a true apprehension of what he is. Negation and affir- mation, accordingly, constitute the two opposed and yet simultaneous methods he lays down for the knowledge of the Infinite. These two paths, the Via Negativa (or Apophatica) and the Via Affirinativa (or Catapha- tica), constitute the foundation of his mysticism. Tliey are distinguished and elaborated in every part of his writings. The positive is the descending process. In the path downwards from God, through inferior exist- ences, the Divine Being may be said to have many names : the negative method is one of ascent ; in that God is regarded as nameless, the inscrutable Anony- mous. The symbolical or visible is thus opposed, in the Platonist style, to the mystical or ideal. To assert anything concerning a God who is above all affirmation is to speak in figure — to veil him. The more you deny concerning him, the more of such veils do you remove. He compares the negative method of speaking concern- ing the Supreme to the operation of the sculptor, who strikes off fragment after fragment of the marble, and progresses by diminution." These early Mystics, it may be added, denied that man could by labor or study excite this celestial flame in his breast ; and therefore they dis- approved highly of the attempts of those who, by defi- nitions, abstract theorems, and profound speculations, endeavored to form distinct notions of truth, and discover its hidden nature. On the contrarj', they maintained that silence, tranquillit}-, repose, and solitude, accompa- nied with such acts as might tend to extenuate and ex- haust the body, were the means by which the hidden and internal word was excited to produce its latent vir- tues, and to instruct men in the knowledge of divine things. They reasoned as follows: Those "who be- hold, with a noble contempt, all human aft'airs, who turn away their eyes from terrestrial vanities, and shut all the avenues of the outward senses against the conta- gious influences of a material world, must necessarily return to God when the spirit is thus disengaged from the impediments which prevent that happy union ; and in this blessed frame thev not only enjoy inexpressible raptures from that communion with the Supreme Being, but are invested also with the inestimable privilege of contemplating truth undisguised and uncorrupted in its native purity, while others behold it in a vitiated and delusive form." Dante, himself an exponent of Plato's Symposium, perhaps drew from thence the inspiring thought of his Beatrice. The further development of the Platonic idea by the Neo-Platonists — Plotinus, Por- phyry, and Proclus — is closely copied in the abstraction of the mundane from the grosser thought, and the unity of divine contemplation to which Dionysius aspired. He ploughed, as Eabricius says (/« Vit. Procli. Proleg. xii), with the Neo-Platonic heifer (comp. Lupton, In- trod. to Dean Colet's tv!0 Treatises on Dionys. xlii). The great end at which he aimed was to show how, by means of an intermediate mediatorial hierarchy, man may hold communion with these celestial powers, order above order, until he reposes on the immediate contem- plation of God himself. But he seems to wander be- yond the pale of the Church. The celestial hierarchy in this scheme replaces the mediatorial functions of the Redeemer of mankind ; he himself defines this hierarchy {Cnl. Ilier. iii, 1) as a divine order, science and energy standing in closest coimection with the attributes of the Deity ; it is, in fact, an exact reflex of those attributes. The works of Dionysius were explained as genuine in a commentary by Maximus, the monk, of Constantinople, who composed also an allegorizing Avork on the Liturgy, with the title of Mystagoyia, very much in the spirit of the Dionysian views. This work still has a value as exhibiting the Liturgy of the Greek Church of the 7th century.
iMaximus forms a middle term between the so-called Areopagite and Erigena. We find in his Scholia on Gregory of Nazianzum the same transcendental notions of the Deity and of the divine immanence in the world of matter, which onlv is bv virtue of that immanence.
MYSTICS
198
MYSTICS
As supra-substantial {vTrtpovaioQ), God has nothing in ] common with any known thing, but so far as the one is manifested in being it is muhiform; and conversely, the multiform, by involution, is substantially one. It anticipates the Spinozist "Alles ist Eins, und Eins ist Alles." Man having had an eternal existence in the ideality of the Divine Being, partakes of that Iking. From the divine substance he comes forth, and into that substance he returns, a consummation apparently but little removed from the Nir^vana (q.v.) of the Indian the- osophy. Jlan, both in his origin and in his future des- tiny, is impersonal. As uniting in one the material and intellectual, he is a microcosmic representation of