The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

St. Dionysius was one of the judges of the Court of Areopagus when St. Paul announced there the Faith. He became one of the few converts made there by the Apostle, and was later created by him bishop at Athens, where he died a Martyr. The night before his death he recalls those things in his past life which led up to that happy end; his early distrust of Athens, much as he loved it; his scorn of its Sophists; his abode in Egypt; the great marvel witnessed there and elsewhere during the Crucifixion; and likewise that vision in which he was permitted to see the Nine Hierarchies of Angels.

The Athenians ne'er were cruel: from the first
Persuasion as a Goddess they revered,
To Pity gave her temple. They have chosen
For me fair prison: through its window bars
The violet odours of the violet city
Reach me from vale and plain. Reed-loved Ilyssus
Whispers far off; and here and there a harp
Reports of happy listeners round it ranged,
Happy; the younger doubtless innocent;
While full before me from the Acropolis
The Parthenon sends forth its snowy gleam.
Minerva Polias, Wingless Victory,
The Propylea—great that thought, to place
The city's fortress near its chief of temples—
Are hid. I see the Parthenon alone.
The first and holiest court in Greece is this,

Our Areopagus. At first, men say,
It held its sacred sessions in the dark
Lest aught that moves the sense might warp the award.
'Tis sage in earthly things; in things of heaven
Some strange judicial blindness on it falls:
It saw in Paul ‘a preacher of new Gods:’
The noblest man in earlier Athens born
Old Socrates, it slew. If me it slays
'Twill do injustice to itself, not me:
I never valued life; in what men value
I struck not root profound.

Brighter each hour
Yon Parthenon makes answer to the moon,
Pallas to Dian. These the fablers old
Revered as sisters. Maiden were they both:
I never gazed upon the Parthenon
Without this thought, what depths, while pure herself,
Clear-sighted Athens saw in purity;
With what a diverse skill she sang its glories—
A Pallas, strenuous, sage, self-mastering, proud,
A Dian, all too bright, too swift for stain,
A Hebè; Purity meant childhood there,
An accident; in Iris 'twas essential,
A Spirit was she, spanning a fleshly world;
The Muse, with her 'twas life all intellect;
Great Vesta, holy there, and venerable,
Vigil it kept o'er hearths. What worlds of Thought
Here met until one lily flower of earth
Grew wider than the firmament eterne!
What worlds! O Greece, when centuries had gone by
The virtue honoured in thy youth was that
By thee in age most trampled! For that cause
God's truth from thee is hid.

Was it to lure

My heart by beauty of this visible world
From spiritual hopes, they chose for me this prison?
For still the vision of that purple deep
By me so often from Eleusis watched,
Clipping at once far isles and headlands near
Clings to mine eyes. I will not think of these:
This earth is not our mother, or our sister:
For some it hath, I fear, the syren's snare.
O what a snare to thee, my Greece, was beauty!
Thy fancy robbed thy heart. Beauty to thee
Was beauty's ruin. Truth must needs be beauteous:
Yea, but that smile about her lips for thee
Cancelled the lovelier terrors of her brow,
The ardours of her eyes. Thou mad'st thy pact
Thus with Religion: ‘Charm, but scare me not!’
The shadows of high things to thee were dear;
Their substance was offence.

A subtler snare
Thou found'st in Dialectics. What was that
Which made me, wild and wayward as I was,
In this unlike thee? Was it my mother's prayer
Dead at my birth? ‘The shaft of Artemis
Slew her,’ men told me weeping on her grave
A six years' orphan. Many a dangerous friend
In that stern sport was keener thrice than I:
They mixed with youthful pleasures large discourse
Of seers from Solon to the Stagyrite,
Yea, Epicurus. Most were of his crew,
While many, his in life, in spleen of thought
Walked with the Stoic, or with mincing step
Glided from path to path of Academe
Boasting its freedom. Others proud of lore
Forgotten by the crowd were large in praise
Of earlier names. ‘ “All things from water come,”

Thus taught old Thales. Anaxamines
Made answer, “Not from water but from air:”
Heraclitus replied to both, “from fire.”
Anaximander sware that chaos grew
By force inherent to the world we tread:
Some cried the universe was rife with Gods:
And some that Gods were none. The Ionian School
And Eleatic strove. Zenophanes
Warred on the priests; Parmenides not less:’
Thus babbled those around me. Mute I sat:
Sudden one day in wrath I rose: I cried,
‘Ye men of Greece, your prophets were impostors!
They churned their metaphysic seas of words
As girls a milk-pail, but extracted thence
No food for man or beast. Your great State-Founders
Were dreamers, basing Polities of Law
On lawless wills: the boast of each was this
In turn, to plant a colony in chaos!’
Thus I continued; ‘Philosophic Systems!
Not for asserting wonders scorn I these:
The Truth, when known, will prove more wondrous thrice;
If ever ours, will be its own clear proof,
A sun that tasks our eyes yet lights our world;
Conquering through love, and crowned by man's consent:
As little hurl I scoff at rite or creed
Because rich priests have trafficked in such wares:
Best things are most abused:—for this I scorn them,
Because they nothing brought to heart or spirit
Which helped the helpless. Plato was my guide:
He gave me much: but this he gave not—rest.
He spake of God: I read with beating heart;
Yet ofttimes cried, “Believes he what he speaks?”

A God! What means a God? To me He means
Some heavenly Bender from some infinite height
Who stoops to raise mankind. Know this, Athenians,
Ye shall not find such God by Syllogisms.
Either some herald from some land remote
Will bring the news; “He lives! That God is ours!”
Or breaking from His heavens that God will cry,
“Behold I come at last.”’ My friends reproved me:
‘Theosophist, and not philosopher
Art thou! In mystic India seek thy home.’
I passed to Egypt. Heliopolis,
That priestly city, sacred to the past,
Received me. There I made abode ten years.
Its inmates loved me well. I said, ‘Those priests
Who claim no philosophic lore, nor boast
That from her well their agile wand can lift
Truth by the hair, and fling her in the sun
Naked to common gaze; who guard Traditions;
Who from their ancient rites, long brooding, draw
Meaning occult that grows o'er Thought's broad dial
Slowly as obelisk's shade o'er evening sands;
Those priests hold more of Truth than all our Schools:
They welcomed Orpheus, Homer, Solon, Plato,
And, greater yet, Pythagoras. He had found,
Six centuries since, beneath this visible mask
Of shape and hue of motion and of rest,
The spiritual basis of the universe,
Mathesis awful yet all musical,
Ungrasped by sense, alone by Reason known.
He taught men lore forgotten now; that Earth
With many a planet sweeps around the Sun,
Not he round Earth, and with her sister orbs
Makes part of heaven.’ Those Seers Egyptian spake

Ofttimes of Hebrew Prophets. These, I learned,
Discoursed long since on social Polities,
But not like Greeks. They ever made proclaim,
Kingdoms that stand are reared on Righteousness,
Not on man's will; his pleasure or his pride.

How strange the difference 'twixt the quick Greek mind
And these Contemplatives! To them each Truth
Was as a thing to rest on—kneel upon,
Die on, content to die. To the Greek a Truth
Meant but a thought. He stept from off it lightly:
'Twas but a stepping-stone athwart a stream:
From stone to stone he stept, and then forgot them.
The Egyptian sage with what he knew of Truth
At least held commerce true.

To the best of these
One day I put that question mine so oft,
‘Who made the worlds?’ He answered thus: ‘A God
Who tells not yet His Name.’ While thus he spake
Behold a wonder! Darkness o'er the land
Rushed sudden: dreadful night was over all:
The stars shone through it terrible of face
As though they too had died. Three hours went by:
To him that knelt beside me thus I spake,
Apollophanes, comrade of my youth,
‘That God who made the universe hath died
This hour; and all creation mourns her Lord.’
That hour the Lord of all had died indeed:
Far off, on Calvary's height, had died for man:
He died; and darkness swept o'er all the earth.
'Twas then that Athens, awed, that altar raised,
‘Unto the God Unknown.’

The years went by:
At last in Athens Paul, my master, stood:
He marked that altar. Fronting it, men say,
He knelt with hands outstretched in prayer three hours.
By it next day his judges thus he judged,
The self-same court which judges me to-morrow;
‘Ye have an altar to the God Unknown:
Him I declare to you.’ With him there strove
The Stoics, and the sect of Epicurus,
While sat the sons of Plato reverence-mute.
Some, when he preached the Resurrection, laughed:
Some said, ‘More late discourse we on this matter.’
Then from that city of the proud he passed
To Corinth of the sinners, and from her
Built up a Church to God.

I thank Thee, God,
That 'mid those few our Athens gave Thy Son
I found a place—the lowest. Humble and glad
Ofttimes I walked, the comrade of Saint Paul
Journeying from Church to Church. I listened mute,
For even as Moses in the Egyptian lore
Was mighty, such was Paul in lore of Greece.
At times of Greek Philosophy he spake,
Spake kindly, yet with sad rebuke. He said,
‘Philosophy at best is mind's ascent
From earth to heaven, an arrow shot in the air:
Not thus the Faith: 'tis ours but by descent
From heaven to earth, even as Incarnate God
Is ours descending from the Eternal Sire.
That verity mankind can ne'er transcend
On earth, in heaven. How high soe'er man soars
That Truth—the God-Man—still shall over-soar him;
That Truth God-given, for that the Martyrs bleed:

For speculative systems no man dies.’
At times he touched on lowlier themes:—‘The men
Who built in Greece her manifold polities
Were great in mind; yet, building not on God,
Their polities are dust.’ I recognized
The teaching of those Hebrew Prophets old,
‘Kingdoms that stand are built on Righteousness,’
And later thus their reasonings harmonized.
Man's social life, not less than personal life,
Is fountained from above. The stateliest Realm,
What is it but the Household magnified?
The Household, what but Christ's fair Church foreshown?
In both each citizen must love his brother;
In both each subject reverence as from God
His ruler; while that ruler in himself
Sees this alone, the minister of all,
And with all reverence loves his meanest subject.
Yet oft my musings ended thus: a life
There is, we know, not human, unlike ours,
A race not body and soul, nor marriage-bred,
All love, yet knowing nought of mortal bonds,
A race that feels not after God through types
But sees Him face to face—the Angelic Race.
Roam they at will the starry worlds? To them
What grades are fitted save the grades of Love?
What need of States, or Homes? The Angelic City,
How shows it to the City of the Saints?
Then all that Sacred Scripture tells to man
Of angel ministry in heart I pondered,
And prayed of God to grant me angel lore:
To some that knowledge might be help supreme,
Since less by battling with the attempts of flesh

Flesh is subdued than by forgetting flesh
Through commerce with the skies.

In thoughts like these
One day upon the Asian coasts I rode
Alone, the year that great Apostle died:
The woods were passed: and lo! great Ephesus
Before me stood; and Dian's sacred fane,
A wonder of the world. Long hours that night,
A rock my seat, I gazed upon that fane
As on the Parthenon now. And I remembered
How when great Socrates at Athens died
That Parthenon had sent no thunders forth,
Nor Dian's temple when within its ken
Paul fought with beasts. Likewise I called to mind
How once, once only, he, the Apostle Paul,
That day he placed me o'er the Athenian Church,
Low-voiced had told me that in years gone by
He, in the body, or apart from body,
Into the heaven of heavens had been upraised,
And looked upon the visions of the Lord,
And voices heard unlawful to repeat.
Also that ‘Loved Disciple’ I recalled
Who saw from Patmos isle the end of earth,
And—o'er the grave of that twelfth Cæsar gazing—
Far off the perfect triumph of the Just.
Of Hermas too I thought, and of his Vision;
‘I saw the Church Triumphant, where it rose,
A mighty tower rock-based 'mid raging seas:
Six Angels of the Lord were building it:
Nor ceased they from their toil.’
To me these things remembering, then and there
Vision there came: if palpable that Vision
Or else God-kindled in my subject soul,
God knoweth, not I: each Vision is Divine.

I saw the concourse of the Sons of God,
The Hosts Celestial, passing in their number
Perchance all atoms of all visible worlds;
Images of God's beauty; bodily beings
Compared with Him; spiritual with us compared;
Fed from His Heart with knowledge and with power
Their everlasting Eucharistic Feast;
Intuitive in Intellect, with their gaze
Ever on Beatific Vision fixed,
Yet active here below, even as man's soul,
Then most in Reason rests while works his hand.
That Faculty Intuitive, their dower,
Passed on to me through sympathy. I saw them,
And knew their nature, even as Adam knew,
When at God's will God's creatures passed before him,
The end of each. Plainly on every grade
Some Attribute divine had pressed its seal,
Its character engraved;—three Hierarchies,
Three Choirs in each.

The Angels were the lowest:
Their life was simplest, humblest ministration,
Meek helpers of man's race. A breath of theirs
Had power to quench the sun; yet their delight
Was this; to be the servants of God's Poor.
They could have passed all worlds, swifter than thought;
Yet hour by hour delightedly they spent
Wiling some child from peril, fire or flood:
They who for ever heard the singing stars
Counted the sick man's sighs. Their faces shone
In rapture of good will. They felt for each
What lovers feel for one. Higher I saw
The Archangels potent o'er the Soul of Man
As Angels o'er his life extern. 'Tis theirs

To sway the elements of his spiritual being
By inspirations brought man knows not whence
Like winds that round the sunset heap the clouds;
Above those two fair choirs I saw a third,
The Principalities that hold in charge
Nation, and City, and House. Next these the Powers:
'Tis theirs to urge the planets on their course,
Rebrim the fiery chalice of the sun
With beams not lost though hurled beyond our orb,
Creation's wine that never runs to waste.
Yet these high Energies are rhythmical:
Their storms themselves are Order. As a river
Winds from the hills, its countless water-drops
Confluent in one unchanging course, so these;
God's Living Laws are they, and for that cause
Nature's not less, since Nature's sacred Laws
Are not like edicts of a king deceased,
Or bound in chains, or driven to banishment,
But of a king rejoicing in his halls,
Whose Face gives strength to all. Above the Powers
The Virtues and the Dominations rise:
Kingship divine o'er earth they hold suspense
Spurn it who lists. Who hates God's Will, perforce
Speeds it, God's purblind drudge. The peasant child
Hath with the Dominations' choir a part
Praying, ‘Thy kingdom come.’

When first I heard
That choral shout, ‘The Thrones advance,’ and saw
Their standards dawning on the Mount of God,
I shook with awe. Vanished that fear like mist!
Not triumph but submission was their joy:
Their title thence:—they are not Gods but Thrones:
Enthroned on them His Judgments Everlasting,
His dread Decrees, His Counsels hid from men,

Yea, secret as the chambers of the deep,
Make visible way through all His universe:
Their glory is to make these manifest,
Their glory and their strength. To them His Will
Steadies alone their being which sustains it,
No more a burthen than the Spring to earth,
Spring throned upon a hemisphere of flowers
Their joy, their crown.

The eighth celestial choir
Far off I saw—a host innumerable
That knelt upon a sunlit mountain's brow
And eastward gazed as when from ocean cliff
A panting people watch their fleet at dawn
Returning victory-flushed. Of them that knelt
Some fanned their wings; some screened therewith their eyes;
All bent t'wards one great Vision. On their heads
Its glory rested tremulously, and streamed
To the utmost skirt of those far-shining robes
Behind them stretched. Close by, a voice I heard:
‘Thou seest the Cherub choir: as thou on them
They on that Beatific Vision gaze
Whereof the feeblest flash would strike thee dead.
The Cherubs these of whom Ezekiel spake
That full they are of eyes—the Spirits of Knowledge
In whom, so far as Knowledge Infinite
Can find a mirror in the finite mind,
God makes His Knowledge shine, since never they
Pushed forth base hand to clutch forbidden fruit,
Stealing God's gift reserved.’

As thus I gazed
Behind me at immeasurable distance
I heard the winnowing of innumerous wings,
A universe all music. Fleet as thought

O'er me they swept. In swiftness form was lost:
They passed me as a lightning-flash that leaves
Blindness behind. Again my head I raised:
An instant on that Cherub Band remote
And all the aerial ridge whereon they knelt
That lightning flashed, and vanished. Then that Voice—
‘The Seraphs! Of the Third great Hierarchy
The loftiest choir and holiest of the Nine!
These are the Spirits of Love: their life is Love;
That God-ward Love wherein all lesser loves
First die; then live sublimed. So great their Love
They know not that they seek in God their joy,
Seeking that God alone. Through vacant space
Alike, or bulk of intermediate worlds,
God-ward they fleet and obstacle find none.
That flight is rest: they can no more suspend it
Than can the stone that falleth cease to fall,
Since Love that speeds it still is self-renewed.
That Vision Beatific deepens on them
The nearer they approach His Throne. That Throne
Not in the eternal ages shall they reach:
The Infinite is infinite in distance:—
Is this frustration? Nay, fulfilment best!
The Infinite is infinitely near
Not less, and nearest to the Spirits of Love.’
Again that Voice; ‘Think not the Spirits of Love
Are less in knowledge than that Cherub Choir:
Each loftier choir retains, yea, closelier clasps
That special grace which names the choir beneath it,
Retains, and lifts it to a higher heaven:
The Spirits of Love in knowledge far transcend
The Spirits of Knowledge, deeplier knowing this
How worthy of love is God. Cherubs in turn

Surpass in reverence for the Will Divine
The Thrones who on their bosoms throne that Will:
Perchance such reverence for that Will it was
Which made such Knowledge theirs. In all the Choirs
The glories of all virtues co-exist
Diverse in measure. Such diversity
Not envy breeds in heaven, but Love's increase:
The amplest Spirits possess no gift not held
Implicitly by least. To choirs beneath
Exulting they transmit it. Seraphs thus
Fling fires of Love on Cherubs. These in turn
Redound, subdued to milder lights of wisdom,
Their kinglier knowledge on the Choir of Thrones:
Thence down to humbler choirs.

One Virtue thus
Too great, too pure to find a name on earth,—
Its nearest earthly name is Charity—
Sacred and prime there lives that in itself
Blends all the Virtues, even as one great Truth,
Ungraspable, we know, except by God,
The paramount of Truths, conjoins all Truths:
That Virtue not ascends but makes descent
A chain long-linked dropt from the Throne of God,
Through all the Angelic grades; descends to man
Even as that one great Truth, the Lord of Truths—
Its nearest name on earth is “God made Man”—
Descends, man's heritage, to man's race, the sole
That Spirit conjoins with Flesh.’

All-glorious Vision
Vouchsafed to me unmeet, how oft, and most
In danger's hour, my spirit hast thou made
Still as the central seas! When first I saw thee
I prayed that I might see thee in my death:
Never since then hast thou so blessed my heart

As on this night! Means this that death is near;
Or comes it casual through the law of thought
For this cause that when first that Vision graced me
The Ephesian Temple stood before mine eyes
As now yon Parthenon? The moon descends:
Eastward that Temple's shadow slowly creeps:
At dawn the Judges meet and speak the award.
But Thou, O God, save Thine Athenian people!
Crown her great gifts with this Thy best, to use
Rightly the lesser. Reason is her boast:
Wed it with Faith; that those two gifts, made one,
May breed o'er earth a race of Truths divine,
Raising a Christian Athens next to Rome!
Ah me, how little knows or man or nation
How near our hand a possible greatness lies
Beyond all wish, all thought!

University of Virginia Library

SAINT DIONYSIUS, THE AREOPAGITE.

(DIED A.D. 96.)

ARGUMENT.