I. Relations between the General and the Particular, God and Individual Things, according to Aristotle, the Neo-Platonists, and the Medieval Strict Realists

1. Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus.

(1) With regard to the relations between the General and Particular, we should note Aristotle’s final perplexities and contradictions, arising from his failure to harmonize or to transcend, by means of a new and self-consistent conception, the two currents, the Platonic and the specifically Aristotelian, which make up his thought. For, with him as with Plato, all Knowledge has to do with Reality: hence Reality alone, in the highest, primary sense of the word, can form the highest, primary object of Knowledge; Knowledge will be busy, primarily, with the Essence, the Substance of things. But with him, as against Plato, every substance is unique, whence it would follow that all knowledge refers, at bottom, to the Individual,—individual beings would form, not only the starting-point, but also the content and object of knowledge.—Yet this is what Aristotle, once more at one with Plato, stoutly denies: Science, even where it penetrates most deeply into the Particular, is never directed to individual things as such, but always to General Concepts; and this, not because of our human incapacity completely to know the Individual, as such, but because the General, in spite of the Particular being better known to us, is more primitive and more knowable, as alone possessing that Immutability which must characterize all objects of true knowledge. The true Essence of things consists only in what is thought in their Concept, which concept is always some Universal; yet this Universal exists only in Individual Beings, which are thus declared true Substances: here are two contentions, the possibility of whose co-existence he fails to explain. Indeed at one time it is the Form, at another it is the Individual Being, composed of Form and Matter, which appears as real; and Matter, again, appears both as the Indefinite General and as the Cause of Individual Particularity.

(2) Now Plato had indeed insisted upon ascending to even greater abstraction, unity, and generality, as the sure process for attaining to the truth of things; and had retained what is, for us, a strangely unpersonal, abstract element, precisely in his highest concept, since God here is hardly personal, but the Idea of Good, a Substance distinct from all other things, yet not, on this account, an Individual. Yet Plato’s profoundly aesthetic, social, ethical, above all religious, consciousness forced him to the inconsistency of proclaiming that, as the Sun is higher than the light and the eye, so the Good is higher than (mere) Being and Knowledge; and this Supreme Idea of the Good gives to things their Being, and to the understanding its power of Cognition, and is the Cause of all Rightness and Beauty, the Source of all Reality and Reason, and hence, not only a final, but also an efficient Cause,—indeed the Cause, pure and simple. In the Philebus he tells us explicitly that the Good and the Divine Reason are identical; and in the Timaeus the Demiurge, the World-Former, looks indeed to the Image of the World, in order to copy it: yet the Demiurge is also himself this image which he copies. We thus still have a supreme Multiplicity in Unity as the characteristic of the deepest Reality; and its chief attribute, Goodness, is not the most abstract and aloof, but the most rich in qualities and the most boundlessly self-communicative: “He was good, so he desired that all things should be as like unto himself as possible.” And Aristotle, (although he places God altogether outside the visible world, and attributes to Him there one sole action, the thinking of his own thought, and one quasi-emotion, intellectual joy at this thinking), still maintains, in this shrunken form, the identity of the Good and of the Supreme Reason, Noûs, and a certain Multiplicity in Unity, and a true self-consciousness, within Him.

(3) It is Plotinus who is the first expressly to put the Godhead,—in strict obedience to the Abstractive scheme,—beyond all Multiplicity, hence above the highest Reason itself, for reason ever contains at least the duality of Subject thinking and of Object thought; above Being, for all being has ever a multitude of determinations; and above every part and the totality of All Things, for it is the cause of them all. The Cause is here ever outside the effect, the Unity outside the Multiplicity, what is thought outside of what thinks. The First is thus purely transcendent,—with one characteristic exception: although above Being, Energy, Thought, and Thinking, Beauty, Virtue, Life, It is still the Good; and because of this, though utterly self-sufficing and without action of any kind, It, “as it were,” overflows, and this overflow produces a Second. And only this Second is here the Noûs, possessed of what Aristotle attributes to the First: it is no sheer Unity, “all things are together there, yet are they there discriminated”: it is contemplative Thinking of itself; it is pure and perfect Action.

(4) And Proclus who, through the Pseudo-Dionysius, is the chief mediator between Plato and Plotinus on the one hand, and the Medieval Mystics and Scholastics on the other, is, with his immense thirst for Unity, necessarily absorbed by the question as to the Law according to which all things are conjoined to a whole. And this Law is for him the process of the Many out of the One, and their inclination back to the One; for this process and inclination determine the connection of all things, and the precise place occupied by each thing in that connection. All things move in the circle of procession from their cause, and of return to it; the simplest beings are the most perfect; the most complex are the most imperfect.

2. The Anti-Proclian current, in the Areopagite’s view.

Now in the Pseudo-Dionysius we find an interesting oscillation between genuine Neo-Platonism, which finds Beings perfect in proportion to the fewness and universality of their attributes, although, with it, he inconsistently holds Goodness,—the deepest but not the most general attribute,—to be the most perfect of all; and Aristotelianism at its richest, when it finds Beings perfect according to the multiplicity and depth of their attributes. Dionysius himself becomes aware of the dead-lock thence ensuing. “The Divine name of the Good is extended to things being and to things not being,”—a statement forced upon him by his keeping, with Plato and Plotinus, Goodness as the supreme attribute, and yet driving home, more completely than they, their first principle that Generality and Perfection rise and sink together. “The Name of Being is extended to all things being” and stretches further than Life. “The name of Life is extended to all things living” and stretches further than Wisdom. “The Name of Wisdom is extended,” only, “to all the intellectual, and rational, and sensible.”

But if so, “for what reason do we affirm,” (as he has been doing in the previous sections), “that Life,” the less extended, “is superior to (mere) Being,” the more extended? “and that Wisdom,” though less extended, “is superior to mere Life,” the more extended? And he answers in favour of depth and richness of attributes. “If any one assumed the intellectual to be without being or life, the objection might hold good. But if the Divine Minds,” the Angels, “both are above all other beings, and live above all other living creatures, and think and know above sensible perception and reasoning, and aspire beyond all other existent and aspiring beings, to … the Beautiful and Good: then they encircle the Good more closely.” For “the things that participate more in the one and boundless-giving God, are more … divine, than those that come behind them in gifts.” And with abiding truth he says: “Those who place attributes on That which is above every attribute, should derive the affirmation from what is more cognate to It; but those who abstract, with regard to That which is above every abstraction, should derive the negation from what is further removed from It. Are not, e.g., Life and Goodness more cognate to It than air and stone? And is It not further removed from debauch and anger than from ineffableness and incomprehensibility?”

But more usually Dionysius shows little or no preference for any particular attribution or denegation; all are taken to fall short so infinitely as to eliminate any question as to degrees of failure. “The Deity-Above-All … is neither Soul nor Mind, neither One nor Oneness, neither Deity nor Goodness.” God is thus purely transcendent.

3. Continuators of the Proclian current.

The influence of the Areopagite was notoriously immense throughout the Middle Ages,—indeed unchecked,—along its Proclian, Emanational, Ultra-Unitive current,—among the Pantheists from the Christian, Mohammedan and Jewish camps.

(1) Thus Scotus Eriugena (who died in about 877 A.D.) insists: “In strict parlance, the Divine Nature Itself exists alone in all things, and nothing exists which is not that Nature. The Lord and the Creature are one and the same thing.” “It is its own Self that the Holy Trinity loves, sees, moves within us.” One of his fundamental ideas is the equivalence of the degrees of abstraction and those of existence; he simply hypostatizes the logical table. Eriugena was condemned.

(2) But the Pseudo-Aristotelian, really Proclian, Liber de Causis, written by a Mohammedan in about 850 A.D., became, from its translation into Latin in about 1180 A.D. onwards, an authority among the orthodox Scholastics. It takes, as “an example of the (true) doctrine as to Causes, Being, Living-Being, and Man. Here it is necessary that the thing Being should exist first of all, and next Living-Being, and last Man. Living-Being is the proximate, Being is the remote cause of Man; hence Being is in a higher degree the cause of Man than is Living-Being, since Being is the cause of Living-Being, which latter again is the cause of Man.” … “Being, (of the kind) which is before Eternity, is the first cause.… Being is more general than Eternity.… Being of the kind which is with and after Eternity, is the first of created things.… It is above Sense, and Soul, and Intelligence.”

(3) The Mohammedan Avicenna, who died in 1037 A.D., is mostly Aristotelian in philosophy and Orthodox in religious intention, and, translated into Latin, was much used by St. Thomas. Yet he has lapses into pure Pantheism, such as: “The true Being that belongs to God, is not His only, but is the Being of all things, and comes forth abundantly from His Being. That which all things desire is Being: Being is Goodness; the perfection of Being is the perfection of Goodness.”

(4) And the Spanish Jew, Ibn Gebirol (Avicebron), who died about 1070 A.D., is predominantly Proclian, but with a form of Pantheism which, in parts, strikingly foreshadows Spinoza. His masterly Fons Vitae, as translated into Latin, exercised a profound influence upon Duns Scotus. “Below the first Maker there is nothing but what is both matter and form.” “All things are resolvable into Matter and Form. If all things were resolvable into a single root,” (that is, into Form alone), “there would be no difference between that one root and the one Maker.” There exists a universal Matter and a universal Form. The first, or universal Matter, is a substance existing by itself, which sustains diversity, and is one in number: it is capable of receiving all the different kinds of forms. The universal Form is a substance which constitutes the essence of all the different kinds of forms.… By means of the knowledge of this universal Form, the knowledge of every (less general) form is acquired,—is deduced from it and resolved into it.” “Being falls under four categories, answering to: whether it is, what it is, what is its quality, and why it is: but, of these, the first in order of dignity is the category which inquires whether it is at all.” We thus get again the degree of worth strictly identical with the degree of generality.

4. Inconsistencies of Aquinas and Scotus.

(1) St. Thomas, the chief of the orthodox Scholastics, has embodied the entire Dionysian writings in his own works, but labours assiduously—and successfully, as far as his own statements are concerned—to guard against the Pantheistic tendencies special to strict Realism. Yet it is clear, from his frequent warnings and difficult distinctions regarding the double sense of the proposition, “God is sheer Being,” and from the ease with which we find Eckhart, an entirely consistent Realist, lapse into the Pantheistic sense, how immanent is the danger to any severe form of the system. And he fails to give us a thoroughly understandable and consistent account as to the relations between the General and the Particular, between Form and Matter, and between these two pairs of conceptions. Thus “Materia signata,” matter, as bearing certain dimensions, “is the principle of individuation”: yet this quantum is already an individually determined quantity, and this determination remains unexplained. And certain forms exist separately, without matter, in which case each single form is a separate species; as with the Angels and, pre-eminently, with God.—Yet, as already Duns Scotus insisted, Aquinas’ general principle seems to require the non-existence of pure forms as distinct beings, and the partial materiality of all individual beings.

(2) And Duns Scotus teaches, in explicit return to Avicebron, that every created substance consists of matter as well as of form, and that there is but one, First Matter, which is identical in every particular and derivative kind of matter. The world appears to him as a gigantic tree, whose root is this indeterminate matter; whose branches are the transitory substances; whose leaves the changeable accidents; whose flowers, the rational souls; whose fruit are the Angels: and which God has planted and which He tends. Here again the order of Efficacity,—with the tell-tale exception of God,—is identical with that of Generality.

5. Eckhart’s Pantheistic trend.

But it is Eckhart who consistently develops the Pantheistic trend of a rigorous Intellectualism. The very competent and strongly Thomistic Father Denifle shows how Eckhart strictly followed the general scholastic doctrine, as enunciated by Avicenna: “In every creature its Being is one thing, and is from another, its Essence is another thing, and is not from another”; whereas in God, Being and Essence are identical. And Denifle adds: “Eckhart will have been unable to answer for himself the question as to what, in strictness, the ‘Esse’ is, in distinction from the ‘Essentia’; indeed no one could have told him, with precision.… Eckhart leaves intact the distinction between the Essence of God and that of the creature; but, doubtless in part because of this, he feels himself free,—in starting from an ambiguous text of Boetius,—to break down the careful discriminations established by St. Thomas, in view of this same text, between Universal Being, Common to all things extant, and Divine Being, reserved by Aquinas for God alone.” “What things are nearer to each other, than anything that is and Being? There is nothing between them.” “Very Being,” the Being of God, “is the actualizing Form of every form, everywhere.” “In one word,” adds Denifle, “the Being of God constitutes the formal Being of all things.” The degrees of Generality and Abstract Thinkableness are again also the degrees of Reality and Worth: “the Eternal Word assumed to Itself, not this or that human being, but a human nature which existed bare, unparticularized.” “Being and Knowableness are identical.”

When speaking systematically Eckhart is strictly Plotinian: “God and Godhead are as distinct as earth is from heaven.” “The Godhead has left all things to God: It owns nought, wills nought, requires nought, effects nought, produces nought.” “Thou shalt love the Godhead as It truly is: a non-God, non-Spirit, non-Person … a sheer, pure, clear One, severed from all duality: let us sink down into that One, throughout eternity, from Nothing unto Nothing, so help us God.” “The Godhead Itself remains unknown to Itself.” “It is God who energizes and speaks one single thing,—His Son, the Holy Ghost, and all creatures.… Where God speaks it, there it is all God; here, where man understands it, it is God and creature.” No wonder that the following are among the propositions condemned by Pope John XXII in 1329: “God produces me as His own Being, a Being identical, not merely similar”; and, “I speak as falsely when I call God (the Godhead) good, as if I call white, black.”

6. The logical goal of strict Realism.

This series of facts, which could be indefinitely extended, well illustrates the persistence of “the fundamental doctrine common to all forms of Realism,—of the species as an entity in the individuals, common to all and identical in each, an entity to which individual differences adhere as accidents,” as Prof. Seth-Pattison accurately defines the matter. “Yet when existence is in question, it is the individual, not the universal, that is real; and the real individual is not a compound of species and accidents, but is individual to the inmost fibre of his being.” Not as though Nominalism were in the right. For “each finite individual has its” special “place in the one real universe, with all the parts of which it is inseparably connected. But the universe is itself an individual or real whole, containing all its parts within itself, and not a universal of the logical order, containing its exemplifications under it.” And, above all, minds, spirits, persons,—however truly they may approximate more and more to certain great types of rationality, virtue, and religion, which types are thus increasingly expressive of God’s self-revealing purpose and nature,—are ever, not merely numerically different, as between one individual and the other, but, both in its potentialities and especially in its spiritual actualization, no one soul can or does take the place of any other.

And if we ask what there is in any strict Realism to attract the Mystical sense, we shall find it, I think, in the insistence of such Realism upon Unity, Universality, and Stability. Yet in so far as Mysticism, in such a case Exclusive Mysticism, tends to oust the Outgoing movement of the soul, it empties these forms of their Multiple, Individual, and Energizing content. Inclusive Mysticism may be truly said alone to attain to the true Mystic’s desires; for only by the interaction of both movements, and of all the powers of the soul, will the said soul escape the ever-increasing poverty of content characteristic of the strict Realist’s pyramid of conceptions; a poverty undoubtedly antagonistic to the secret aspiration of Mysticism, which is essentially an apprehension, admiration, and love of the infinite depths and riches of Reality—of this Reality no doubt present everywhere, yet in indefinitely various, and mutually complementary and stimulative forms and degrees. And the readiness with which Mysticism expressed itself in the Nominalist Categories,—distinctly less adequate to a healthy, Partial Mysticism than the more moderate forms of Realism,—shows how little intrinsic was the link which seemed to bind it to a Realism of the most rigorous kind.