CHAPTER
The Negative Theology
The Dark Ages knew of no mystery schools such as had flourished in Antiquity. The Pythagorean and Orphic brotherhoods, the Platonic Academy, the Hermetic and Mithraic cults—all had disappeared from Europe along with the Roman Empire. Their vision of man as a microcosm, reflecting in miniature the whole universe and its source, and their offer of a path by which man could become divine, were almost lost. The new official religion of Christianity could barely tolerate such ideas, even among its own intellectual elite. The Church’s power rested on the divinity of one man only, Jesus Christ, and on one path to salvation for the rest: that of obedience.
Despite this we can sometimes glimpse, like a golden thread half buried in the soil, the legacy of a Christian theosophic tradition that was very different from the mainstream. This seems to have derived its energy from mystical experience, weighed and interpreted in the light of Neoplatonic philosophy. What characterizes this tradition is that it does not assert anything about God, but rather denies the possibility of assertion. It is the antithesis of the type of utterance that begins: “Thus saith the Lord.” It grew quite naturally out of Neoplatonism, when an unidentified Greek writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite1 reinterpreted the highest flights of pagan mysticism in the light of the new religion.
Dionysius was well aware of the dangers of exoteric monotheism. He deplored those “who describe the transcendental First Cause of all by characteristics derived from the lowest order of beings.”2 His best efforts to describe it worthily take the form of paradoxes, or of statements of what it is not (hence “negative theology”). He speaks of it as outshining all brilliance with the intensity of its darkness; as possessing all the attributes of the universe, since it is the universal cause of all, yet possessing none of them since it transcends them all.3
The words of theologians tend to be dry, but here they spring from a direct experience that is, paradoxically, no experience, because there is no separate self to experience it. Dionysius says in another paradox, sounding just like Plotinus: “Through the inactivity of all his reasoning powers the mystic is united by his highest faculty to That which is wholly unknowable; thus by knowing nothing he knows That which is beyond knowledge.”4
These things, Dionysius says, are not to be disclosed to the uninitiated.5 In fact they were disclosed, and served as inspiration to the entire Christian mystical tradition. Beside his Mystical Theology, from which these quotes are taken, Dionysius wrote a treatise, On the Celestial Hierarchies, that is the foundation of all Christian angel lore. His achievement was to make the principles of Neoplatonic theology acceptable to monotheism. He reclassified the hierarchies of gods and daimons as the Nine Orders of Angels,6 and made them accord with Hebrew tradition and with the Bible. Thus the hierarchy of secondary powers who rule the cosmos7 was saved from extinction in the imagination of the new era.
Dionysius’s double achievement makes him the father of Christian esotericism.8 First, he teaches that the Absolute is indescribable and utterly transcendent, yet in some way accessible and present in man. This is the ultimate justification for every spiritual effort. Then he fills in the rest of the cosmic hierarchy, populating the heavens and the spheres with invisible beings. These become the foundation of ceremonial magic, philosophical astrology, a revived Hermetic cosmology, and hence of the occult sciences in Europe.
Dionysius was unknown in the West until the ninth century, when the Irish monk John Scotus Eriugena translated his works into Latin. Eriugena then developed the anonymous theosopher’s principles into a grandiose conception of the universe and human destiny. A natural Platonist, he saw no difference between true religion and true philosophy, because the entire conceivable universe—the object of philosophic speculation—is inseparable from God. What one might call Eriugena’s “positive theology” concerns Nature, seen as God in the process of self–revelation. Thanks to this, humans are also able to become God, or sons of God. What is more, in the end all of them will be redeemed, along with all the animals and even the devils. This kindly doctrine of Eriugena’s was in stark contrast to the eternal Hell favored, or feared, by orthodox believers.9
The other aspect of God is the negative or indescribable one, but to Eriugena this is paradoxically also accessible, by the very fact that we are all divine in our inmost natures. He says in his Homily on the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel: “John, therefore, was not a human being but more than a human being when he flew above himself and all things which are. Transported by the ineffable power of wisdom and by purest keenness of mind, he entered into that which is beyond all things.…He would not have been able to ascend into God if he had not first become God.”10
The third great proponent of the negative theology is Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1327), another keen reader of Dionysius.11 Eckhart was no hermit but a capable monastic administrator in Bohemia and Germany. Far from reserving his teachings to an esoteric few, he proclaimed them to the world. He preached his sermons not in learned Latin, but in the powerful and earthy monosyllables of his native Rhineland.
Eckhart’s main theme was the potential of man to know, and in a way to be, God. He told his listeners that when a man abides in God, “there is no difference between him and God; they are one.” Here is one of his explanations of why this is so: “When God created man he safeguarded him against all ills; the golden chain of destiny coming from the Trinity to the highest power of the soul and running also through her lower powers subordinates them to the higher so that no fell disorder can attack either the body or the soul excepting he transgress this law. In her higher powers the soul is spirit and in her lower, soul; and betwixt soul and spirit is the bond of one common being.”12
Meister Eckhart here suggests a threefold analysis of the human being as consisting of spirit, soul, and body, with spirit (Geist in his German—like the “Holy Ghost” in older English texts) at the head of the hierarchy. Such an arrangement had been present in Platonism, but was not part of regular Christian doctrine, which with rare exceptions allows man a soul and body only.13 The Latin term spiritus is used for the Holy Spirit, but otherwise applied to a much lower order of invisible beings and substances14 (again, compare the uses of the word “ghost”). When reading esoteric theories about the constitution of man, it is important to know how the author is using the word “spirit”: either as something more divine than the soul, or merely for the subtle link between soul and body.
Eckhart’s concept of threefold man is also the foundation of spiritual alchemy (see chapter 13), in which Sulphur and Mercury symbolize spirit, in the higher sense, and soul. Their conjunction or “chemical wedding” then represents the union of the entire soul with its highest, spiritual principle,15 i.e., with the divinity within, which is indistinguishable from the God who can only be described in negations.
Of these three theologians, Dionysius eluded official censure because he was believed to have been a companion of St. Paul, as well as the patron saint of France. Eriugena’s writings were condemned by several church councils, mainly on the grounds of pantheism (making a god out of the universe). Meister Eckhart was excommunicated in 1329, shortly after his death, when he could no longer answer the charges made against him: these included proclaiming the secrets of the Church to the public. And indeed he had done so, wisely or unwisely sharing the inner certainties of one “from whom God hid nothing.”
Christianity has always had problems with its mystics and theosophers, because they cannot help straying from the path laid out for the great mass of the faithful.16 With very rare exceptions, of which Socrates is the most famous, this problem did not arise in polytheistic cultures. It is a symptom of the contradiction that lies at the heart of monotheistic religions. Semitic monotheism, often celebrated as a great advance in the history of religious ideas, was actually a retrograde step in almost every respect. It illustrates how a truth, when transposed to the wrong level, can spawn a host of false concepts in the exoteric mind.
The subtle intelligence of Indian, Egyptian, and Greek philosophers easily grasped the truth of monotheism: that there can be only one ultimate source of all things. But the ordinary worshipper, in every religion, takes comfort not from metaphysics but from faith, and draws spiritual sustenance from a personal relationship with a god or goddess. A polytheistic culture like ancient Rome or modern India recognizes that there are many worthy objects for such devotion, and allows everyone his or her divinity of choice. Its philosophers keep their understanding to themselves, and do not interfere in people’s religious customs by saying: “You should throw down the idols of Jupiter (Shiva, Isis, etc.) and worship the ineffable One!” Not so the monotheisms. The scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam insist that there is only one God, and in a sense they are right. But what they call God is no longer the One of the philosophers. He is a masculine entity with attributes of a far lower order, such as tribal chauvinism, the desire for love, response to prayers and bribery, and intervention in human affairs. He is no better than the gods of Olympus, yet he is supposed to be the source of all. And as he acts, with bitter enmity to the worshipers of other gods, so do his followers—as if the One could care!
I cannot blame Christ, or the esoteric school that originated the Christian mythology, for the millennium and a half of heresy–hunting, schisms, persecutions, inquisitions, and civil wars waged in his name. I can only blame the “one way” mentality, which leads to rigidity, dogmatism, and the conviction that it has a monopoly of the truth, backed by an anthology of Hebrew and Greek writings still held by many people to be the Word of God. When the cause of these terrors was not basely political or economic, it stemmed from someone’s conviction that he possessed some truth about God which his opponents disputed or denied. Few things are more dangerous in human affairs, or have such painful consequences, than the religious person’s conviction of his own rightness. The conviction of Dionysius, Eriugena, Eckhart, and the like was of an entirely different order. But once they descended from the heights of metaphysical contemplation, they too could not avoid using the imagery, and eventually the dogmas, that Church and Bible had instilled in them. Dionysius, for example, wrote a companion volume to his Celestial Hierarchy in which he defended the ecclesiastical hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons on the grounds that it reflected the orders of angels. Eriugena, for all his unitive vision of God and Nature, felt obliged to attack the Arian heresy, which holds that the Son is not equal to the Father, as well as the theologies of the Jews and pagans. Eckhart strove to extract hidden meanings from every phrase of Scripture, with touching confidence that its authors were more divinely inspired even than himself. The same relationship to revealed writings existed in the other monotheisms. In the medieval Islamic world there were mystics of no lesser distinction than the Christian ones, for whom everything, apart from the unknowable God, appeared in the theological categories of the Qur’an, which expresses horror that God should be said to bring forth a Son.17 And the enlightened masters of Kabbalah, who felt authorized to speak of the Ain—the indescribable plenitude of Nothingness—did not believe that they had come to it through the grace of Jesus Christ.
How can we deal with these staring differences at the most fundamental level of faith, touching on the very essence of theology, which divide the three Abrahamic religions from each other? Only in a postreligious age can we begin to contemplate an answer, and the answer I propose will not be acceptable to many. I suggest that the indescribable experiences of these mystics be taken as the best evidence we have of the central truth of monotheism: that there is one reality behind and beyond all things, to which the human being is mysteriously connected. But the sacred and revealed books, the contentious theologies, the laws, clergy, and qualified images of God seem to me proof positive of the central truth of polytheism: that there are many higher beings than us in the universe, some of whom enter into relations with mankind. Gods and goddesses, angels and daimons, spirits, egregores, or extraterrestrials—classify them as you will. The matter is probably very complex and beyond our categories of thought.18 But it is these beings, I suspect, that are responsible for the “revealed” religions and for the mutual exchange of energy that keeps them, against all probability, alive.