' Sec Evolution Crentiicc^ towards llic ciul.
PSV(1I()L()(;V ()1< (T)NTEMrLATION 33
technical term of the Mysteries or of later Greek
Philosophy, and that this is the real exi)lanati()n
and interpretation of the inscription on the Athenian
altar: "To the Unknown God." ^
VII. — The Psychology of Contemplation
Be this as it may, Dionysius is unquestionably
speakinc^ of a psycholoi^ical state to which he himself
has been occasionally led. It must, however, be
carefully distinguished from another psychological
state, apparently the same and yet really quite dif-
ferent, of which there is also evidence in other writers.
Amiel speaks of a mental condition in which the
self lies dormant, dissolved, as it were, and absorbed
into an undifferentiated state of being; and it is well
known that a man's individuality may become merged
in the impersonal existence of a crowd. The con-
trast between such a state and Unknowing consists
wholly in the difference of spiritual values and spiritual
intensity. Amiel felt the psychic experience men-
tioned above to be enervating. And the danger is
fairly obvious. For this ps)'chic state comes not
through spiritual effort but through spiritual indo-
lence. And the repose of spiritual attainment must
be a strenuous repose.
The same psychic material may take either of two
opposite forms, for the highest experiences and the
lowest are both made of the same spiritual stuff.
That is why great sinners make great saints and
why our Lord preferred disreputable people to the
respectable righteous. A storm of passion may pro-
duce a Sonata of Beethoven or it may produce an
act of murder. All depends on the quality and
direction of the storm. So in the present instance.
There is a higher merging of the self and a lower
^ Acts xvii. 23. Cf. Norden's Agnostos Theos.
34 Dionysius the Areopagite
merging of it. The one is above the level of per-
sonalit}% the other beneath it; the one is religious
the other hedonistic ; the one results from spiritual
concentration and the other from spiritual dissipation.
Apparently our souls are crystallizations, as it were,
out of an undifferentiated psychic ocean. So our
personalities are formed, which we must keep in-
violate. To melt back, though but for a time, into
that ocean would be to surrender our heritage and
to incur great loss. This is the objection to mere
psychic trances. But some have been called on to
advance by the intensification of their spiritual powers
until they have for a moment reached a very different
Ocean, which, with its fervent heat, has burst the
hard outer case of their finite selfhood, and so they
have been merged in that Vast Sea of Uncreated
Light which has brought them no loss but only
gain.
Just as in early days some had special gifts of
prophecy through the power of the Holy Ghost, but
some through the power of Satan, and the test lay
in the manifested results,^ so in the present instance.
We cannot doubt that the experience is true and
valid when we see its glory shining forth in the
humble Saints of God.
To illustrate this experience fully from the writings
of the Saints would need a volume to itself. Let us
take a very few examples from one or two writers of
unquestioned orthodoxy.
And first, for the theory of personality implied in it we may turn to Pascal, whose teaching amounts to very much the same thing as that of Dionysius. " Z^ inoi,'' he says, ''est Jiaissable. . . . En nn mot^ le Mot a deux qualites : il est injuste en soi^ en ce qiiil se fait centre du tout ; il est incommode aux aiitres, eii ce qtiil les veut asservir : car cJiaque Moi est Ve^tnemi
' I Cor. xii. 1-3 ; i Jolm iv, 1-3.
psvnioLor.v of contemplation 35
ct vondnxit etrc Ic tyrdii dc tons Irs (infn-s.'" ' Thus a self-centred Jl/o/^ov rersonalit)', is wroni^ inherenlly and nt)t only in its results. And it is inhierently wronij because a pcrsonjdity has no rii^ht to be the centre of thini^s. From this we may conclude (i) that God, as beih<^ the rii;htful Centre of all things, is not a Afoi\ or Personality ; and (2) that the transcendence of our A/oi\ or Personality, is our highest duty. What, then, is the goal to which this tran- scendence will lead us? Pascal has a clear-cut answer : " // u'j/ a que I' Eire imivcrsel qui soil tel. . . . Le Bien Universe I est en nous, est nous meines et n'est pas nous!"^ This is exactly the Dionysian doctrine. Each must enter into himself and so must find Some- thing that is his true Self and yet is not his particular self His true being is deep within his soul and yet in Something Other than his individuality which is within his soul and yet outside of him. We may compare St. Augustine's words : " I entered into the recesses of my being . . . and saw . . . above my mind an Unchanging Light. ^ Where, then, did I find Thee except in Thyself above myself?"^
Now for the actual experience of Unknowing and
of the Negative Path that leads to it. The finest
description of this, or at least of the aspiration after
it, is to be found in the following passage from the
Confessions of St. Augnstine : ^
" Could one silence the clamorous appetites of the
body ; silence his perceptions of the earth, the water,
and the air ; could he silence the sky, and could his
very soul be silent unto itself and, by ceasing to think
of itself, transcend self-consciousness ; could he
silence all dreams and all revelations which the mind
can image ; yea, could he entirely silence all lan-
guage and all symbols and every transitory thing —
^ Pen sees, vi. 20 (ed. Havet). ^ lb. 26, xxiv. 39.
* Coiif. vii. 16. * lb. X. T,"]. ^ lb. ix. 25
36 Dion Ysius the Areopagite
— inasmuch as these all say to the hearer : ' We made
not ourselves but were made by the Eternal ' — if, after
such words, they were forthwith to hold their peace,
having drawn the mind's ear towards their Maker,
and He were now to speak alone, not through them
but by Himself, so that we might hear His word, not
through human language, nor through the voice of
an angel, nor through any utterance out of a cloud,
nor through any misleading appearance, but might
instead hear, without these things, the very Being
Himself, Whose presence in them we love — might
hear Him with our Spirit even as now we strain our
intellect and reach, with the swift movement of
thought, to an eternal Wisdom that remains un-
moved beyond all things — if this movement were
continued, and all other visions (being utterly unequal
to the task) were to be done away, and this one vision
were to seize the beholder, and were to swallow him
up and plunge him in the abyss of its inward delights,
so that his life for ever should be like that fleeting
moment of consciousness for which we have been
yearning, would not such a condition as this be an
'Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord'?"
This passage describes the Via Negativa in terms
of aspiration drawn (we cannot doubt) from experi-
ence. The soul must cast all things away : sense,
perception, thought, and the very consciousness of
self; and yet the process and its final result are of
the most intense and positive kind. We are reminded
of Wordsworth's —
" Thoiit^ht was not ; in enjoyment it expired." ^
Perhaps more striking is the testimony of St
Thomas a Kempis, since, having no taste for specu-
lation, he is not likely to be misled by theories. In
^ Excursion^ IJook I.
Psvctiology 01"^ Contemplation 37
the Imitation of Christ^ occurs the following passage :
*• When shall I at full i;athcr myself in Thee, that for
T^hy love I feel not myself, but Thee only, above all
feeling and all manner, in a manner not k)iown to
all?''
Thus he speaks longingly of a state in which the
individual human spirit is altogether merged and has
no self-consciousness whatever, except the mere con-
sciousness of its merging. It is conscious of God
alone because, as an object of thought, it has gone
out of its particular being and is merged and lost in
Him. And the way in which St. Thomas describes
this state and speaks of it as not known to all
suggests that it was known to himself by personal
experience.
The clearest and profoundest analysis of the state,
based also on the most vivid personal experience of
it, is given by Ruysbroeck. The two following
passages are examples.
" The spirit for ever continues to burn in itself, for
its love is eternal ; and it feels itself ever more and
more to be burnt up in love, for it is drawn and trans-
formed into the Unity of God, where the spirit burns
in love. If it observes itself, it finds a distinction and
an otherness between itself and God ; but where it is
burnt up it is undifferentiated and without distinction,
and therefore it feels nothing but unity ; for the flame
of the Love of God consumes and devours all that it
can enfold in its Self."-
" And, after this, there follows the third way of
feeling ; namely, that we feel ourselves to be one with
God ; for, through the transformation in God, we feel
ourselves to be swallowed up in the fathomless abyss
of our eternal blessedness, wherein we can nevermore
find any distinction between ourselves and God.
And this is our highest feeling, which we cannot
* Book IIT., chap, xxiii. ' The Sparkling Stone, chap. iii.
38 Dionysius the Areopagite
experience in any other way than in the immersion in
love. And therefore, so soon as we are uphfted and,
drawn into our highest feehng, all our powers stand
idle in an essential fruition ; but our powers do not
pass away into nothingness, for then we should lose
our created being. And as long as we stand idle,
with an inclined spirit and with open eyes, but without
reflection, so long we can contemplate and have
fruition. But, at the very moment in which we seek
to prove and to comprehend what it is that we feel,
we fall back into reason, and there we find a dis-
tinction and an otherness between ourselves and God,
and find God outside ourselves in incomprehensi-
bility."!
Nothing could be more lucid. The moi is merged
in the Godhead and yet the ego still retains its in-
dividuality un-merged, and the existence of the
perfected spirit embraces these two opposite poles of
fusion and distinction.
The same doctrine is taught, though with less
masterly clearness, by St. Bernard in the De Diligendo
Deo. There is, he says, a point of rapture where the
human spirit " forgets itself . . . and passes wholly
into God." Such a process is " to lose yourself, as it
were, like one who has no existence, and to have no
self-consciousness whatever, and to be emptied of
yourself and almost annihilated." " As a little drop
of water," he continues, " blended with a large
quantity of wine, seems utterly to pass away from
itself and assumes the flavour and colour of wine, and
as iron when glowing with fire loses its original or
proper form and becomes just like the fire; and as
the air, drenched in the light of the sun, is so changed
into the same shining brightness that it seems to be
not so much the recipient of the brightness as the
actual brightness itself: so all human sensibility in
^ TJic Sparkling Stone, chap. x.
Psychology of Contemplation 39
the saints must then, \n some ineffable manner, melt
and pass out of itself, and be lent into the will of
God. . . . The substance (?.t'. personality) will remain
but in another form." ^
Of this transcendent experience St. Bernard bluntly
sa)'s : " To experience this state is to be deified," and
"Deification" is a technical term in the Mystical
Theology of both the Eastern and the Western
Church. Though the word Oeojoiq was perhaps a
Mystery term, yet it occurs, for instance, in the
writings of St. Macarius, and there is therefore
nothing strange or novel in the fact that Dionysius
uses it. But he carefully distinguishes between this
and cognate words ; and his fantastic and uncouth
diction is (here as so often) due to a straining after
rigid accuracy. The Super-Essence he calls the
Originating Godhead, or rather, perhaps, the Origin
of Godhead (OsaQxia), just as he calls it also "the
Origin of Existence " (pvoiaQXio.). From this Origin
there issues eternally, in the Universal stream of
Emanation, that which he calls Deity or Very
Deity (0£6T7]g or avToOeoxrjg). This Deity, like
Being, Life, etc., is an effluence radiating from the
Super-Essential Godhead, and is a distant View of It
as the dim visibility of a landscape is the landscape
seen from afar, or as the effluent heat belongs to a
fire. Purified souls, being raised up to the heights of
contemplation, participate in this Effluence and so
are deified [Oeovvxai) and become in a derivative
sense, divine {Oecodelg, Osiot), or may even be called
Gods [Oeol), just as by participating in the Effluence
or Emanation of Being all created things become in
a derivative sense existent (ovoicodfj, ovxa). The
Super-Essential Godhead (OeaQxici) is beyond Deity
as It is beyond Existence; but the names " Deit}' "
{OEoxrjg) or " Existent " {wv) may be symbolically or