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