best characterization of God. Pre-eminent on the theology of God as non-being is the 20th century French philosopher theologian Jean Trouillard. I have an essay commenting on his work on Eriugena posted on my Academia.edu site.
3. How does such a God come into being? Through the human. The human is the "workshop" of creation in which God creates himself (which is what creation is --this is the only logically possible implication of "Creation from Nothing” (creatio ex nihilo). This is the human considered objectively as an eternal reality. The human contains all the modes of knowing and ignorance, of being and non-being. The Savior must be human in order to be the universal savior and creator (John I and Colossians I (15-19). The human and divine are joined in Christ eternally. What is eternal is manifest in time at the kairos, the critical moment. There are statements tending in this direction in Colossians I and elsewhere in Scripture. Berulle wrote with great speculative energy on it in the 16th century and founded the spirituality of modern Catholicism which lasted until Vatican II. I have essays on his work posted on my Academia.edu site.
4. You may find that you get help understanding this idea from the notion found at least in Plotinus, Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, as well as elsewhere, of "spiritual senses" i.e. that senses are originally in nous or intellect and descend from there. However, you can go directly to Periphyseon Book IV (807A). The page contains much of the philosophy – theology underlying The Place of the Lion but I shall not quote it all. The most relevant portion begins thus.
Man had been placed in the genus of the animals, in fact, … all the animals were according to the substance created in him (in illo create), not only because the knowledge of all things existed in him (inerat ei), but also because the visible and invisible universe was established in him (universitas visibilis et invisibilis creaturae in eo condita est).
Eriugena goes on to deal with the fall. God “foresaw that the human would come to live as an animal and that he would fall from the beauty and dignity of the Divine image into the life of irrational animal passion” (807 B) and would come to be free from that condition again (807D).
Consider this passage:
Richardson “remembered the Will beyond all the makings; then, with a tremendous effort, he shut out even that troublesome idea of the Will--an invented word, a mortal thought--and, as far as he could, was not before what was." (Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion, 171-72)
Williams follows Eriugena not only in seeking to get above (and back before) will but also to the fullness of non being. At 808C part of the reason comes out in Eriugena’ understanding of will:
man was never without sin, for he was never without the mutability of the free will, which is the cause of evil, must be accounted a kind of evil: for who would dare to say that the cause of evil is not itself evil, when the freewill which was given to choose the good made itself the slave and follower of evil?
One not in this list, but which holds an exceptionally important position in Eriugena’s system is “place,” obviously a, or the, central concern of the novel
Right from the start, Williams does not allow us to escape seeing how crucial place is. The novel opens: “From the top of the bank, behind a sparse hedge of thorn, the lioness stared at the Hertfordshire road.” The first human exchange carries us to the significance of placing: “"After all, that's our direction." "The chief use of the material world," Anthony said, still sitting on the gate, "is that one can, just occasionally, say that with truth.” (3)
Evidently the novel concerns the place of the Angelicals relative to their sensible instantiations, their proper separation, and the return of the Principles to beyond the pillar of fire. Pace is also considered: the slow step by step ascent of the affirmative way, and the unicorn’s speedy Dionysian flight of negation directly to the end. It is also about placing as ordering and presiding: so the Lion and the Crowned Serpent cross over first and return last, and the Eagle must fly with vision over all and govern their relations. Repose too: “that beauty of innocence which is seen in unhappy mankind only in sleep and death and love and transmuting sanctity--the place of the lamb in the place of the lion.” (202)
Ultimately, the aim is harmony within and without and between the inner and the outer.
Piece by piece Charles Williams gives us the elements of Eriugena’s system we need to understand his novel. I extract them so you can pass more easily from one to the other and arrive at the whole.
Damaris Tighe’s work on the history of philosophy gives us the first ideas which I outlined in “Getting Ready”. When trying to understand the stages of David’s journey up the mountain by comparing them to steps in the Platonic ascent ( conversion) from the Cave to life in the light of the Sun, image of The Good, we looked at Plato’s allegory of the Line. The level just below the Good belongs to the Forms. They are objects of thought for Plato, existing independently. With Aristotle, late Ancient and Medieval philosophers and theologians, they become thoughts in the mind of God (the LOGOS, WORD, NOUS, INTELLECT, for Christians the second Person of the Trinity). These thoughts are living (“in Him was life” John 1:4) and have an inherent movement to pass into sensible existence. As living forms of this kind, here they are called “Angelicals.” For some of these theologians (for example, the great Jewish theologian, Moses Maimonides), angels are forms, structures of reality, flashes of the divine intellect. The tendency of medieval Platonism is in this direction.
The Principles may be regarded as gods. They can enter the sensible world by way of their particular instantiations. None of this is to be found in Eriugena or the Medieval Platonists, but it is a sufficiently plausible deduction to make the story of the novel.
From the notion that we are constituted from this principles Anthony draws the correct, though also self-destructively one sided, conclusion that, by mastering himself, he can master the principles in him.
When Anthony tries to face one of the principles (the Lion) he discovers that his own power over himself is not enough. He must operate by the power of the principles and in accord with their harmonic order. What he requires may be compared to what David, in The Mountain and the Valley also needs: the grace of the other, the harmony which is prior, posterior, and underlies.
Are the principles coming into the sensible or pulling it into their world? The question is left open. The Eriugenian Eschatology would have the sensible drawn into the intelligible at the end of time. In any case in an Eriugenian view, the human is the medium, as it is here.
The novel returns to its fundamental question, the fundamental question of Late Ancient Philosophy, of Medieval Christian theology, certainly of Eriugena, and of my University seminar next Term, is the human the centre of reality, and, if so, on what basis, and with what consequences? Further is the Medieval or Eriugenian form of this anthropocentrism the same as, or deeply different from, the form this takes now?
We learn from Richardson, the central teaching of all Williams’ novels in this genre: those who try to use the higher powers will be destroyed by them because in fact we cannot control them. This may be Williams’ analysis of what humanity is now attempting and why it is destruction.
In fact we have a mention of John Scottus Eriugena, called here “Joyn the Scot”:
“Joyn the Scot had taught that the account of the Creation in Genesis--"let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind"--referred, not to the making of the earthly animals, but to the formation of the kinds and orders in the Divine Mind before they took on visible and material shapes.”
Eriugena does teach this, but it is a common doctrine of Jewish and Christian Platonism at least since it was taught by Philo Judaeus in the first century of the Christian Era. Augustine teaches it, as readers of his Confessions will know. It is found in Books XII & XIII there, as well as elsewhere in the corpus. Plato’s Timaeus teaches, a work Jews and Christians used to understand the account of the coming forth of things in Genesis, that, before the sensible creation in space and time, there was an eternal intellectual pattern. For Philo (a contemporary of St Paul), St John’s Gospel, and St Augustine what God would make sensibly first came forth eternally in the Divine Logos, Verbum, Mind, or Word as logoi, thoughts, or mental words. So a whole paradigm of what would come to be visibly and materially existed eternally in God’s mind. It is these gods, Immortals, universals, principles, Virtues, Dominions, “the original Dionysian nine,” or Angelicals (all names used for them in the novel) which are threatening the earth. The especial contribution of Eriugena (Joyn the Scot) is to make the human the “workshop” of the creation. Knowing this is essential to understanding what Anthony (Adam) finally does in The Place of the Lion.
This is the doctrine as I have explained it in the Powerpoint introduction. “Eriugena found the human as the immediate connection of God and the All in Augustine and radicalised it. Drawing upon Gregory of Nyssa, he came to understand human nature in such a way, that, more than being “that in which all things could be found”, it became “that in which all things are created”. The medium through which God creates himself and the universe of beings out of his own nothingness is the human, because, uniquely among beings, it possesses all the forms of knowing and ignorance, including sensation.”
This is explained by Eriugena. It belongs to the human to know and govern the creative forms.
Anthony’s encounter with the Immortals when he visits The Crossings, Berringer’s House, in Chapter Ten brings us to the most difficult question. The human is the place of creation. If it is to govern the Principles, the Immortals, or Angelicals, the human must know them and go over into their harmony and order. Anthony discovers that he can only govern them by them. What then is left of the human? Can human being, human reason, survive its own exaltation?
This is the great question of Patristic and Medieval Christianity. Doctrinally it is the question of whether Jesus Christ had a complete human nature (the Church takes terrible pains over six centuries to decide and decree that he does). In the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, it is the question as to whether human reason, freedom, and prayer are real. The following gives how it is worked out in The Place of the Lion.
What is above and beyond the Angelic Principles, God as Absolute, is represented in Dionysian-Eriugenian terms as Nothingness by excess.
Damaris, like Richardson, learns the negative Platonic theology of Proclus-Dionysius-Eriugena and Nicholas of Cusa (as well as many others). The concepts reason constructs, and the words formulating them, are inadequate to the infinite. Our concepts and words are finite conjectures.
The penultimate Chapter, on Friendship, prepares us for Anthony’s world saving final act. Then, as Adam returned, he both emerges in the creation, and also, he is the human of Eriugena that in which all things are and are created. Anthony sees the creation and himself in it. He also names the beasts (“knows them by the spiritual intellect.”) Thus he knows himself and comes into the balanced rational life friends share:
Anthony’s great task is foreshowed in a dream in the place of his friendship with Quentin. It is essential that, for Eriugena, paradise and the creation are not in time. Creation and its essential acts are eternal. The proper structure and relation of the human, the Principles, and the temporal creation are shown in Anthony’s dream. Williams, the theologian of Romantic Love, inserts the coming into being of Eve: “he strove to utter his name, and as he strove he was divided and woke to find humanity doubled. The name of mankind was in neither voice but in both; the knowledge of the name and its utterance was in the perpetual interchange of love.”
Anthony? Adam?--whatever giant stood before her between the trees of an aboriginal forest--was calling … he uttered not one word but many, pausing between each, and again giving to each the same strong summons. He called and he commanded; nature lay expectant about him…. At each word that he cried, new life gathered, and still the litany of invocation and command went on. By the names that were the Ideas he called them, and the Ideas who are the Principles of everlasting creation heard him, the Principles of everlasting creation who are the Cherubim and Seraphim of the Eternal. In their animal manifestations, duly obedient to the single animal who was lord of the animals, they came. … They were returning, summoned by the authority of man from their incursion into the world of man.”(227-32)
The last to return was the lion, restored to its place. Then the flaming Cherubim who keeps the eternal Eden separate set itself again protecting humans from the powers on which they depend.
NOVEMBER 6, 2019
WJH
Our discussions are opening deep fundamentals and an approach to them came from conversations after our last session. One of the participants pointed to Rebecca West’s opposition of the Pelagian (we could be free, good, forgiving and loving if only we worked hard enough at it) to the Augustinian (the Good is graciously given) as an interpretative frame. Another participant quoted to me a passage on David’s social place in Entremont. Together they have inspired this last commentary on the novel. I begin with the way the community and his family gave David a particular place. It will lead us to Charles Williams and The Place of the Lion.
I go on to David’s mode, which, on the face of it is evil. However, because the first contains the second and uses it to reveal itself and make its operation actual in what opposes it, David’s mode also belongs to The Good—as he discovers ultimately and terminably.
A. A GRACIOUS BEGINNING IN EDEN AND AN END OUTSIDE TIME: COMMUNITY AS CO-INHERENCE AND SUBSTITUTION
B. SOLITARY SELF-SUFFICIENCY
C. THE ISSUE
Community, social and cosmic, which contains the individual, because it is an articulate whole of diverse members, kinds, and elements, is the grace which precedes as Eden and succeeds as governing end. It is so strong that it draws into its operation the delusions of self-sufficiency, exclusion, and control, essential to the fantasies of freedom.
David’s characteristic mode is exposed as empty freedom, a self-constructed walled in trap from which he cannot escape. His universality which appeared as openness, at home everywhere, is exposed as emptiness, tolerable only as emptiness. Ultimately its goodness is that it is infinite capacity. The universality opens him to the other he excluded. It asserts itself as voices and forms of infinite life, insistent and demanding. The excluded other is overwhelming unavoidable necessity. David goes out into it; there is no inside left.
As David’s mind comes to absolute white, the daimonic Ellen finishes her last paradigmatic rug, by hooking in its white centre. The cosmic pattern draws him in:
The snowflakes fell on David’s face … and then they clung, without melting, to his eyelashes and his hair … And then they grew smoothly and exactly over him and over the fallen log that lay beside him until the two outlines were as one. (301)
***
“Ecological sin”: “an action or omission against God, against others, the community and the environment." "It is a sin against future generations and manifests itself in acts and habits of pollution and destruction of the environmental harmony, transgressions against the principles of interdependence, and the breaking of solidarity networks among creatures, and against the virtue of justice.” (Amazon Synod of the Catholic Church, October 2019)
All Saints, 2019
WJH
Drawing upon Gregory of Nyssa, Eriugena came to understand human nature in such a way, that, more than being ‘that in which all things could be found (inerat)’, it became ‘that in which all things are created (condita est)’ Periphyseon, IV 807A). The human is the workshop of creation (Peri. II 531AB, III 733B, V 893BC); it is the medium in which God creates himself and the universe of beings out of his own nothingness precisely because, uniquely among beings, the human possesses all the forms of knowing and ignorance, including sensation. Because everything is through human perception, there are no absolute objects.
As in earlier Platonic systems, the forms have become not only thoughts, but forms of apprehension in various kinds of subjects; as Plotinus puts it, ‘all things come from contemplations and are contemplations’ (Enneads III 8 [30] 7, 1-2). In Eriugena, there are ‘thinkers who turn out to be objects of thought…[and] objects of thought which turn out to be thinkers’ (Stephen Gersh). Periphyseon, Eriugena’s great system, is an interplay of diverse subjectivities looking at the universe from different, even opposed, points of view.
The divisions of nature are constituted by human perspectives on God. Because God does not know what he is apart from human reason and sense, these perspectives are theophanies even for God in the human, divine manifestations of which God and the human are co-creators.
When trying to understand the stages of David’s journey up the mountain by comparing them to steps in the Platonic ascent ( conversion) from the Cave to life in the light of the Sun, image of The Good, we looked at Plato’s allegory of the Line. The level just below the Good belongs to the Forms (see chart below). They are objects of thought for Plato, existing independently. With Aristotle, Philo Judaeus (decisively important), Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas (for example) and Jewish, Christian and Islamic Neoplatonic and Medieval philosophical theologians generally, they become thoughts in the mind of God (the LOGOS, WORD, NOUS, INTELLECT, for Christians the second Person of the Trinity). These thoughts are living (“in Him was life” John 1:4) and have an inherent movement to pass into sensible existence. As living forms of this kind, they are called “Angelicals.” For some of these theologians (for example, the great Jewish theologian, Moses Maimonides), angels are forms, structures of reality, flashes of the divine intellect. The tendency of medieval Platonism is in this direction.
The most important medieval philosophic theologian for putting all these elements together and determining Latin medieval theology was John Scottus Eriugena. I quote here a modified version of my text for the Chapter on him for the Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (2010).
Drawing upon Gregory of Nyssa, Eriugena came to understand human nature in such a way, that, more than being ‘that in which all things could be found (inerat)’, it became ‘that in which all things are created (condita est)’ Periphyseon, IV 807A). The human is the workshop of creation (Peri. II 531AB, III 733B, V 893BC); it is the medium in which God creates himself and the universe of beings out of his own nothingness precisely because, uniquely among beings, the human possesses all the forms of knowing and ignorance, including sensation. Because everything is through human perception, there are no absolute objects.
As in earlier Platonic systems, the forms have become not only thoughts, but forms of apprehension in various kinds of subjects; as Plotinus puts it, ‘all things come from contemplations and are contemplations’ (Enneads III 8 [30] 7, 1-2). In Eriugena, there are ‘thinkers who turn out to be objects of thought…[and] objects of thought which turn out to be thinkers’ (Stephen Gersh). Periphyseon, Eriugena’s great system, is an interplay of diverse subjectivities looking at the universe from different, even opposed, points of view.
The divisions of nature are constituted by human perspectives on God. Because God does not know what he is apart from human reason and sense, these perspectives are theophanies even for God in the human, divine manifestations of which God and the human are co-creators.
“Ecological sin”: “an action or omission against God, against others, the community and the environment." "It is a sin against future generations and manifests itself in acts and habits of pollution and destruction of the environmental harmony, transgressions against the principles of interdependence, and the breaking of solidarity networks among creatures, and against the virtue of justice.”
“He went out into them until there was no inside left. He saw at last how you could become the thing you told.”
I. EXACT DESCRIPTION, POSSESSION AND LOSS
The Mountain and the Valley is sufficiently autobiographical to alert us to the importance of David Canaan’s becoming a writer in the course of it. David as author is radically transformed. He is turned around, converted. The writing he proposes at the end has the opposite purpose to the one in which it was taken up.
II. KNOWING AND THE DEMAND OF THE OTHER
Travelling to Annapolis Royal, David experiences another of the phenomena which will repeat itself on the top of the mountain:
A sense of earned lassitude followed. Then came the rush of communicativeness from everything he looked at, as if in congratulation. Then this new need to possess these things by describing them exactly in his mind. … And then the whole multiplicity of them clamoured to known exactly, and so possessed. (201).
Crucially, until David climbs the mountain, he writes his descriptions of what is only for himself.
III. ABSOLUTION
David’s ascent of the mountain brings him to the voices and demands he encountered after he started writing as a form of self-therapy, a way to objectification, possession, control, and self-sufficiency. The essence of his spiritual climb is the step by step breaking down of the inward which is created by pushing out. He pushed out, or possessed for the purpose of conquering control, not only what demands from outside, but also what constitutes the inside as universal. In fact, humans know, and are, by identity with all. The ascent restores that identity.
In his book:
I will tell them just as they are, but people will see that there is more to them than the side that shows. … They’re intricate as anyone else, but there’s no hardness about it. They’re the best people in the whole world. … He felt the warm crying of acquittal again. Even my mother and father and all others who are gone will know somehow, somewhere that I have given an absolving voice to all the hurts they gave themselves or each other—hurts that were caused only by the misreading of what they couldn’t express. (300)
With this understanding and purpose, David enters the place in the paradigm Ellen has completed for him.
The Mountain and the Valley must be read from back to front as well as the converse. David’s terminal ascent of the mountain in the Epilogue is understood and imagined through steps and forms drawn from Western mysticism, that is, the Platonic ascent to the One-Good merged with what comes from the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). For approaching this, André-Jean Festugière o.p. (1898-1982) Personal Religion among the Greeks (Berkeley, 1954), 44 is an excellent guide.
II. DEATH, SELF-VICTIMIZATION, HYPOCRISY, JEALOUSY, PRIDE, ENVY ENTER
Chapter II begins the story the novel tells of life in the valley enclosed within the mountains with David wakening Chris in his excitement for a fishing trip with their father, Joseph. David will climb the mountain with them and have his first stay in the cabin at its top. In fact, within the novel, the cabin is never reached. Owing to the deaths of two men working in the Spring log run, the husband of Bess and father of Effie, and the husband of Rachel, and father of Charlotte, which Joseph, David, and Chris, fatefully encounter at the base, the trip up is not made and mortal sequences start in the valley.
III. STRANGERS WITHIN THE FAMILY
During the annual family visit to the graves of the settlement out of which Entremont moved, in a mutual erotic attraction, Chris and Charlotte have their first sexual intercourse. At home that night, David notes Chris’ deranged fly and discovers what occurred. His reaction was to feel belittled, shut out, and envious:
It was like a slap. David felt small and strange. … He felt betrayed. He felt a sudden hatred of Chris. … He’d do it now all right. … He’d get even with Chris. … He’d show them whether he was kid or not. (101).
Out of this jealousy, rivalry, and hatred, and out of an endeavour to show his superiority to his playmates, at fourteen, he draws the adoring Effie into sex with him.
IV. THE SCAR OF SEPARATION
Buckler devotes a whole Part (Five) of the novel to “The Scar,” gives it a date, 1935, and a mark of change: before it was “the last morning, he’d been unconscious of his flesh.” (183). David is marked when his face hits a barrel as he falls from the rafters of the great barn during the slaughter of a pig. It goes with a never ending pain, which ebbs and flows in a pattern of psychosomatic causation. It is wrapped up with fraternal love and hate.
David's logic pushes everyone out. However, its other side is perfect openness. David’s fitting in no single place is also the universality for everything and everyone. “Even the sensations of his own flesh had become outside. The inside was nothing but one great naked eye of self-consciousness with only its own looking to look at.” (281) Pure seeing is mind which the Platonic tradition knows to be all things both because it produces them and because it receives all, can become all.
Discovering that the inside is the outside and the outside the inside is the ascent of the mountain. The purification to universal openness is the condition of the climb, the mystical ascent to the Unity in which passage from inside to outside and from outside to inside are the dynamic of perfect activity.
When I first read The Mountain and the Valley my memory was pushed back to parts of the passage I insert here from Ibn Tufayl Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale. That Ernest Buckler should have carried features of the mysticism of Ibn Tufayl into his novel may seem unlikely. However, like the Hellenes, Buckler is a philosopher mystic and Islamic mysticism is especially tied into philosophy. Those of you acquainted with the writings of al-Fārābī (870-950), Ibn Sīnā (called Avicenna by the Latins, 980-1037) and al-Ghazālī (1058-1111), Ibn Rushd (died 1198, called by the Latins, “Averroes” and “The Commentator”), will hear echoes of their teachings in Ibn Tufyal (c. 1105- 1185). Lenn Goodman is correct to say in his introduction that for these Islamic philosophical mystics and mystical philosophers “nothing revealed in a beatific experience can contradict the truths we learn through the use of reason”. The inverse is also true: nothing rigorously demonstrated through the use of reason can contradict the truths of prophecy. Thomas Aquinas would say the same.
Ibn Tufayl was attached to both the occidental (rational) and the oriental (mystical) Arabic philosophies. He had introduced Ibn Rushd (Averroes) to the Caliph, was succeeded by Averroes as court physician, and was behind the commissioning of Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle.
Hayy Ibn Yaqzan was widely influential. It had a large following in the Arab world, was summarized to the Royal Society in England in 1672 and in the 18th and 19th centuries became a best seller in the West. Translated to English and Dutch in the first decade of the 18th century, it played a role in the European Enlightenment (see Samar Attar, The Vital Roots of the European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl’s Influence , Lexington Books, 2007). Hayy is “the man of reason,” whose most well-known appearance is in Robinson Crusoe, and in the idea of the tabula rasa, it enables an escape from the framework imposed by the Augustinian opposition of nature and grace and a revival of Aristotelian philosophy.
At the level of fundamentals there is much in common between The Mountain and the Valley and Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. In the latter, there is a step by step ascent by way of a correspondence between individual, social, philosophical, mystical and religious developments which is represented as inherent to the cosmic structure. However, crucially “wide awake” (the name of the solitary who makes the ascent) cannot live in the social world. He attempts to bring enlightenment to it but is rejected and forced to flee back to his island.
Suggesting any connection between the two works is somewhat daring and it is clear that there is no identical repetition but there are images and concepts and programmatic elements in common. Enough I judge to make me suggest that reading this will be a worthwhile for some of you.
IN ERNEST BUCKLER’S THE MOUNTAIN AND THE VALLEY
Ascending the log road to the top of the South Mountain frames and encloses The Mountain and the Valley as completely as the two mountains do the valley and Entremont, the Canaan’s village. The unravelling of its life, of the Canaan family, and of the possibility of David’s existence in them, and, in all these unravellings, and, by the ascent of the mountain, both exposing the dissolution of the culture of rural Nova Scotia and absolving its faults, is its story. Ascending the log road is a “pharmacon”: simultaneously healing drug and poison.
I. PHARMACON: HEALING DRUG AND POISON.
II. BORED TO DEATH: REPETITION AND DIFFERENCE
III. UP IS IN: INSIDE IS OUTSIDE: WHAT DAVID AND PLATONIST MYSTICS PASS INTO ON THE MOUNTAIN
With this absolution his work and story is complete and David’s body asserts itself again: “he felt the beating of his heart.” Blackness in his head turns to grey and then to white “an absolute white made of all the other colours but of no colour of itself at all.” (301) This is the nature of mind in the Platonic tradition. As Aristotle says “the mind is in a way all things.” This is why it can become, or is perhaps already at one with, the source and good of all. As David’s mind comes to absolute white, Ellen finishes her last rug by hooking in its white centre.
The snowflakes fell on David’s face … and then they clung, without melting, to his eyelashes and his hair … And then they grew smoothly and exactly over him and over the fallen log that lay beside him until the two outlines were as one. (301)
THE INSIDE IS THE OUTSIDE. “Extinction, nay, Extinction from Extinction, for the soul has become extinct to itself, extinct to its own extinction; for it becomes unconscious of itself and unconscious of its own unconsciousness, since, were it conscious of its own unconsciousness, it would be conscious of itself. In relation to the man immersed in this state, the state is called, in the language of metaphor, ‘Identity’; in the language of reality, ‘Unification’.”
1. ITINERARIES. a) both The Mountain and the Valley and The Power and the Glory center on, or may even be said to be about, journeys simultaneously translocations in place and movements of mind-soul-spirit, b) the terminus of both journeys is death, c) the spiritual journey in both is, or involves, growth in charity and an understanding of cosmic or divine inclusiveness beyond the ordinary, d) a map, paradigm, interpretive framework of the journey is provided by Ellen’s rugs; nothing like this is given in The Power and the Glory. The creation of humans in Genesis and Adam’s naming of the animals provides the interpretative framework and paradigm in The Place of the Lion.
2. PLATONISM AND MYSTICISM IN THE ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS. To be fully understood both The Mountain and the Valley and The Place of the Lion require knowledge of Platonism.
3. A COMMON PRINCIPLE OF INTERPRETATION. In neither The Power and the Glory and The Mountain and the Valley does anyone in the present earthly journey attain self-understanding or adequate knowledge of the nature or consequences of their actions.
4. TIME. Throughout The Mountain and the Valley diverse kinds of time and timeliness or its absence are essential: e.g. country time, city time. Places and persons live in accord with different times, and changes in these are profoundly important to the story.
5. PLACE. Places and times are relative to each other.
6. PAIN. As in The Power and the Glory, pain is essential and as in The Power and the Glory, it is always connected to spiritual condition.
7. DEATH. We might have supposed that Entremont was paradise, and the mountain its extension, but were stopped short when the first attempt to scale the mountain is prevented by two deaths and then those deaths play out to destroy the innocence and the very life of David’s family. Death is the sign and the reality of the limit the good must overcome. There is no way out of The Mountain and the Valley except through death. It is the way of salvation, if there is such a way.
Our final session on The Power and the Glory brought out several points to records for further discussion. I list those which come to mind.
a. The ceaseless coming of priests, their individual personalities effaced by their office, matches the desire for God as the Divine is present sacramentally, i.e. corporeally or “really.”
b. Fidelity of the Whisky Priest and the Whisky Catholic.
c. Among the mirrors of the Whisky Priest the half-caste, fang toothed, “Judas” must be listed.
d. Among the features of his Catholic practice Greene discloses is his wide reading of theology. It is perhaps out of this that he finds the need to bring together the particular and the universal in the charity to which the Whisky Priest comes in his journey.
e. More than one of you insists on the evidence that the American murder is associated with the death of Coral.
October 1, 2019
wjh
I. THE POWER AND THE GLORY AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
II. CREATING HIMSELF. GREENE IN HIS NOVELS
III. EROS, THANATOS AND GOD
IV. A SUMMARIZING QUESTION
The Lawless Roads and remarks Greene made on The Power and the Glory make evident the enormous extent to which the situation, plot, and characters of the novel depend on and derive from Greene’s trip to Mexico investigating the persecution of the Catholic Church there and its resistance. However, none of that prevents Greene also finding himself in Mexico and writing himself in the novel. He is there, and not there, in the four mirrors: priest, police, captain, and dentist, and also in more than these.
While asking how Greene may be creating –revealing himself in The Power and the Glory, let us not fail to remind ourselves both from the novel itself, and from Greene’s life as created in his fiction, that we are incapable of self-knowledge and self-judgment. As Socrates discovered after his life of questioning “Wisdom belongs to God.”
WJH
September 29, 2019
A FOURTH MIRROR, ABANDONMENT: THE PRIEST AS ALTER CHRISTUS, THE FINAL POWER
I. A FOURTH MIRROR: CAPTAIN FLOWERS
II. ABANDONMENT: THE PRIEST AS ALTER CHRISTUS
The Catholic Church honors the priest as “alter Christus,” another Christ, because, as consecrating the sacred elements, he must speak in the first person: “This is my body”, “This is my blood,” and, as Christ, the head of the body in the sacramental action, the priest offers the body and blood of Christ and the Church to God. Although we see the priest celebrate Mass twice, this language is not used in The Power and the Glory, and the priest crouched on the floor with his empty brandy-flask does not look like an image of Christ on the way to the cross, but there are other aspects of his death which are Christ-like. We must consider them in understanding the spiritual journey of the priest: his forgiving of Judas, of his executioner and his abandonment.
III. THE FINAL POWER
What finally is the power and the glory? Is it the ceaselessness? The never-ending offering and coming of those who do what must be done? Of martyrs who feel they had nothing to offer.
A THREEFOLD MIRRORING: PRIEST, POLICE LIEUTENANT, DENTIST
I. THE LIEUTENANT AND THE PRIEST
The Lieutenant mirrors the priest in The Power and the Glory from beginning to end.
II. THE DENTIST, THE LIEUTENANT, THE PRIEST
The first words of The Power and the Glory name “Mr Tench” a dentist looking for a cylinder of ether, vainly sought, and, when not found, declared not worth the trouble: “It did not matter so much after all: a little additional pain was hardly noticeable in the huge abandonment.” (18) The archetypical pain-giver, the dentist, who also has a pain in the stomach (14, 214-7), is the first person to meet the Whiskey priest and he is equally there at the end of the novel.
III. THE REASON FOR THE THREEFOLD
If the mirroring of the priest in the dentist were not essential to The Power and the Glory, the full extent of Graham Greene’s questioning of post Enlightenment secularity and its religious forms, including the Anglicanism of his family, school, and Oxford, would not appear. The battle with Catholicism is not ultimately between political-social-economic ideas. As Greene’s The Lawless Roads (1939), his Mexican travelogue, made clear, the embattled church in Mexico taught the social doctrines of the Papal Encyclicals of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, which were certainly not capitalist, and were taken up along with Marxist ones in Nova Scotia by Catholic, Anglican and Protestant clergy. The Indians, peons, and the people en mass reopened the churches and forced the state to allow the return of bishops and priests.
That Greene is attacking the whole modern project which ties technology to science for the entire elimination of pain, because pain has no religious, theological, philosophical justification appears with the dentist, with whom, I repeat, The Power and the Glory opens. This brings the novel very directly into the most terrible questions of our society at present: entertainment by pornography or as pornography, the legalization of pot, mass psychic and social control / therapy by prescription and non-prescription drugs, with the consequent drug / opioid crisis, on the one hand, and Medically assisted death (MAID), on the other. To bring this out I quote again from Hegel with whom I began my comments on The Power and the Glory and from George Grant on Nietzsche.
George Grant in Time as History (most useful reading to prepare for both The Power and the Glory and The Mountain and the Valley) writes:
The last men are those who have inherited the ideas of happiness and equality from the doctrine of progress. But because this happiness is to be realized by all men, the conception of its content has to be shrunk to fit what can be realized by all. … The last men will gradually come to be the majority in any realized technological society. Nietzsche’s description of these last men in Zarathustra has perhaps more meaning in us and for us than for his contemporaries who read it in 1883. “They have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night: but they respect health. ‘We have discovered happiness’, say the last men and blink.” Or again, “A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at the last, for a pleasant death.”
In neither The Power and the Glory and The Mountain and the Valley does anyone in the present earthly journey attain self-understanding or adequate knowledge of the nature or consequences of their actions. Further The Place of the Lion actually depends upon knowledge of heavenly realities. The Mountain and the Valley concludes by reaching that, and union beyond even that, and simultaneously the terminus of the earthly journey. The Power and the Glory constantly assumes the perspective of eternity as presiding over the action, entering it but never possessed. All three then depend on what is beyond (or “epekeina” in the language of Plato and the Platonic religious traditions which include Judaism, Christianity and Islam) our present capacity of knowing. The required knowledge belongs at present to God and the saints.
The next Dionysius is well on the way to appearing online and in your email and post boxes. A large and varied issue, it is edited by Dr Wayne Hankey (Emeritus Professor), and produced by Jacob Glover (MA 2015) with copy-editing by Amy Bird.
André Lanoue, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, “L’interprétation du carme de Simonide dans le Protagoras : une herméneutique de la censure philosophique.”
Jordan Daniel Wood, Boston College, “Stoic Motifs in the Cosmology of Maximus Confessor.”
Daniel Heide (MA 2016), McGill University, “Divine Eros: The Providential and Perfective Ecstasy of God in Dionysius’ Divine Names IV.”
Michèle Anik Stanbury, Notre Dame, Indiana, “The Metaphysical Origin of the Principles of Logical Thought in Plotinus’s Emanative System.”
Matthew Vanderkwaak (MA 2018), “‘A Shrine for the Everlasting Gods’: Matter and the Gods in Proclus.” Matthew is part of the European Research Project Neoplatonism and Abrahamic Traditions. A Comparative Analysis of the Middle East, Byzantium and the Latin West (9th-16th Centuries) at the University College Dublin School of Philosophy where he will do a PhD in Philosophy. Other members of the research team are Evan King (MA 2012) and Elizabeth Curry-King (MA 2013). Daniel Watson (MA 2013), having just completed a PhD at Maynooth, is also at UCD with a postdoctoral fellowship.
Edward P. Butler, “Damascian Negativity.”
Dwight Crowell (MA 2019), “Thomas Aquinas’ Attribution of Participation to Aristotle.” Dwight is starting a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Toronto fully funded by a “super SSHRC.”
Wayne J. Hankey, “Divine Henads and Persons. Multiplicity’s birth in the Principle in Proclus and Aquinas.”
James Bryson (MA 2007) Has just finished two years as a Research Associate in the Cambridge Platonists at the Origin of the Enlightenment Project at Cambridge University, coming there from a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at McGill University. He and his family now move to Munich where Dr Bryson’s position is in the Martin-Grabmann-Forshungsinstitut für mittlalteriche Theologie und Philosophie part of the Katholisch-Theologishe Fakultät in the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. There he will work on “Christian Neoplatonic Sources of Franz von Baader’s Philosophy of Love.” His article for this issue of Dionysius is “The Cambridge Platonists in Henry Fielding’s Christian Platonic History of Tom Jones.”
Cezar Enia, Université de Montréal, “The Problem of the Individuality of the Archaic Man according to Carl Gustav Jung: A Complementary File to See Mircea Eliade’s Thesis on Primitive Religions in a New Light.”
M. Laura Gemelli Marciano, University of Zurich, “Revisiting Jung and Corbin: A Review of Peter Kingsley’s Catafalque.”
September 2, 2019
There is a renewed engagement, promisingly diverse and discerning, partly dependent on new understandings of Neoplatonism. It is crucial, both for the modern legacy of Plotinus, and for the future of Bergson’s thought, that Bergson was almost uniquely attached to Plotinus among previous philosophers.
I. JEAN SCOT ERIUGENA AND JEAN TROUILLARD: RE-DISCOVERING NEOPLATONISM “In the first part of the ninth century he undertook to construct a Christian theological synthesis employing the Neoplatonic problematic. His will for orthodoxy was only equalled by the penetration with which he reinvented the greater part of the theses of Neoplatonism largely forgotten.”
The position of Postmodern Christian theology vis a vis philosophy is strikingly ironic. The totality with which it asserts its right and need to proceed independently of philosophy is, in fact, philosophically situated and determined. Heidegger above all defines the problem and the project for theology and sets the terms within which it proceeds.
The problematic is set up by his narration of Western Fate as a history of Being, or rather, of its progressive hiding. In this story of ontological closure, he gives the leading role to onto-theology. Jean-Luc Marion, John Milbank and others now define this category more strictly than Heidegger did, and efforts are made to limit those theological positions to which it is supposed to apply. Their enthusiasm for ancient and medieval Christian Neoplatonism lies in its subordination of being and its limitation or elimination of ontology or metaphysics autonomous in respect to theology. However, despite the limitations and exceptions, the use of this category by contemporary Christian theology to describe and judge its own history is determinative.
So far as the primary trinitarian difference requires the passage of divinity into infinite indeterminacy, into an endless finitude, which as a principle of divinity prevents theoretical completion, Aquinas’ self-differentiating Trinity and a postmodern one are incompatible. However, if trinitarian difference requires only that difference is essential to divinity and not just once but twice, then Thomas’ trinitarian theology is fuller and richer than an antiphilosophical and anti-Greek polemic can think.
If, however, its rich logic be set in opposition to the Aristotelian actus purus, and if an opposition to onto-theology be also required, we are in a bad way. For this would exclude from view the continuity between Aristotle’s ontological theology and the systematic henological theology in which it was conveyed to Thomas. It is just these which make difference fundamental, all pervasive, and understandable in Thomas’ trinitarian theology.
Sermon for the Requiem of Petronella Neish
St George’s Round Church
December 6th 2011 at 10 am
Forsaken on his cross, Our Lord Jesus, in the desolation of his tortured death, makes homes for us. For the thief, crucified beside him, he makes real the promise of a home with his heavenly Father. The Son of God had declared “In my Father's house are many mansions … I go to prepare a place for you.” Now, to the prayer of the penitent sinner, “Lord, remember me when you come into thy kingdom”, Jesus opens the door of our homeland: “Verily I say unto thee, Today thou shalt be with me in paradise.”
For his mother, the Son of Mary, hoisted up for mockery and death beyond embrace or caress, makes an earthly home: “When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he said to his mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then said he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.” Here, now, we offer the Holy Sacrifice in confident hope that the sufferings and death of the God-man will bear home another mother, our beloved Petronella.
All Saints, Ashmont: At Evensong and Benediction
"The last shall be first" (Matthew 20.16)
After the Ascension the apostles gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem. Almost as an afterthought, the Bible tells us: they "continued...in prayer...with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus" (Acts 1.14). Later,
when the day of Pentecost was fully come, there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues, like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost (Acts 2.2-4).
Centuries later, when artists began to paint the scene in the upper room on the day of Pentecost, they reversed the order. Mary, the afterthought, comes first. Inspired artists show the Holy Spirit descending in a river of fire, first upon blessed Mary; from her, the river branches out into eleven smaller streams to each of the apostles. The last has become first: the humble handmaid of the Lord is represented as the THEOTOKOS, the mother of God, the source of divinity to us, the first member of the church. As the Holy Spirit came upon her at the conception of her blessed son and God was born among us, so the descent of the Holy Spirit, bringing to birth the church, comes first to Mary and, from Mary, spreads to the apostles and from them spreads to us.
This postscriptural reordering has a scriptural logic. Scripture habitually makes the last first. Jesus, the son of Mary comes after her: "late in time behold he comes", he is the least among men, despised, rejected, crucified among criminals outside the city wall. But, in reality, according to Hebrews, the one by whom God spake "in these last days" is the Son and heir by whom God "made the worlds...being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person" (Hebrews 1.2-3). He is in the beginning, before the foundation of the world. He, not Adam, is the true image and likeness of God, truly the first man. Adam must conform to Christ, not Christ to Adam. Jesus declared: "Before Abraham was I am" (John 8.58). He is the Lamb slain for sin from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13.8). So, though he was born of blessed Mary, in fact her sinlessness comes from her son. Jesus takes flesh "without spot of sin" from the Virgin Mary his mother, because, in reality he gives her, in advance, the benefit of his sacrifice on Calvary for the sins of all mankind. What his sacrifice gives to all his redeemed church is first and uniquely given to Mary his mother by her son before his birth. The reversal continues: the last shall be first.
A Sermon for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Old St Edward’s, Clementsport, consecrated 1797
August 15, 2010 at Evensong
“From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty has made me great and holy is his Name.” (St Luke 1.49-50)
Our Acadian neighbours as a community are among a billion Christians celebrating a homecoming with us today. Together, we rejoice that Mary the Mother of God was welcomed home by her Son and reigns there as Queen of Heaven. However, we, here, at Old St Edward’s, and ten thousand Greek and Russian Christians near Trebizond in Turkey, are joining this homecoming to another. We come back annually at this time to refresh our souls by meeting God again in the place consecrated as our spiritual home during more than two centuries. But those thousands of Orthodox Christians, for the first time in almost ninety years, worship again today at a site sacred to the Blessed Mother for fifteen centuries. This morning the Ecumenical Patriarch and his flock came home again to a shrine so sacred to the Virgin Mother that a Christian Emperor was crowned there and there Moslem Sultans visited and left lavish gifts. Nationalism, not religion, divided Our Holy Mother’s children in her lands.
No day could be more appropriate than this for our homecoming here, and the other in Turkey. Mary, the all holy God-bearer, as the Orthodox call her, is the greatest exemplar of sacred place for us. Our forebearers here, those who built Old St Edward’s, shared this idea.
We are celebrating three hundred years of Anglican worship in these parts; this is a year and a day to take up what our founders believed and loved. St Mary was at Bishop Charles Inglis’ heart. Seven years before he consecrated St Edward’s, he designed and saw to the building of a church, near his home, St Mary’s, Auburn; he worshipped in, loved, and ornamented her temple like a personal chapel. He made her dwelling in that place so fair that it is depicted among the most beautiful religious buildings in the world. This was the first of seven more Anglican churches dedicated to St Mary in the provinces of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. One of these is very close, St Mary’s, Belleisle. Several more are prominent in New Brunswick. But there, as well as in this parish, and in Toronto, we find something very rare: Anglican churches consecrated to French Canada’s favourite saint, Anne, the mother of Mary. Saints Anne and Joachim, the mother and father of the Blessed Virgin, come down to us, not from the Bible, but from the holy stories which have grown up about their daughter. Devotion to Anne comes from devotion to Mary and shows its depth. The extent of that love might surprise you.
A Sermon for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
St Mary the Virgin, Crousetown
August 16, 2009 at Evensong
“Can a mother forget her sucking child that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” (Isaiah 49:15-16)
In the three decades since I last had the privilege of speaking to you here on the Patronal (should we say Maternal?) Festival of St Mary the Virgin, I have, like a figure at the beginning of the Book of Job, been “going to and fro in the earth.” Perhaps because I am so personally attached to this church, I have treasured my many encounters with the Virgin Mother to which it is dedicated. To speak of all these and of the diverse faces of the Mother of God revealed would take years. This evening I want to think with you about her power to gather and to care for each and all.
All Saints, Ashmont: at Mass
"My strength is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12.9)
For fifteen years my life has been wrapped up with a fraud, a lie. During that time I have been studying the doctrine of the saint who, with saint Augustine, is the most influential of all Christian theologians. He called himself Dionysius, pretended to have been converted by St. Paul in Athens and to have been St. Paul's disciple. Especially, he claimed to hand on the knowledge of the heavenly mysteries St. Paul saw when he was "caught up in the third heaven"(2 Corinthians 12.2). He has been the greatest teacher of the church, eastern and western, about the order of the earthly and the heavenly hierarchies, about the names of God, and about the mystical union with the unspeakably exalted Holy One who is beyond knowledge and all our power.
However, scholars have discovered that this man, who wrote in Greek, in fact lived in the sixth century, not the first, 500 years after Christ, not 50. That is all we know about him! He is not who he claimed to be, he wrote in Greek, he lived about 500 years after Christ. That is it: the extent of our knowledge of one of Christianity's top two theologians! He successfully hid himself from us and used a fraud to do so. Why?
Why? because he wanted us to pay attention to his teaching not to his person. He taught the God whom Paul preached to the Athenians: the hidden, unknown God. "Verily, thou art a God who hidest thyself"(Isaiah 45.15). The unknown and unseen who made the world and everything in it, who gives life and breath and all good things, who has made us his offspring, who makes us seek him, feel after him and find him for in him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17.22-29). How better to proclaim the unknown God, who hides himself, than to preach him, while hiding oneself? How better to draw us to union with God in his secret invisible light, light which is the same as darkness (Psalm 139.12)? How better to lead us to the silence of God's hidden peace than for the preacher to obscure himself in darkness and silence? Dionysius succeeded. His strength was perfected in weakness. His person is lost to sight in the background, but his doctrine in everywhere potent in the church.
Two realities define Christianity and all holy ordering of the ministry of the church. The Trinity we invoke though this passage from John’s Gospel. Our Lord addresses his Father, and ours:
I have manifested thy name unto those you gave me … : thine they were, and you gave them to me; and they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever you have given me are of thee. For I have given unto them the words which you gave me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that you did send me. … They are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them.
God is the whole Good, the eternal possession and enjoyment of the Good, and its cause in all else but only as given and received. The Son has nothing from himself and by himself. All he is he receives eternally from the Father. The Father gives his all, the whole infinite Good which he is; the Son who receives is equal to the Father, but only by total receptivity. The Son proclaims “all things whatsoever you have given me are of thee.” His followers know and believe the gospel secret; his ministers embody and teach it: “they have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that you sent me.”
The character of the Son as joyfully and obediently receiving all he is from his Father makes him the place of the Divine humiliation, self-emptying and obedience unto death, we call the Incarnation. Paul exhorts the Philippians:
Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped at, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
In the office and work of a deacon, this primal necessity of Christ’s gospel is symbolized, enacted and made the irremovable foundation of the ministry of reconciliation between God, the human, and the cosmos. The deacon’s obedient service and receptivity without entitlement is the door into ordained ministry. The Ordinal reiterates this self-emptying from beginning to end, without relief.
Nine Meditations drawn from Dame Julien of Norwich and Meister Eckhart contemplate the consequences of these texts for the office of Deacon.
Sermon for the Octave Day of Easter
We are encompassed, surrounded, by the goodness of God, the goodness which has overcome the world and assures us of victory. When the soldiers thrust the spear into the side of Jesus, there flowed out water and blood. Water lies at the root of all new life, by the water of baptism God begins to surround us by his goodness. In the sacrament he washes and embraces us, declares his good will toward us. He takes us as his own children and makes us partakers in the resurrection of his own dear Son.
“Whatsoever is born of God overcomes the world...and this is the witness, that God hath given to us eternal life and this life, is in his Son.” (1 John 5:4, 11)
The rock from which we are hewn, the wounded side of Christ yields blood and also another sacrament. The sacrament of the altar -- the bread of eternal life and the cup of everlasting salvation. This food and drink are more than comfort to us along the way, they represent to us the end of our journey: the banquet and feast of the Lamb of God in the heavenly mansions of his Father, the final rejoicing to which baptism is our invitation. We are surrounded by the goodness of God, as our beginning and our end, our alpha and omega. The supper in which Jesus was known in the breaking of the bread belongs to the end of the journey, when Jesus and his companions had reached the village at evening. The sacrament of the supper comes from the side of Christ to represent our end and goal.
But the way needs a sacrament of its very own, a sacrament which is neither the beginning before which there is only darkness, chaos, disorder and bitterness, nor the end goal after which there is no striving nor danger but only fulfillment and joy. We remember the first in our baptism, we look forward to the last in the sacrament of the altar, but we need something for our endless stumblings, confusions, frustrations and falls, our straying, dirt and wounds along the way. And there is a sacrament just for the way itself. For there are three that agree in one: the water, the blood and the Spirit. They always go together, but the Spirit is especially the power of forgiveness.
Giving and receiving, this mutual opposition, this conjugal submission of opposites to each other, is the image and likeness of the triune God, the inmost being of all which is. Elizabeth, Evan and I read Thomas Aquinas together, and the Saint is radically clear and dangerously forthcoming about what God as three persons essentially one and equal is. God is the infinite fullness given and received as knower and known, and the same infinite fullness given and received as lover and beloved. The Father submits all that He is to being known as the Son, the Son receives all that He is as the knowledge of the Father; together they submit to the unity of lover and beloved as the Spirit. All else is unfolding, participation, likeness of this. Theophany, God made manifest.
Sermon for the Feast of the Ascension, May 14, 2015
I am celebrating the 50th anniversary of teaching my first university course and asking myself what I have done with my life. Despite all the diverse courses and programmes and places, it all comes to one thing: I teach people to read and, as a result, I keep learning to read. I teach only great texts and most of them many times: Aristotle On the Soul, St Augustine’s Confessions, St Dionysius On the Divine Names, St Thomas’ Summa theologiae to name a few, some almost every year. These texts are inexhaustibly deep, and each time I read and teach them I learn new things. I was brought up on a method of teaching and learning by Professors James Doull and Robert Crouse in the Classics Department at Dalhousie and I have tried to hand it on to my students. The main idea is this: if you read these texts very carefully, if you really get out of yourself into them, the truth in them will emerge, convince, and transform you. If, in contrast, you bring your prejudices and opinions to the texts, you will find them to be wrong. To understand their truth, we must get out of ourselves into them. Take, for example, the texts set by the Church for today.
If I were to ask you what they said, you might tell me: “Today is the Ascension and the Gospel and Lesson say that Jesus ascended into heaven.” You may have a picture in your imagination, unfortunately in it Jesus probably looks like an early version of Superman leaping up into the sky. This has been a great embarrassment: first, because Jesus is not Superman, he is really and truly a man, and he is really and truly God, not something in between. Second, Western painters don’t know what to do with the feet, which is what you would mostly see if he jumped up like Superman. In consequence of these and other embarrassments, when I preached at Oxford University on the Ascension I was told, even by Anglo-Catholics, that it was a doctrine they had given up. So, let us read these texts.
The first thing we discover is that “he ascended into heaven” occurs in only one place, the Latin version of the Creed which has just been sung by the Choir: “ascendit in cælum”, and its translations. This is not the same as what the Creed says in Greek “ἀνελθόντα εἰς τοὺς οὐρανοὺς”, “he was taken up into the heavens”. The Greek creed is closer to the Scripture: “ἀνελήμφθη εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν”, “he was received up into heaven”, according to St Mark, or “νεφέλη ὑπέλαβεν αὐτὸν ἀπὸ τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν αὐτῶν”, “A cloud received him away from their eyes", according to the Acts. ...
St John 11.25-26.
Sermon for the Requiem of Dr Jane Veronica Curran
University of King’s College Chapel
August 4, 2011
Resurrection was first proclaimed as certain hope by a Jewish mother two centuries before our Lord Jesus identified himself as “the resurrection and the life.” She, “marvellous above all and worthy of honourable memory,” encouraging her seven sons to a martyrdom she would share, articulated and linked two of the great doctrines emerging from the blending of Judaism and Hellenism: resurrection from death and creation from nothing. She had faith that the same God who created everything from what-is-not would recreate: “The Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will, in his mercy, give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws.” She told her youngest, the last to face the tortures of the tyrant: “look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God made them out of what did not exist.” The ancient blending of Hellenism and Judaism produced these and other essential teachings and practices common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: “If today the West and Islam believe in resurrection, the idea is one which Maccabean Judaism took over from Hellenism, and then passed on to Christianity and Islam.”
of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress,
or persecution, or famine, or nakedness
or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these
things we are more than conquerors through
him that loved us. For I am persuaded,
that neither death, or life, nor angels, nor
principalities, nor powers, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature, shall be able
to separate us from the love of God, which
is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8.35,38,39).
Since I have been here this week, I have learned an important theological lesson. Before I tell you what it is, let me confess how difficult, indeed almost impossible it is for a high Tory teaching at a Loyalist College grateful to have been founded by King George the Third, to admit to having learned anything good in Boston. Nonetheless, you have me in your debt, and I must confess it for it concerns tonight's Gospel: the tomb was not broken open so that our blessed Lord Jesus could break out, but so that we could get in.
For night vision, we must not falsely identify darkness with sin and evil: black is beautiful, " nigra sum et formosa. " The second darkness fell when the sun hid her face, unable to look upon the death of the Son of God and Mary. The " sun's light failed. " That awe-filled reverence is not sin. In that respectful darkness, our Beloved delivered his spirit into the hands of the Father, and descended into the darkness of death. Were we not all relieved by that blessed " It is finished " ? The tortures are over. Darkness is also peace. What of tonight's darkness? What quality do you perceive? The Scripture and hymns awaiting us gather in the prior darknesses and even add to them, but there is a fundamental difference. The darkness of sin recurs with the Israelites lost in the dessert and terrifyingly trapped between the Red Sea before them and the army of Pharaoh behind. There is the sin of Adam, the father of us all, but here strangely, it is called " blessed, " O felix culpa. Death's darkness is present, both as the destructive chains of death for those imprisoned in Hell, and as the Passover plague sent on Egypt, killing all her first born, man and beast. Above all, and archetypically, giving the key which unlocks the mystery of this night, is the darkness of creation. " Darkness covered the face of the deep…And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. " (Genesis 1.2-3). That the dark mystery of this night might shine out brilliantly for us, we must recollect and unite two fundamentals: one, a truth about religion generally, and, the other, the Scriptural origination of what we celebrate tonight, Resurrection. We begin with the Bible—with a book written in Greek but not in the New Testament. In the Second Book of Maccabees, recording the guerrilla war and victory of faithful Jews against idolatrous tyrants and Jewish collaborators, two doctrines new to the Bible appear together, the resurrection of the dead, and the creation of the world from nothing. Significantly they appear in the context of martyrdom. The connection of the three was made by a Jewish mother urging her youngest son to martyrdom (the other six had already been tortured to death before her eyes), she pleaded: 1 If Proclus, De subsistentia malorum and Dionysius, De divinis nominibus are to be believed, as they ought.
The correct tenses are eternity, the present perfect, and now. Here and now we offer “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” Better, here and now, the eternal sacrifice of the lamb is made by us, in us, for us. We are joyfully and easefully capable of this impossibility because of a present perfect, because once, only once, and once for all, Jesus Christ “took our nature upon him and suffered death upon the cross for our redemption, making there by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction” for all the inadequacies “of the whole world.” The eternal, and the present perfect, create our now, here, where we are, at the end of time: “Now, once for all, at the end of time, he hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” (Hebrews 9.26)
We come to the point. For us to do what we do this night, in this Eucharist, and in every other, for us to bear the weight of ourselves, our others, and the cosmos of which we are the stewards, Another must be in us. Another is in us, by the union of the eternal and the present perfect, here, now, and forever. The Christian religion in its own peculiarity within the economy of the Divine revelation and action has nothing else to reveal than this. Another is in Me who suffered for me. Another is in me who now and eternally suffers for me as I suffer for him. Another will be in me who will suffer for me, as I shall suffer for him fulfilling his law. Revealing this, making it present to knowledge, love, and act, this is the work by which Christianity validates itself and all the exchanges of love, past, present, future, of all religions, and of none. This should and must be the cause of your ease and your joy, this must be your strength. The alternative is the fatigue of an infinite inadequacy.
PANTOKRATOR, the Cosmic Christ: A Christian Theology of Nature
Lent V, Passion Sunday, March 28, 2004 at Evensong
In ieiunio et fletu
Orabant sacerdotes:
Parce, Domine, populo tuo.
So, in the exquisite setting of Thomas Tallis our choir prayed last Sunday evening: “With fasting and with tears let the priests pray, saying: ‘Spare thy people O Lord’.” When, as a Gentleman of the Royal Chapel, Tallis set these words to music in 16th century England, they were not intended for a private group. Instead, as in the Israel to which they were first preached by the prophet Joel, these words were an expression of the public fasting, repentance, tears, and prayers of the whole society. A few minutes attention to your Book of Common Prayer will show you the corporate fasting and prayer which it ordained and regulated for the common life of the English nation. Beyond the seasonal fasts, like those of Advent and of Lent, and or those which accompanied solemn prayer, like Rogationtide for the success of the planting, or the Ember Days which fall in the octave of Pentecost, there are fasts which preceded and prepared the soul for festival and feast. The rhythm of spiritual life matched the rhythm of nature; fast balanced feast, lean and plenty alternated. The same law matched the life of the church to the life of the state: for every Te Deum there is an In ieiunio et fletu. Public and corporate fast, repentance, and prayer followed on great public calamity like defeat in battle and plague or accompanied beseeching God in time of great common need.
There was general praise at home and abroad of the leadership of President George Bush at the time of the murderous terrorist victory against the United States in 2001. Nonetheless, some American commentators expressed surprise that their Pontifex Maximus had not urged his people to repentance and sacrifice. Some members of the House of Representatives, conscious of the fasts proclaimed by the Congress during the Revolutionary War and by President Lincoln during the Civil War, urged President Bush to proclaim “a day of humility, prayer and fasting for all people of the United States” in which they would “seek guidance from God to achieve a greater understanding of our own failings and to learn how we can do better in our everyday activities.” Heroic sacrifices had been made by firemen and rescue workers, their martyrdoms were celebrated, the dead were mourned and commemorated, the bereaved comforted by the national high priest, but this petition he did not grant. Neither priest nor people were urged to fast; none donned the sackcloth or ashes of repentance.
Wednesday in Holy Week
Religion is not strange experiences, exalted speculations, exclusive visions. It finds God in the ordinary. The most immediate necessity of our flesh and blood existence, being carried in the body of another, is an operation of the highest metaphysical mystery. The formula of the desert mystic: “Your life and your death are with your neighbour” is a fact of everyday existence. The necessities of life in the body imply and found all the exchanges of love without which our psyches are isolated and anxious, locked into hellish self-absorption. Entering the Passion of Christ by which he is in us and we in him, opens the thoughts of our hearts to the modes of Substituted Love. For others to be in me, bearing my life as I bear theirs, the separations of time and place must dissolve. Tonight the Passion of Christ remakes our perception of time.
Tuesday in Holy Week
Last night, I introduced you to Pauline, terrified at meeting herself. It seems that neither she, nor Wayne, none of us, are, so to speak, enough for ourselves; we have “no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” Pauline’s friend, who understands the law of substituted love, offers, and does, indeed, bear her fear for her. He is an utter realist, “the fact [of the required meeting] remains,” he affirms; the fear must be borne; “but see how different a fact, if it cannot be dreaded! As of course it cannot be by you [now, after I have taken it on].” The rule of the world in the ordinary course of things, holds also for psychic realm; the debt must be paid. The Kingdom of Heaven is no never neverland where fantasy is fulfilled without cost or payment. Nonetheless, I can pay for you, and you for me. You can bear my spiritual burden, and I yours. There is communion between spirits. Jesus promised, disclosing the medium of the exchange: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open , and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
Last night, we looked at two instances, both effective and real. One is operating now as we speak. In the communion of the soul world, others are carrying us by identification in the medium of prayer, just as here by this Eucharist we carry them. Thus, “Each one’s joys and hopes, sorrows and distresses, they are our joys, hopes, sorrows and distresses.” Another instance exists in the tense we call ‘present perfect’. Because Christ bore the suffering of Felicitas, she confronted the beasts in the Coliseum with courage: “Another will be in me who will suffer for me, as I shall suffer for him.” The testimony of St Felicitas, whose martyrdom we celebrated this month, carried us to what we re-enact this week, the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ. It is the foundation of all the exchanges of love.
The persistence of this neo-Augustinianism may be gathered from Jean-Luc Marion’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Chicago: Mihi magna quaestio factus sum: The Privilege of Unknowing,” just published in the Journal of Religion. Set under a text from Augustine, it connects the unknowability of the human to that of God in order to oppose late medieval and modern ontology and the contemporary objectification of human life.
The lecture distinguishes three stages in the relations between this neo-Neoplatonism and this neo-Augustinianism. First with Maurice Blondel (1861-1949), their projects are identical. Second with Henri de Lubac (1896-1991), there is a strong criticism of the Augustinian tradition together with an endeavour to hold to Augustine as sharply distinguished from his late medieval and modern followers. The reason for this differentiation is that de Lubac discovers the late medieval and modern Augustinian tradition to be at the origins of the problems with modernity for which he is seeking a solution. Third with Jean Trouillard (1907-1984), Henry Dumery, Stanislas Breton (1912-2005), and others, there is a criticism of Augustine himself as a source for what is causing the destruction of transcendent religion in Western Christendom. Jean-Luc Marion’s position mixes a number of these moments and the lecture closes with some remarks about it.
Key words: corporeality, prayer, circles, theurgy, sumbola, Proclus.
It is a dialogue of self-discovery because it represents the misery from which it begins as owed to the prisoner forgetting who is, i.e. forgetting his true nature. This loss of memory results in his failure to recognize Lady Philosophy. Thus self-knowledge and philosophical wisdom develop together in the work by way of dialogue. The dialogue with Philosophia, which makes up the whole of the work, is talking to himself, but this self, which comes to self-knowledge through philosophy. is rediscovering its self-transcendence. The identity of growth in philosophical wisdom and self-knowledge is the first of the three identities essential to the Consolation.
The second essential identity is between philosophical Wisdom and Christianity. The Consolation was written by a Christian preparing himself for execution by torture. Boethius is St Boethius (just as Augustine is St Augustine) and he is celebrated as a Christian martyr. His tomb is in the crypt of San Pietro Ceil d’Oro, Pavia, where the tomb of St Augustine is on the High Altar. However, there is only one explicit reference to a Christian doctrine or Biblical text in the whole work. Like many pagans and other Christians in the period, Boethius held to Philosophy as a total spiritual system at one with true religion. So there is lots of Christianity to be discovered under the text; the one explicit Biblical reference is to the Book of Wisdom, one of the books of Hellenic Judaism written in Greek, thoroughly philosophical, and excluded from many Protestant bibles.
The journey into self-knowledge, the philosophical conversion by which the prisoners chained at the bottom of the Cave turn and move into the Sun–lite truth is also the religious conversion of a Christian to the face to face knowledge of God promised by St Paul (I Corinthians 13.12): when we shall know “even as we are known” in the heavenly homeland. The Consolation achieves a foretaste of that. For this, it must not only discuss and justify prayer, but also Lady Philosophy prays. Some regard the Consolation as prayer.
The third identity is between the intellectual, rational, emotional, and physical. This is where the poetry comes in. The Consolation alternates poetry (“meter”) and prose from beginning to end. In the Republic (II, beginning at Stephanus 377), after criticizing the poetry of his world as theologically false, Socrates speaks of the need for poetry written in conformity with philosophically discovered truth about divinity and true humanity. The poetry of the Consolation would seem to be of this kind: Lady Philosophy begins by dismissing the false elegiac muses who are keeping the prisoner trapped in his own self-pitying misery (she comes to the prisoner as he has finished writing the poem which opens the work in this mode) and then singing almost all the rest of the poems herself.
Just as the conversion out of Plato’s Cave is physical, as well as rational and moral, so the journey of Consolation is physical, emotional and moral, as well as rational, and, for this, poetry sung out loud is required. The poems of the Consolation use ALL the meters used in Latin poetry. These meters are thought to be effective emotionally and spiritually for better and for worse, in the way music is. Here they are matched to the philosophical content, either delivering it, or moving the body-soul-mind-spirit unity in accord with it. Because Philosophia in the Consolation uses the physical spiritually and intellectually in this way, the Platonism of Boethius has one of its sources in Iamblichus and Proclus, as well as many other philosophers.
Unfortunately the meters are not reproduced in any English translation of the Consolation—and doing so would be extremely difficult or impossible. Therefore without learning some Latin you cannot experience the full effect of the poetry. I include some Latin verses here in case any of you want to try scanning and reciting these. However, Victor Watts, a Professor of English, in Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy, translated with an introduction by Victor Watts, revised edition (Penguin, 1999), has rendered the poems beautifully. I give here a selection together with a very brief indication of the place each poem stands in the movement of the Consolation.
at St Andrews University, Scotland
I shall discuss with you today, the hermeneutical principles of James K. A. Smith. Dr Smith and John Milbank agree that these are rooted in his identification with “the Dutch Calvinist tradition from Kuyper to Dooyeweerd.” I shall not speak today of Dr Smith’s engagement with Radical Orthodoxy but rather of his treatment of Augustine in an article sent to me in August 2003 entitled: “Confessions of an Existentialist: Reading Augustine After Heidegger.”
Prayer is not only a means in the Consolation. The work as a whole may also be seen as prayer effected by Philosophia’s divine-human theurgy.
Unless viewed within this particular Neoplatonic context, where “the oracles, held to be divine, are included among the authorities of philosophy” and where “philosophical texts themselves, in the first place those of Plato, are raised up to the level of divine revelations” , The Divine Names is completely enigmatic. A central puzzle is that, though Dionysius makes Biblical revelation the absolutely necessary condition for the activity of naming God and the source of the particular names ascribed to the deity, he clearly both derives many names from Proclus, and also orders the whole treatise according to a Neoplatonic logic primarily, though not exclusively, Procline. What is presented as Christian and Biblical is in logic and content also a continuation of pagan Neoplatonism.
At about the same time that Dionysius’ reflections on his reading of Proclus were producing his peculiar treatise on The Divine Names, a Latin Christian author who had also read Proclus, was writing a book puzzling in the opposite way. After Boethius the next great meeting of these two opposing but interacting Neoplatonic traditions is in Eriugena and here the Procline side is above all encountered through the Pseudo-Dionysius, just as the other is primarily known in Augustine. I will conclude by briefly comparing the large scale structure of Eriugena’s Periphyseon and Boethius’ Consolation.
I wish to attend to the reversal of the direction of movement in the two works. Whereas the direction in the Consolation is from multiplicity to simplicity, a gathering of the whole self, including dividing reason, into intellect unified at the still divine center, the direction in the Periphyseon is from the uncreated and unnamable simplicity above being, through intellect, reason, imagination and sense, as created and creative means, to the created material cosmos, from which the return to the uncreated is effected.
A communication to the Twelfth International Conference on Patristic Studies, Oxford, August 21 -26, 1995.
for God Everyday and Everywhere, the 37th Annual Atlantic Theological Conference, June 22nd 2017 at the University of King’s College
This paper and my “The Conversion of God in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae” concern the Divine Trinitarian life, in itself, and as the reality of everything else. If Being is Trinitarian and Incarnational for Aquinas, then, for him, as much as for Augustine, God is everyday and everywhere. Augustine’s Confessions and Aquinas’ Summa both move to God as Trinity from incomplete manifestations of the fundamental Trinitarian structure of reality. For them, the totality of the self-differentiation in the divine self-conversion must be revealed step by step. That self-othering, and the co-relative gathering-return back into the originating self, are not seen immediately. The disclosure of real opposition in God, constructing three infinite divine subsistences, “persons”, requires the Christian revelation. Nonetheless, as Dr Diamond’s paper last evening showed, because both are Aristotelian in their doctrine of God as self-thinking, they share a philosophical trinitarianism which is common to pagans, Jews, and Muslims.
The ways Aquinas and Augustine treat the Trinity are related as the Way Up and the Way Down, in the manner Aquinas understood Heraclitus: “The way up and the way down are the same”. Yesterday I exhibited this structure in its outward emanation in Aquinas’ Summa. In complementary contrast now, with the hope of illumining both, I look at the upward movement towards an ever clearer revelation of the fundamental trinitarian constitution of the whole in “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos”.
My paper is largely devoted to bringing out how, in the Confessions, God’s Trinitarian life is both his own being and that of everything else in the cosmos. Augustine’s Trinitarian God is everyday and everywhere. By way of conclusion, I convey the radical and deeply serious criticism of Augustine and Augustinian Christianity by a few great French philosophical theologians of the 20th-century.
Thus the final future of Augustinian spirituality is to see God “face to face” and to know “as we are known.” By this theological and philosophical anthropology and cosmology, Augustine gave the Latin Christian spirituality its specific character and determined the fate of Western civilization. There is no future for Western Christianity religious or secular without a recovery of Augustinian spirituality.
Why is the Church so unconscious of this need and so ill equipped to supply it? In brief because Augustine is found at the origins of the Protestant Reformation, of Modern philosophy and of the Modern controversies about grace (like Jansenism) which have so troubled the Catholic Church for five centuries. For almost five hundred years she has felt forced very often to combat, condemnation and silence. As the cause of so much trouble, Augustine has been treated with suspicion and an attempt was made to impose an alternative philosophical and theological mind on the Latin Church. That effort has now failed in part because it required misrepresenting both Augustine and Aquinas. With that failure the initiative is now with the Augustinians.
Shall we so listen to Augustine as to hear what he and his followers have to teach us? Shall we so examine ourselves in the light of what we hear that we can begin to discover whether what Augustine and his friends teach is true? Shall we try to find a way to God in this examination? On our answers to these questions the contribution of the Order of St. Augustine to the future of Augustinian spirituality depends. That spirituality must be at the heart of the future, this is not in doubt . The only question is as to the role this great Order will play in the Augustinian future.
Janowski concludes that before 1630 Descartes had read De Doctrina Christiana, and the De Ordine and De Genesi ad Litteram before 1637. Before 1641 he had read De Immortalitate animae, De Quantitate animae, De Libero Arbitrio, De Trinitate, Confessiones, De Ciuitate Dei, Contra Academicos and De Vera religione. The themes essential to the Cartesian metaphysics as presented in the Meditations which derive from Augustine include the following: the end of philosophy, i.e. knowledge of God and soul, that mathematics is certain whether we are awake or asleep, the evil genius, the cogito, the definition of soul, the notion of extension, the example of the wax, Inspectio mentis, that I am a middle between being and nothing, the explanation of the origin of error, that in intellectual vision there is no error, that understanding judges between the data of the senses, the definition of eternal truths, that God creates by the action of his knowing, and Inneism. Janowski determines: “Whatever the final judgment about the true relationship between Augustinianism and Cartesianism, one can safely conclude that even if Cartesianism is not the most faithful interpretation of the thought of St. Augustine, it is certainly a legitimate one” The affiliation is profound, indeed: “Numerous passages that the Augustinians could recognize in the Meditations must have sounded to their ears as if the Saint himself was speaking.” Moreover, Janowski shows that by means of Augustine, Descartes is transforming the conception of the self inherited from the Scholastics.
In consequence, we must not only praise Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, as many rightly have, for bringing the self to the fore within the Anglo-American philosophical world. In addition, we must recognise that his treatment of the Western self is remarkable in its scope. He has shown the need for a consideration which includes history (or which is, as he says, “analytical and chronological” ). Moreover, in showing us how the modern identity has been made, Taylor has reached back further than many would think necessary. As is required, he has put Augustine at the foundation of Cartesian modernity and of
its account of the self. His assertion that “On the way from Plato to Descartes stands Augustine” is more than a chronological fact. It is a significantly true and necessary statement about our construction of ourselves.
Nonetheless, Taylor’s sketch of the sources of the western self involves problems, problems which are at the center of many present philosophical, historical and theological treatments of the self. My difficulties are not with what Taylor has written, but rather with what he leaves out. We should not be surprised if in the twelve hundred years between the cogito of Augustine and that of Descartes, subjectivity found and made for itself other sources, shapes and structures. These also make the modern identity and, just as importantly, belong also to its necessary deconstruction. I propose here to trace, as briefly as it can be done, the way from Augustine to them.
When writing the two papers, I saw that they are related as the Way Up and the Way Down, more or less in the manner Aquinas understood the ancient law. Heraclitus had declared: ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή (Diels, B60), “The way up and the way down are the same”. Without citing its source, Aquinas quotes the formula with approval at the beginning of the last Part of his Summa contra Gentiles: “eadem est via qua descenditur et ascenditur.”
Confronting the inadequacy of the human intellect for “seeing the divine substance in itself,” St Thomas tells us we can get to the knowledge we need and desire starting from creatures, from “the things themselves”, because the way up and the way down are the same. There is a common structure at work whether the mind moves from God or from creatures. The starting and ending points differ, but, because of the universal return to source, they too are the same ultimately. The same fundamental figure is discernable and at work in the beginning, the mediation, and the conclusion.
Aquinas finds “the most perfect unity, in God, the highest summit of things”, from this emerges a greater and greater “diversity and variation in things.” So, “the process of emanation from God must be unified in the principle itself, but multiplied in the lower things which are its terms.” The emanation, or going out, is seen in God in a simple form, the one proper to its nature as cause. The same structure must be visible, opened up and multiplied, in the various creatures which are the end terms of the divine creative activity. This inclusive opening and multiplication is the mediating process. I aim to exhibit this common structure in its downward emanation in “The Conversion of God in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae” and in its upward movement towards an ever clearer revelation of its fundamental constitution in what follows on “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos”. In consequence, I hope that they will illumine each other and make reading both useful.
“Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos” is largely devoted to bringing out how, in the Confessions, God’s Trinitarian life is both his own being and that of everything else in the cosmos. Augustine’s Trinitarian God is everyday and everywhere. By way of conclusion, I draw Augustine’s Trinitarian understanding of reality into current discussions through the radical and deeply serious criticism of it by a few great French philosophical theologians of the 20th-century. By this means I point to what most importantly differentiates Augustine and Aquinas, Proclean Neoplatonism as continued by Dionysius and Eriugena. Thereby. I raise the question of its necessity, as well as its presence, as a corrective and counterbalance to Augustine in constructing Latin Western philosophical theology and in moving us beyond that.
By way of statutes on the façade of L’Hôtel du Parlement de Québec (especially Marie de l'Incarnation, Jean-Jacques Olier, and François de Laval), we explore the Augustinian and Pseudo-Dionysian foundations of the spirituality of New France. By way of records of the life there, and the textbooks used in them, we investigate the kinds of Augustinianism taught and inculcated at the Séminaire de Québec and the Grand Séminaire de Montréal; particularly, we observe the passage from Gallican to Ultramontane ecclesiology. Olier’s surprising presence on the façade leads us to the Sulpicians and the political theology of the Cardinal de Bérulle. The Copernican revolution effected by this Dionysian hierarch brings a new interpretation of the sacrifice of Christ and the centrality of the priest. The institutional and ascetical implications of this new orientation in Christianity were worked out in New France far more completely than in the Hexagon. We conclude with a consideration of the character and role of the Catholic Church formed in this way in Post Conquest Québec and the consequences this had for the definitions of provincial and federal powers in the Canadian constitution. The Québec Church showed not only the enormous success modern clericalist and centralised Catholicism, with the seminary as its instrument, could achieve but also its limits.
Phillip. Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self. The Legacy of a Christian Platonist. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. These two books show that he is central for understanding the history of Western political thought and how we constituted the self.
In contrast to the modest and careful empiricism of Atkins and Dodaro, the claims Cary makes for Augustine are unsurpassed and his judgments are of astonishing breadth. This bishop is supposed to have invented Western inwardness: 'the private inner space is in fact something Augustine made up' (p. viii). Moreover, his crucially transforming intellectual invention emerged from a notion of the divine intelligibility both unique to him and setting Eastern and Western Christianity against one another.Augustine was: 'last in West or East to believe that the substance of God is intelligible' and his 'idiosyncratic commitment to divine intelligibility' is 'the key strain of theological difference between East and West' (p. 55). Cary’s case is set out step by step with a persuasive clarity, close reading of crucial texts, wide learning in respect to relevant scholarly literature, remarkably shrewd judgment on many very difficult and much controverted cruxes of interpretation. In the end, however, it depends upon constructions composed out of oppositions so one-sided as to result not only in fundamental misrepresentation but also in self-contradiction.
The first indication of how Cary's argument will go wrong is his false contrast between Plotinus, for whom the soul moves inward but not upward because it is divine, and Augustine adapting Platonic inwardness to the Christian soul which must ascend because created. Only a predetermined reading of the Enneads could miss the relentlessness of their ascending logic, in large part owed to the subordination of the hypostases whereby divinity is graduated. In Chapter 1, Cary both contradicts himself and the texts of Plato he quotes when he tries to contrast Augustine, for whom the ideas are in the soul, and Plato, for whom they are not.
A paper for the Eleventh Theological Conference
published in Replenish the Earth. The Christian Theology of Nature, ed. Susan Harris (Charlottetown: St. Peter Publications, 1992), 39-56.
Despite Our Lord's rebuke of Thomas, demanding to touch and see, that the blessed were those who believe not having seen, and the Pauline definition of faith which opposes faith and sight, we tend to accept the axiom that seeing is believing.1 Partly because of the domination of communication by television, the character of our relation to nature, the problems with that relation, and the solutions seem obvious. I want to show you something about the Christian understanding of nature which can quite literally be seen. Moreover, it can be seen because, as an historical transformation of the understanding of nature, it is fundamentally simple. However, I hope that what you will see and understand will give to the questions before this conference the complexity they deserve. Our Christian relation to nature is what it is because, nature is, first of all, "hid with Christ in God,"2 it has died and been resurrected with him. Second, we only have the modern relation to nature in which we are at home in the world as Christians and are not afraid of it, or afraid to use it, because the nature which has appeared out of its hiddenness in the heavenly places is God's, and Christ's, and so ours.3
The Christian transformation in how we see and understand nature and our place in it I propose to treat in two parts.4 First, we shall see what happened to the human view of space; namely, how modern western painting came to develop the perspective box in which objects are placed in an infinite space formed by locating them on planes erected horizontally on parallel lines which converge at a necessarily hidden, or invisible, point in the beyond. This development, which arises out of certain necessities of western Gothic sculpture and painting, was a discovery of the Italian renaissance and perfected by the Flemish renaissance painters. The slides shown in Part I, "Perspective and infinite space: making the world infinite," will illustrate this historical movement of western Christian culture.
Second, we shall try to understand what this bringing of the infinite into the natural world of humans means. Part II, "The Presupposition of an infinite nature: the union of the heaven and the earth," will explore the theological presuppositions of the Christian renaissance of the Fifteenth and early Sixteenth centuries under three headings. One aspect of this Christian renaissance is a new understanding of the Christian relation to non Christian culture, especially, though not exclusively, the culture of the pagan Greeks and Romans. It is well known that the Christians of the modern renaissance greatly admired these pagan predecessors and thought of themselves as recovering the pagan golden age. But, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth century humanists, who, like their mediaeval predecessors, called themselves "modern" because they were Christians, also thought they had surpassed the ancients. So we must begin by appreciating both what the pagan Greeks and Romans accomplished and what lay beyond them.
A conversion is required (periakteon) (ἀναγωγή or περιαγωγή)
This demands someone with the art (techne) of leading around (periagoges), (τέχνη…τῆς περιαγωγῆς) who can convert (metastraphestai) (μεταστραφήσεται). Ultimately this requires that someone who has seen the light return to the dark to help the prisoners break their chains, turn around, move upwards and out. There is an important convergence with Christianity. St Paul [1st century CE contemporary of Philo, died in Rome], writing to the Corinthians about the itinerarium love travels from lower to higher kinds of knowing until it reaches the mutual divine human seeing at which Boethius [died Pavia 525/526] arrived at the end of his Consolation of Philosophy, compares our present knowledge to obscure vision through a mirror. I Corinthians 13.12: “We see now through a mirror enigmatically / obscurely, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am known.” Religions, pagan, Jewish, Christian, Muslim have the idea of conversion from darkness, ignorance, non-being to enlightenment and the image of the Cave at their centre and a converting saviour or saviours (Pythagorus [Ionia and Southern Italy c 530BCEstarted his school], Moses [Egypt and Palestine c1400 BCE], Jesus, Mohammed [Arabia 622 “Hegira” (Mohammed's Flight from Mecca to Medina)]). Probably the resulting soteriology (theory of the saviour or of salvation) is most completely worked out philosophically by Iamblichus (Syria c250-c325 CE), but it is everywhere present in the itineraries (journeys) of the soul among the religions of the Book.
A proposed paper for a Panel, "Alterity in Neoplatonism: Christian and non-Christian," at the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies meeting Dominican University College , Ottawa, 12-16 June, 2019
In recent work on the foundation of matter in the Principle I have drawn together Proclus and Aquinas with some others in the Platonic tradition up to Henri Bergson and Jean Trouillard. The parallels drawn were suggestive but not pushed beyond suggestion. So while Aquinas was treated in terms of self-alienation within Ipsum Esse Subsistens, as the basis of the Trinity and Incarnation, I only looked at Proclus in terms of the immediate connection of the One as Nothing by excess and Matter as Nothing by defect. I propose now to attempt to bring Aquinas and Proclus closer together by going back, with Aquinas, to work I published in 1985. There I dealt with the 20th century Neo-Thomist wars in terms of the identity of esse and essentia in the perfect activity of he First (as opposed to Gilsonian Existential Esse as facticity). On the Proclean side I shall attempt to use Trouillard on procession, Edward Butler on the One and the Henads, and Tim Riggs on the Trinity in Dionysius to find a birth of Alterity in the One.
Canadian Evangelical Review: Journal of the Canadian Evangelical Theological Society 26-27 (Spring 2004): 35-64.
POIÊSIS: CHRISTIAN AND POSTMODERN
As my title indicates I propose to describe and evaluate Radical Orthodoxy where it locates itself, as a form of postmodern Poiêsis. John Milbank connects Poiêsis and postmodern Christianity as follows:
If art as redemption … is modernity’s own antidote to modernity, then poesis may be the key … to a postmodern theology. Poesis ... is an integral aspect of Christian practice and redemption. Its work is the ceaseless re-narrating and ‘explaining’ of human history under the sign of the cross.
In another essay, he tells us:
[P]ractice cannot claim to ‘know’ the finality of what it treats as final. ... We know what we want to know, and although all desiring is an ‘informed’ desiring, desire shapes truth beyond the immanent implications of any logical order, so rendering the Christian logos a continuous product as well as a process of ‘art’.
The end of modernity ... means the end of a single system of truth based on universal reason, which tells us what reality is like. 2. [T]heology .. no longer has to measure up to accepted secular standards of scientific truth or normative rationality. ... 4. ... the point is not to ‘represent’ .. externality, but just to join in its occurrence, not to know, but to intervene, originate.
Before describing Radical Orthodoxy and its poiêsis, we should begin by thinking about poetry, Christianity, and religion in a way that Radical Orthodoxy would generally approve. The divine - human poetry essential to Christianity and, mutatis mutandis, to religion generally is:
a) first, simply liturgy, roughly the prayer of the religious community, which embraces everything from the dance of cultic movement, hymns, and music to architecture, as well as the verbal prose and poetry we ordinarily associate with liturgy,
b) second, the myth-making or story-telling which is reflected in but by no means confined to what is called Holy Scripture, and includes the stories of the saints great and small, and recounting the on-going supernatural or miraculous (the non prosaic), revelation which constitutes the Church,
c) third, making and being the Church, which is everything from entrance into, life in, and extension of the sacred community, the edifying care it extends to its members, to humanity, and to the world as the steward of God’s reign, and even extends to the projection of its appropriate political communities (“states”) both as the secularization of the church and as its antipode.
It is easily seen that poiêsis is the normal and ordinary religious activity, perhaps even the essential character of religious life. Although some of the language I have used here is current, John Milbank is not wrong to see Patristic and Medieval Christian writers representing the life of the Church as poetic in the ways I have listed. Certainly, the Radically Orthodox are right to judge that these forms of poiêsis are united in works of Christian theology within the Platonic tradition like the Confessions of Augustine (especially when the first ten books are considered in light of the last three) and the Periphyseon of John Scottus Eriugena. Radical Orthodoxy is the reassertion of what is normal in the present circumstances. As such it should be and would be unremarkable.
Radical Orthodoxy, however, is neither unremarkable nor uncontroversial because it self-consciously makes this reassertion in the context of what we may generally identify as a Heideggerian understanding of our world, and of the role of philosophy in constructing it. Within the metaphysics of the will to power which, for Heidegger, constructs modernity and concluded metaphysics as a whole, the West witnessed the death of God, and either endeavoured to annihilate religion and the gods as a consequence, or ushered them to the ineffectual margins. Heidegger assumes the death, witnesses to it, and seeks in poiêsis a way beyond it. In fact, we now face the survival of both religion and the gods, and we witness the return of gods who have immunized themselves from the rationality of the old metaphysics. As a result, much at the end of the last millennium and in the beginning of the new may make us ask whether it is poetry as religion, or whether it is rather modernity itself that are the more embattled in the postmodern world, and, therefore, whether the mixture of assertive arrogance and defensiveness which so mutilates Radical Orthodoxy is the right reaction of Christian theology to the present. However, the fact that it may come as a surprise to many that religion generally, and Christianity particularly, count as poiêsis and, indeed, the primary poiêsis, makes Radical Orthodoxy’s reassertion of these against modernity of some real importance and use.
Christianity and Islam.
In common with conservative Christians generally, since the inauguration of the Atlantic Theological Conferences, participants have habitually complained about secularization as one of the chief enemies to living an authentic Christian life. However, since September 11, 2001, and the turn of our attention to world-changing “fundamentalism” among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, there has been a striking reversal. On the one hand, Islam and Zionist Judaism are accused of lacking a proper basis for the secular. On the other hand, Christians now lay claim as a point of pride to being the originators of the secular, and, thus, of a space wherein religious differences can be mediated and peaceful coexistence fostered. For Christian Westerners, secularism is presented “within a continuum of social and historical ‘progress’ that portray[s] it as the highest achievement” of our own culture, so that we are not alienated from our religious and cultural traditions by it; moreover, we are confident that what originated with us will be the future of all mankind. In this shift, or reversal for conservatives, it remains agreed that secularization is a product of Christianity; the point of difference is how we evaluate it. It had been a threat; it has now become our pride. Our aim in this conference is to note this shift, to reconsider the basis of our previous evaluation of secularization as ‘a bad thing’, and reflect on whether we want to join in the enthusiasm for it and in the praise of Christianity as its originator.
The chapter moves from 19th and 20th century Biblical criticism which placed the Christian scriptures at the service of revolution and reaction by setting them against the doctrinal, theological and philosophical ecclesiastical tradition back to the reassertion of the unity by way of Patristic and medieval exegesis.
George Grant (Dalhousie and McMaster † 1988) from Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (1969).
Charles Taylor (McGill & Oxford, born 1931) from The Malaise of Modernity (1991).
Kant († 1801), Hegel († 1831), Marx († 1883), Nietzsche († 1900), & Heidegger († 1976).
James Doull (Dalhousie † 2001), “Would Hegel Today Be a Hegelian?” (1970): “In antiquity Prometheus could be subdued and taught to live under the power of Zeus. But now he has captured the citadel of Zeus and founded technology on the sovereign right of the individual. The principle of the modern age is the unity of theoretical and practical. A more dangerous principle there could not be.”
Frye writes: “liberal education, the pursuit of truth for its own sake … is an act of faith, a kind of potential or tentative vision of an end in human life.” (114)
B. WESTERN CIVILIZATIONS: AN ALTERNATIVE STORY
In 1997, we first started lectures on Plotinus († 270) and Neoplatonism. The lectures included not only blacks like St Augustine († 430; his mother, St Monica, was a Berber), but Persians: Al-Farabi († 950) & Ibn Sina († 1037); Syrians: Iamblichus († 330) & Dionysius (6th century); Jews and Moslems writing in Arabic in Spain: Moses Maimonides († 1204), Ibn Tufayl (12th century), Ibn Rushd (12th century); the greatest Neoplatonic syncretizing philosopher, Proclus († 485), was from Asia Minor, a religious and racial melting pot.
As the Odyssey begins, Poseidon is visiting the pious Aethiopians for relief from the ever quarrelling Greeks. In the 4th century, Iamblichus used the Homeric types to mutually characterize Hellenes and barbarians. The old ‘pristine’ Eastern cultures give weight and wisdom. The Hellenes are “experimental by nature and eagerly propelled in all directions, having no proper balance,” they endlessly alter “according to [their] inventiveness and illegality.” Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, VII.5.
I Hellenism in Arabic and Persian, our Forgotten Heritage.
II. Jewish and Christian Hellenisms in Greek and Their Successors
III. Bringing in the Latins
IV. The modern western civilization of secularised Protestantism
George Grant from Technology and Empire: “The absence of natural theology and liturgical comforts left the lonely soul face to face with the transcendent (and therefore elusive) will of God. This had to be sought and served not through our contemplations but directly through our practice. From the solitude and uncertainty of that position came the responsibility which could find no rest. That unappeasable responsibility gave an extraordinary sense of the self as radical freedom so paradoxically experienced within the predestinarian theological context. The external world was unimportant and indeterminate stuff (even when it was our own bodies) as compared with the soul’s ambiguous encounter with the transcendent.”
Dr Eli Diamond on “Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age” (2007) in 2010: The ‘buffered self’, “is defined by its sense of self-completeness, invulnerability, being author of our own laws and master of the meaning of things. On the side of the self, through a gradual discipline, there emerges a rationality disengaged from powerful feeling and bodily processes, a narrowing of our sphere of intimacy and the emergence of an ideal of polite and civilized behaviour. On the side of the world, there is disenchantment of the world, a mechanized view of the universe, a view of time as homogeneous, and a leaving behind of a Platonic world of hierarchical complementarity. The result of this buffered self is the modern sense of power, an ability to self-govern, a feeling of self-reliance and self-sufficiency.”
C. HOPE WITHIN AND WITHOUT
I. Prince as the “Dionysian Christian”: an Itinerarium corporis in deum
In “Prince as a Dionysian Christian” Dr Diamond says: “Dionysus is the God of the transgression of boundaries. And you see in Prince, embodied in his lyrics and his music and his person, the transgression of every single boundary imaginable. Between the sacred and the secular, and the body and the spirit, man, woman, racial divides and especially every single musical genre. … Prince, from the beginning, is intensely spiritual. But there’s a sense with him that you’re blocked from God if you’re living in the political, if you’re living in the social according to conventions, according to all these repressive binaries, and that it’s really by entering into and listening to our corporeal bodily nature that you actually have a feeling of self-transcendence through sexuality into the divine.
II. The old west and Indigenous spiritualities
Five aspects:1) Story and myth are essential and contain what reason cannot find or say on its own. 2) Philosophical or scientific reason is absolutely necessary and has its own laws, but it is not the highest form of knowing because inspired theologians tell the stories of spirit. Thus, reason and religion are different, but mutually necessary. 3) Effective healing and union with divinity comes through practices that cooperate with the natural rhythms, sacred places and times of the cosmic order, implanted by the Creator. Theory is not enough. The one who discerns and can invoke these realities is demanded, be she, or he, called priest, theurge or medicine man. 4) The cosmic mediating and animating spirits are manifold: saints, heroes, and daimonic beings. 5) Finally, the modern Disenchantment of the material cosmos is blindness. The cosmos is, as Thales, the first philosopher, said, “full of gods”. It is the living appearance of divinity, theophany, not dead matter.
III. Jean Trouillard: Authentic Neoplatonism in a French Seminary
Augustine, Confessions: “The three aspects I mean are being, knowing, willing. … Knowing and willing I am. I know that I am and I will. I will to be and to know. In these three … contemplate how inseparable in life they are: one life, one mind, and one essence, yet ultimately there is distinction, for they are inseparable, yet distinct. The fact is certain to anyone by introspection.”
Jean Trouillard (Sulpicien † 1984) judged: “The danger is … to reduplicate the distinctions inherent in created spirit in order to found them in the Absolute. One of the weaknesses of the Augustinian tradition is … not to have understood that the requirements of criticism and the necessities of religious life converge in order to liberate Transcendence from all that would draw it back within what we can know. Without this transcendence we perpetually risk the quiproquo [exchange], as it results in the Hegelian dialectic where no one is able to say if this is of God, or this is of man, and which plays upon this ambiguity.”
Stanislas Breton (Passionist † 2005), De Rome à Paris. Itinéraire philosophique (1992), 154: “What they inaugurated under the appearance of a return to the past was well and truly a new manner of seeing the world and of intervening in it, of practicing philosophy, of comprehending the givenness of religion, both in its Christian form and in its mystical excess; since, and I hasten to add, they reconnected the old West to its Far Eastern beyond.”
IV. Eriugena’s Neoplatonism: A cultural miracle
Philosophy turned from seeking rest and security above change and fate to the most radical creativity and humanism. What is before thought and being, the Nothing by Excess, Uncreated Creating, founds reality by creating itself in the human as its workshop. All things were created in the human. This optimistic unity, of physics, psychology, and theology, & of East and West, became the underlying assumption of every future western total system.
A freedom within Neoplatonic western civilization opens it to the spirituality of the indigenous in this land where we can only live if both live in harmony. The Middle Ages seemed to be an end of civilization, in fact, there contemplation built a new one. Silence is the place where hope opens.
Translated by Christian Trottmann
For the interpretation of Eriugena, therefore (and perhaps for the understanding of the history of medieval thought more generally), it is important to move beyond the conventional paradigm [note, if “conventional” it is an extremely recent convention] of opposed Plotinian and Procline Platonisms, and consequently opposed Augustinian and Dionysian Platonisms.
Since I have attempted for more than 15 years to treat first Aquinas, and then Western post Patristic theology, philosophy, “spirituality” and culture generally, in terms of just such a paradigm, looking at Eriugena specifically in these terms in a paper delivered at the Patristic Conference this last August, some justification of how I can go on in this way is required. This is especially true since Dr. Crouse, when he handed me a copy of his paper, indicated, in his understated way, that I would likely find that it differed somewhat from my own position. Nothing decisive or complete can be offered here either in defining our differences, nor in my justifying my position, if it can be justified, but at least the nature of the problem can be faced.
More on this will be found in my “Memoria, Intellectus, Voluntas: the Augustinian Centre of Robert Crouse’s Scholarly Work,” a paper for an Academic Celebration of Professor Robert Darwin Crouse, Dalhousie Department of Classics, October 14th and 15th 2011, Dionysius 30 (2012): 41–76 posted on Academia.edu
The Medieval Review 2000 <http://www.hti.umich.edu/t/tmr/>. 00.10.02
Eriugena, master of the liberal arts, translator, philologue, poet, philosopher, and theologian, ‘reinvented the greater part of the theses of Neoplatonism’ (Jean Trouillard) , by his time largely forgotten in the Latin West. Such a profoundly authentic retrieval of the doctrines developed in the pagan Platonic schools of late Antiquity from Plotinus to Damascius would not be created again in the Middle Ages until Maître Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa—both, directly or indirectly, under Eriugena’s influence. His accomplishment is the more remarkable because made almost entirely without access to non-Christian authors, by drawing out philosophy largely from theological writings —into which genres his own works almost entirely fall.
After Boethius, he was the first to unite the Greek and Latin Platonisms of late Antiquity; this enabled his reconciliation of Latin and Greek Christian theology. The Latin Fathers were foundational—pre-eminently Augustine, crucially Boethius, and importantly Ambrose. In Periphyseon they are contained within a single system with the Greek Fathers. The writings of the Greeks were known to him and affected his thought before he made his famous translations beginning with the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus. While producing them, he learned, and deeply reflected upon, the doctrines of the late Hellenic Platonists in the tradition from Iamblichus to Damascius, ideas he had not acquired by means of the Latins. Eriugena’s reconciliation was accomplished by extending the primarily Plotinian and Porphyrian Platonism of the Latin Fathers in the direction of notions from Iamblichus, Syrianus, Proclus, and Damascius transmitted by the Greeks. The logical conclusion of pagan Hellenic philosophy, John encountered indirectly, first, by way of Boethius, and, then by way of the more radically apophatic theologies of Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor—to name the most influential sources. In general, in the Latin Middle Ages, when the earlier Platonism of Augustine met the later, most authoritatively conveyed by Dionysius, ‘this highest theologian’ (Expos. IV 189), the later determined the systematic structure within which ideas were placed. Eriugena established the pattern which would prevail among the Latin mediaevals. He rode the wake of the interpretation of the first hypothesis of Plato’s Parmenides established by Plotinus (V 1 [10] 8) into meontology. In consequence, the divine ‘nothingness by excellence’ is ‘beyond all things which are and which are not’ (Peri. III 681AC). This divine nature, which is said not to be ‘because of its ineffable excellence and incomprehensible infinity’ (Peri. III 634B), contains being. Nothingness underlies being, being emerges from it, and being returns into it. By plunging into it, Eriugena follows Dionysius into ‘the ineffable and incomprehensible and inaccessible brilliance of the divine goodness, unknown to any intellect’ (Peri. III 681A), where Augustine can no longer be his guide.
2. “Being both unparticipated and participated is essential to the character and role of the non aliud.” In the course of your response to this proposition you will find it useful to consider whether the need for this contradiction is common to the Cardinal von Kues, Proclus, and Dionysius. You will comment on why the higher reaches of philosophy have need of contradiction and how contradictions are used. In this latter context it will be important to relate philosophy to mystical experience (by which I mean experience of union or extinction), both positively and negatively (i.e. how philosophy and such experience are the same and different).
3. Write on A or B. You may not answer the same question for both this examination and the examination on the Consolation of Boethius. You may answer 3B in this examination and the equivalent of 3A in the examination on the Consolation of Boethius.
3A. Beginning with the treatise of Plotinus “On Eternity and Time” (Ennead III.7) and going on through Proclus, Elements of Theology, propositions 52-54, Dionysius, The Divine Names, cap. 10, Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 5 prose 6, Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1.10, we can trace a path which comes to a conclusion in Nicholas Cardinal von Kues, De Li Non Aliud, chapters 15 & 16. What elements from this history are retained in the De Li Non Aliud? Why are such heterogeneous elements preserved? How are they reconciled?
3B. The De Li Non Aliud is important not only as a work of systematic philosophy at its highest levels but because it exhibits part of what is the most sophisticated understanding of the history of philosophy, theology, and religion in the Middle Ages and the relation of that to the Christian revelation. From the treatise work out how Plato, Aristotle, Proclus and Dionysius stand to one another and how the Christian revelation stands to that which proceeds from the Divine Plato. You are welcome but not required to supplement this from other treatises of the Cardinal von Kues especially the De pace fidei.
[email protected]
February 26 2018
for God Everyday and Everywhere, the 37th Annual Atlantic Theological Conference
June 22nd 2017 at the University of King’s College
Wayne J. Hankey
DRAFT
Please send comments and suggestions to me at [email protected]
INTRODUCTION
This paper has two parts. In the first I bring out, almost exclusively from the Confessions, how God’s Trinitarian life is both his own being and that of everything else in the cosmos; in humans God, as the structure of our being, is that by which we are, know and love; the power by which we do good and do evil. Augustine’s Trinitarian God is everyday and everywhere.
In the second part, I bring before you the radical and deeply serious criticism of Augustine and Augustinian Christianity by the some of the greatest theologians and philosophers of the 20th-century. Although such criticism can be found elsewhere, among Eastern Christian theologians for example, I confine myself to what is self-criticism because it comes from those raised by and deeply immersed in the Latin theological tradition.
In the second part, I bring before you the radical and deeply serious criticism of Augustine and Augustinian Christianity by the some of the greatest theologians and philosophers of the 20th-century. Although such criticism can be found elsewhere, among Eastern Christian theologians for example, I confine myself to what is self-criticism because it comes from those raised by and deeply immersed in the Latin theological tradition.
I. THE TRINITY IS EVERYDAY AND EVERYWHERE IN THE CONFESSIONS
A. TRINITARIAN ITINERARIUM “AB EXTERIORIBUS AD INTERIORA, AB INFERIORIBUS AD SUPERIORA”
Contemplation of the forms of God’s Trinitarian life both in Himself and in his creatures, as they emerge in Augustine’s Confessions, might begin with God, the defining summit moving and explaining all the rest. This would be exactly like the place of God as self-thinking activity in Aristotle’s De Anima, of which Augustine’s God is an heir. This structure has been masterfully explicated by Dr Diamond in Mortal Imitations of Divine Life. However, Augustine accords with Aristotle in not beginning there; as with the De Anima, the divine form, through which all the rest is understood, does not appear until the end of the Confessions. Augustine does not use the word “Trinitas” until Libri XII and XIII, the final Books, although, as we shall see, there are many Trinities before these Books in the Confessions.
In the second part, I bring before you the radical and deeply serious criticism of Augustine and Augustinian Christianity by the some of the greatest theologians and philosophers of the 20th-century. Although such criticism can be found elsewhere, among Eastern Christian theologians for example, I confine myself to what is self-criticism because it comes from those raised by and deeply immersed in the Latin theological tradition.
A. From Simplicity to Unity
B. From Knowing to Beatitude
Theology, as our participation in God’s self-knowledge, demands the unity of form and content. What God is (and is not), and our coming to Him in knowledge and ignorance, must be one. So at about the last moment in the Middle Ages when Augustine alone was authority enough, Anselm, in his monastery, where meditative ascent and teaching went together, sought “one argument.” It should “need nothing other for proving itself than itself alone, and by itself would suffice for showing that God truly is and that he is the highest good needing none other, which all things need for their existence and well-being, and whatever else we believe about the divine substance”. When he found the unum argumentum, St Anselm gave us his tiny Proslogion which leads to the unum necessarium. There reasoning became contemplation and the way to God and God’s nature were united.
Aquinas lived in intellectually and institutionally far more complex times and theologically he increased their complexity, nonetheless, he desired in his theological teaching the same, though more complicated unification of our knowing and of our ignorance with the being of God and with the divine simplicity beyond knowledge. Writing the Summa theologiae gave him that opportunity. In consequence, my talk has two parts: I. The character, principles of order and plan of the Summa theologiae. II. The structuring structure of divinity in the Summa such that, by the way God Himself orders our science of Him, the internal logic of Being manifests itself as Trinitarian and Incarnational.
From at least the time of Homer, the Greeks characterised themselves in terms of an inquisitive, ceaselessly active reason with an inclination to scepticism; so multi-formed and determined to succeed with its schemes as to be deceptive and untrustworthy; so endlessly questioning as to defy authority even that of the gods, to say nothing of rulers. We need only to mention Odysseus, Achilles, Ajax, Prometheus, Pentheus, Antigone, and, above all, Oedipous, to see the poetic theologians depict equally the god threatening power of reason and the evil in it. In consequence, the reason which is proper to them is ultimately self-critical and self-transcending, or, to add 19th century terms, it is Aufgehoben or self-overcoming. The fear of endlessly meddling rationality and the deeply thought criticism of it appear in a great chorus of the Antigone of Sophocles: “Awesome and terrible wonders are many, and none is more than the human … [S]peech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hath he taught himself… Cunning beyond fancy's dream is the fertile skill which brings him, now to evil, now to good. When he honours the laws of the land, and that justice which he hath sworn by the gods to uphold, proudly stands his city: no city hath he who, for his rashness, dwells with sin.”
The Principle is not an abstraction. It is not the empty extremity of reason’s reach. Because the Epekeina is truly transcendent, it is also the sole totally immanent, existing as the unity, goodness, truth, power, and being of everything. God is Everyday and Everywhere. The Ineffable does not stand on the side of reason and spirit against sense and body. Platonism is not Manichean dualism, but its overcoming, as Augustine laboriously discovered. Theurgy is not the decadence of Hellenism, but the union of philosophy and religion, and, as Augustine remarked, what Christians call sacraments. In Platonism corporality is found and affirmed diversely at every level.
This interplay, the linguistic, philological, and historical disciplines, which enable listening, and the philosophical and theological appropriation and judgment which are its medium, are the life of our Department. This gathering in shows that, hints at its extent and influence, and carries it forward.
This paper and the one I shall deliver tomorrow, “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos” go together. Both concern the Divine Trinitarian life, in itself, and as the reality of everything else. If Being is Trinitarian and Incarnational for Aquinas, then, for him, as much as for Augustine, God is everyday and everywhere. Both Augustine’s Confessions and Aquinas’ Summa move to God as Trinity from incomplete manifestations of the fundamental Trinitarian structure of reality. For them both, the totality of the self-differentiation in the divine conversion must be revealed step by step. Neither for their readers, nor for humankind generally, is that self-othering and the co-relative gathering-return back into the originating self seen all at once. For both of these two defining Western Christian theologians, the disclosure of real opposition in God, constructing three infinite divine subsistences, requires the Christian revelation. Nonetheless, as Dr Diamond’s paper tonight will make clear, because both are Aristotelian in their doctrine of God as self-thinking, they share a philosophical trinitarianism which is common to pagans, Jews, and Muslims. Thus, Augustine and Aquinas stand together in the tradition of Hellenic theology with Philo, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Moses Maimonides, for example, an approach to which Dr Diamond was introduced by Robert Crouse.
DR WAYNE J. HANKEY’S RETIREMENT COLLOQUIUM
JUNE 18TH TO 21ST 2017
COMPLETE LIST OF PANELS AND ADDRESSES
ADDRESSES
Michael Harrington (Duquesne), The Divine Name of Wisdom in the Dionysian Commentary Tradition
Timothy Riggs, The Light of Truth: The Role of the Good in Human Cognition
OLIVIER BOULNOIS (EPHE, PARIS), FREEDOM
Wayne Hankey, THE CONVERSION OF GOD IN AQUINAS’ SUMMA THEOLOGIAE: BEING’S TRINITARIAN AND INCARNATIONAL SELF-DISCLOSURE.
PANELS
PANEL: A. SYMBOLIC THEOLOGY, PRAYER AND PHILOSOPHY
1. Stephen Blackwood, Plato’s Timaeus, a Liturgical Hymn
2. Matthew Wood, Similarity and Difference in Proclus' Theory of the Symbol
3. Rebecca Coughlin, Uniting with Divine Wisdom: theurgic prayer and religious practice in Dionysius and Marsilio Ficino.
4. Gary Thorne, Contemplative Union of the Soul with God through the Christ Icon according to Theodore Studios
PANEL: B. SOCRATES, PHILOSOPHY AND THE WISDOM OF DIVINITY
1. Gregory MacIsaac, Divine Dialectic and Sophistry in Plato’s Sophist
2. Nic Thorne, Socratic Wisdom in the Gorgias and the Republic
3. Nathan McAllister, The Soul as Limit: Iamblichus’ Doctrine of the Soul and the Beginning of Wisdom
4. Simon Fortier, The Limits of the Divine in Proclus
PANEL: C. THE SELF, MATTER, BODIES & GOD
1. Michael Fournier, Epicurus’ Panpsychism
2. Aaron Higgins-Brake, “We too are Kings”: Plotinus on God and the Self
3. Douglas Hedley, God ‘inward to every thing’: The legacy of Plotinus in Cambridge and the Spirit of Nature
4. Daniel Heide, σῶμα ψυχικόν, σῶμα πνευματικόν: The Fate of Bodies in Origen and Eriugena
PANEL: D. AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS
1. Richard Smith, Expositions of the Psalms 145.5 and Confessions 11.29.39: Keys to the Structure of St. Augustine’s Confessions
2. Matthew Robinson, Augustine's Confessions: Intellectual Quest and Divine Grace.
3. Seamus O’Neill, Augustine on Curiositas: What Superstition and Natural Science Share in Common
4. Hans Feichtinger, Augustine on Pluralism
PANEL: E. INTELLECT & ITS BEYOND
1. Evan King, Dietrich of Freiberg and Berthold of Moosburg on Intellect and the One
2. Peter Bullerwell, The Limit and Transcendence of Human Wisdom in Richard Hooker
3. Daniel Watson, A Law beyond Grace in the Prologue to Senchas Már.
4. David Curry, “Redire ad principia”: The Dance of Apophatic and Kataphatic Theology in Lancelot Andrewes
PANEL F. NEOPLATONIC AND CARTESIAN SELF-KNOWLEDGE & HEIDEGGERIAN Ontotheology
1. David Puxley, Between Chomsky and Foucault: Plotinus, Memory and Paideia
2. Matthew Furlong, The Liturgy of Place: Liberal Arts and Theophany from Eriugena to De Libera
3. Neil Robertson, Human Self-Knowing and Divine Wisdom in Descartes' Meditations
4. Daniel Gillis, Overcoming Ontotheology: The Plight of Michel Henry
PANEL: G. VIRTUE
1. Elizabeth King, The Anagogy of Virtue in Enneads I, 2 (19) and its Legacy
2. Tom Curran, Cato as Philosopher-King and Guardian of Dante’s Purgatory
3. Corey Owen, Virtue Made Flesh: Marital Discord between Philosophy and Rhetoric in Cotton Nero A.X
4. Barry Craig and Sara MacDonald, Freedom in the Novels of David Adams Richards
PANEL: H. PLATONISM’S DIVERSE HISTORY
1. Emily Parker, A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place: Order in Philo of Alexandria
2. DAVID D. BUTORAC, "THE REVERSAL OF ALL THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE" (DAMASCIUS): UNITIES, SCIENCE AND MEDIATIONS IN NEOPLATONISM
3. Ian Stewart, Isaac Barrow: the doctrine of ‘space’ in the Lectiones Mathematicae
4. Alexander Treiger, Platonism in Soviet Russia: Reflections on Alexei Losev’s Essays on Antique Symbolism and Philosophy.
https://www.dal.ca/faculty/arts/classics/wisdom-belongs-to-god.html
(37TH ANNUAL ATLANTIC THEOLOGICAL CONFERENCE)
WEDNESDAY EVENING JUNE 21
7:30 p.m. Eli Diamond, "The trinitarian structure of Aristotle's living God and its mortal imitations"; Response Virginia Wilmhoff.
THURSDAY JUNE 22
10 a.m. Wayne Hankey, “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos”; Response Elizabeth Curry
2:30 p.m. Evan King, “The Ground: Time, Eternity and the Friends of God in Eckhart and Tauler” Response, Nathan McAllister
FRIDAY JUNE 23
10 a.m. Patrick Graham, Contemporary Islamic Theologies; Response, Stephen Blackwood
6 p.m. SOLEMN EUCHARIST ST GEORGE’S ROUND CHURCH, Preacher, the Rev’d Gordon Neish
SATURDAY JUNE 24
10 a.m. Douglas Hedley, “Charles Williams’ Theoanthropos”;
Summary by Tom Curran
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE COLLOQUIUM & CONFERENCE
GO TO THE “WISDOM BELONGS TO GOD” WEBSITE
https://www.dal.ca/faculty/arts/classics/wisdom-belongs-to-god.html
AND CONTACT JUSTIN WOLLF AT [email protected]
OR
THE ATLANTIC THEOLOGICAL CONFERENCE WEBSITE
http://www.stpeter.org/conf.htm
AND CONTACT THE REV’D DR PETER HARRIS [email protected] OR
[email protected]
JUNE 21ST TO 24TH 2017
HELD AT AND SPONSORED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF KING’S COLLEGE
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS ARE FOUND AT
https://www.dal.ca/faculty/arts/classics/wisdom-belongs-to-god.html
&
https://dal.academia.edu/WayneHankey
Inquiries to Justin Wollf at [email protected]. All are invited to this week of philosophy, literary study and theology.
PATRICK GRAHAM. CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC THEOLOGY
&
OPEN LETTER TO POPE BENEDICT XVI
OCTOBER 4TH, 2006
WRITTEN AND SIGNED BY LEADING MUSLIM SCHOLARS AND LEADERS IN RESPONSE TO POPE BENEDICT XVI’S REMARKS ON ISLAM AT THE REGENSBURG LECTURE ON SEPTEMBER 12, 2006
Confronting the inadequacy of the human intellect for “seeing the divine substance in itself,” St Thomas tells us we can get to the knowledge we need and desire starting from creatures, from “the things themselves”, because the way up and the way down are the same. There is a common structure at work whether the mind moves from God or from creatures. The starting and ending points differ, but, because of the universal return to source, they too are the same ultimately. The same fundamental form is discernable and at work in the beginning, the mediation, and the conclusion.
Aquinas finds “the most perfect unity, in God, the highest summit of things”, from this emerges a greater and greater “diversity and variation in things.” So, “the process of emanation from God must be unified in the principle itself, but multiplied in the lower things which are its terms.” The emanation, or going out, is seen in God in a simple form, the one proper to its nature as cause. The same structure must be visible, opened up and multiplied, in the various creatures which are the end terms of the divine creative activity. This inclusive opening and multiplication is the mediating process. I seem to have exhibited this common structure in its downward emanation in “The Conversion of God in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae” and in its upward movement towards an ever clearer revelation of its fundamental constitution in what follows on “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos”. In consequence, I hope that they will illumine each other and make reading both useful.
I present here what I call a “background paper”. It provides the full argument of what I shall present in an abbreviated version at the Atlantic Theological Conference.
***
I. INTRODUCTION
This paper has two parts. In the first I bring out, almost exclusively from the Confessions, how God’s Trinitarian life is both his own being and that of everything else in the cosmos; in humans, God, as the structure of our being, is that by which we are, know and love; the power by which we do good and do evil. Augustine’s Trinitarian God is everyday and everywhere.
In the second part, I bring before you the radical and deeply serious criticism of Augustine and Augustinian Christianity by a few great philosophical theologians of the 20th-century. Although such criticism can be found elsewhere, among Eastern Christian theologians for example, I confine myself to what is self-criticism because it comes from those raised by and deeply immersed in the Latin theological tradition.
The materials here are for the papers of Eli Diamond, “The trinitarian structure of Aristotle’s living God and its mortal imitations”, Wayne Hankey, Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos, Evan King, Eckhart’s Grund
Time, Eternity and the Friends of God in Eckhart and Tauler, Patrick Graham. Contemporary Islamic Theology, Dr Douglas Hedley, Charles Williams Theoanthropos.
Registration And Website
“Wisdom belongs to God” colloquium with “God Everyday and Everywhere” (the 37th Atlantic Theological Conference)
Sunday June 18th to Saturday, June 24th, 2017
to be held at and co-sponsored by the University of King’s College is open for registration.
On its website you will find details of the Programme, the titles and abstracts of the colloquium papers, and materials to help participants of all kinds and levels to prepare for this week long festival. There is also a link to the conference registration site and King's accommodations booking site.
Inquiries to Justin Wollf at [email protected]. All are invited to this week of philosophy, literary study and theology.
See
https://www.dal.ca/faculty/arts/classics/wisdom-belongs-to-god.html
Colloquium materials, including drafts of Dr Hankey’s papers will also be found on his Academia.edu site
https://dal.academia.edu/WayneHankey
February 26, 2017
University of King's College Halifax
In the second part, I bring before you the radical and deeply serious criticism of Augustine and Augustinian Christianity by a few great philosophical theologians of the 20th-century. Although such criticism can be found elsewhere, among Eastern Christian theologians for example, I confine myself to what is self-criticism because it comes from those raised by and deeply immersed in the Latin theological tradition.
JUNE 18TH TO 24TH 2017
HELD AT AND SPONSORED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF KING’S COLLEGE
PROGRAMME OF PAPERS AND ADDRESSES
for God Everyday and Everywhere, the 37th Annual Atlantic Theological Conference June 22nd 2017 at the University of King’s College, Wayne J. Hankey
November 16, 2017
Reason? The Human?
In the current circumstances of philosophy and religion, three obstacles to reasoning in common with ancient and medieval philosophers stand in our way. Our predecessors differ from what is at present generally assumed because for them:
Reason is neither the only form of thinking, knowing, like being, is said in many ways (as Aristotle put it), nor is reasoning the highest of these.
In the graded series of the kinds of apprehension, first diagrammatized in Plato’s allegory of the Line, ways of apprehending match objects and they are relative to one another.
Human knowing is dependent on higher forms of understanding.
Although these are related so that we must touch on all of them, the last, is the subject of this lecture.
Conclusion: an Eternal Humanity
Sir Richard Southern judged: “It is probably true that man has never appeared so important a being in so well-ordered and intelligible a universe as in Aquinas’ works. Man was important because he was the link between the created universe and the divine intelligence. He alone in the world of nature could understand nature. He alone could use and perfect nature in accordance with the will of God and thus achieve his full nobility.” (Medieval Humanism, 50).
Latin Christian philosophical theology had been moving in this direction at least since Augustine replaced mediation by the world soul with the Deus-Homo as mediator. This movement to the human pushes forward in the Consolation of Philosophy, with its final book preserving the freedom of reason in the Providential divine intelligence. It concludes with the unique role of the human, and with divine-human mutual intuition. Plotinus, in contrast, following Plato and Aristotle, had urged the good man to choose “the life of the gods.” With Iamblichus and Proclus, the individual soul is accepted as an eternal reality and this, as well as the Christianization seen in Augustine, may influence the developments in Boethius, Eriugena, and Aquinas.
Striking, with both Boethius and Aquinas, is how determined they are to preserve the human characteristic way of knowing, reason, vis-à-vis the divine intellect. Reason must use its freedom to convert toward the intellect which grounds and enables it, but it is equally essential that the Creator of reason be not frustrated by its dissolution.
There is no humanism which surpasses that of Aquinas, when, in the Summa theologiae, he teaches not only that the Holy Spirit comes as gift which enables human knowing and loving to possess the power of enjoying God, but also that, in glory, grace itself is made a power of the creature enabling human knowing to see the very essence of God.
Revised for delivery to the Department of Philosophy
St Francis Xavier University, Antigonish
November 17, 2017
In the current circumstances of philosophy and religion, three obstacles to reasoning in common with ancient and medieval philosophers stand in our way. Our predecessors differ from what is at present generally assumed because for them:
Reason is neither the only form of thinking, knowing, like being, is said in many ways (as Aristotle put it), nor is reasoning the highest of these.
In the graded series of the kinds of apprehension, first diagrammatized in Plato’s allegory of the Line, ways of apprehending match objects and they are relative to one another.
Human knowing is dependent on higher forms of understanding.
Although these are related so that we must touch on all of them, the last, is the subject of this lecture.
Predestination is in God’s eternity so the will (election) by which his grace saves us and the righteousness He imputes to us by seeing us in his Son are simultaneous. This is essentially the result Boethius enables by his argument in the Consolation of Philosophy.
Thinking about the question you is probably why some Calvinists give up Christianity. So we must take care about it. Neither he nor his teachers are likely to have adopted the solution of Boethius especially as Boethius got it from the pagan philosopher – theologians.
Our starting point: “I am thinking about Jesus' answer to the Pharisees in this morning’s NT lesson for Matins, "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." Having met holy men, I know that heaven is not just for those whose bodies have died, as I was brought up thinking, but I don't think that is all I should take from this.”
The beginning of an answer: “Yes we find or get the kingdom of heaven "at hand", close by. It is not the immediate (that is "the world"), but its neighbor, a counter to the world. The world upside down. Just as baptism is dying (Epistle to the Romans 6, Colossians 2), sins are deaths, conquests over vices are “mortifying your members,”(Colossians 3.5) so resurrections are the opposites of all these. I have risen from the deaths of my various lives so often I think of myself as "the resurrection kid".
There seems to be something of the necessary play in this passage: I Corinthians 15. Set by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer for funerals it is as much about ongoing life in hac via ( vita) as in another.
Meeting for 13 Mondays from Sept 11 to Dec 11 except for Harvest Thanksgiving
Dr Eli Diamond says it is the most difficult book he has read. It is so full of poetic theological epigrams that a modern Plato might have written it. I have read it repeatedly for 50 years and it is far from exhausted for me. I cannot think of a more profound book of theology written in English in the 20th century and I have been converted to the view that Williams is the greatest contemporary Anglican theologian. Provided you are willing to approach it contemplatively, seeing what opens itself and being patient with what remains hidden,it will become a vade mecum.
The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church contains the most fundamentally necessary reorientations of our vision, and is, since Hegel, the most metaphysical & theological understanding of history known to me. By this means Williams deals successfully with the most troubling critical problems of 20th century Christian theology. To those approaching it Williams recommends his own Descent into Hell which is known to many of you and He Came Down From Heaven which is probably his most important theological treatise.
Charles Williams writes: “The presidency of the Holy Spirit over the “holy and glorious flesh” (“la carne gloriosa e santa”) is there exhibited in the height; at the foot is the entombment of the consummate Flesh. Beyond the one lies the state known as the Beatific Vision; below the other the principle called the Harrowing of Hell. Between the two extreme points appears the great mass of created souls; those on earth, and, beyond a line of angelic beings, those “in heaven.” There are recognizable faces, but they are momentary; they are travellers upon one or other of the Ways. But the painting, above and below, is of the co-inherence of the whole redeemed City.”
Williams is quoting the Paradiso of Dante’s Comedia, Canto 14. There Solomon, the wisest of humans, speaks as the culmination of the Doctors in the Heaven of the Sun. In his Outlines of Romantic Theology (pp. 107-8) Williams reports about the nature of Paradise. “In the first canto Dante, bidden to look at the sun, sees as it were a second sun, as if he came into a new universe which was yet the same, ‘a new heaven and a new earth’. The earth is certainly there; the body is there; Dante does not forget that vehicle by which all illumination of that Way came. In the fourth circle of heaven, where the great doctors and sages are, Solomon proclaims the doctrine: ‘When the glorious and holy flesh shall be reclothed upon us, our persons shall be more acceptable by being more complete … the glow we now wear shall be less than the flesh … the organs of the body shall be strong to all that can give delight’; and all the circle, desiring their bodies, say Amen. This statement is made in answer to Beatrice inquiring on Dante’s behalf. It is her business and privilege in the Paradise to supply, of herself, or from others, the instruction and knowledge he so passionately desires. The flesh and the soul are one: that is the nature of the experience of beatitude.”
The principle of Beatrice’s leading is in the co-inherence of divinity and humanity, of Spirit and flesh, in the theotokos, Mary, as she was declared to be by the Council of Ephesus, 431: “If anyone does not confess that Emmanuel is God in truth, and therefore that the holy virgin is the mother of God (for she bore in a fleshly way the Word of God become flesh, let him be anathema.” The Communion of the Properties of the Divine and Human Natures exhibited in the naming at Ephesus survived the Protestant Reformation as the doctrine of Christendom; Lutherans and Calvinists fought each other to the death over its interpretation. As fundamental, it determines the progress of Dante in the Comedia: “The eyes of Beatrice have been the sign and means of ascent in experience; they have shown themselves to Dante and in a sense known heaven for Dante. But at the moment when ‘Beatrice and all the blessed’ implore the Divine Mother for him, it is not her eyes that the poem names, though it may be her eyes also that the poem means. It is Mary’s — ‘those eyes, loved and venerated by God’. It is the mortal maternity of Godhead that is here expressed.” (The Theology of Romantic Love, 110)
Williams takes up “la carne gloriosa e santa” again in The Descent of the Dove. It was the Theotokos who sent Beatrice to Virgil for the salvation of Dante, so Beatrice is her operation, just as She is the operation of her Son. From the Trinity down the way is Co-inherence. In Chapter VI, Williams writes: “Dante cries to Folco of Marseilles in the third heaven, of Venus : “did I in-thee myself as thou dost in-me thyself.” The recurrent image of this inmeing and in-theeing is the eyes of the Florentine girl, which had reflected the two-natured Gryphon - and all the Paradises are the anatomy of the Gryphon - and now laugh at the man she loves so that his mind is at one point drawn away from the union with God (for which he is not yet ready) and splintered into an awareness of the great intellectual doctors of the Church who then surround him. This is an example of the Way of Affirmation; it is the substantial body of Beatrice which is the measure and the link of all that knowledge –“la carne gloriosa e santa,” and again, “ the organs of the body shall be strong for all that means delight.” And when Beatrice leaves Dante’s side, St. Bernard who takes her place has no other doctrine; without the body the soul cannot be consummated in God. It is these great doctrines of matter, of exchange, of perfect love, which are made apparent in the paradox of the line “Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo Figlio.” This is the secret of the universe, the mortal maternity of Godhead; beyond is but the ray of Godhead which contains all.”
“Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo Figlio.” “Virgin Mother, daughter of your Son” the words by which St Bernard invokes the Theotokos open the last book of the Paradiso, the conclusion of the Comedia.
In The Descent of the Dove, Charles Williams will display how for Christendom, as with the Platonism which provided the original “intellectual climate” “set for Christendom”, spiritual forms and matching bodies interact universally.
Christians are required to work at once in two opposed modes of knowledge. They are, put in Platonic terms, the mode belonging to eternal being and the mode belonging to becoming in time, that is on both sides of the main horizontal line in Plato’s analogy of the Line. What God did in Christ is both complete and is also being realized, it has not as yet appeared: Hebrews 2.8 “Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. … But now we see not yet all things put under his him”. The New Testament is dominated by the first mode of knowledge, apocalyptic immediacy. “We are they upon whom the ends of the ages are come.” (I Corinthians 10.11) Promise and prophesy are fulfilled and are replaced by fact, a transition of crucial important for William’s theology. Joy in the Fact, the second of William’s theological-philosophical fundamentals is essential to overcoming the greatest philosophical challenge to theology, the fact – value separation, just as the necessity of both modes of knowing enables him to deal metaphysically with the other destructive threat, historicist Biblical Criticism. Understanding and co-operating in the work of the Spirit in the Church requires the second mode; “He will lead you into all truth” (John 16.13). For in the Church we are reconciled with extended time and Christendom appears. Entering The Descent of the Dove demands we understand according to both modes.
Meditations Appropriate to Descent of the Dove Chapter 2
Taken from Sermons for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in Holy Week & Maundy Thursday,
Five weeks ago, when we began Lent together, I told you of a small group of women enclosed in the Monastery of the Precious Blood on Prince Edward Island. Their work is reparation accomplished by the perpetual adoration of what we contemplate and enact this week, the sacrifice of Christ in his shed Blood. Each of the sisters does continually by prayer what Stanhope offered Pauline. Through the communion Christ established between us all, the sisters carry in prayer the spiritual burdens of others. This is what they write of their work in their Covenant of Love:
Each one’s joys and hopes, sorrows and distresses, especially of the poor, of those who suffer, they are our joys, hopes, sorrows and distresses, and there is nothing of a truly human nature which fails to resound in our hearts.
These women bear up to God our sin and need, known in their inner character: the fear, loss, misery, despair, anger…. They enter and carry the great weight of others in order, on their behalf, to pass it on to the Redeemer. Because in all our affliction, he was afflicted…and he carried us, their carrying has lightness and joy of spirit.
Weakness does not prevent bearing the burden of another. The enacted formulation of this fundamental law of the universe was made in 203 A.D., during the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Septimius Severus, by an imprisoned African slave while in childbirth:
She not only endured martyrdom but in a sentence defined the Faith. Her name was Felicitas; she was a Carthaginian; she lay in prison; there she bore a child. In her pain she screamed. Her jailors asked her how, if she shrieked at that, she expected to endure death by the beasts. She said: ‘Now I suffer what I suffer; then another will be in me who will suffer for me, as I shall suffer for him.’ In that, Felicitas took her place forever among the great African doctors of the Universal Church.
“In all their affliction he was afflicted…and he bare them, and carried them.” “He brake it, and gave it to them, and said, ‘Take eat this is my body.’” Lay claim now to the promise: “Another will be in me who will suffer for me.”
The Chapter principally concerns the mutuality of the Affirmative and the Negatve Ways, Dionysius and the possibility of prayer, and the humanisms of the creed of Athanasius and of Augustine.
I. On the separation and purification of the sacred from the secular which is the condition of the reform of church and world in “the Imposition of Belief”, two things might be further discussed.
The first comes from Williams on the Divine transcendence and reveals the logic of co-inherence, exchange, substitution and reconciliation, i.e. they all depend on and enable difference:
“And the very condition of that faith was that Deity was single, supreme, and different. Without difference there was no Reconciliation. And Reconciliation was the supreme aim of faith.” (p. 30)
The second is that secularization has two meanings and may be regarded as positive in respect to religion or negative.
II. The Devil and Evil
III. Reason & its defeat
IV. A New Romantic World. Loving in Love: In certain states of romantic love the Holy Spirit has deigned to reveal, as it were, the Christ-hood of two individuals each to other.
V. A process according to the Affirmative Way. It begins when a boy and a girl meet in the streets of Florence; it ends when the whole web of interchanging creation pour themselves towards the Deivirilis within the point of Godhead.
VI. Repentance and exchange
VII. “the proud curious wit” & “the naked being of him”
VIII. The split of the Reformation was already prepared.
The Descent of the Dove is, in fact, close to being a complete history of the Christian church. It does not, however, tell the reader that history, but rather reflects on it poetically and theologically. These reflections depend upon a poet’s transformative use of language; this provides the wonderful pleasure and stimulation of thought and imagination the book gives. Understanding all Williams’ reflections depends on two things, one of which we can all bring: slow puzzling contemplative reading. I have been doing that since a wonderful high school teacher from Bedford, Joan Boutilier, a pious member of All Saints Bedford when the Rev’d Walter Harris, the father of Peter and Susan, was Rector, introduced me to Charles Williams when I was 14; she taught English at Halifax West High School. I owe her infinite and unrepayable thanks for this, for getting me to read The Cloud of Unknowing and other classics of Christian mysticism, as well as The White Goddess by that splendid neopagan Robert Graves. This list and the directions of my subsequent work will indicate how much I owe to her. To her this series of talks and discussions is dedicated.
The other requisite is a knowledge of the whole history of the Christian Church, of Christendom, and of Christian theology. This takes a life of study. I shall help with the second.
If your standard of successful reading is to understand what you read when you read it, then you are misplaced in this group. If you are patiently content to begin a process of understanding by rejoicing in the pleasure and stimulation given by flashes of knowledge (on this as the method in theology see Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed) and visions of beauty, then you should be at home. In this spirit I shall sometimes provide indications which very few of you will want, and many of you will not be able, to take up. Substitution, Exchange, Pardon, Co-inherence, life in the City, that into which Williams is attempting to draw you, requires this patience which rejoices in what others understand and loves all the forms of joy including those of ignorance.
Chapter 2: The Reconciliation with Time
I. Defining the Co-inherence
The name of a slave who not only endured martyrdom but in a sentence defined the Faith.
II. From Chapter One: “Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation.” The Now of Salvation and the continuing Then
III. The Reconciliation with Time 1: The Natural Loyalty: the sacred secular (continuing from Felicitas)
IV. Reconciliation with Time 2: the Disappearance of the Extraordinary Supernatural Impulses
V. Reconciliation with Time 3:Sacraments replace prophesy: sacred hierarchy is established; prophesy becomes interpreting the mystery
VI. “Works of Supererogation” The Treasury of Merit
VII. Sins were not to be forgotten; they were to be remembered.
VIII. Philosophy becomes necessary: Fides quaerens intellectum: “There seems to me,” Clement wrote, “to be a first kind of saving change from heathenism to faith, a second from faith to knowledge.”
IX. Christian Gnosticism
X. Origen’s great discovery: obedience in God, the co-inherence of the Divine Persons
XI. The Definition of Orthodox faith reaches climax: “My Eros is crucified”
Felicitas had asserted the divine order– “Another for me and I for him.” Clement had defined it among the faithful: “He demands of us our lives for the sake of each other.” What the martyr and doctor declared another voice also proclaimed out of the desert. During the reign of Diocletian St. Antony, the first of the Christian hermits, whose life was to be written by Athanasius, took up his dwelling between the Nile and the Red Sea. Alone, ascetic, emaciated, he gave to the Church the same formula: “Your life and your death are with your neighbour.” Yet perhaps the greatest epigram of all is in a more ambiguous phrase. Ignatius of Antioch in the early second century, had tossed it out on his way to martyrdom: “My Eros is crucified.” Learned men have disputed on the exact meaning of the word: can it refer, with its intensity of allusion to physical passion, to Christ? or does it rather refer to his own physical nature? We, who have too much separated our own physical nature from Christ’s, cannot easily read an identity into the two meanings. But they unite, and others spring from them. “My love is crucified”, “My Love is crucified”: “My love for my Love is crucified “; “My Love in my love is crucified.” The physical and the spiritual are no longer divided : he who is Theos is Anthropos, and all the images of anthropos are in him. The Eros that is crucified lives again and the Eros lives after a new style: this was the discovery of the operation of faith. The Eros of five hundred years of Greece and Rome was to live after a new style; unexpected as yet, the great Romantic vision approached. “My” Eros is crucified; incredible as yet, the great doctrines of interchange, of the City, approached. “Another is in me”; “your life and death are in your neighbour”; “they in Me and I in them.”
Chapter 4: The Wars of the Frontiers
Reminder that we shall not meet on Monday October 9, Thanksgiving Day.
On the September 25th I started by indicating that we would return to Indulgences, and the substitution and exchange common to it and other forms of Christian life, in later chapters and that understanding “My eros is crucified” will be a continuing work. I began with VI from the readings indicated in Bulletin 8. I start here with notes on what we actually covered that evening.
I. A Metaphysical Empire and A Metaphysical Religion dependent on belief.
Christianity requires a defined philosophically dependent dogma which is the subject of creedal belief. It took seven centuries to work out its essentials. This is in contradiction from ancient Hellenic (pagan) and Jewish religions. Christianity, together with Islam and Judaism within the Islamic world (the latter acquired the equivalent of a creed from Moses Maimonides only in the 12th century; his model for it came from Islam) demands belief.
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II. Dionysius, Eros, and the Affirmative and Negative Ways as two sides of the process of Going Out and Return, the structure of Platonic and Christian theology
III. Grace and Predestination: God’s “choice is (beyond human thought) inextricably mingled with each man’s own choice. It wills what he wills, because it has freedom to do so. Predestination is the other side of its own freedom.”
Texts from Chapter 4, The War of the Frontiers
Note the way the political – hierarchical is sacramental, theological, psychological and belongs to the intersection of the Ways.
I. The duality which made Christendom: the secular-sacred and the sacred-secular & a third, the refusal of the earthly point of union
II. Iconoclasm: the Principle of Islam operates within Christianity
III. The Alteration of Crosses: My Eros is crucified
IV. The Movement Inward
V. The Eucharistic simultaneity and temporality. The sacrament of the two orders.
VI. Hymns. A new Beat: “dulce lignum, dulce clavo, dulce pondus sustinens.”
VII. Mass and Coerced Conversion from which Christianity has not recovered
VIII. “Every lot is good”, Consolation of Philosophy & “My Eros is crucified”
IX. “Filoque
W.J. Hankey September 27, 2017
Chapter 5: The Imposition of Belief
“The imposition of belief” is the title under which Charles Williams treats the Latin high Middle Ages and its 14th and 15th centuries aftermath. In fact the imposition of belief as a Christian phenomenon began far earlier and the ambiguously good-evil programmes of established Christendom, east and west are a response, an endeavour to thoroughly Christianize a superficially converted society.
A superficially converted society.
I. The Ordinary Means: Canon Law and the endless parish
II. The War against Evil and the Devil: the Extraordinary Means arise
III. The Devil and the dualism of the Christian Imagination appear in the fight for “civilization”
IV. The War creates its enemies
“It was under examination, under examination, as difficult to be quite orthodox as to be quite healthy. ..."
V. Parallel Movements.
“The new age has its beginnings signalized by the rise of the Universities...
VI. The matter of Salvation: Transubstantiation and Corpus Christi
VII. “Let us suppose”
“It consists of saying, at the very beginning, as that other great rationalist Euclid said : “Let us suppose . . .” What we agree to suppose is another matter; it may be that logic can be trusted, or that things exist, or that I can think, or anything else. We cannot begin to prove anything without supposing something. The great Scholastics hardly ever said : “Let us suppose. . . .” (p. 122). Charles Williams has Aquinas and the scholastics wrong here. The propositions of faith which must then be all tested play the role of “Let us suppose. . . .” in their systems.
VIII. The Sacramental System: the Extraordinary Ordinary
The Accomplished Goal of the Great Reform: A Purified Sacrificing Priesthood Offering the Unbloodly Sacrifice and Administering the Sacrament of Penance for the forgiveness of the sins of the living and the dead.
The spiritual logic of today’s Chapter is clear enough. It is the reaction to the terrible violence of the wars of religion both within and between states consequent on what Williams calls the compacting and solidifying of homo. The states are more and more determinedly uniform and powerful, mobilizing all resources to their centrally directed purposes dependent on military and commercial might. The religion of what are more and more state churches, independent of both Pope and Emperor, is reduced towards means of that compacting and solidifying. Williams writes: “The Middle Ages had desired greatness and glory and gold as much as their children; virtue after them was not so very much impaired. But the metaphysical vision which had illuminated those otherwise base things was passing; they were no longer mythological beyond themselves. Man was left to take glory in, and to glorify, himself and his works. Had chances been different, there might then have been a revival of the old wisdom of Christ as anthropos; the secrets of Christendom might have enriched with new significance the material world. It was not to be; the anthropos had been forgotten for the theos, and now the other anthropos, the Adam of Augustine, the homo sapiens of science, preoccupied European attention. But the Homo was, at points, compacted and solidified. The Prince arose, and the separate Princes. The rise of the nations had exalted those figures of surrounding kingship to more and more of a formal equality with their centre the Emperor. … The Great Schism had encouraged the Thrones, for the decision between Pontiff and pseudo-Pontiff-the decision which of them was which, the decision which of them was canonically and righteously which, and where grace lay-had depended largely on the Thrones. … By a natural impulse, the Throne of Peter became one also among the Thrones.” (Descent, p. 159-60) The reaction to the fires and blood was Disbelief, rationalism, Enlightenment.
MY BIG QUESTION to myself and to all the members of our group at this point is whether the history of the Holy Spirit in the Church as told by Williams has a shape? Does “Our Lord the Spirit” operating “towards Christ under the conditions of our humanity” have a characteristic way of acting--except, as is clear already, the opposite of the way before? That pattern is, I think, clear. The Spirit is dialectical: act and reaction. The immediacy of the eternal is followed by the reconciliation with time. Worldly consummation is followed by contrition. The fiercely bloody wars of reform are followed by disbelief as a quality of Christian belief. Further, the history seems to be shaped as a rise and fall: definition, entering time and space, success, growth and opposition on the frontiers, intensification within, CONSUMMATION and schism, contrition, disbelief. But then comes “The Return of the Manhood” which does not fit a rise and decline pattern; thus making our consideration of it more important.
These questions are deferred until the 27th when we shall also look directly at Co-inherence. About which I make three points now:
1) it is for Williams fact. It is.
2) Co-inherence is in sin and guilt as well as in redemption. Recollect: “ ‘Fuimus ille unus’ he said; “we were in the one when we were the one.” Whatever ages of time lay between us and Adam, yet we were in him and we were he; more, we sinned in him and his guilt is in us. And if indeed all mankind is held together by its web of existence, then ages cannot separate one from another. Exchange, substitution, co-inherence are a natural fact as well as a supernatural truth. “Another is in me,” said Felicitas; “we were in another,” said Augustine. The co-inherence reaches back to the beginning as it stretches on to the end, and the anthropos is present everywhere. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive”; coinherence did not begin with Christianity; all that happened then was that co-inherence itself was redeemed and revealed by that very redemption as a supernatural principle as well as a natural. We were made sin in Adam but Christ was made sin for us and we in him were taken out of sin. To refuse the ancient heritage of guilt is to cut ourselves off from mankind as certainly as to refuse the new principle. It is necessary to submit to the one as freely as to the other. The new principle had been introduced into the web, and only that principle could separate one soul from another or any soul from the multitude. The principle was not only in the spirit but in the flesh of man.” (pp. 69-70)
3) “In the flesh of man”: the Descent begins with the heavenly crowning under the Spirit of “La carne gloriosa e santa”. This elevation of flesh and matter to the immediate presence and presidency of God is fundamental to Christianity and is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is the Return to this as dogma and as operation that Chapter 9 is devoted.
+ FACTUS HOMO FACTOR HOMINIS FACTIQUE REDEMPTOR + IUDICO CORPOREUS CORPORA CORDA DEUS +
“God is made man who having been made is the Maker of the man he has been made. As a bodily Redeemer, human and divine, of the man I have been made, I judge bodily beings and hearts.”
The text in Greek and Latin he holds is
“I am the Light of the Kosmos who follows me will not walk around in darkness but will have the Light of Life.”
“Of Life” is between his fingers (“vite); the middle two are together symbolizing the dual nature. The Trinity, to which He belongs, is given in the fingers of the hand which blesses; both the two natures and the three Persons are symbolized. The Co-inherence, expressed in the paradoxes of the untranslatable arch text (Latin syntax enables expression by juxtaposition of which English is not capable), is depicted in the Image. This is “Jesus Christ” (abbreviated) “Pantocrator” (Greek: not given here but given in other representations also made in Sicily in the same period), i.e. “Omnipotent” (Latin) or “Almighty” (English), a title given to God in the Old Testament Septuagint (the ancient Jewish translation of the Torah into Greek). Here it is applied to the Son as Maker (John 1) and Light (John 8:12: the text in his hand) who, all importantly, is the Crucified (as the Cross in his halo indicates). This is the Created Man – God (Factus Homo – Deus are the beginning and end of the text), Crucified - All Powerful, Dead - Eternally Alive, who, in virtue of holding the extremes together so that they “co-inhere”, is the Redeemer and Judge of both “hearts and bodies”, the inner and the outer. It is of great importance that the Greek of John 8:12 is kosmos--i.e. universe, not the "world" of most English translations. This is the kosmic Christ who saves the whole kosmos. Light, Life and Creator go together when the texts from John are joined as they are here. The English translations belong to modern anthropocentrism. Dogmatically what is depicted here was defined at the Council of Chalcedon 451
Christianity is in principle intolerant Right up to the end Charles Williams in The Descent of the Dove maintains this and gives reasons for it. For example: “… the idea that everyone ought to be as free as possible had spread widely during the nineteenth century. Even then (and even now) that farther development of liberty which has been nobly defined to be “the protection and not the persecution of the Opposition” had not spread far. It was not easy for it to spread in Christendom, for, by definition, Christendom cannot fundamentally admit the right of an Opposition (to its dogmas) to exist; to refuse the Co-inherence is to separate oneself from the nature of things.” (Descent, pp. 216–7) ...
All this follows from his fundament representation of Christianity as belief in a metaphysic of reality. It is sustained by his Augustinian Christianity, Catholic, Reformed and still determinative, which makes freedom depend on grace ...
The result must be that Christianity is tolerant only within a secular regime which limits its social, political and psychological power. ...
Something more can and must be said. From the beginning Islam is represented by Charles Williams in terms of the opposite metaphysical principle from Christianity’s and as its boundary. Thus, he writes: “In the year 630 the first Army of the Resignation and of the Unincarnate Alone, offered battle to the central City of the Co-inherent and Incarnate. … The most opposite earthly frontier of Christendom had been drawn, both in military and metaphysical affairs. Christendom was, and remains, for all its victories, in a state of siege.” (Descent, p. 92)
This representation neglects much. First, and most obviously, it leaves out the mutual dependence and co-inherence of opposites on one another.
The Confessions is a complete work of mutually necessary parts.
The overall structure is the Divine Trinitarian Self-conversion. From it derive the cosmic conversion and the human.
Neoplatonic – Trinitarian Conversion is the fundamental and omnipresent logic; therefore, creation and recreation happen within the same structure.
The Confessions simultaneously becomes more clearly both Neoplatonic and Christian.
The movement within the Confessions is from Trinity to Trinity.
Corporality is omnipresent and fundamental. Although the movement is from the corporal to the Church and the new creation allegorically seen in the creation, it is emphatically not as such from sin and evil to the good.
Comparison, which requires standing on both sides, even of the divine –human divide, as well as of the other divides, is the fundamental structure of reason and pushes it to infinity.
In the comparison central to the work, the divine and the human are known mutually in a triple comparative seeing.
Human reason is an infinity both good and evil.
As superiora, intellect and Scripture must correspond, and, because of the infinity of mind, are able to do so.
Creatures, the processes, and the principal elements of creation are correlated to, or, in fact, are, spiritual and mental states.
The infinity of the human takes its proper and concluding form in the coincidence of the divine and human trinities. In this the human finds the rest the Confessions seeks.
The common form of Creation and Recreation.
i. Book XIII is a mystical interpretation of the account of creation in Genesis, finding in it the Christian Church as the New Creation. It follows, and depends upon, the literal and philosophical interpretation in Book XII, especially on the notions of a spiritual creation of pure intellect, ontologically, though not temporally, prior to the sensible, on the creation of matters as indeterminate and nearly nothing, of the necessity of an ignorant knowing, which goes with them, and, more generally, on the positive role of ignorance in enabling the multiplication of diverse interpretations of Scripture. The propriety and goodness of endlessly diverse non erroneous interpretations of Scripture is a crucial contribution of Book XII to XIII.
ii. Book XII begins the explicit naming of God as “Trinity” carried forward, and further defined in Book XIII relative to the natural (measure, number and weight) and human psychological trinities. The greater weight of names signifying the divine simplicity and unity is crucial. The return is to God as One.
iii. With Id Ipsum and Unum, and the notion of creation and recreation in terms of “recurrens in te unum,” creation and recreation have a common form. This is the foundation of the allegory which is Book XIII.
iv. Book XIII is clearly written as a conclusion to the whole work. It begins with the desire for God inherent in the creature as creature with which the Confessions starts and with the problem that the presence of God in the soul is required for the desired knowledge of God, as in Books I and X. It concludes similarly and analogously for the whole work, the whole church, and the universe to how Book IX concluded the biography as “exteriora.”
Conclusions of this reading of the Confessions
a. The Confessions is an itinerarium moved by a desire, innate to the human, but beyond its capacity to satisfy.
b. The Confessions is a complete work of mutually necessary parts.
c. The overall structure is the Divine Trinitarian Self-conversion. From it derive the cosmic conversion and the human.
d. Neoplatonic – Trinitarian Conversion is the fundamental and omnipresent logic; therefore, creation and recreation happen within the same structure.
e. The Confessions simultaneously becomes more clearly both Neoplatonic and Christian.
f. The movement within the Confessions is from Trinity to Trinity.
g. Corporality is omnipresent and fundamental. Although the movement is from the corporal to the Church and the new creation allegorically seen in the creation, it is emphatically not as such from sin and evil to the good.
h. Comparison, which requires standing on both sides, even of the divine –human divide, as well as of the other divides, is the fundamental structure of reason and pushes it to infinity.
i. In the comparison central to the work, the divine and the human are known mutually in a triple comparative seeing.
j. Human reason is an infinity both good and evil.
k. As superiora, intellect and Scripture must correspond, and, because of the infinity of mind, are able to do so.
l. Creatures, the processes, and the principal elements of creation are correlated to, or, in fact, are, spiritual and mental states.
m. The infinity of the human takes its proper and concluding form in the coincidence of the divine and human trinities. In this the human finds the rest the Confessions seeks.
Book XIII is a mystical interpretation of the account of creation in Genesis, finding in it the Christian Church as the New Creation. It follows, and depends upon, the literal and philosophical interpretation in Book XII, especially on the notions of a spiritual creation of pure intellect, ontologically, though not temporally, prior to the sensible, on the creation of matters as indeterminate and nearly nothing, of the necessity of an ignorant knowing, which goes with them, and, more generally, on the positive role of ignorance in enabling the multiplication of diverse interpretations of Scripture. The propriety and goodness of endlessly diverse non erroneous interpretations of Scripture is a crucial contribution of Book XII to XIII.
Book XII begins the explicit naming of God as “Trinity” carried forward, and further defined in Book XIII relative to the natural (measure, number and weight) and human psychological trinities. The greater weight of names signifying the divine simplicity and unity is crucial. The return is to God as One.
With Id Ipsum and Unum, and the notion of creation and recreation in terms of “recurrens in te unum,” creation and recreation have a common form. This is the foundation of the allegory which is Book XIII.
Book XIII is clearly written as a conclusion to the whole work. It begins with the desire for God inherent in the creature as creature with which the Confessions starts and with the problem that the presence of God in the soul is required for the desired knowledge of God, as in Books I and X. It concludes similarly and analogously for the whole work, the whole church, and the universe to how Book IX concluded the biography as “exteriora.”
CLAS 3413 & 5070 RELS 3413
Second (of two) Take-home Examination
Due Monday April 23, 2018. 40% of final grade.
Write an essay with three parts treating Augustine’s Confessions in the following ways. i) Part I. The Confessions is a self-writing, recording and making a journey into self-knowledge by which a particular human being comes to active awareness of his infinity. By this self-understanding Augustine comes to contain the internal and external conditions, including the divine, of his existence, and thus becomes free. He models humanity. ii) Part II. The Confessions is recognition and praise of what is superior, other, and outside, which goes out from Augustine’s beginning so as to return him to it, and, by being the peace of God and of the cosmos, is also Augustine’s own peace. iii) Part III. This part will consider whether these opposed readings can be reconciled. If they can, the third part of your essay will reconcile them. If your view is that they cannot be reconciled, it will explain why not.
Book X is the sine qua non of the advance of the soul in its itinerarium towards the peace the Confesssions sought from the beginning and attains in the Sabbath rest of Genesis at the end of Book XIII.
The point of the search, which is Book X, was to not to find what is looked for in the way the quest established its elements, but rather, travelling through, and thus extending, his knowledge of his unplumbable mysterious memory or mind, and how it contains and does not contain God, thus how God and the self are known and not known, he overthrows and transcends the terms of the search, and in Book XI sets up a new structure which appreciates the need for and joys of ignorance. It belongs to meditation on Scripture.
Books VII, X, and XI conclude with Jesus Christ, both God and human, who, as human, is mediator. Scripture is mediator, addressed to the human foris (outside) and recognizing revelation and understanding it require that a middle be found between the divine immutable eternity and the changing human mind. Thus mediation between the superior and the inferior is the centre of Book XI. This comes out strongly in its conclusion at Conf. 11.29.38 (pp. 243-44): “‘Your right hand upheld me’ (Ps. 17: 36; 62: 9) in my Lord, the Son of man who is mediator between you the One and us the many mediatore filio hominis inter te unum et nos multos, who live in a multiplicity of distractions by many things in multis per multa; so ‘I might apprehend him in whom also I am apprehended’ ut per eum adprehendam, in quo et adprehensus sum (Phil. 3: 12–14), [which takes us back to knowing as we are known] and leaving behind the old days I might be gathered to follow the One, ‘forgetting the past’ and moving not towards those future things which are transitory but to ‘the things which are before’ me, not stretched out in distraction but extended in reach, not by being pulled apart but by concentration. et a veteribus diebus colligar sequens unum, praeterita oblitus, non in ea quae futura et transitura sunt, sed in ea quae ante sunt non distentus, sed extentus, non secundum distentionem, sed secundum intentionem.”
The aim comes out again in the next paragraph. Conf. 11.30.40 (p. 244): “Then shall I find stability and solidity in you, in your truth which imparts form to me. Et stabo atque solidabor in te, in forma mea, veritate tua.”
Knowledge of God and the human is always in the interplay between them. In this the difference and unity of eternity and time is privileged. That difference and unity become the means of understanding how God can know what we say to him and how we can know what he says to us.
Moving to the superiora as Scripture in Genesis occurs in Book XI where the problems of the way up and the way down are both raised and dealt with together. First comes the way down. Why does what is in time address the eternal ...
Scripture is a blow, a knock, from pulsare, to which we respond by knocking to demand that the mystery be opened. It is light from outside. Conf.12.1.1 (p. 246): “my heart is much exercised under the impact made by the words of your holy scripture. pulsatum verbis sanctae scripturae tuae … it takes longer to state a request than to have it granted, and the hand which knocks has more work to do than the hand which receives operosior est manus pulsans quam sumens. We hold on to the promise, which none can make null and void. ‘If God is for us, who can be against us?’ (Rom. 8: 31). ‘Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened to you. pulsate, et aperietur vobis For everyone who asks receives and the door is opened to the one who knocks’ pulsanti aperietur (Matt. 7: 7–8).”
Book X opens with Augustine asking to know God: “May I know you, who know me. May I ‘know as I also am known’.” Confessiones, 10.1.1: “Cognoscam te, cognitor meus, cognoscam, sicut et cognitus sum.”
This requires what he prays for: “Power of my soul, enter into it and fit it for yourself virtus animae meae, intra in eam et coapta tibi, so that you (God) may have and hold it without blemish ut habeas et possideas sine macula”, that is, another level of himself, which is also God outside him, must enter him. This assumes spatial and time differences with soul as quantitative place and God as outside and able to come and dwell inside at some future time. All this will be overthrown.
This power, which right from the beginning, is both his and beyond him, enables the repentance, the cleansing of his house, his soul, by which God can dwell there. Here we get confession (in confessione), in the sense of self-examination and repentant exposure of sin.
The overthrowing begins. This repentance, however, requires that he already knows God. The God he asks to know is already present and known. To be effective self-examination must be undertaken relative to the Divine Law and the repentance must be performed in the presence of the Divine Judge. Indeed, Augustine demands that he judge himself by the divine standard. He is to judge himself by God or, put from the other side, God is his judge: “‘But I do not sit in judgement on myself’ ... You, Lord are my judge.” Confessiones, 10.4.6 to 10.5.7: “neque me ipsum diiudico … Tu enim, domine, diiudicas me.” This is the realized escatology we considered last week. He knows himself by the knowledge in which he is known. So the presence of God is the requirement of the beginning in which he goes in search of God. This is also his conclusion.
Massive Book X returns us to the infinite profundity of the human self discovered in Book VI. It is at the heart of the divine-human reciprocity which is the Confessions and is the experience of its extent and of its limits.
For Augustine, repentance and forgiveness, requiring self-examination by God’s own law in God’s own knowing, demand that St Paul’s promise that “then” “we shall know even as we are known” (I Corinthians 13.12) be realized “now.”
The modes of that realization bring together revealed Scripture, and the disciplines of the pagan Gnothi seauton (Know thyself), through Plotinian introspective intuition. There Jesus Christ, the divine-human creator, mediator, and judge is primarily present and walking always with us as St John’s Verbum (or Logos) understood through Plotinus’ NOUS with which the human mind has always immediate contact. (also Confessions VII.ix (13).
The realized eschatology in the moving back and forth, within an infinite, but fallen, self, between philosophy and revelation give what is most characteristic, most powerful, and most problematic in Augustine’s philosophical theology, and in the Western (Latin) tradition which derives from it and forms Western culture, including its philosophical forms.
We can say that the realization of the reciprocity between the divine and the human knowings (knowing ourselves as we are known and created by God) in Book X of the Confessions is experienced by us everyday in a myriad of ways, exalting and destructive.
The overarching question for the last part of the Confessions seminar. There is a reciprocity between human knowing and God’s knowing. Is it complete? Do they pass into each other totally?
It is evident that for Augustine in the Confessions the Divine and the human know and are known together. The work is a movement in Augustine knowing himself through his knowledge of God and vice – versa. The ultimate question is whether, in that reciprocal knowing, the human trinity contains the divine? or whether the divine trinity contains the human? or whether they are equal?
The logic of divine human mutual knowledge is displayed most openly in Confessiones, VII.x: “When I first came to know you, you raised me up to make me see that what I saw is Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being”. “et cum te primum cognovi, tu assumsisti me, ut viderem esse, quod viderem, et nondum me esse, qui viderem. ” The last “viderem” of “I who saw” includes the others. Augustine knows the knowings by which he knows. He discovered that this was required in Book IV: “I did not know the source of what was true and certain in them. I had my back to the light and my face towards the things which are illuminated. So my face, by which I was enabled to see the things lit up, was not itself illuminated.” “et nesciebam, unde esset quidquid ibi verum et certum esset. dorsum enim habebam ad lumen, et ad ea, quae inluminantur, faciem: unde ipsa facies mea, qua inluminata cernebam, non inluminabatur.” (IV.xvi) ...
In them, he describes experiential union with incorporeal being, eternal truth, the creator’s goodness, immutable happiness, and rest-giving satiety, simple unity, the source which is end. These are the superiora.
After the first account of the initial anagogy, ascents to “proleptic glimpses in moments of extraordinary vision” (Dr Crouse’s phrase) are reiterated in different contexts, from different beginnings, in different circumstances, and repeatedly recounted. The paradigms and language of the accounts are from Plotinus and Porphyry.
Vis-à-vis Plotinus, Augustine intellectualises 1) the ascent, 2) the experience of the Principle, and 3) the self which experiences God. The Bishop stops at the divine Trinity of self-subsistent Being, Intellect, and Love which reflects and is reflected in the human known in the same way.
To understand what Augustine is doing it helps to see that the same kind of argument about knowing occurred in Book III where he set up corelations between knowing and being and God.
Book IX, which ends the exteriora, begins as Book VIII does, with sacrifice: i (1) ‘O Lord, I am your servant, I am your servant and the son of your handmaid. You have snapped my chains. I will sacrifice to you the offering of praise’ (Ps. 115: 16–17). The Sacrifice of Praise and Thanksgiving is a name for the Holy Eucharist (or Mass) and Book IX ends with repeated pleas for and celebrations of the “Holy Sacrifice”.
2. More Sacrament and more body: IX.ii, 4 Most merciful God, did you not grant pardon and remission for this fault together with my other horrendous and mortal sins in the holy water of baptism? See iii (6), iv (8): your remedies the sacraments (illa sacramenta, illa medicamenta); their basis: iv (9) For by a true physical death ‘he who intercedes for us died for us’ (Rom. 8: 34).
3. A Neoplatonic light, self, eternity and God
More Body
4. The miraculous bodies of the saints.
IX.Vii (16): When they had been produced and dug out, they were transferred with due honour to Ambrose’s basilica...
5. More Body: His and Monica’s
6. Sensation of the Immaterial: Touching the self-same.
7. More Body: Augustine (against Plotinus) weeps
Plotinian and Augustinian Interiority
In the very middle of the Confessions, by means of the Platonic books,
Conf., 7.9.13: “quosdam platonicorum libros ex graeca lingua in latinam versos”; 7.20.26 “lectis platonicorum illis libris, posteaquam inde admonitus quaerere incorpoream veritatem, invisibilia tua per ea quae facta sunt intellecta conspexi” (note this reference to Romans 1.20,
Augustine follows Plotinus’ unity of meditative method and content.
By it the mutual equality of the three elements of the Trinity constituting the human mind: knower, knowing and known, is effected. At that centre, Augustine, as knower and lover, discovers his true nature, and is changed toward it by the only activity which can.
Plotinus’ guidance is also God’s. Augustine learns to know and love God by the knowing and loving in which God knows and loves himself.
Augustine testifies that it was “with You as my guide”, Conf., 7.10.16: “intravi in intima mea, duce te”, that he undertook the inward journey.
The Platonist books “admonished me to return into myself, and I did enter into my inner realities.” Confessiones, 7.10.16. “admonitus redire ad memet ipsum intraui in intima mea.”
The Interpretative Hypothesis: Augustine’s identity (or rest) is found in the mutual divine-human othering.
We began by placing the Confessions as a whole within the frame of divine-human othering. 1.i (1) “To praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” is matched in the conclusion not only by 13.xxxvii (52) “There also you will rest in us, just as now you work in us. Your rest will be through us, just as now your works are done through us.” but also by 13.xxxi (46) “When people see these [good things you have created] with the help of your Spirit, it is you who are seeing in them. When, therefore, they see that things are good, you are seeing that they are good. Whatever pleases them for your sake is pleasing you in them. The things which by the help of your Spirit delight us are delighting you in us. … When someone sees something which is good, God in him sees that it is good … . God is not loved except through the Spirit which he has given.” To summarize: the result of the Confessions is that Augustine shows the divine-human reciprocity by which the being, knowing, and loving of the human is the being, knowing, and loving of God. This does not, or at least may not, mean that God only is, knows, and loves in and through the human (although the human only is, knows, and loves through the divine). In the ancient world with Eriugena and his successors, Augustine was interpreted in this way. In any case, this is the hypothetical interpretative framework within which we are working at present and within which the following two questions are set. You are required to write short essays responding to them.
I. LOVE
2.ii (2) “And what was it that delighted me except to love and to be loved. (Et quid erat, quod me delectabat, nisi amare et amari?)” [Note that I have translated the text rather than reproducing Chadwick.] Write a short essay (see instructions below) analyzing in detail at least two incidents from Books 1 to 5 (inclusive), of which one must be Augustine’s account of the theft of the pears in Book 2. The essay will focus on the forms and implications for self, society, and relation to God of the human need to be loved by others, as Augustine presents it.
II. KNOWLEDGE
3.vi (10) “How far removed you are from those fantasies of mine, fantasies of physical entities which have no existence! We have more reliable knowledge in our images of bodies which really exist, and the bodies are more certain than the images. But you are no body. Nor are you soul, which is the life of bodies; for the life of bodies is superior to bodies themselves, and a more certain object of knowledge. [Quanto ergo longe es a phantasmatis illis meis, phantasmatis corporum, quae omnino non sunt! Quibus certiores sunt phantasiae corporum eorum, quae sunt, et eis certiora corpora, quae tamen non es. Sed nec anima es, quae ita est corporum (ideo melior vita corporum certiorque quam corpora)].” Although Books 1 to 5 assert continually that the human problem is loving the creature instead of the Creator, and taking pride in knowing the creature, because human identity is bound up with the other, there must be an integrity to the creature, right love of it, and true knowledge of it. Write a short essay (see instructions below) analyzing in detail Augustine’s account of the true knowledge of nature in Books 1 to 5 in contrast with the Manichean stories about nature. The essay will include a consideration of how the Manichees help bring Augustine to that understanding and will explain why, for Augustine, there must be a true knowledge of nature and in what sense.
Book IV begins the transformation of the subjective side, the knower, and attention to the medium, the light of knowledge. There, because of the death of a most intimate friend, his self is expanded. He knew himself in his friend, “another self.” Confessiones, 4.6.11: “quia ille alter eram.”
Not yet believing in God’s immortal life for his soul mate, when this other self dies, Augustine is overcome by death. Thrown back on an intolerable mortality, Augustine cries: “I had become a place of unhappiness in which I could not bear to be, but I could not escape from myself.” Confessiones, 4.7.12: “ego mihi remanseram infelix locus, ubi nec esse possem nec inde recedere.”
This terrible experience is not merely negative. The self has become central, the thing being questioned, and, the burden of bearing with himself has been doubled with the death of his other. Augustine tells us: “I had become to myself a vast problem.” Confessiones, 4.4.9: “eram ipse mihi magna quaestio.”
He now knows himself as “a vast deep,” Confessiones, 4.13.22: “grande profundum est ipse homo,” an unplumbable one, where, in Books X and XI, he will discover the infinite and eternal. Confession, public repentant self-examination, brings experience of a vast, labyrinthine, horrifying interiora, which will become the place of the rise to the superiora in the exegesis of Genesis.
Moving from Books centered on Loving to Books centered on Knowing
If, as it seems, the first three Books of the Confessions (certainly Books II and III) are centered on loving, the latter half of Book III, Book IV and Book V are about knowing. The two go together in Augustine’s trinitarian self and in the Line. Love of the Good and the Beautiful draws the soul up the Line. Concupisence enchains it at the bottom.
When Augustine’s carnal soul, bound up in bodies and images, loves immortal wisdom, he is a carnally minded philosopher; his mind is at one level, the object of its love is at another. The conversion in Book III is to immortal immaterial truth but loved corporeally: the basic contradiction to be overcome. The knower is at a lower level on the line than is the known. This is one problem addressed here. The other is knowing the knowing by which we know.
xvi (30) (30) Moreover, what advantage came to me from the fact that I had by myself read and understood all the books I could get hold of on the arts which they call liberal, at a time when I was the most wicked slave of evil lusts? I enjoyed reading them, though I did not know the source of what was true and certain in them. I had my back to the light and my face towards the things which are illuminated. So my face, by which I was enabled to see the things lit up, was not itself illuminated.
Et quid erat, quod me delectabat, nisi amare et amari?
Love of love and loves.
The Philosophical Point made Rhetorically
This point is a foundation, necessary to the Platonic-Aristotelian position cohering with the Genesis account of being, that we are moved only by the good.
8. 16. ... ipsum esset nihil et eo ipso ego miserior? Et tamen solus id non fecissem (sic recordor animum tunc meum) solus omnino id non fecissem.
Confessiones III
Love of Love and more reciprocal love. The Source of Augustine’s sinful descent into evil.
i (1) I came to Carthage and all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves. As yet I had never been in love and I longed to love; and from a subconscious poverty of mind I hated the thought of being less inwardly destitute. I sought an object for my love; I was in love with love. Plato’s Cave and its Prisoners as projection of Love and Illusion: the Theatre
i (1) … My hunger was internal, deprived of inward food, that is of you yourself, my God. But that was not the kind of hunger I felt. I was without any desire for incorruptible nourishment, not because I was replete with it, but the emptier I was, the more unappetizing such food became. So my soul was in rotten health. In an ulcerous condition it thrust itself to outward things, miserably avid to be scratched by contact with the world of the senses. Yet physical things had no soul. Love lay outside their range. …. I rushed headlong into love, by which I was longing to be captured. ‘My God, my mercy’ (Ps. 58: 18) in your goodness you mixed in much vinegar with that sweetness. My love was returned and in secret I attained the joy that enchains. I was glad to be in bondage, tied with troublesome chains, with the result that I was flogged with the red-hot iron rods. …
ii (2) I was captivated by theatrical shows. They were full of images of my own miseries and fuelled my fire.
Confessiones III
Seeking one thing in the realm of illusion, he finds the opposite.
iv (7) … I was to study the textbooks on eloquence. I wanted to distinguish myself as an orator for a damnable and conceited purpose, namely delight in human vanity. …I had come across a book by a certain Cicero, whose language (but not his heart) almost everyone admires. That book of his contains an exhortation to study philosophy and is entitled Hortensius. The book changed my feelings. It altered my prayers, Lord, to be towards you yourself. It gave me different desires and priorities. Suddenly every vain hope became empty to me, and I longed for the immortality of wisdom.
immortalitatem sapientiae concupiscebam
The fundamental conversion to immortal immaterial truth but loved corporeally: the basic contradiction to be overcome. The knower is at a lower level on the Platonic Line than is the known.
1. Her Conversion is to the Roman Catholic Church and its Sacraments. This derives from her journey as mystical return to source and her identification with the poor and simple, the masses.
2. Implication of Good and Evil. There is a great deal on this in the work. I note three instances in order to start our discussion which must continue next week.
a. Destroying her marriage by her conversion.
b. Good out of evil?
c. Sacraments a necessary good but bring misunderstanding.
3. Good requires suffering. A teaching common to our three authors.
For Action and Evil 6, October 29, 2018
St George’s Round Church, Halifax
The first passage has been raised by several of us as crucially important. After it I give others suggested by members of our group or which strike me as useful for starting our discussion. My title for this selection is Judas the patron saint of us all.
For Action and Evil 5, October 22, 2018
St George’s Round Church, Halifax
I. Writing and Involvement
Central to The Quiet American is the destruction of Fowler’s self-delusion that , because neither Vietnamese, nor French, nor American, as an English observer reporter, not an editorial writer of judgments, he can avoid being involved, and, in fact, is not. “The war. That’s no concern of mine. I’m not involved.” “I’m not engagé.”(Vintage Greene, 2004, pp. 143, 89). He discovers that, in reality, he is so deeply involved as to set up the death of a young man who both saved his life and took his lover. He discovers that the Communist Heng is right “Sooner or later , one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.” (p. 166).
An essential accomplishment of Graham Greene’s writing as a whole is to persuade us of the truth which the Communist articulates in this formula, and to show the endless working, both subtle and crude, both inward and corporeal, of what Heng states as law. Greene, knows its inescapable truth because it determines all writing-creation. Particularly, the knowledge is forced upon him person ally and makes him who he is because Greene’s writing is his necessary life-saving therapy. As the particular individual he is, writer by necessity, Greene cannot avoid knowing how he is discovering and creating himself in others and being saved in that self-othering. He cannot avoid understanding that the distance Fowler wants to establish between knowledge and involvement is a delusion. The creation of others in their difference is part of the author’s self-creation. However, the circle by which our others are both other and our own holds for all. Greene never ceases to explode false objectivity.
From an England which still excluded, despised, and penalized Roman Catholics, and an author who left intact an Establishment in Church and state whose hollowness she exposed, to an author who is a convert to Roman Catholicism and who depicts the wrestling between it and Marxism – Communism – Social Democracy as the only event worth serious attention.
From novels in which religion is in the background or identified with the established order where the clergy are respected in proportion to their income, and has use only as an incentive to morality, to ones for which religion has reemerged, is a continual subject of engagement, either negatively or positively, and the fact of priesthood is an absolute, and revered even in the “Whisky priest” and where Christ and the infinite worth of persons appears in the place of their most complete negation.
From the limited domestic world of gentry in the “Home Counties,” where Jane Austen shows the process of conversion which is the heart of Christianity working through social interactions and interior exertions in which religion never appears but good and evil are identified, judged and rewarded or punished to the world outside Austen’s, the oppressed below and the powers above, which her focus excluded.
As I did in our last meeting I shall use a few passages from Charles Williams’ The Descent to the Dove to make a transition. To these I shall add some facts and judgments about Graham Greene I think useful as beginnings, and conclude with passages from his letters which provide enough of a guide to The Quiet American to prevent going down false paths at the start.
In Chapter xvii Anne describes “Mrs Smith”: “this was not a case of fortitude or of resignation only. A submissive spirit might be patient, a strong understanding would supply resolution, but here was something more; here was that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself, which was from nature alone. It was the choicest gift of Heaven; and Anne viewed her friend as one of those instances in which, by a merciful appointment, it seems designed to counterbalance almost every other want.”
A nature which was the gift of Heaven.
A. Classic Augustine
Such a formulation, collapsing nature into grace or grace into nature, belongs to Jane Austen’s secularized Protestant Christianity but is NOT Classic Augustinianism. Augustine and those who, like Aquinas, continue to refine Augustine’s doctrine in the Middle Ages, and perhaps who, like Richard Hooker, Archbishop Laud, and Jeremy Taylor, carry a form of it into Anglicanism, preserve nature and grace. In grace received, God’s gracious action and what is proper to human nature are related analogously to the way the human and divine natures are related in Jesus Christ. Grace comes to us through that union. In us, there is no divine action by grace without a corresponding activity of human nature, a human exercise, as it is often called. Aquinas, in a formula derived from the Platonic philosophical tradition, puts the principle like this: “Grace does not destroy nature but makes it complete: gratia non tollit naturam sed perficit.”
B. Calvinist Dead Dog Augustinianism ...
C. The Disappearance of Nature and a ceaseless alternation of Extreme Opposites
Dead Dog Calvinism with its concentration on God’s electing will (a dangerous contemplation according to Article XVII) proved to be intolerable especially where it was most strongly in control: Puritan America with Harvard as its intellectual heart. There Trinitarian Christianity was lost and replaced by Pelgianism: “liberal” good works Unitarianism, as we shall witness with Pyle in The Quiet American. Elsewhere Arminian Methodism took over teaching salvation open to all with inwardly experienced assurance. In any case the nature – grace balance of Classical Augustinianism and the Roman Catholic Church was lost when Calvinism dominated the English Protestant world. This seems to be what we are seeing in Jane Austen.
With Jane Austen it is anachronistic to speak of predestination (as I have been doing) but there seems to be rigid determination by the nature or character each is given. It seems that virtue can only be acquired by those given enough virtue to learn or be converted by the circumstances of their lives and encounters. We shall return to the question of confession, conversion and how virtue is acquired on October 1st.
In the meantime it may be worth reflecting that the violent moves between opposites seems to dominate at present. Everything is free choice or my circumstances and what happens to me determine (or both!). There is a pure atheist naturalism (Heaven’s giving is no longer required) or an “Evangelical” Christianity of the Holy Spirit where we become the direct agents of God. Ironically the latter is usually the enemy of Islam mischaracterized by being looked at through one of its theological schools as totally determined by God’s willing, i.e. EVERYTHING is immediately done by infinitely numerous acts of God’s undetermined will.
In Persuasion, the emptiness of the social hierarchy is the starting point: “Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; … This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened: ‘ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALL’ … Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation.” Judgement of Sir Walter in terms of the old standard, as if it still stands, is, nonetheless, part of the conclusion. In the last Chapter (xxiv) he is condemned by the standards of the Prayer Book Catechism: “a foolish, spendthrift baronet, who had not had principle or sense enough to maintain himself in the situation in which Providence had placed him.” By the same standard, Anne justified herself against Captain Wentworth’s accusation, that she was weak in being “over persuaded”; this names the novel and sets its primary question. Anne maintains that she was right to obey Lady Russell, though she now thinks Russell was wrong and is explicit that she herself would not now give the same direction. However, Lady Russell stood in the place of a parent for a motherless girl who had learned that her duty was “To love, honour, and succour my father and mother: To honour and obey the Queen, and all that are put in authority under her: To submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters: To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters” as the Catechism of 1662 has it.
Jane Austen’s novels have many memorable scenes in which parental or hierarchical command is defied or contradicted.
“One trait only remains to be touched on. It makes all others unimportant. She [Jane Austen, the writer’s sister] was thoroughly religious and devote; fearful of giving offence to God and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature. On serious subjects she was well-instructed, both by reading and meditation, and her opinions accorded strictly with those of our Established Church.” Conclusion of Henry Austen’s 1817 “Biographical Notice”. The religious fear comes out explicitly in the repentance of Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, Chapter xlv: “my desire [is] to live to have time for atonement to God and to you all,” but it means much more than this.
I. DIVINELY ORDAINED AUTHORITY AND ITS UNDERMINING IN JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS
To understand how the evil involved in action is overcome for Jane Austen, and the limits of that overcoming, we need to look at both sides of her Anglicanism: its Classical “Tory” form and its “Whig” undermining. The Classical Anglicanism of “passive obedience” and “non-resistance” to divinely ordained authority, as reasserted in the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, produced after the Restoration of the Stuarts with Charles II, determines the frame of judgment in Persuasion (1817). Equally, however, its undermining with the radical shift made by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 is strongly present in Persuasion and in all Austen’s novels.
In 1688, the legitimate heir to the throne, the Roman Catholic, brother of Charles IInd, James IInd, was ousted as King and replaced, after an invasion, by a Dutch Calvinist, William of Orange, married to James’ daughter, Mary. Thus the legitimate ruler by hereditary right and the power actually in possession were opposed. Except for the Tory Non-Jurors, who included Archbishops and Bishops, in 1689 the Church of England chose the power in possession, despite their oaths to James IInd. ...
The major section on Jane Austen's novels is entitled "Secularization Completed and the Beginnings of a Critique." They are not the loss of conversion in the Christian Platonist tradition but rather such a complete passage into the processes of social and individual life, i.e. secularization, that religious forms need not be represented along side them. Jane Austen is a modern Sophocles in his difference from Euripides and Aeschylus. Indeed, there is a sense in which her novels are the deepest treatments of conversion in the genre.
Anselm’s new beginning Bonaventure, with speculative insight, assimilates to Dionysius’ primary name for God, so as to bring forth Anselm’s deduction of the Trinity. Crucially the vision of the first Cherub is not lost or erased because the Trinity of persons only appears when the summum bonum is also simple being. Moving from both Cherubic visions to the Incarnation, Bonaventure then leads the itinerant mind to the Dionysian darkness which is brilliant light and emptiness entirely full. It is significant that in both authors Augustine is surpassed. Dionysius has become an Augustinian, and Augustine lives within a Proclean systematic cosmos which was not his creation.
In contrast, Bonaventure places his explicitly Augustinian philosophical theology within an explicitly Dionysian framework. This appears at the beginning with the mediation in the opening lines. He invokes the First, invisible Father of lights, through a train of connected mediators, so that he begins, as if from sensible veils (for Dionysius we come to the invisible through these), at hand in the sensed world “Francis, our father and guide” in of whose Order Bonaventure is the head, who spoke always of the end: peace.
Choose one or two questions from this section.
1. “You are nevertheless not in place or time, but all things are in You. For nothing contains You, but You contain all things. (Tu autem, licet nihil sit sine te, non es tamen in loco aut tempore, sed omnia sunt in te. Nihil enim te continet, sed tu contines omnia.) ” [Proslogion, cap. 19 ] In slide 7 of the Powerpoint for March 13 with this text, I commented: “At this point we gather in what was negative for the knowledge of God in Chapter 12: ”es, non per aliud es quam per teipsum”, ”you are not through another but through yourself” and in the question about space and time in Chapter 13 (“He alone is limitless and eternal, although other spirits are also limitless and eternal”), and, in the consideration of place in Chapter 16 (“the ‘inaccessible light’ in which He ‘dwells’”). The solution is known through physics, we may say, the physics of divinity which allows us to conceive the divine inclusivity (to put it one way) or the divine self-differentiation (to put it the other way.)” Explain this “physics of divinity” explain how it was built up in the chapters to 19 and continued in subsequent chapters, and indicate what problem it solves and how this “physics of divinity” solves it. As well as my comments in the Powerpoint for March 13, my “Omnia sunt in te: A Note on Chapters Twelve to Twenty-six of Anselm’s Proslogion,” Dionysius 27 (2009):145–54, and Dr Fournier’s “Ring Structure in Chapters Six to Thirteen of Anselm’s Proslogion,” Dionysius 27 (2009):127–44 are likely to be useful to those attempting this question.
2. Chapter 23 of the Proslogion, concludes its quest in a way which results from and preserves its deepest solutions to the contradictions the search created. It also enables and compels a new beginning which allows Anselm to live the remainder of his days joyfully and hopefully. Explain how it does both of these.
3. The list of goods in Chapter 25 enjoyed in the “one thing necessary in which is all good, indeed, which is all and one and the complete and the sole good (unum necessarium, in quo est omne bonum, immo quod est omne et unum et totum et solum bonum.)” [Proslogion, cap. 23 ] includes those from beauty to melody which are goods of the body as well of the soul. This is a culmination of a feature of the Proslogion from the beginning, namely, that bodily and sensuous goods are never to be surrendered. Outline the ways Anselm develops this feature in the course of the Proslogion, and explain how and why he insists on this.
4. “If it is friendship, they will love God more than themselves and one another as themselves, and God will love them more than they love themselves because it is through Him that they love Him and themselves and one another, and He loves Himself and them through Himself. (Si amicitia: diligent deum plus quam seipsos, et invicem tamquam seipsos, et deus illos plus quam illi seipsos; quia illi illum et se et invicem per illum, et ille se et illos per seipsum.)” [Proslogion, cap. 23] This belongs to the list of goods in Chapter 25 which are enjoyed in the “one thing necessary in which is all good, indeed, which is all and one and the complete and the sole good (unum necessarium, in quo est omne bonum, immo quod est omne et unum et totum et solum bonum).” [Proslogion, cap. 23] I have commented that this gives the metaphysical or theological basis of ethics. So the eternal life provides the foundation of the life well lived in time. Explain how this is the theological basis of ethics, what the character of this ethics would be, and why it must be established in eternity.
B. Section B
Choose one or two questions from this section
5. In the Itinerarium mentis in Deum, the enormous borrowing from Augustine by Bonaventure is inserted within a framework taken from Dionysius the Areopagite. Bonaventure is explicit that Dionysius dominates Chapter 6. Chapter 7 of the Itinerarium is largely taken directly from The Mystical Theology of Dionysius (and thus indirectly from Proclus). Scholars with as profound a sense for Anselm’s theology as Robert Crouse were certain that he must have read works of Dionysius. Explain how, in the Itinerarium, Augustine is inserted into a Dionysian framework. That is not the case with the Proslogion. If you think there are any Dionysian elements in the Proslogion, list them. What difference does the dominance of Augustine in the Proslogion make to the character of its doctrine and structure as compared to the Itinerarium?
6. “If you wish then to contemplate the invisible traits of God in so far as they belong to the unity of His essence, fix your gaze upon Being itself, and see that Being is most certain in itself; for it cannot be thought not to be, since the purest Being occurs only in full flight from Non-Being, just as nothingness is in full flight from Being. (Volens igitur contemplari Dei invisibilia quoad essentiae unitatem primo defigat aspectum in ipsum esse et videat, ipsum esse adeo in se certissimum, quod non potest cogitari non esse, quia ipsum esse purissimum non occurrit nisi in plena fuga non-esse, sicut et nihil in plena fuga esse.) ” [Itinerarium, Chapter 5, §3 ] This, and the chapters which immediately follow it, are the equivalent of Anselm’s proof for the existence of God in the Proslogion. What is common between the two? What is different? Account for the likenesses and the differences.
7. “See then and pay heed, since the best which exists simply is that than which nothing better can be thought of. And this is such that it cannot be rightly thought not to be. For Being is in all ways better than Non-Being. This is such that it cannot rightly be thought of unless conceived of as both three and one. For the Good is said to be self-diffusive. The highest good is therefore the most self-diffusive. The greatest diffusion, however, can exist only if it is actual and intrinsic, substantial and hypostatic, natural and voluntary, free and necessary, lacking nothing and perfect. Unless, then, there be eternally in the highest good a production which is actual and consubstantial, and an hypostasis as noble as the producer through generation and spiration, so that it would be from the eternal principle eternally co-producing and would be beloved ("dilectus") in itself and co-loved ("condilectus"), generated, and spirated as are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, in no way would it be the highest good, for it would not diffuse itself most highly. (Vide igitur et attende quoniam optimum quod simpliciter est quo nihil melius cogitari potest; et hoc tale sic est, quod non potest recte cogitari non esse, quia omnino melius est esse quam non esse; sic est, quod non potest recte cogitari, quin cogitetur trinum et unum. Nam "bonum dicitur diffusivum sui"; summum igitur bonum summe diffusivum est sui. Summa autem diffusio non potest esse, nisi sit actualis et intrinseca, substantialis et hypostatica, naturalis et voluntaria, liberalis et necessaria, indeficiens et perfecta. Nisi igitur in summo bono aeternaliter esset productio actualis et consubstantialis, et hypostais aeque nobilis, sicut est producens per modum generationis et spirationis - ita quod sit aeternalis principii aeternaliter comprincipiantis - ita quod esset dilectus et condilectus, genitus et spiratus, hoc est Pater et Filius et Spiritus sanctus; nequaquam esset summum bonum, quia non summe se diffunderet.) ” [Itinerarium, Chapter 6, §2 ] With Anselm’s Proslogion clearly in mind (the repetitions are not only doctrinal but verbal), Bonaventure moves directly from the existence of God to proof of the Trinitarian character of absolute being. He uses “nothing better is able to be thought (nihil melius cogitari potest)” to make the highest good most self-diffusive. There is a great deal in common between Anselm Proslogion 23 and Itinerarium 6, §2 and a great deal that is different. Set out what is common and what is different. Explain the differences. Are the doctrines different? or is the only difference in the use made of them and their placing? Does placing change doctrine?
8. In Chapter 6, §2 to 6, §5, Bonaventure moves, as he did in Chapter 5, from one form of contradiction to another, the contradictions being generated from within the highest contemplations. He aims to create greater and greater wonder. He then places the vision of the highest being against the equally necessary vision of the greatest diffusion of goodness to draw intellect down to the greatest of all contradictions: “look to the propitiatory and wonder that in it the primal principle is joined to the last term, God joined with man formed on the sixth day, the eternal joined with temporal man, born in the fullness of time of a Virgin—the most simple joined with the most composite, the most actual with the most passive and mortal, the most perfect and immense with the little, the most highly unified and all-inclusive with the composite individual distinct from all else, namely, Jesus Christ. (Respice ad propitiatorium et mirare, quod in ipso principium primum iunctum est cum postremo, Deus cum homine sexto die formato, aeternum iunctum est cum homine temporali, in plenitudine temporum de Virgine nato, simplicissimum cum summe composito, actualissimum cum summe passo et mortuo, perfectissimum et immensum cum modico, summe unum et omnimodum cum individuo composito et a ceteris distincto. homine scilicet Iesu Christo.)”[ Itinerarium 6, §5]. Anselm also uses contradiction encountered in the internal movement of his argument in order to advance it, not to close it down. Describe instances of this use of contradiction in both the Proslogion and the Itinerarium. Show how it is constructive in the instances you describe. Is the use made of contradiction the same or different in the Proslogion and the Itinerarium? What conception or conceptions of reason enable these uses of contradiction?
In Chapter 24 Anselm again rouses his soul: “NOW, my soul, rouse and lift up your whole understanding and think as much as you can on what kind and how great this good is. EXCITA nunc, anima mea, et erige totum intellectum tuum, et cogita quantum potes, quale et quantum sit illud bonum.” This takes us back to Chapter 1. “Rousing the mind to the contemplation of God Excitatio mentis ad contemplandum deum”: “COME now, insignificant man, fly for a moment from your affairs, escape for a little while from the tumult of your thoughts. EIA nunc, homuncio, fuge paululum occupationes tuas, absconde te modicum a tumultuosis cogitationibus tuis. ”
This requires that God teach the seeker where and how to find him. “Come then, Lord my God, teach my heart where and how to seek You, where and how to find You. Eia nunc ergo tu, domine deus meus, doce cor meum ubi et quomodo te quærat, ubi et quomodo te inveniat.”
A member of the seminar commented: “Chapter 1 establishes the structure that governs the seeking which produces the proof of chapters 2-4. The structure of seeking which begins chapter 1 seeks God as something external: “doce cor meum ubi et quo modo te quaeret”.”
Crucially, by Chapter 24 and the reiterated excitatio, the relative situations of the soul and God are inverted. By the journey which the soul has undergone, it is now within God, who as Trinity is the good, which contains its own differentiation as infinite goods: “this good is equally Father and Son and Holy Spirit hoc bonum sit pariter pater et filius et spiritus sanctus.”
(Cap 12: “quidquid es, non per aliud es quam per teipsum”).
The Proslogion is the realization of a quest to know the existence and nature of God in the way that God exists. It attempts to realize now, in a different way than Augustine also required in Confessions 10, St Paul’s promise in I Corinthans 13.12 that human knowing of God would pass from a dim mirroring in something else to face to face knowledge, so that we would know God in the way that God has known and knows us. “One argument that for its proof required no other save itself alone (unum argumentum, quod nullo alio ad se probandum quam se solo indigeret),” would draw us into this equalization of our way of knowing and God’s knowing and being. Chapter 1 shows that this quest for face to face knowledge of God is essential to the human as rational. It is prayed for with great frequency in the Benedictine opus dei where the recitation of the psalter is central: “Your face I seek, your face, Lord, I require (Quæro vultum tuum; vultum tuum, domine, requiro).” [Proslogion, c. 1]. The meditative turn inward it necessitates is the heart of monastic life, its raison d’être. Whether known within us or in the world, God is not known immediately.
The meditative turn or conversion of the soul is based in a distinction which saves the proof in Chapters 2-4: “[T]here is not only one sense in which something is ‘said in one’s heart’ or thought. For in one sense a thing is thought when the word signifying it is thought; in another sense when the very object which the thing is is understood. ([N]on uno tantum modo dicitur aliquid in corde vel cogitatur. Aliter enim cogitatur res cum vox eam significans cogitatur, aliter cum id ipsum quod res est intelligitur.]) ” [Proslogion, c. 4] The proof for God’s existence in Chapter 2 requiring the fool’s denial of God’s existence had been undermined by the proof in Chapter 3 that God so truly is as to be unable to be thought not to be (“Sic ergo vere es, domine deus meus, ut nec cogitari possis non esse”). The unthinkability of God’s non existence is required because otherwise the creature would be above the creator and would judge concerning the creator (“ascenderet creatura super creatorem”, et iudicaret de creatore.” [Proslogion, c. 3]
The quest to conform our knowing to God’s knowing and being depends on the power to compare forms of knowing, a property of reason. This comparison is the fundamental of the definition of God in the proof: “than which nothing greater can be thought (quo maius nihil cogitari potest).” [Proslogion, c. 2] It is given by faith: “we believe you to be that than which nothing greater can be thought (credimus te esse aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit)” [Chapter 2]; “what I believed before by your giving (quod prius credidi te donante)” [Proslogion, c. 4]. The difference between forms of knowing which belongs to reasoning contains the difference between faith, on the one hand, and the certain understanding to which the proofs in 2 to 4 brings him, on the other: “I understand now … by your illumination (iam … intelligo te illuminante).” [Proslogion, c. 4]
That kind of difference is necessary to all coming to know so far as faith, or something analogous, gives in an obscure and preliminary way the knowledge which is sought. Faith or its analogue allows reason to find and recognize what it seeks. The impossibility of immediate direct knowledge and the necessity of the climb through lower forms is indicated also in the fact that the proof in Chapter 2 is by the negation of a negation. (The negation of the fool’s denial in a reductio ad absurdum). As well as by its explicit denial: “Lord, I do not attempt to penetrate your height, because my understanding is in no way equal to it (Non tento, domine, penetrare altitudinem tuam, quia nullatenus comparo illi intellectum meum).” [Proslogion, c. 2]. Comparison between the human and divine ways of knowing and being continues in Chapters 5 to 12 as Anselm attempts to ascribe the proper attributes to God.
The doctrine that a thing is known according to the mode of the knower was found in the most authoritative Latin, Arabic and Greek sources of mediaeval thought -- even if the authority of the source was mostly owed to mistakes. It had a long, important, and varied, influence in Latin mediaeval philosophical theology and beyond. This influence has not been widely recognised since it is at odds with one of the central purposes for which the history of mediaeval philosophy has mostly been constructed among us: namely, opposition to a modern philosophy represented as destructively subjective. Those retrieving, and in many ways creating, mediaeval theological literature as philosophy to be used in this war against modern subjectivity, will not emphasize the importance of a doctrine which shows not only that the subject conforms the object of knowledge to its own substantial mode but also that it may thereby bring into being new objects. Nonetheless, such a doctrine was not only central in the Latin West, but there it also encountered the opposed principle for relating the divine and the human. The Western meeting, conflict, confluence and mutual transformation of these opposed fundamental principles imposed terrible problems on thinkers. These profound troubles arose because the opposed principle also came from a pre-eminent authority, the one who gave Latin theological culture its specific character, namely, Augustine. Nonetheless, like the Neoplatonic reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle, resolving the contradictions proved enormously creative.
As monk, theologian and bishop, Anselm belongs to the Great Reform of the Catholic Church spanning the 11th to 13th centuries. It emerges in major part from the interaction of Cluniac monasticism and the Papacy. Reform started with Papal and conciliar decrees preventing election of popes by emperors, enforcing celibacy of the clergy, preventing clergy from shedding blood (so they could not be warriors), and stopping the conferring of the symbols of the sacred functions of bishops and abbots by laypersons, “INVESTITURE”. In general it was a reaction against the control of the sacred by lay powers (kings, lords, landowners) for the sake of secular ends. Anselm was deeply committed to this reform programme but he was profoundly moved by the need to transform fides into intellectus. So he bypassed Cluny on the way to Bec and Lanfranc.