Augustine, Boethius, Dionysius: Julian's Mystical Philosophy

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AUGUSTINE, BOETHIUS, DIONYSIUS,

BENEDICT, GREGORY, AND DANTE:

JULIAN'S MYSTICAL PHILOSOPHY

You can also open the sound files of this essay, toggling back from Quicktime to this page by reducing but not closing the audio file in order to experience the images, written text, and sounds together: the Ambrosian hymn, Deus Creator Omnium, aug.mp3 (performed, Stirps Jesse, directed, Giacomo Baroffio, included here with his permission),

Deus creator omnium
polique rector vestiens
diem decoro lumine,
noctem soporis gratias.

Artus solutos ut quies
reddat laboris usui
mentesque fessas allevet
luctusque solvat anxios.

Grates peracto iam die
et noctes exortu preces,
voti reos, ut adiuves,
hymnum canentes solvimus.

Te cordis ima concinat,
te vox sonora concrepet,
te diligat castus amor
te mens adoret sobria.

Ut, cum profunda clauserit
diem caligo noctium,
fides tenebras nesciat
et nox fide reluceat.

Dormire mentem ne sinas,
dormire culpa noverit:
castos fides refrigerans
somni vaporem temperet.

Exutu sensu lubrico
te cordis alta somnient,
nec hostis invidi dolo
pavor quietos suscitet.

Christum rogemus et Patrem
Christi Patrisque Spiritum;
unum potens per omnia
fove precantes, Trinitas.

Amen

with this text read aloud, augmyst.mp3. Even all three at once can be called up and experienced on your computer in a sensual medieval polyphony. Their manuscripts were read so, with gold-leafed and splendidly coloured illuminations and the memory for the reader of the music that went with the words.

Augustine, The Confessions || Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy || Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystic Theology || Gregory on Benedict, Dialogues || Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, Commedia || Wisdom in the Bible

Hans Memling, 'St John Writing Revelations', The Hospital of St John, Bruges, Belgium
Reproduced with permission from the Memlingmuseum, Stedelijke Musea Brugge, Belgium

Augustine, The Confessions

ugustine, Aurelius Augustinus, was born in Africa in A.D. 354 at a time when the Roman Empire was crumbling. He grappled with the conflicting beliefs of that uncertain era, coming to reject Neoplatonism and Manicheanism for Christianity, being converted in a garden outside Milan through reading Paul's Epistle. He had been a Professor of Rhetoric, of Literature, he now professed Christ, the Word. Edith Stein has written a beautiful dialogue between Ambrose and Augustine in her Three Dialogues. Augustine was baptised by Ambrose in 387. Returning to Africa he became Bishop of Hippo, dying as the Vandals were besieging his beloved cathedral city. In his Confessions he writes his spiritual biography, much as Julian does in her Showing of Love. In it he explains that sin is the tending to non-being, to diverging from God's Creation. In its Book XI Augustine presents a heady discourse upon Time and Eternity, based upon Ambrose's evening hymn. The entire Book XI is given in an oral reading at augustine.mp3.

Take the line 'Deus Creator omnium', which consists of eight syllables . . [Augustine sings the line.] What has become of each syllable? Their sound is finished and has been wafted away into the past. They no longer exist. . . . It is in my own mind, then, that I measure time . . . . Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from the province of expectation and relegated to the past now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation . . . But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past. [Then Augustine compares that action to God.] If there were a mind endowed with such great power of knowing and foreknowing that all the past and all the future were known to it as clearly as I know a familiar psalm, that mind would be wonderful beyond belief. We should hold back from it in awe at the thought that nothing in all the history of the past and nothing in all the ages yet to come was hidden from it. It would know all this as surely as, when I sing the psalm, I know what I have already sung and what I have still to sing, how far I am from the beginning and how far from the end. But it is unthinkable that you, Creator of the universe, Creator of souls and bodies, should know all the past and all the future merely in this way. Your knowledge is far more wonderful, far more mysterious than this.

Augustine wrote those lines in his homeland, in Africa; but earlier in Milan in Italy he had met Ambrose, then was converted and baptised by him. He had next set forth to journey home with his mother Monica but in Ostia the two of them had a vision together, a vision beyond time and even music, that informs Confessions XI. The two were discussing one night the Kingdom of Heaven.

My mother and I were alone, leaning from a window which overlooked the garden in the courtyard of the house were we were staying at Ostia. . . .Our conversation led us to the conclusion that no bodily pleasure, however great it might be and whatever earthly light might shed lustre upon it, was worthy of comparison, or even of mention, beside the happiness of the life of the saints. As the flame of love burned stronger in us and raised us higher towards the eternal God, our thoughts ranged over the whole compass of material things in their various degrees, up to the heavens themselves, from which the sun and the moon and the stars shine down upon the earth. Higher still we climbed, thinking and speaking all the while in wonder at all that you have made. At length we came to our own souls and passed beyond them to that place of everlasting plenty, where you feed Israel for ever with the food of truth. There life is that Wisdom by which all these things that we know are made, all things that ever have been and all that are yet to be. But this Wisdom is not made: it is as it has always been and as it will be for ever . . . And when we spoke of the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleeting instant we reached out and touched it. Then with a sigh . . . we returned to the sound of our own speech, in which each word has a beginning and an ending - far, far different from your Word, our Lord, who abides in himself for ever, yet never grows old and gives new life to all things.

And so our discussion went on. Suppose, we said, that the tumult of man's flesh were to cease and all that his thoughts can conceive, of earth, of water, and of air, should no longer speak to him; suppose that the heavens and even his own soul were silent, no longer thinking of itself but passing beyond; suppose that his dreams and the visions of his imagination spoke no more and that every tongue and every sign and all that is transient grew silent - for all these things have the same message to tell, if only we can hear it, and their message is this: We did not make ourselves, but he who abides for ever made us.

In that moment they together touched and were touched by the eternal Wisdom. Shortly thereafter Monica, saying she desired no longer to live in this word, died. Julian, who herself echoed those words, when she came to her Anchorhold, lived across the street from an Augustinian Priory where this saint's works were read and studied. She would have heard the Austin Friars' chanting of Psalms and of Ambrose's 'Deus Creator Omnium'.

Confessions, Book XI, is given in an oral reading at augustine.mp3

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

oethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, was born about A.D. 480. A Christian, he also knew all the classical and pagan works of philosophy written by Plato and Aristotle, Parmenides and Pythagoras, Cicero and Seneca, and he reconciled these to Christian theology in his own writings. He was a Roman Senator, defending the ancient principles of their Republic, but was thrown into prison by the barbarian Emperor Theodoric where he awaited a most brutal form of execution, ropes to be bound around his head till his eyes burst out and then to be finished off by the bludgeon and the axe, A.D. 524. During that time he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, which is modeled upon the biblical books of Job and Wisdom and upon the Platonic dialogues about Socrates while he was awaiting execution in Athens. Boethius in this work presents Philosophia as a beautiful woman who consoles Boethius (she is really his wiser self) for his foolish and mawkish self-pitying. She gets him to recover from his depression by telling him of Time and Eternity, Creation and Creator, Man and God, the Circle and the Centre. She is his and our psychiatrist.

His book was treasured up for centuries, only falling out of favour at the Age of Reason. King Alfred translated it into Old English, Jean de Meun translated it into French, Chaucer translated it into Middle English. Queen Elizabeth I translated it into Elizabethan English. Dante, Chaucer and Julian of Norwich all used its concepts and were all deeply influenced by it. Boethius' Consolation is a key to understanding medieval poetry and Christian theology. It is also a 'golden book' as Edward Gibbon called it, that can be of use to disordered souls in our own moment in time.

The work is written in sections, divided between Prose and Poetry. Medieval manuscripts of the text are richly illuminated, presenting Boethius in prison, mourning on his bed, and visited by the Lady Philosophia, and from her Dante derived his consoling figure of Beatrice.

Book II, Prose 7

Boethius: You know that ambition for material things has not mastered me; but I have desired the opportunity for public service so that my virtue should not grow old and weak through lack of use. Philosophia: But think how trivial and empty such glory is. You know from astrological computation that the whole circumference of the earth is no more than a pinpoint when contrasted to the space of the heavens; in fact, if the two are compared, the earth may be considered to have no size at all. . . But, if the soul, in full awareness of its virtue, is freed from this earthly prison and goes to heaven, does it not disregard all earthly concerns and, in the enjoyment of heaven, find its satisfaction in being separated from earthly things?

Book II, Poem 8 Philosophia: Love rules the earth and the seas, and commands the heavens.

Book III, Prose 1 Philosophia: I am about to lead you to true happiness, to the goal your mind has dreamed of. But your vision has been so clouded by false images you have not been able to reach it.

Poem 1 Philosophia: Just so, by first recognizing false goods, you begin to escape the burden of their influence; then afterwards true goods may gain possession of your spirit.

Poem 3 Philosophia: The only stable order in things is that which connects the beginning to the end and keeps itself on a steady course.

Poem 9 Philosophia: You [God] who are most beautiful produce the beautiful world from your divine mind and, forming it in your image, You order the perfect parts into a perfect whole.

Prose 12 Philosophia: Then it is the supreme good which rules all things firmly and disposes all sweetly (Wisdom 8.1). Boethius: I am delighted not only by your powerful argument and its conclusion, but even more by the words you have used. And I am at last ashamed of the folly that so profoundly depressed me. Philosophia: Then can God do evil? Boethius: No, of course not. Philosophia: Then evil is nothing, since God, who can do all things, cannot do evil. Boethius: You are playing with me by weaving a labyrinthine argument from which I cannot escape. You seem to begin where you ended and to end where you began. Are you perhaps making a marvelous circle of the divine simplicity? Philosophia: As Parmenides puts it, the divine essence, is 'in body like a sphere, perfectly rounded on all sides'.

Book IV, Prose 6 Philosophia: Consider the example of a number of spheres in orbit around the same central point: the innermost moves toward the simplicity of the center and becomes a kind of hinge about which the outer spheres circle; whereas the outermost, whirling in a wider orbit, tends to increase its orbit in space the farther it moves from the indivisible midpoint of the center. If, however it is connected to the center, it is confined by the simplicity of the center and no longer tends to stray into space. In like manner whatever strays farthest from the divine mind is most entangled in the nets of Fate; conversely, the freer a thing is from Fate, the nearer it approaches the center of all things. Therefore, the changing course of Fate is to the simple stability of Providence as time is to eternity, as a circle to its center.

Book V, Prose 6 Philosophia: Eternity is the whole, perfect, and simultaneous possession of endless life. The meaning of this can be made clearer by comparison with temporal things, For whatever lives in time lives in the present, proceeding from past to future, and nothing is so constituted in time that it can embrace the whole span of its life at once. It has not arrived at tomorrow, and it has already lost yesterday; even the life of this day is lived only in each moving, passing moment. But God sees as present those future things which result from free will. If you will face it, the necessity of virtuous action imposed upon you is very great, since all your actions are done in the sight of a Judge who sees all things.

Dionysius the Aeropagite, The Mystic Theology

hristianity, for centuries, believed that a late fifth-century theologian was, as he pretended to be, that Dionysius the Areopagite whom Paul converted, along with the woman Damaris, at Athens (Acts 17.22-34). The Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius wrote magnificent treatises, Julian of Norwich quoting from him three times in her Showing of Love. His manuscripts had been given by the Emperor Michael the Stammerer in A.D. 827 to King Louis the Pious. John Scotus translated them in 862, Anastasius, the papal librarian, commenting on the text in 875. Abbot Suger of St Denis (Saint Dionysius) commenced Gothic architecture through using Dionysius' theology in stone, lead and glass.

Gothic Architecture, Norwich Cathedral

But Abelard, while a monk at St Denis, denounced Dionysius's identity as fraudulent. Meanwhile, the Victorines also discovered and used the Dionysian corpus of writings. Cardinal Adam Easton, the brilliant Benedictine of Julian's Norwich, owned the complete works of Pseudo-Dionysius, in a fine thirteenth-century manuscript giving some of the Greek text as well as all the Latin translation, the invocation to the Trinity being most beautifully illuminated with a gold-leafed, intertwined 'T' at folio 108v. That manuscript is today, Cambridge Ii.III.32. Meanwhile, the Cloud of Unknowing Author (but whom I suspect to have been Adam Easton writing to Julian), translated the Mystic Theology into Middle English as Deonise Hid Diuinite for a woman contemplative. To do so he converted the Trinity into an invocation to divine and feminine Wisdom.

Thou vnbigonne & euerlastyng Wysdome, the whiche in thiself arte the souereyn-substancyal Firstheed, the souereyn Goddesse, & the souereyn Good, the inliche beholder of the godliche maad wisdome of Cristen men: I beseche the for to drawe us up in an acordyng abilnes to the souereyn-vnknowen and the souereyn-schinyng height of the derke inspirid spekynges, where alle the pryue thinges of deuinytee ben kouerid and hid vnder the souereyn-schinyng derknes of wisest silence, makyng the souereyn-clerest souereynly for to schine priuely in the derkyst; and the whiche is in a maner that is alweys inuisible & vngropable souereynli fulfillyng with ful fayre cleertees alle thoo soules that ben not hauyng eyghen of mynde.

Dionysius also, similarly as had Boethius, spoke of God at the centre, 'All the radii of a circle are brought together in the unity of the centre', Adam Easton annotating those lines in his manuscript now at Cambridge.

Gregory on Benedict, The Dialogues

regory the Great (c. 540-604) wrote an account of the Life and Miracles of St Benedict (c.480-547), casting these in the form of Dialogues between himself and Peter, a fellow monk. In these Dialogues there is a most moving account of Benedict and of his twin sister Scholastica and how she is able to force her brother to break his Rule and stay over night at her convent at Subiaco so that they may converse all night upon God. She prays to God for a storm which he grants. Three days later she dies.

That account is followed by one of Benedict's vision of God as greater than all his Creation. He is standing in prayer at a window of a great tower, apart from his sleeping disciples, when suddenly there is a great light, greater than that of the sun. As he marvels he suddenly sees as it were the whole world collected into one ray of light before his eyes.

Gregory and Peter discuss that vision, Gregory explaining that to the soul who sees the Creator all Creation becomes small, 'animae uidenti creatorem angusta est omnis creatorem'. He goes on to explain that it is not that the world contracts, but that the soul, seeing God, expands above the world, becoming greater than itself. 'Quod autem collectus mundus ante eius oculos dicitur, non caelum et terra contracta est, sed uidentis animus dilatatus, qui, in deo raptus, uidere sine difficultate potuit omne quod infra deum est'. And he further discourses upon the interior light and that of the eyes in this vision. The male abbot has experienced Mary's Magnificat in his prayers. 'My soul doth magnify the Lord'. Smallness become largeness; darkness, light; humility, power.

Gregory's Dialogues was, of course, a staple in Benedictine circles. The lovely dialogue, within the Dialogues, of brother and sister was sung antiphonally on the feast day of Benedict and Scholastica by Benedictines, celebrating the breaking of their sacred Rule. And that served to make Benedict's following vision concerning prayer the more memorable.

Christina of Markyate refers to it, where she sees in a flash of light the whole world.

And Julian of Norwich refers to it - and especially in connection with the Virgin at the Annunciation and Nativity,

and with the hazelnut passage,

and then again and again fugally throughout her text.

For Julian, whose anchorhold at St Julian's Church is under the Benedictines of Carrow Priory, who are in turn under the Benedictines of Norwich Cathedral Priory, is seeped in Benedictinism. It is possible that her Benedictinism is taught her by the brilliant Norwich Benedictine Adam Easton. It is even possible that Adam Easton might be her brother, might even be her twin. There is a medieval manuscript referring to a devout person desirous to know God's wounds, whose name is given as ' Mary Oestrewick'. Adam Easton so spells his own name in one manuscript 'Adam Oeston ', the 'wick' of the Scandinavians perhaps being changed by him to the 'town' or 'ton', more common in other parts of England.

Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, the Commedia

ante Alighieri, like Julian, lived in the fourteenth-century, and was as deeply influenced as was she by these three mystic theologians. He embedded the principle of Love, spoken of by all three, as the controlling force of his Commedia as it is of the Cosmos, ' l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle'. And in Vita Nuova XII, he had described God as Love saying to him, 'Ego tamquam centrum circuli, cui simili modo se habent circumferentie partes; tu autem non sic.' [I am as at the centre of the circle, equidistant from all parts, but you are not'.]

Dante and Julian both share in the sense of the Trinity as Divine Power, Wisdom and Love (Inferno III), both share, by way of Marguerite Porete, in the theology of Mary as paradoxically Mother and Daughter of her Creator, 'figlia del tuo figlio' (Paradiso XXXIII).

It is not likely that Julian was influenced by Dante except, perhaps, through Cardinal Adam Easton, who quotes from him in his own writings. What is important is that they share the same principles derived from these preceding mystic theologians, participating in a past 'Internet' of God's Wisdom. Common also to many of these mystics, these Friends of God, is the sense of drawing apart, as to Mount Tabor with Christ, only to descend the Mountain again to be with all people in God's image, to be both chosen and universal, to treasure these things in their heart as had Mary, their task to seek Wisdom, amongst women and amongst men, and with her to be part of God's sweet ordering of the cosmos.

All these writers, Augustine, Boethius, Dionysius, Dante and Julian, are influenced by the Hebraic and feminine figure of God's Wisdom, God's Daughter.

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work. The first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth . . . When he established the heavens I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep. When he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, When he assigned to the sea its limits, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, Then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, Rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world. Proverbs 8.22-31

She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other and she orders all things well. Wisdom of Solomon 8.1

Bibliography

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.

Baker, Denise Nowakowski. Julian of Norwich's Showings: From Vision to Book. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy . Trans. Richard Green. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.

CETEDOC, CLCLT.

Cloud Author. Deonise Hid Diuinite and Other Treatises on Contemplative Prayer Related to The Cloud of Unknowing. Ed. Phyllis Hodgson. London: Oxford University Press, 1958. Early English Text Society, 231.

Dante Alighieri. Tutte le opere . Florence: Sansoni, 1981.

Jantzen, Grace. Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian. London: SPCK, 1987

Long, Asphodel P. In a Chariot Drawn by Lions: The Search for the Female in Deity. London: The Women's Press, 1992.

Nolan, Edward Peter. Cry Out and Write: A Feminine Poetics of Revelation. New York: Continuum, 1994.

Nuth, Joan. Wisdom's Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Norwich. New York: Crossroad, 1991.

Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. Classics of Western Spirituality.