THE MYSTICAL COSMOS

These lucid lectures take up the thread of Joseph Milne's previous book, Metaphysics and the Cosmic Order. They are short and elegant expressions of metaphysics, something all too rare in our time. Moreover, we tend to be so blinkered by our own preconceptions that we fail to see the inadequacies of our worldview in relation to other orders of knowing and being. Milne covers the forgotten metaphysics, the ancient view of nature, creation and revelation, and the mystical destiny of the universe. Each culture has its own orientation towards the real in terms of ontology, epistemology and ethics. Our ideas of the meaning of knowledge no longer correspond to those of Plato and Aristotle who regarded the quest for knowledge as one combining pure intellect and virtue. The proper end of knowledge involves 'a correlation between the knower and the known' and the ultimate form of knowledge is the divine understanding with which humans can align; this is what he calls a reciprocal epistemology. The mind is thought to have an intrinsic affinity with the truth of things, and all things are oriented towards being known. Properly speaking, the intellect - as opposed to discursive reason - gives us our capacity to discern the unity of things. For the Greeks, intellect and conscience, wisdom and virtue, reason and ethics are connected and the concern of justice is to 'bring the human realm into harmony with the universal order.' This is a wonderful concept, even if rather foreign to our understanding, and one well worth recovering. Plato did not separate good and truth, while for Aristotle every part of nature 'seeks to actualise its own perfection and at the same time serve the good of the whole', thus reconciling diversity and unity. Knowledge participates in the truth of things and is responsive to reality rather than representing it. Milne points out that we have lost this connection between the true and good at the same time as reducing our orders of knowledge to science which is claimed to be value free. He gives a very clear account of Aristotle's physics and the terms he uses. His concept of thinghood is represented by ousia, while energeia means being-at-work. These two then merge into his concept of entelechia, 'being-at-work-staying-itself.' His Phusis is defined in a dynamic way as the activity of things 'seen in their birth, growth, and self maintenance and independence of things and equilibrium of the parts of the cosmos.' This dynamic understanding resonates with Goethe, while his idea of self-moving reappears in the modern term autopoeisis even if stripped of its teleological context. Milne's review also reminds one of the participatory philosophy explained by Richard Tarnas in the epilogue of The Passion of the Western Mind. The universe comes to know itself through the human. Many readers will be familiar with descriptions of mystical experience whereby the form of knowledge is immediate; the knower is one with the known, as pointed out as long ago as the ninth century in the work of John Scotus Eriugina. The human soul is not so much a microcosm as the image of God's knowing. So true or ultimate knowledge is divine knowledge - what Walter Russell calls knowledge of causes rather than effects. In a passage of extraordinary subtlety, Eriugina refers to the manifestation of the hidden, the comprehension of the incomprehensible, the understanding of the unintelligible, the materialisation of the spiritual and the visibility of the invisible - all of which is predicated on the idea that the creation is God made manifest and can be understood mystically in its essence. This cannot be understood either by literalist fundamentalism or its scientific counterpart reductive materialism. In the final lecture, Milne reminds us that the ancients would not have understood the modern divorce between mind and the intelligibility or being of things. To know the mind of God is to know the knower of all things, and this beatific vision 'is the true mystical end of human knowing.' Meister Eckhart expresses something very similar when our knowing is understood as the very knowing of God so that it seems that God is knowing in us rather than us knowing on our own account. Within this understanding, God knows things actually that humans only potentially know. If we can conform our minds the truth of things, then we will also know how to act since 'knowledge of the true and of the good are ultimately inseparable.' This stage can only be achieved by a spiritual transformation of perception and an orientation of the human being not only towards the true but also towards the good and indeed the beautiful. The ultimate value of culture must be the extent to which its creations are reflections of these three principles. The book is closely written and deserves careful study especially since the modern mind is not immediately structured to understand our original orientation to reality.