Читать книгу The Physics of Angels - Rupert Sheldrake - Страница 10

Dionysius The Areopagite

Dionysius lived in the sixth century, probably in Syria. For many centuries he was wrongly identified with Dionysius the Areopagite, converted by St. Paul in Athens (Acts 17.34). He is more correctly called Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, and is also known as Pseudo-Denys. This confusion gave his writings great authority up to the sixteenth century, and his influence on Orthodox and Western theology has been enormous.

Deeply influenced by the Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus (A.D. 411-485), he combines Neoplatonism with Christianity in his four principal books, The Celestial Hierarchies, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Divine Names, and Mystical Theology. It is in his Celestial Hierarchies that he discusses at length the nine orders of angels as mediators from God to humankind, and it is from that book, which has been so influential in Christian angelology, that most of the following passages are taken. He has been called a “moderate Monophysite” in his theology, Monophysitism being the heretical doctrine that denies the human side of Christ at the Incarnation. But at the Lateran Council of A.D. 649 his works were invoked to combat more extreme Monophysite thinkers, and this invocation of his work by a church council also helped embellish the doctrinal authority of his teachings. Because he elaborates at such length on the nine orders of angels that St. Paul only alludes to lightly, his angelology has greatly influenced Christian theology.

The Multiplicity Of Angels

The scriptural tradition respecting the angels gives their number as thousands and thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand, multiplying and repeating the very highest numbers we have, thus clearly showing that the Orders of the Celestial Beings are innumerable for us; so many are the blessed Hosts of the Supermundane Intelligences, wholly surpassing the feeble and limited range of our material numbers.¹

Matthew: Dionysius is putting his discussion of angels in the context of the vastness of the cosmos and talking about the numbers being innumerable to us. Centuries later Meister Eckhart would say that the angels outnumber the grains of sand on the earth. So what we’re talking about here is a vast array, a vast challenge to our imaginations. Go beyond numbers as we know them—just keep adding zeros to get a sense of angelic numbers.

Rupert: Since vast numbers are usually called astronomical, it brings to mind the obvious connection with the stars. We now recognize a cosmos full of innumerable galaxies, each containing billions of stars. When we look at the night sky we see only the stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way being the main part of it. Insofar as angels are connected with the stars, then this would, literally, give us an astronomical number of angels.

Matthew: Astronomical numbers and astronomical beings.

Rupert: Yes. And if we also think of angels being connected with all the different kinds of being in nature, then we have to consider the millions of biological species on this earth, and probably on billions of other planets around other stars and in other galaxies. And then these planets themselves are organisms, as is our planet, Gaia. The vast numbers of forms of organization in nature dwarf our imagination, just as Dionysius says the numbers of angels do.

Matthew: It seems appropriate in that context to turn to one of Dionysius’s favorite themes, hierarchy. In fact, he seems to have invented the word itself in his book with the title The Celestial Hierarchies.

Hierachies, Fields, And Light

Hierarchy is, in my opinion, a holy order and knowledge and activity which, so far as is attainable, participates in the divine likeness, and is lifted up to the illuminations given it from God, and correspondingly towards the imitation of God.

Now the beauty of God, being unific, good, and the source of all perfection, is wholly free from dissimilarity, and bestows its own light upon each according to his merit; and in the most divine mysteries perfects them in accordance with the unchangeable fashioning of those who are being perfected harmoniously to itself.

The aim of hierarchy is the greatest possible assimilation to and union with God, and by taking him as leader in all holy wisdom, to become like him, so far as is permitted, by contemplating intently his most divine beauty. Also it 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; and being mystically filled with the gift of light, it pours it forth again abundantly, according to the divine law, upon those below itself. For it is not lawful for those who impart or participate in the holy mysteries to overpass the bounds of its sacred laws; nor must they deviate from them if they seek to behold, as far as is allowed, that deific splendour, and to be transformed into the likeness of those divine intelligences.

Therefore he who speaks of hierarchy implies a certain perfectly holy order in the likeness of the first divine beauty, ministering the sacred mystery of its own illuminations in hierarchical order and wisdom, being in due measure conformed to its own principle.

For each of those who is allotted a place in the divine order finds his perfection in being uplifted, according to his capacity, towards the divine likeness; and what is still more divine, he becomes, as the scriptures say, a fellow-worker with God, and shows forth the divine activity revealed as far as possible in himself. For the holy constitution of the hierarchy ordains that some are purified, others purify; some are enlightened, others enlighten; some are perfected, others make perfect; for in this way the divine imitation will fit each one.²

Rupert: What Dionysius says here is related to the Neoplatonic conception of emanations from the One, the source from which things flow out. The idea of a chain of being was very important in the ancient world and remained a common theme in literature right up until modern times. There is a source of being and then every grade of being below that, becoming more and more dimmed the farther the descent into matter. That seems to me the Neoplatonic background of Dionysius’s thinking. Would you agree?

Matthew: Yes. And I find that difficult to deal with today. The idea of everything emanating from a source is fine; that’s certainly the image I get from the creation story today—everything beginning with a tiny pinprick of a fireball. But the idea that beings have to 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 nested hierarchies.

Arthur 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.

When we conceived of the universe as being disconnected or isolated, the angels had to go on vacation. Their main task is connecting and interconnecting, and there was not much for them to do within the world machine.

I like the idea of the angel as connector. The tradition is that some connect in terms of knowledge and guiding, some in terms of healing, some in terms of defending, some in terms of inspiring. So it makes sense, in a time when we’re rediscovering interconnectivity, that these angels who seem to connect one pole of a relation to another are going to have a lot of employment. We should put up a sign: angels needed. There’s plenty of work for angels in a period of interconnectivity.

Rupert: And of course interconnectivity within fields is not a one-way process. If I have a big magnet with a strong magnetic field, and I place a smaller magnet nearby, the field of the bigger magnet both influences and is influenced by the field of the smaller magnet. If I move the smaller magnet, this affects the entire field.

Matthew: Now there we have a good analogy for healthy hierarchy or holarchy. There is mutual influence, where the big magnet is not just telling the little magnet what to do, but there’s a give and take.

Rupert: Gravity, even according to Newton, works on that principle. All matter attracts all other matter in the universe. There’s the idea of a mutual connection there, not just a one-way influence. Following Einstein, we now see this mutual interconnectivity as mediated through gravitational fields, all contained within the gravitational field of the universe, the universal field.

Insofar as we think of whatever affects us as being mediated through messengers or invisible connections, or angels, then something of what’s happening to us and what’s happening to the world will be conveyed back through the angelic field to more inclusive levels of organization to more inclusive fields of consciousness.

Matthew: The image of fields is so much healthier to me than the basic image we get of a ladder. A field is three-dimensional.

Rupert: Angels operate in fields of activity, coordinating and connecting. Material bodies are mutually exclusive—you can’t have two billiard balls in the same place at the same time—but fields can interpenetrate. For example, the room in which we’re sitting is filled with the earth’s gravitational field, which is why we’re not floating in the air. Interpenetrating the gravitational field is the electromagnetic field, through which we see each other, which is also full of radio waves, TV transmissions, cosmic rays, ultraviolet and infrared rays, all sorts of invisible radiations.

These also don’t interfere with one another. Radio waves interfere with one another only if they’re at the same frequency. But all the radio programs and TV programs in the world can coexist, interpenetrating the same space and not canceling one another out or denying one another. Even if we take only the fields that orthodox science currently recognizes—quantum-matter fields, electromagnetic fields, and gravitational fields—they all interpenetrate. And so the idea of angels as fieldlike allows us to see how they too can interpenetrate.

Matthew: What I like about the word field is that it is an everyday word. Field has a sense of space to it. It feels like an invitation to play: one plays in a field. Also, things grow in a field. A field is generative; it is a place of life and activity. It’s also about having your feet on the ground. It’s matter, it’s earth, it’s life bubbling up from below. It’s an honoring of the lower chakras. I think fields are a wonderfully rich metaphor for bringing angels down to earth, and yet they are three-dimensional. So I want to honor the word field in its nonscientific connotation. It too speaks to us of something everyday and something welcoming.

We can also rediscover the meaning of the word receptive. In a way, a field is a mirror. It’s pulling in the light and converting it into life through photosynthesis and into food. Wonderful things come from fields. Obviously all food comes from fields. Pastures and orchards and romping places and ball games. Gaia is a playing of fields. She invites people to play.

Yesterday, here in London, I was watching football players kicking the ball in Regent’s Park, and I had this experience that Gaia is not just land—Gaia is these two-legged creatures with a rubber ball playing on the land. But for all that play you need fields to play in. And what are relationships? What is a marriage but an effort to create a field? What is a home but a field? Children, bringing new beings into the world, and bearing those who die and everything that passes in between. It’s living life in fields, fields of interconnectivity.

Rupert: When Faraday first used the word field in science, he was using an ordinary English word that had all these implications already built into it. The primary meaning is agricultural field, and this gives rise to the general sense of a field as a region of activity, as in “battlefield,” “field of interest,” and “field of view.” A field is where you do something. To make fields, the first agriculturalists usually had to cut down the trees. Then they grew things in the cleared space. If we stop cultivating fields, if we stop carrying out the activity of agriculture, the fields revert to forest, as in much of New England. Then we have another kind of field, the natural, self-organizing field of the forest.

Participation and Revelation

Wherefore all things share in that providence which streams forth from the superessential deific source of all; for they would not be unless they had come into existence through participation in the essential principle of all things.

All inanimate things participate in It through their being; for the “to be” of all things is the divinity above Being itself, the true life. Living things participate in Its life-giving power above all life; rational things participate in Its self-perfect and preeminent perfect wisdom above all reason and intellect.

It is manifest, therefore, that those natures which are around the Godhead have participated of It in manifold ways. On this account the holy ranks of the celestial beings are present with and participate in the divine principle in a degree far surpassing all those things which merely exist, and irrational living creatures, and rational human beings. For moulding themselves intelligibly to the imitation of God, and looking in a supermundane way to the likeness of the supreme deity, and longing to form the intellectual appearance of It, they naturally have more abundant communion with him, and with unremitting activity they tend eternally up the steep, as far as is permitted, through the ardour of their unwearying divine love, and they receive the primal radiance in a pure and immaterial manner, adapting themselves to this in a life wholly intellectual.

Such, therefore, are they who participate first, and in an all-various manner, in Deity, and reveal first, and in many ways, the divine mysteries. Wherefore they, above all, are pre-eminently worthy of the name angel because they first receive the divine light, and through them are transmitted to us the revelations which are above us. …

Now, if anyone should say that God has shown himself without intermediary to certain holy men, let him know beyond doubt, from the most holy scriptures, that no man has ever seen, nor shall see, the hidden Being of God; but God has shown himself, according to revelations which are fitting to God, to his faithful servants in holy visions adapted to the nature of the seer.

The divine theology, in the fullness of its wisdom, very rightly applies the name theophany to that beholding of God which shows the divine likeness, figured in itself as a likeness in form of that which is formless, through the uplifting of those who contemplate to the Divine; inasmuch as a divine light is shed upon the seers through it, and they are initiated into some participation of divine things.

By such divine visions our venerable forefathers were instructed through the mediation of the celestial powers. Is it not told in the holy scriptures that the sacred law was given to Moses by God himself in order to teach us that in it is mirrored the divine and holy law? Furthermore, theology wisely teaches that it was communicated to us by angels, as though the authority of the divine law decreed that the second should be guided to the divine majesty by the first.… Within each hierarchy there are first, middle, and last ranks and powers, and the higher are initiators and guides of the lower to the divine approach and illumination and union.