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Quod factum est in ipso vita erat

“ho gegonen en autô zôê ên.”

These words,¹ taken from John 1:3, 4 are cited in the form in which they are given in nearly all of the earlier codices, and in which they are quoted by the Scholastics, e.g. Meister Eckhart in Expositio S, Evangelii sec. Johannem (ed. J. Christ and J. Koch, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1936, p. 56), and by Origen in Comm. in Ev. Joannio, II.16.2 I render, “What has been made (or, “has become,” or “was begotten”) was life in Him,” or in Sanskrit Yad bhûtam (or jâtam) tad svâtmani jîva âsît.

Both Meister Eckhart and St. Bonaventura, the latter in I Sent., d. 36, a. 2, q. 1 ad 4 citing St Augustine’s res factae ... in artifice creato dicuntur vivere, recognize the analogy of the human and divine artificers; in both cases the pattern of what is to be made pre-exists in the maker’s living mind, and is alive in it, and remains alive in it even when the factibile has become a factum or after it has been destroyed. Our intention is to indicate the immediate and universal background against which these ideas subsist.

This background is essentially that of the traditional doctrine of the “two minds,” or two aspects of the mind, the one in act and the other in action. Combining Aristotle’s Metaphysics, XII.7.8, 1072b 20f. and XII.9.5, 1074a 34f. with De anima, III.5, 430 a-f., we find that of these two the first, or Mind³ “in act” (energeia)— “in itself” (kath’ adtên), in its own act of being—is “apart” (chôristos) “from sensibles” (tôn aisthêtôn), “contemplative” (theôrêtikos), “impassible” (apathês), without remembrance⁴ and unmixed; “it does not think,” or rather, “its ‘thinking’ is the ‘Thinking of thinking,’ (noêseôs noêsis) i.e. the principle and sine qua non, but not the activity of thinking. In other words, “it thinks only itself” (auton ara noei) “throughout eternity,” (ton apanta aiôna) without distinction of subject from object, for where both are immaterial “the thesis is both the operation and the thought,” (ho logos to pragma kai hê noêsis) “thought and what is thought of are one and the same” (hê noêsis tô nooumenô mia),⁵ Mind, “becoming everything,” (panta ginesthai) is what it knows. Furthermore, it is eternal and beatific (hêdistos) Life, the Life (zôê) of God himself. The second mind is creative (poiêtikos), and an “efficient cause (to aition kai poiêtikon) in that it makes everything”⁶ (tô panta poiein); it is passible (pathêtikos) and mortal, and thinks of contingent things, not always of itself. It is on a plane still lower than that of its creative activity that the mind is “sensitive” (aisthêtikos=pathêtikos).⁷

These two (or three) minds are the same as Plato’s two (or three) parts of the soul, one immortal, and the other mortal, the latter in its best part active and courageous, and in its worst part passively affected by and subject to emotions and reactions provoked by sensation (aisthêsis). The two minds are the “natures” in the universal doctrine of “one essence and two natures.”⁸ As three, they correspond to the contemplative and active lives and the life of pleasure.

In these distinctions of the theoretical from the practical mind, and in the identification of the former (Mind) with the Life (zôê) of God and of it’s Thinking with its Thesis, or why not say “Word” (Logos)? there is a veritable prediction or fore-telling of St. John’s “In the First Principle (as the Scholastics so often interpret in principio = Skr. agre, not so much “in the beginning” as “at the top”) was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The “Word” that, as Aristotle says, the First Mind thinks, when in its act of being it thinks itself, is for St. John the Christ, the Son of God, “through whom all things were made” and whom St. Augustine therefore calls “as it were, God’s art” (De Trin. VI.10)⁹—the art by which all things were made. “Word” and “Mind” (logos, nous) are for Plato often interchangeable, while if for Aristotle the Word is what the First Mind thinks, and the Thinker and the thought are one, it is clear that one might safely paraphrase St. John by “In the First Principle was the Mind, and the Mind was with God, and the Mind was God.”¹⁰

Having so far outlined the immediate background and implications of our text, it may be shown that these are also universal, and in particular, Indian conceptions; in saying which we are very far from suggesting or implying that in their Hellenistic context they are of Indian origin. As before, and to simplify the presentation, we shall combine the evidence of several texts, notably Brhadâranyaka Upanisad, I.a 4.10, IV.1.6, IV.3.28, 30, 32, Kena Upanisad, I.2 and 5 and Maitri Upanisad, VI.34.6, with Satapatha Brâhmana, X.5.3.1, “In the beginning (or rather, “at the top”)¹¹ there was just That Mind” (agre...tan-mana evâsa); a paraphrase of Rg Veda, X.129.1, “There was That One (tad ekam ... âsa), naught else whatever.”

To the question, “what was it that Brahma knew, whereby he became the All?” it is replied, “In the beginning, verily, this (Self)¹² was Brahma. It knew just Itself (âtmânam-evâvet), thereby It became the All” (sarvam abhavat). And as to this Gnosis, “Verily, though he (who can say, ‘I am Brahma’) does not think (na manute) or know (na vijânati), yet is he one who thinks and knows, albeit he does not think or know (contingently). Forsooth, there cannot be a dissipation of the Knower’s knowing, because of his imperishability. It is not, however, any second thing, divided from Himself, that he should know ... That is his highest station, that is his Beatitude” (ânanda).

And “What is that Beatitude? Nothing but Mind (mana eva). Verily, my King, it is by his Mind that He possesses himself of the Woman (i.e. vâc, the Voice, Theotokos),¹³ a Son is born of Her, in his image (pratirupah); that is his Beatitude. Verily, my King, the Imperial, Supreme Brahma is just Mind.” As expressed in Thomist phraseology, the generation of the Son is a vital operation, a principio conjunctivo.

Aristotle’s “Thinking of thinking,” i.e. non-discursive principle of discursive thought, is the “Mind of the mind” (manaso manas) of the Kena Upanisad where, to the question “By whom (kena) impelled and sent forth does the mind fly?”¹⁴ it is answered that is by “the Mind of the mind,” and that “the Contemplatives, wholly relinquishing (atimucya, sc, their own mind), when they depart from this world, become immortal.” A subsequent verse says that “He has It in mind, who does not think It; he who thinks It, does not know It; It is unknown to those who ‘know It,’ but known to those who ‘know it not’”; and that is precisely the thesis of Nicolas of Cusa’s Docta Ignorantia, while “wholly relinquishing their own mind” corresponds to Philo’s “He that flees for refuge from his own mind, flees for refuge to the Mind of all things” (I.93).¹⁵

And so, as the Maitri Upanisad says, “The mind is said to be twofold,¹⁶ clean and unclean: unclean, by admixture with desire, clean when separated from desire¹⁷ ... The means of bondage and release;¹⁸ of bondage, when it clings to the objective, of liberation, when disconnected from the objective.”

Is it not then true, as Jeremias said, that “in den verschiedenen Kulturen findet man die Dialekte der einen Geistessprache”?

Notes

1. In which the distinction is implied of esse from essentia, existence from being, genesis from to ontôs on.
2. Meister Eckhart quotes the gloss, Quod in mente est, vivit cum artifice; quod fit, mutatur cum tempore.
3. Henceforth I use the capital when the First Mind is referred to.
4. Just as for Plotinus, Enneads, IV.4.6, the Gods “never learn” and “do not remember”: and for the same reason, viz. that where there is no forgetting, there is no occasion for learning or remembrance. It is only for the second and variable mind, our mind that has forgotten so many things, that to be taught and so reminded is desirable. What it can be taught is what it has forgotten (Meno, 80, etc., and also Indian doctrine), and so, as Meister Eckhart says, “Not till the soul knows all that there is to be known can she pass over to the Unknown Good.”
5. To restore “that original nature in which the knower and the known are alike” is for Plato life’s highest purpose (Timaeus, 90D); it is the beatific “synthesis” (samâdhi) for which the discipline of Yoga is undertaken, and in which it culminates.

6. Cf. Mahesvarânanda, Maharthamañjarî, p. 44, where “The suchness called Sadâsiva (sadâ, “eternal”) is prior with respect to the principle called îsvara (Lord, kurios) which latter, by the splendor of its practical power becomes the demiurge of all things in their manifested likeness.” Cf. John, “through whom all things were made,” and Skr. Visvakarma, “All-maker.”

   Aristotle’s to aition kai poiêtikon (De anima III.5, 430 12) reflects Phaedrus, 97C nous ... pantôn aitios. Cf. Hermes Trismegistus Lib. 1.9 “And the First Mind, which is Life and Light, gave birth to another mind, the maker of things” (dêmiourgos).

7. “Aesthetic” (or “pathetic”) is, properly speaking, the science of the feelings, whether of plants, animals or men. Art has to do with the making of things for good use, physical and mental.
8. As in Brhadâranyaka Upanisad, II.3.1 (dve rûpe); Maitri Upanisad, VII.11.2. (dvaitîbhâva) etc.
9. Meister Eckhart’s “bildner aller dingen in sînem vater” (Pfeiffer, p. 391). In the same way the human artist works per verbum in intellectu conceptum (St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., 1A.45.6).

10. “The Mind was God”: cf. Satapatha Brâhmana, X.5.3.1 “Mind” (manas) = Rg Veda X. 129.1 “That One” (tad ekam).

    “Mind is the male, Voice the female...He, by Mind had intercourse with the Voice” (Satapatha Brâhmana, 1.4.4.3, 4, VI. 1.2.8); so we call a thought a concept, implying that it is the produce of a vital operation.

11. Rather than “in the beginning,” since it is to a before the beginning (ante principium) that the text refers.
12. Not, as rendered by Hume, “this world”; for we are told that He became, not that He was, the All. “This” contrasted with “All” can be only “One.”
13. Separated from Himself (Prajâpati, the Father) as a mother of whom to be born, Pañcavimsa Brâhmana, VII. 6; as Agni, Jaiminîya Upanisad Brâhmana, 1, 51.5.
14. “Mind is the swiftest of birds” (Rg Veda, VI.9.5).
15. “The Lord of Mind, the Lord of all minds” (Sankarâcârya on Vedânta Sûtra, IV.4.8).
16. “There are two minds, that of all, which is God, and that of the individual” (Philo, I. 93). Hence the possibility of a “repentance,” or rather, “change of mind” (metanoia). Cf. my “On Being in One’s Right Mind.”
17. “Desire, first seed and child of Mind” (Rg Veda, X.129.4). To be “minded to” is to desire, and when we “mind” things, then there is “wishful thinking.”

18. “By what (kena) ladder does the sacrificer ascend to heaven?...by the Mind” (Brhadâranyaka Upanisad, III.1.6). “I am born a new being of God, and I see now not with the eye but by the Mind’s act” (Hermes Trismegistus, Lib. XIII.11a).

    It will be understood that the First Mind, throughout, is intellectus vel spiritus, and the other a purposeful and constructive mentality; the First, or theoretical (speculative) Mind “cares for nothing but the Truth,” the other is pragmatic, and contented with fact.