Koestler suggested another word for a nested hierarchy: holarchy. He preferred the word holarchy because it got away from the connotation of priestly rule.
The nested hierarchies or holarchies of nature help us make sense of what Dionysius is talking about. We can see the angelic hierarchies in this inclusive sense. For example, some angels could correspond to the angels of galaxies, others to the angels of solar systems, and still others to those of planets. This is actually how the celestial hierarchies were often pictured, in a series of concentric spheres.
Matthew: I think it’s also a relationship of three dimensions. If you make it two dimensions on the ladder, then you’re stuck with that dominating and domineering motif. But if you see these as spheres within spheres, they’re not standing on top of each other giving one and the other orders; they have their own space and their own configuration.
One point I’d like to emphasize in Dionysius’s statement on hierarchy is his remark that each being, “according to his capacity,” takes part in the divine order and divine likeness and “becomes, as the scriptures say, a fellow-worker with God, and shows forth the divine activity.” He says hierarchy is holy order, knowledge, and activity. Activity flows from this participation in beauty, and being a fellow worker with God is, as he says, divine imitation. I think that gives a dynamic dimension to his sense of hierarchy.
I like very much the term “holarchy.” We have to come up with other words because the word hierarchy has borne so much weight, perhaps far beyond anything Dionysius intended. Political oppression and other things are included in it. Actually I think the best part of the word hierarchy is “hier.” In English, when most people hear the word hierarchy, they think it means high; those who are up high exploiting those below. But of course it doesn’t; hieros is Greek and it means sacred. It’s because we’ve lost the sense of the sacred in the heavens and on earth that we’re in the trouble we’re in.
Rupert: I think holarchy is fine, because actually what hier means is not just sacred but holy; and “holy” has the same root in English as “whole.” Likewise in Greek holos means a whole.
Matthew: Another powerful phrase he uses here is “[Divine beauty] moulds and perfects its participants in the holy image of God like bright and spotless mirrors which receive the ray of the supreme Deity which is the source of light.”
Hildegard says every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity. That’s the tradition, and it’s a wonderful tradition. God looks at us as in a mirror and sees the Godself. We are divine mirrors. And of course mirrors need light. A mirror in the dark is no good as a mirror. Mirrors are needy; they have to receive. This theme of mirrors that he refers to is very common in the mystical tradition; in fact, the term “speculative mysticism” is about mirror mysticism. The Latin word for mirror is speculum. Dionysius is saying that things are mirrors of divinity. It’s not about speculating and turning mysticism into a philosophical act of rationalization. It’s about finding the mirror image in things. Everything mirrors God.
Angels, then, have a special power of mirroring. Maybe it’s like the refined mirrors in the Hubble telescope. There’s been a leap forward in the human art of making mirrors, and this has been very important for bringing the light into our telescopes and seeing more of the universe. And the mirror is a very wonderful technological invention. I wonder who made the first mirror? I wonder how shocked the people were to look at it.
Rupert: I would have thought that pools of water would have been the first mirrors, as in the myth of Narcissus.
Matthew: Natural mirrors. Maybe the first mirror was carrying a little pool of water around. That’s good.
Rupert: To continue with the idea of hierarchy, an important thing about the organization of natural holarchies is that they can be thought of as levels of organization by fields. I call these fields morphic fields, the fields that determine the form and organization of the system. We can think of a galaxy as having its field, a solar system as having its field, and a planet as having its field. The levels of inclusive organization are also levels of inclusive fields. Even without my theory of morphic fields, we still have the idea of a galactic gravitational field, of the solar gravitational field that holds the entire solar system together and makes the planets go round the sun, and of the earth’s gravitational field holding us all on the earth and causing the moon to orbit the earth. There are also the magnetic fields of the galaxy, the sun, and the earth, and their associated electric fields. Even if we stick to the limited conceptions of fields at present available within science, we see we’ve got nested hierarchies of fields, or a holarchy of fields.
The same goes for the electromagnetic fields within a crystal: within the crystal field are the molecular fields; within those, the atomic fields, the fields of the electrons, and the atomic nucleus. These are not only electromagnetic fields but quantum-matter fields.
In many ways the modern conception of fields has superseded the traditional conception of souls as invisible organizing entities. Up until the seventeenth century even electricity and magnetism were described in terms of souls, stretching out invisibly beyond the magnet or electrically charged body and capable of acting at a distance.
Fields are a contemporary way of thinking about the invisible organizing principles of nature. Historically, these invisible organizing principles were thought of as souls. The soul of the universe, the anima mundi, has been replaced by the gravitational field. The magnetic soul has been replaced by the magnetic field, the electric soul by the electric field. The vegetative souls of plants and animals, the souls organizing the growth of the embryo and the body, have been replaced in modern developmental biology by morphogenetic fields. The animal soul can be replaced by the fields of instinct and behavior, and our mental activity can be understood in terms of mental fields.
Matthew: Getting away from the idea that the soul is in the body, let’s just say the body is in the soul. How distant, how near to the horizon can our soul fields roam? In other words, our thoughts, our hopes, our dreams, our passions, our knowledge? In some way, everything we’re talking about is encapsulated in our soul field. We can only talk about what we know or imagine we know, and so in many ways our fields, that is, our souls, are growing as we reach to the perimeters of the universe. So there is an awakening of the human field, you might say. We are moving away from the smallness of soul in the pineal gland or cerebral cortex that the modern era gave to soul as the encapsulating dynamic, the consciousness of everything that we can know.
Rupert: I agree. I think our knowledge does reach out from our brains to include that which we perceive, that which we experience, and that which we know. Our mental fields are vastly larger than our brains, and as our conceptions enlarge and extend, as our sense of the cosmos enlarges, our fields become cosmic in scope.
Insofar as we see angels as organized holarchically, perhaps we can see them as associated with angel fields. Angels themselves could be thought of as a particulate manifestation of the activity of these fields, just as photons are a particulate way of thinking about the activity, the energy, carried in electromagnetic fields.
So angelic beings, like quantum beings, may well have a double aspect, a distributed aspect to do with the region of activity with which they’re concerned, and manifestations as quanta of activity.
Matthew: Somehow we’re talking about photon and field coming together in the light. Angel light.
Rupert: And their traditional role is as interconnectors, as messengers. The very name angel comes from this meaning of “messenger.” So they’re things that link together; and connecting together is what fields do.
Matthew: And as messengers, how appropriate they are returning in our time, since we’re rediscovering the habit of the universe known as interconnectivity.
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