be distant from matter to be spiritual is, I think, one of the great mistakes made by Hellenistic thinking, and it’s set us up for all kinds of dualism.
Also I think there’s another implication in his language, for example, in his very first sentence, the language of “being lifted up.” The idea of pouring out from the top down sets us up to disparage what is below, whether that is the earth we stand on or the lower chakras of our own nature. There are inherent problems in Neoplatonism that I’m uncomfortable with. The coming together of energy in matter and spirit in matter in our century has managed to dispel these misconceptions based on dualism of matter versus spirit.
But the way Dionysius describes hierarchy is interesting—a holy order and knowledge and activity participating in the divine likeness and of course responding toward an imitation of God. That kind of understanding is useful.
It’s interesting that his next definition of hierarchy is about the beauty of God. The very first gift that he’s alluding to as flowing out from the source is beauty and light. For him beauty is light. And I think that’s very wonderful. I think the recovery of the sense of beauty as being another name for the divine is very important today. It’s behind the passion for eco-justice, for example. Beauty is one of the great energy sources that we have as individuals, and our experience of beauty is what we share as a species.
Rupert: But isn’t there a problem with the image of God as the source of light? It implies that you’ve got the brightest source at the top, and farther away you get more mixing in with darkness, and the darkness then becomes another Neoplatonic way of conceiving of matter.
Matthew: Exactly.
Rupert: Darkness in this view is not part of the divine; it’s a negative principle. If we see darkness and light as polar principles within the divine, then we get a different view. We get a bottom-up as well as a top-down view. We see that the intermingling of light and matter, the flowing down from a bright source, is not entirely negative or a dilution of some primary divine principle.
Matthew: I had that experience when I stayed awake all night in the woods and I realized that the night is not just the absence of the sun; it has its own energy. The darkness moves in. And it has its own energy and its own power, and this is lost in the Neoplatonic view of things. They put down matter, and they put down darkness, and they put down down.
Meister Eckhart says, “Up is down and down is up,” and that’s much more contemporary. Buckminster Fuller says anyone using the words up and down is four hundred years out of date because in a curved universe things go in and out but they don’t go up and down.
So I think that the notion of climbing Jacob’s ladder, the whole archetype of climbing up, can be an escape from materia—mater, mother, matter, the earth. This is part of the hierarchical worldview that Neo-platonism takes for granted, and we can’t be at home with that today.
It also has profound political implications. For example, in this text itself there’s a statement, a footnote, that is quite troubling. It’s a quote from Proclus, who was one of the influential Neoplatonic philosophers: “The peculiarity of purity is to keep more excellent natures exempt from such as are subordinate.”
That definition of purity is: keep your hands clean from those who are below you. It would certainly feed any temptations to caste consciousness. It endorses the untouchable mentality, and that’s again what distinguishes this Neoplatonic philosophy of Proclus, Plotinus, and Dionysius from the biblical tradition that honors the poorer things of life as being pure in their own right, welcome in the circle of beings in which we all live. Aboriginal people think in terms of the circle of being, not the ladder. So the question arises: Can we shift this archetype of the chain of being to see it more as a circle or a spiral and not as a ladder?
Rupert: I think so. But I also think there is value in the up-and-down imagery. When we look up, we see the sky. Looking up to the heavens is very important. I think that most of us in the modern world don’t look up enough. Our gaze is fixed down on the earth and the things of the earth. Almost everything we buy and sell comes from the earth, as well as the money we buy and sell it with. The heavens, the celestial environment, the limitless potentiality of space, the vast variety of celestial beings are simply not in our gaze at all.
Matthew: Are we really looking up or are we looking out? For example, if you get high enough, say on a mountain or from an airplane or a satellite, you know you’re looking out, and that’s really when the universe gets vast. In other words, we are only looking out in this limited way because our eyes are not on the top of our heads. It’s kind of our biological problem that we have to tilt our heads to see some stars. But not always. When there are horizons—I like that word, horizons—we’re looking out beyond the earth. And I’m thinking now of what they call big sky in Montana, where you really do feel the horizon out there, you can see the sky just by looking straight ahead. And I remember once in South Dakota coming out of a sweat lodge and the Milky Way was absolutely on fire: you could see all the stars but they ran like a rainbow from flat earth into a curved space all the way to flat earth again.
But, as you say, in cities people are forced to look up more because we’ve destroyed the horizon. In any case, I couldn’t agree more with your basic point, because it’s the vastness of the cosmos that we’re missing in the way we look.
Rupert: I agree that looking out is a good way to put it. And the best way of looking at the stars is to lie down. Then you can look without straining your neck and you can really appreciate the sky. I imagine that the earliest stargazers were people like shepherds who slept under the sky.
Looking out at the horizon is also an important way. Most megaliths in the ancient world, like Stonehenge, were observatories for viewing the rising and the setting of the celestial bodies against the horizon. These stones divided up the horizon into arcs or regions.
The idea of hierarchy is important in another way. In any holistic worldview—for example, Whitehead’s organismic philosophy of nature, or the holistic worldview as it’s developing today within science and philosophy—the essence is that at each level of organization the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Nature is composed of a series of different levels, and this is usually called a hierarchy. It’s best called a nested hierarchy, because there are levels within levels (see page 14). For example, within a crystal, considered as a whole, you have molecules. And each of the molecules within the crystal is itself a whole made up of atoms, and each atom is an organism of its own with its nucleus and its electrons in orbit around it. And then each nucleus is a whole of its own consisting of neutrons, protons, and forces that hold them together, and so on.
We see these multiple levels of organization everywhere. Our own bodies, for example, are wholes, containing organs, tissues, cells, organelles, and molecules. And we as individual organisms are part of larger systems; we’re part of societies, and societies are like an organism at a higher level. And they’re within ecosystems. And then there’s the planet, Gaia, and then the solar system, which is a kind of organism, then there’s the galaxy and then groups of galaxies.
When you look at nature this way, at every level you find a wholeness that is more than the sum of the parts, and this wholeness includes the parts within it. There’s no way you can have a planet separate from a solar system; it’s got to be part of this larger whole. You can’t have solar systems separate from galaxies, as far as we know. It’s rather like the way that San Francisco is a city within the United States. The United States is bigger than San Francisco, and the United States in turn is just one part of the American continent.
We’re familiar with this pattern of organization in every sense—geographically, in the way that nature’s constituted, and even in the way our language is organized, with phonemes in syllables, syllables in words,words in phrases, phrases in sentences. All are
